Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Janet Abramowicz
Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 288 pp.; 41 color ills.; 71 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300100361)
Recent history has witnessed renewed interest in the work and life of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), famous for the muted tones and graceful volumes that epitomize his intimate still-life and landscape paintings, unadorned compositions that defy association with a single artistic movement. Characterized as stubbornly solitary, Morandi filled his canvases with barren combinations of forlorn bottles, vases, and other miscellaneous containers, producing clusters of architectonic bodies that allude to cathedrals, sculptures, and even the human figure in images whose “ambiguity of figure and ground” arrest the viewer (103). The Bolognese painter’s subdued landscapes oscillate between meditative abstract floating… Full Review
August 7, 2006
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Jay Fisher
The Essence of Line: French Drawings From Ingres to Degas
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, The Walters Art Museum, and Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. 408 pp. Paper $39.95 (0271026928)
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, June 19–September 11, 2005; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, June 19–September 11, 2005; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, February 19–May 14, 2006;
Published in conjunction with the exhibition by the same title, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas is a study of the superb nineteenth-century French drawings collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, and the Peabody Institute Art Collection of the Maryland State Archives (on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art). The core holdings of drawings at each institution are private collections amassed by Baltimoreans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, quite remarkably, have remained intact, thereby providing scholars a window into period taste and connoisseurship.… Full Review
August 2, 2006
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Caroline Jones
Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 544 pp.; 23 color ills.; 127 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0226409511)
The last word on the history of the New York School is far from having been written. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses announces a new chapter in the study of mid-century art and criticism by attempting to conclude one. At the end of her preface, Caroline Jones reveals, “More than anything else I’ve written, this book exists to end its subject—to construe the Greenberg effect, in order to be done with it” (xxix). Her central claim is that Greenberg’s art criticism served to limit and reduce experience to the visual, which, in the process… Full Review
August 2, 2006
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Xavier F. Salomon
Veronese's Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice
The Frick Collection, 2006. 56 pp.; 32 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Paper (0912114312)
Frick Collection, New York City, April 11–July 16, 2006
Paolo Veronese is in the news these days, enjoying the spotlight in two recent monographic exhibitions. Last year’s Veronese: Gods, Heroes, and Allegories, the Museo Correr in Venice, treated a wide array of the artist’s mythological works. Now, Veronese’s Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice at the Frick Collection, a more focused exhibit curated by Xavier Salomon, gathers together all five of the large allegorical canvases by the artist that have come to rest on US soil. These shows mark something of a renaissance for Veronese, which complements the current profusion of exhibits on Venetian topics: from… Full Review
August 2, 2006
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Allen Hockley
The Prints of Isoda Koryūsai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 336 pp.; 8 color ills.; 51 b/w ills.; 59 ills. Cloth $60.00 (0295983019)
Allen Hockley’s long-awaited monograph on Isoda Koryūsai (1735–90) is a welcome addition to the literature on Japan’s eighteenth-century print culture. Not only does he focus on one of the too-long neglected masters of the period, he also presents a fine analysis of some of Koryūsai’s major themes as well as his best-known series of single prints, Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh Young Leaves. That this study is, indeed, long overdue can be inferred from the fact that Koryūsai has received little scholarly attention in spite of the sheer number of designs for which he was responsible. As… Full Review
August 1, 2006
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Mark Coatzee and Laura Edward Heon
Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection
Miami and North Adams: MASS MoCA, 2006. 143 pp.; 27 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Cloth (0971634149)
MASS MoCA, March 19, 2005–March 31, 2006; SITE Santa Fe, April 21–June 19, 2006; Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington DC, September 5–October 29, 2006; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, February 16–June 3, 2007; Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, June 23–September 30, 2007
Leipzig is the new Berlin—at least that is what I have been told. Rents are still what Berlin rents used to be, after reunification but before the government arrived. Many artists have already moved their Berlin or Cologne studios to Leipzig. It is like Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain circa 1995, a combination of advanced, though scenic, urban decay pierced through with startling additions like high-tech (West) German mass transit or gleaming new bakeries and department stores. There is a developed Leipzig scene—the spreading waves of (West German-style) gentrification that includes clubs, restaurants, and of course, art galleries Another sign of… Full Review
August 1, 2006
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9th International Istanbul Biennial
Exhibition schedule: Istanbul, Turkey, September 16–October 30, 2005
The 9th International Istanbul Biennial, distributed across seven sites (Deniz Palace Apartments, Garanti Building, Antrepo No. 5, Tobacco Warehouse, Bilsar Building, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and the Garibaldi Building) used the city of Istanbul as not only its host but its principal theme. Visitors walked to and from each site, guided by the Italian Gruppo A12’s fuchsia paint on the venues’ façades and windows, occasionally getting lost in the streets of the Beyoğlu district. Rather than finding such wanderings a burden, visitors enjoyed the treats and surprises wherein they were routinely rewarded with the discovery of buildings that would… Full Review
July 25, 2006
In Search of Perfect Harmony
Exhibition Schedule: Tate Britain, London, February 4–May 7, 2006
With In Search of Perfect Harmony, a recent exhibition in the Art Now cycle at Tate Britain, British artist Jamie Shovlin cements his recent work’s affinity to what Hal Foster has described as the “archival impulse” prevalent in contemporary artistic production. The three works that comprised Shovlin’s exhibition all take root in the kind of idiosyncratic probing into a history, philosophy, or experience that Foster sees as the foundation of the “archival impulse.” While Foster’s descriptive moniker for this kind of work reminds us that such gestures have already become common practice in contemporary art, Shovlin’s… Full Review
July 19, 2006
Andrew Schulz
Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 255 pp.; 80 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780521821056)
Francisco de Goya's Los Caprichos (1799), a series of eighty etchings and aquatints, are widely known as satiric criticisms of human ignorance and folly. The artist is democratic in his critical assessment of society and its customs, from the superstitious beliefs of the lower classes to the genealogical obsession of aristocrats. Although the series includes themes particular to Spain at the turn of the century, Goya often veils these fixed references with ambiguous meanings, settings, and figures. Thus, many of the critiques expressed pictorially by Goya have application for locations and times outside of late-eighteenth-century Spain, giving the series a… Full Review
July 13, 2006
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Christopher B. Donnan
Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 220 pp.; 258 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (0292716222)
Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru is a welcome addition to the literature on the art of ancient Peru. The Moche were a state-level society who prospered in the first seven or so centuries AD on the desert coast of what is now northern Peru. They were prolific and prodigious artists in many media, the most famous being metalwork, the most numerous being ceramics. The gold-filled graves at Sipán and other Moche sites have been discovered in the last twenty years, and much progress has been made in our knowledge of this important ancient American society and its art. Christopher… Full Review
July 5, 2006
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