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Tracing artistic origins and sources is always tricky business, never more so than when one is seeking to identify and explain a concept as broad and malleable as naturalism. First there is the problem of the term itself. Postmodern theory has rightly claimed that there is no such thing as a naïve, unmediated, “natural” representation of the world around us. Not only are there different kinds of naturalism and different purposes it can serve, but one culture’s naturalism may also strike another’s as highly stylized and limited by convention. Even when there is general agreement that a certain group of… Full Review

As anyone who has ever lectured on early medieval metalwork knows, two of the most frequently questions put to the speaker are “How was it made?” and “What do we know about the lives of the smiths?” The two authors, the archaeologist and art-historian Elizabeth Coatsworth and the silversmith Michael Pinder, address these issues in this book. Its scope is precisely outlined in the subtitle: Fine Metalwork in Anglo-Saxon England: its Practice and Practitioners. There is also some discussion of style and iconography, but these are not the volume’s chief topics. Nevertheless, this book is ambitious… Full Review

From the provocative opening lines of his catalogue essay—which incorporate verses from Ecclesiastes that seem calculated to signal the extent of his commitment as much as to state his thesis—Daniel A. Siedell adopts what he clearly expects to be a besieged position on the subject of the spiritual in art. Carefully chosen, his words implicitly brace themselves for rebuttal. Describing the intent of the catalogue and the exhibition of Enrique Martínez Celaya’s rich and resonant black paintings that it documents, Siedell borrows the idea of a “wager” on meaning from the literary critic George Steiner and thus overtly acknowledges the… Full Review

If you are looking for a book to animate the scholarship on the group later known as the Pictures artists of the 1970s and 1980s, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia by Richard Hertz could prove to be an essential text. Produced by the editor of Theories of Contemporary Art and Twentieth Century Art Theory: Urbanism, Politics, and Mass Culture (with Norman Klein) as well as the author of the boundary-busting Desiring Machines,[1] the interviews in the volume under review provide surprising and unusual insight into an otherwise closed association of California schoolmates who transplanted themselves to New York… Full Review

Zhou Mi’s Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes: An Annotated Translation offers a stimulating and well-documented discussion of art collecting in late-thirteenth-century China. Revised from her dissertation, completed in 1994 at the University of Kansas, Ankeney Weitz’s book is centered on her copiously footnoted translation of Yunyan guoyan lu, an important catalogue by Zhou Mi (1232–1298).[1] The title of Zhou’s work, translated as Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes, is Zhou’s ironic twist on a well-known comment by the poet Su Shi (1037–1101), who compared painting and calligraphy to evanescent clouds… Full Review

In November of 2003, the Society for Visual Anthropology awarded Corinne Kratz its first Collier Prize for work that exemplifies the use of still photography for research and communication of anthropological knowledge. Presented at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Chicago, this award makes clear that her work in visual anthropology is of great significance. Kratz’s commitment to the field also led her to study the process of exhibiting photographs. This book reports the results of that introspection and scholarship. Kratz’s ethnographic fieldwork among the Okiek people of Kenya extends from 1974 to the present. She has taken thousands of… Full Review

This book was written in part to document the collection of gold objects from Africa, Asia, and America donated in 1997 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, by Alfred C. Glassell, Jr., a collector and philanthropist from Houston. The book also serves as the catalogue for the touring exhibition of the Akan part of the collection. Numbering more than nine hundred objects, it is the largest collection of Akan chiefly regalia in the world. The principal author of the book, Doran Ross, has studied and worked among the Ghanaian Akan for the past thirty years. Widely published on the… Full Review

Two discourses of Minimalism have come to determine its academic reception today, both of which reject theories by the twentieth century’s most prominent critic, Clement Greenberg. One line of thought stresses the objecthood of an artwork against Greenberg’s insistence that modernist painting remain true to the inherent, unique qualities of the medium. The other emphasizes the phenomenological experience one has of sculpture in real time and space against Greenberg’s call for a disembodied, intuitive experience of a work. Either discourse moves its results toward Michael Fried’s dreaded theatricality, where the work of art shifts to the subject who beholds the… Full Review

The Norton Simon Museum’s exhibition of thirty black-chalk drawings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard offered the viewer an unusual challenge. Consisting of drawings after old-master paintings executed by Fragonard during a tour of Italy in 1760–61, the exhibition took as its subject the education of an artist. By positioning near each drawing a small photo reproduction of the original painting that Fragonard was copying, the viewer was inevitably drawn into a game of comparison as well as a quest to find traces of the mature artist in these accomplished early copies. I was struck first by how faithful Fragonard… Full Review

The recent publication of two surveys of Sienese painting is another indication of a noticeable boom in this field. Such historians as William Bowsky, Samuel Cohn, and Daniel Waley have fueled this resurgence, and their investigations of the political, religious, and social institutions of the Commune of Siena identified a unique and influential culture with well-preserved archival records. Building upon their work, art historians have added the study of historical and documentary context to the traditional analysis of style that in the late nineteenth century first articulated a separate “Sienese School.” Hayden Maginnis’s historiographical study, Painting in the Age of… Full Review