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

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Karl Bassil, Zeina Maasri, and Akram Zaatari
Exh. cat. Beirut: The Arab Image Foundation, 2001. 250 pp.; 840 ills. $35.00 (9953000581)
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium, May 2002; Die Photographische Sammlung, Cologne, Germany, September 2002; Kunsternes Hus, Oslo, Norway, February, 2003; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, March 2003; World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 2003; VideoBrasil Festival, São Paulo, Brazil, October 2003; Centro de Mariana, Toledo, Spain, November 2003; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece, January 2004; Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon, France, March 2004; Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland, April 2004; Beiteddine Festival, Lebanon, July 2004; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, January 11–April 2, 2005; Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Ill., April 15–June 5, 2005; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Ore., August 23–September 25, 2005
Visually compelling and intellectually sophisticated, Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography, A Project by Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari presented a wealth of photographic materials from the collection of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation (AIF). Embracing current theoretical approaches to the display of visual culture, the exhibition, curated by two artists, offered a richly textured and highly nuanced picture of Arab photography and its relationship to questions of identity. If the history of photography from this region is as little studied as the artist-curators assert, then their show certainly constitutes an exciting opening gambit that should inspire further study. … Full Review
April 8, 2005
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Marcia Kupfer
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. 304 pp.; 117 b/w ills. Cloth $55.95 (0271023031)
In her first book, published in 1993, Marcia Kupfer drew attention to the underdiscussed frescoes of Romanesque central France, reading the images as a field within which political tensions were played out and through which social divisions were reinforced. In her second book, The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town, Kupfer returns to the same fertile ground but focuses still more acutely, concentrating on the wall paintings in the crypt of the collegiate parish church of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, in the diocese of Bourges. The result is a rewarding—but also difficult and speculative—work… Full Review
April 7, 2005
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Frederick N. Bohrer
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 398 pp.; 79 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0521806577)
Mesopotamia, in particular Assyria and Babylon, occupies a foundational place in Western cultural identity derived from classical and biblical texts. Material traces, however, were scarce until large-scale excavations in what is now northern Iraq began in the mid-nineteenth century. In Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Frederick Bohrer examines the complex reception of ancient Mesopotamia through the lens of reception theory and postcolonialism. With the “discovery” and acquisition of monumental sculpture from sites such as Khorsabad, Nimrud, and Nineveh in the 1840s and their subsequent introduction to European audiences, a new engagement with the “ancient Orient”… Full Review
April 7, 2005
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Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, and Jeebesh Bagchi, eds.
New Delhi: Sarai: the new media initiative, 2002. 376 pp. Paper $15.00 (8190142909)
As the name implies, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life is the second in a series of readers edited by the Sarai Group, a collaborative formed by fellows at Delhi’s well-known institute for social and political research, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, and the media artists and critics at the Society for Old and New Media in the Netherlands and the Raqs Media Collective in Delhi. Sarai Reader 01 explored the contemporary contours of the idea of public domain, particularly in relation to changing forms of knowledge, proprietorship, and notions of publicity. Sarai Reader 02 … Full Review
April 6, 2005
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Tracy Ehrlich
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 442 pp.; 12 color ills.; 155 b/w ills. Cloth $132.00 (0521592577)
By acquiring nearly twenty thousand acres of countryside near the town of Frascati (twelve miles southeast of Rome) and refurbishing three residences on this land, the nephew of Pope Paul V, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, both created a papal retreat for his uncle and established a vast agricultural enterprise that was administered from the principal residence on this land, the Villa Mondragone. In Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome: Villa Culture at Frascati in the Borghese Era, Tracy Ehrlich contends that with these initiatives, Scipione Borghese made a comprehensive claim for his family’s nobility, seigniory, virtue, and elegance. Perhaps… Full Review
March 30, 2005
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Burglind Jungmann
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 272 pp.; 112 b/w ills. Cloth $77.00 (0691114633)
Painters as Envoys: Korean Inspiration in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Nanga discusses how diplomatic contact between Korea and Japan during the eighteenth century helped to shape a new Japanese landscape painting style. By examining possible Korean influences on the development of Nanga, or Japanese literati painting, the author sheds new light on China’s Southern school of painting with respect to its cross-cultural transmission in East Asia. Students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art histories will all find this book of interest. Divided into three parts with an introduction and conclusion, Burglind Jungmann’s book provides an in-depth discussion on the… Full Review
March 30, 2005
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David K. Wyatt
Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2004. 92 pp.; many color ills. Paper $24.95 (9749575474)
To the untrained eye, Thai paintings can be hard to decipher. They look confusing, crowded with colorful figures that appear similar in detail and character, leaving no place to focus one’s attention. For those who wish to study Thai painting in its various forms—murals, banners, and manuscript painting—guidance from a visually rich, scholarly book would be invaluable. Reading Thai Murals by David Wyatt, the distinguished American historian of Thailand, should be such a book but falls short of the mark. Attractively presented, Reading Thai Murals focuses on the distinctive Buddhist murals dating from the late nineteenth… Full Review
March 22, 2005
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Richard F. Townsend, ed.
Exh. cat. Art Institute of Chicago in association with Yale University Press, 2004. 288 pp.; 320 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0300104677)
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Ill., November 20, 2004–January 30, 2005; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Mo., March 4–May 30, 2005
Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South explores a period and a region of indigenous art little known even within the field of Native American art studies. Long studied by archaeologists, this vast area, roughly bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico, has been largely neglected by art historians and art museums. The only previous large-scale exhibition of material from this region occurred nearly twenty years ago.[1] Recently, however, scholars have begun reevaluate the imagery of these ancient cultures, and interdisciplinary seminars held over… Full Review
March 18, 2005
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Arthur K. Wheelock
Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art in association with American Federation of Arts, 2003. 172 pp.; 60 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0300106394)
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., November 7, 2004–January 30, 2005; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Mich., February 27–May 22, 2005
Gerard ter Borch is the first exhibition dedicated to this important seventeenth-century Dutch genre painter and portraitist in thirty years, and its accompanying catalogue simultaneously serves as the only comprehensive study on the artist to appear in English to date. The catalogue is smaller than that of the exhibition that took place in The Hague and Münster in 1974, and smaller still than Sturla J. Gudlaugsson’s truly monumental study of Terborch that appeared in 1959–60. Nevertheless, the present exhibition and catalogue open up some new avenues of inquiry, which is only natural given scholarly trajectories in the field over the… Full Review
March 18, 2005
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Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 504 pp.; 91 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (0226133125)
What do we mean when we attribute a painting to an artist in the Netherlands or consider it belonging to the “school of Florence”? These regional designations, the coupling of artworks with place, are central to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new book, which examines notions of cultural geography as they apply to art. Toward a Geography of Art offers the first concentrated consideration of the value of location in the definition of works of art and, as such, is a thoroughly useful endeavor. Only some twenty years ago, Karl Poma, vice president of the Flemish Government of Belgium, introduced a lavish… Full Review
March 16, 2005
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