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

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Joshua Brown
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 384 pp.; 105 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (0520231031)
In the last two decades the study of nineteenth-century American painting has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts. The same cannot be said, however, for the vast realm of nineteenth-century visual culture: the popular prints, book and magazine illustration, pictorial journalism, and ephemera that proliferated throughout the century and became increasingly important agents in the dissemination of news, information, and ideologies. For many ordinary Americans, pictures in books and newspapers had a far greater impact on understanding current events than contemporaneous paintings ever would. Yet, with relatively few exceptions, the “higher” art of painting has continued to occupy a privileged place… Full Review
September 17, 2003
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Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins, eds.
Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2000. 364 pp.; 108 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (0943549884)
The 1990s were an exciting period for those concerned with gender issues in Italian Renaissance art. Seemingly overnight, a group of scholars emerged determined to track down how, when, where, and why women created, commissioned, and utilized works of art. Such scholarship provided access to a world in which Renaissance women were seen to have a greater measure of the autonomy history has traditionally denied them. They became subjects, not objects, and evolved beyond the limited glance-and-gaze theory that dominated feminist scholarship of the 1980s. Moreover, the large number of symposia and conference sessions convened to examine this subject across… Full Review
September 16, 2003
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Justin Wolff
Princeton University Press, 2002. 208 pp.; 16 color ills.; 81 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (0691070830)
As the subject of a monograph, the American genre painter Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855) presents some clear challenges. His life was regrettably short (he died of a morphine overdose at age thirty), his few years of work were not overly prolific (we know of perhaps seven major paintings), his decision to live in Europe for his entire career placed him culturally and physically outside the ranks of his fellow antebellum artists, and, as if to frustrate the historian’s attempt to compensate for these limitations, he left behind almost no personal papers. Moreover, Woodville’s art does not fit into the accustomed… Full Review
September 15, 2003
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Debra Schafter
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 292 pp.; 87 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (0521791146)
Debra Schafter’s book contributes to a small but growing literature committed to identifying intersections of, rather than differences between, ornament and modernism. The stakes of this endeavor should not be underestimated. One needs only to remember Adolf Loos’s proclamation that “the evolution of humanity would cause ornament to disappear from functional objects,” in his polemic from 1908, aptly titled “Ornament and Crime,” to grasp the significance of this turnaround in aesthetic categorization and judgment. Hal Foster, who plays on Loos’s title for his own recent book, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), summarizes the traditional understanding… Full Review
September 12, 2003
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Anne Wilkes Tucker, Dana Friis-Hansen, Kaneko Ryuichi, and Takeba Joe
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2003. 432 pp.; 356 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300099258)
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX, March 2–April 27, 2003; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, May 25–July 27, 2003
See Mikiko Hirayama’s review of this book From its beginnings, photography has been the agent of an international dialogue of its own making. It has enacted and exemplified tensions between local cultures and wider historical energies: those of colonialist assimilation and resistance, of commercial engagement, of transcultural communication. Study of the medium leads quickly and irresistibly to international issues. Therefore few approaches to it have proven as prone to schematic rigidity as surveys of what might be called—to adopt the wishful old Stalinist phrase for realizing “socialism” within national borders—Photography in One Country. Whether extrapolated to fill out… Full Review
September 11, 2003
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Gisela Schmidt
New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 526 pp.; 49 b/w ills. Paper $71.95 (082045611X)
Art history has now and then been structured around psychoanalytic theory and method of inquiry. Clinical method and therapy have often been relied upon to interpret paintings as well. Nevertheless, the two modes of inquiry, historical and therapeutic, have been wary of each other’s conclusions, and therefore a relationship that varies from outright antagonism to interdisciplinary merger has characterized their past. That history is usually thought to begin with Sigmund Freud’s studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and brief references to other artists. As a matter of fact, the psychological interpretation of painting goes much further back, to Pliny the… Full Review
September 9, 2003
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Jodi Cranston
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 258 pp.; 69 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (052165324x)
The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance is an ambitious book, a prolonged meditation on the reflexive nature of portraiture. It constitutes a novel contribution to the history of Renaissance portraiture in that Jodi Cranston seeks to bring modern literary criticism and concepts to bear in her discussion of sixteenth-century Venetian and northern Italian likenesses. Stating that “thinking of pictures in terms of analogous structures characterized the general approach” (7) of Renaissance artists and patrons, she suggests parallels between the structural relationship of sitter and viewer and the rhetorical structures—as distinct from the content—of certain Renaissance literary forms. The… Full Review
September 8, 2003
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Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, ed.
Exh. cat. New York and London: Japan Society and British Museum Press, 2001. 304 pp.; 230 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0810967480)
Japan Society, New York, October 17–December 31, 2002; British Museum, London, February 5–April 13, 2003
In Japan, little formal distinction existed between the fine and decorative arts until about a century ago, when the Japanese began to adopt Western art-historical language and structures. Before then, all works of art—painting, ceramics, sculpture, and textiles—were seen as playing an equally vital role in the embellishment of interior and exterior spaces and as setting the aesthetic tone of a specific locale. The careful choice of the painting to be displayed in the tokonoma, the floral arrangement in a particular vase, or the design on a kimono could work together to create a mood of austerity or luxury,… Full Review
September 5, 2003
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Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, ed.
Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2002. 352 pp.; 189 color ills.; 67 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0300097670)
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, January 17–April 20, 2003; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, June 7–September 7, 2003; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, October 11, 2003–January 4, 2004 . Marsden Hartley. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2002. 352 pp. 189 color ills.; 67 b/w. $55.00 (cloth) (0300097670)
The large retrospective devoted to the work of Marsden Hartley, organized by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, is a delight, a sadness, and a puzzle in nearly equal measure. The delight is easy to relate. It was thrilling to walk into the Hartford exhibition’s first gallery and face a wall of Hartley’s brightly colored, nonrepresentational paintings made in Paris and Berlin in 1912 and 1913 (cat. nos. 8–11). Their recognizable motifs—numbers, seated Buddhas, musical staves, mudras, Chinese cloud forms, uniformed horsemen—float across the canvases, divided by dark blue lines that alternatively undulate among or… Full Review
September 4, 2003
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Eric Thunø
Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2002. 216 pp.; 8 color ills.; 133 b/w ills.; 141 ills. Paper (8882652173)
In Image and Relic: Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome, Erik Thunø thoroughly explores three objects that could be justly deemed among the most important works of art created in the Carolingian period. (One of these is pictured here.) Commissioned as part of what was apparently a coherent papal project of art production in support of the cult of saints and relics, the objects were made for the most prestigious location in all of Western Christendom, the Lateran altar of the Holy of Holies. Nevertheless, these works are now less familiar than they ought to be, not… Full Review
September 2, 2003
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