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

Browse Recent Reviews

Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler
New York: Herbert Press, 2019. 192 pp.; 200 ills. Cloth $40.00 (9781912217960)
Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler’s Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective tells the stories of forty-five female designers, artists, and architects who graduated from the renowned Bauhaus school of design, architecture, and applied arts. Each story offers an invigorating look at the artist’s process, exploring art and life as well as the confronting of self and society. The juxtaposition of these artists’ paradoxical dilemmas between individuality and cultural collectivity demonstrates that they deserve deeper understanding from us. They connect the Bauhaus to the wider world, as asserted by the authors—even though they do not clarify the specific ways such a connection… Full Review
August 6, 2020
Thumbnail
FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. This week we revisit the exhibition Per(sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana with Jillian Hernandez. Full Review
Thumbnail
Suheyla Takesh and Lynn Gumpert, eds.
Exh. cat. New York and Munich: Grey Art Gallery in association with Hirmer Publishers, 2020. 256 pp.; 162 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9783777434285)
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, January 14–April 4, 2020; McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, January 25–June 6, 2021; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York, February 5–June 12, 2022
Writing in 1964, the Algerian painter Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991) identified “that day in 1910 when the Russian artist [Wassily] Kandinsky created the first nonrepresentational work” as marking the birth of “nonfigurative (or abstract) painting.” (Note: For the sake of consistency, I have used the exhibition curators’ transliteration of artists’ names.) Published in Révolution africaine, the National Liberation Front’s weekly newspaper, Khadda’s piece was the first of three artists’ statements titled “Éléments pour un art nouveau” (Elements for a new art), in which the authors grappled with the question of the role of the artist in the postindependence state. While… Full Review
August 4, 2020
Thumbnail
FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today’s highlight is Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, reviewed by Alison Syme. Full Review
Thumbnail
FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today we spotlight Kate Flint’s discussion of The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain by Lynda Nead. Full Review
Thumbnail
FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. First up, Erin Silver considers Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun by Jennifer L. Shaw. Full Review
Thumbnail
Christina Weyl
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. 296 pp.; 76 color ills.; 63 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300238501)
A current and valuable effort in art history is the examination of a well-known topic with greater attention to the contributions of women and other marginalized individuals. This expansion of familiar narratives is grounded not in rewriting historical facts but in rehabilitating figures—whether they be artists, gallery owners, curators, or collectors—who have been largely or even entirely overlooked, not only to shed light on their accomplishments but also to establish a broader understanding of a moment in time, which allows for a deeper historical account. Christina Weyl’s book The Women of Atelier 17, focused on women artists working at… Full Review
July 23, 2020
Thumbnail
Sarah L. Eckhardt
Exh. cat. Richmond, VA and Durham, NC: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in association with Duke University Press, 2020. 260 pp.; 140 ills. Cloth $40.00 (9781934351178)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, February 1–October 18, 2020; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, dates to be announced; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, dates to be announced; Cincinnati Art Museum, Spring 2022
The history of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black photographers founded in 1960s Harlem, is documented and analyzed from multiple, beautifully blended perspectives in this important, substantial book. I had expected to study it after viewing the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) exhibition for which it serves as a catalog. However, shortly after the exhibition opened, the venue was closed to the public, another museum casualty of COVID-19. Louis Draper, the founding member and mainstay of the collective, wrote in his history of the workshop: “‘Kamoinge’ is derived from the Kikuyu [a language of Kenya]… Full Review
July 21, 2020
Thumbnail
Halle O’Neal
Harvard East Asian Monographs 412. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 310 pp.; 90 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780674983861)
In this monograph, Halle O’Neal investigates a genre of Buddhist painting known as “jeweled pagoda mandalas” (kinji hōtō mandara; hereafter JPM), which was popular in Japan during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Three full sets and a few lone examples separated from their original sets remain. At the center of these vertical compositions on indigo-dyed paper, a multistory pagoda appears surrounded by narrative vignettes from a popular sutra. The central pagoda is constructed from a transcription in gold of the very sutra that the painting features in the surrounding vignettes, in some cases with further embellishment in… Full Review
July 16, 2020
Thumbnail
Vincent Delieuvin and Louis Frank, eds.
Exh. cat. Paris: Louvre éditions in association with Hazan, 2019. 480 pp.; 380 ills. Paper €35.00 (9782754111232)
Musée du Louvre, Paris, October 24, 2019–February 24, 2020
It is tempting for biographers of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) to wax poetic about the artist’s supernatural talents and divine genius, but instead the Louvre’s blockbuster exhibition Léonard de Vinci offered a cerebral and technical approach to understanding the old master’s virtuosic oeuvre. Cocurated by Vincent Delieuvin, the Louvre’s curator of paintings, and Louis Frank, curator of drawings and prints, this much-anticipated retrospective coincided with the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death. As stated in the wall text and accompanying booklet, the primary goal of the exhibition was to demonstrate “Leonardo’s revolutionary approach,” which “aimed to make painting a science encompassing… Full Review
July 14, 2020
Thumbnail