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

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Perrin Stein, ed.
Exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale Universtiy Press, 2022. 308 pp.; 242 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781588397461)
Few artists have been as profoundly involved in their political milieu as Jacques Louis David. In this regard, the subtitle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of the artist’s drawings—“Radical Draftsman”—makes perfect sense. Indeed, its signature image, The Oath of the Tennis Court, shows David at the zenith of his artistic service to the nascent republic: members of the Third Estate unite in the highly finished study, which he displayed at the Salon of 1791 to inspire citizens to fund an ambitious painting, one he ultimately never completed. Less triumphant proof of the artist’s embroilment in the French… Full Review
September 11, 2023
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Jennifer Borland
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022. 240 pp.; 33 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Hardcover $114.95 (9780271090597)
In this finely produced monograph, Jennifer Borland offers a compelling case study of medical illustration and bookmaking in the later Middle Ages. This case consists of seven deluxe manuscripts of a French-language medical regimen, all bearing initials richly illuminated with scenes of medicine and domestic life. These initials provide Borland with evidence for the active part of women in caregiving and domestic management. Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the ‘Régime du corps’ places this seven-manuscript corpus at the center of its investigations and expands outward from there, from the finely wrought design of historiated initials to… Full Review
September 6, 2023
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Seattle Art museum, Seattle, WA 98101, May 9–May 29, 2023
Ikat is one of the most ancient and important traditional textile dyeing techniques connecting East and West, and in recent years has been growing in recognition. Ikat has a distinctive look with shaggy edges and shifted skinny lines. Commercially printed ikat-inspired designs are sold for such items as curtains and cushion covers as people enjoy the aesthetic of ikat in their living rooms. However, many people may not know about real ikat weaving processes. Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth, beautifully conceived and installed by curator of African and Oceanic art Pamela McCluskey, provides an important sense of the… Full Review
September 5, 2023
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Rosario I. Granados, ed.
Exh. cat. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press and Blanton Museum of Art, 2023. 248 pp.; 140 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (978-1477323977)
August 14, 2022–January 8, 2023
Painted Cloth offers a new dimension to the study of the Spanish Americas by asking how colonial subjects used fashion and fabric—painted, sculpted, woven, and worn—to think productively about the social and spiritual worlds around them. This stunning exhibition catalog showcases a selection of artworks and artifacts from primarily seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Spain and Peru and was the result of fruitful collaboration with private collections worldwide. Thoughtfully curated and edited by Rosario I. Granados, Marilynn Thoma associate curator for art of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton Museum, the catalog marks the occasion of the first large-scale exhibition of… Full Review
September 1, 2023
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Christopher D. M. Atkins and Jeffrey Muller, eds.
Exh. cat. Boston: MFA Publications, 2022. 105 pp.; 41 color ills.; 19 b/w ills. E-book
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, November 12, 2022–November 5, 2023
Michaelina Wautier and ‘The Five Senses’: Innovation in 17th-Century Flemish Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) is the first exhibition in the United States devoted to the Brussels-based female painter who, despite her unmistakable artistic talent and successful career, fell into obscurity after her death. Only recently have experts rediscovered and revalued the oeuvre of Michaelina Wautier (1604­–1684), mainly thanks to the scholarship of Katlijne van der Stichelen, professor in art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium. A pioneer in the study of female artists, Van der Stichelen began researching Wautier after she… Full Review
August 28, 2023
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Edouard Kopp, Elizabeth M. Rudy, and Kristel Smentek, eds.
Exh. cat. 334 pp.; 168 color ills. Paperback $50.00 (9780300266726)
Harvard Art Museums September 16, 2022–January 15, 2023
In 1783, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner posed a question to the Berlinische Monatsschrift’s readers: “What is the Enlightenment?” One year later, Immanuel Kant, professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg, responded with an aphorism: “Sapere aude!” or “Dare to Know!” Kant went on to define the Enlightenment as the “resolution and courage” to use one’s own reason to comprehend the world, unrestricted by prejudice and the guidance of others. Two hundred years after Kant’s response, Michel Foucault called attention to the temporal structure of this question. Zöllner and Kant, Foucault argued, described the Enlightenment in the present tense… Full Review
August 23, 2023
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Target Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art; October 16, 2022–January 8, 2023
When Eike Schmidt left the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) in 2015 to become director of the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, he did not forget his old institution. The connection paid off for the former’s audiences this fall and winter as forty-six treasures from the Uffizi came to Minneapolis. There, joining with a dozen objects from MIA’s own collection (and one from a Chicago private collection), they represented the flowering of the Renaissance in the quattrocento. The exhibition scored high marks for showmanship, with spaces and ideas unfolding in a thrilling, almost cinematic sequence. Though… Full Review
August 21, 2023
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Jennifer Van Horn
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 344 pp.; 105 color ills.; 34 b/w ills. Hardcover $60.00 (9780300257632)
In the penultimate paragraph of my Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the Art of Agostino Brunias (Manchester University Press, 2018), I admitted—with no small degree of shame—that not until I came to the very end of the project did it ever even occur to me to ask, “What did the brown and black women working in Sir William Young’s plantation home see in Brunias’s canvases?” (233). Jennifer Van Horn’s Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery makes such questions the very focus of its inquiry. In doing so, this important book at once advocates for and models a critical recentering… Full Review
August 18, 2023
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Susan Taylor-Leduc
Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 316 pp. € 123.00 (9789048552634)
Susan Taylor-Leduc begins with a question that readers in the field of eighteenth-century studies may have already wondered: why another book dedicated to Marie-Antoinette (12)? Taylor-Leduc answers by sidestepping overworked themes in the rococo queen’s world: explorations of Marie-Antoinette’s biography, examinations of garden aesthetics, and correlations between royal patronage and contemporary politics. Instead, she creates an interdisciplinary framework that unites garden history with spatial, anthropological, and cultural memory studies to reassess Marie-Antoinette’s pivotal role in defining the French picturesque garden style at the Petit Trianon. Moreover, Taylor-Leduc traces the lasting effects of the queen’s garden legacy across three generations of… Full Review
August 14, 2023
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Lara Evans, Ryan S. Flahive, Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, Stephen Wall, and Manuela Well-Off-Man
Exh. cat. Santa Fe: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2020. 148 pp.; 62 color ills. Cloth $30.00 (9781732840317)
Westmoreland Museum of American Art, February 26–May 28, 2023
Saint Louis Art Museum, June 24–September 3, 2023
Schingoethe Center, Aurora University, IL, October 2, 2023–January 7, 2024.
Abstract Expressionism still holds a mythic power over art historians, curators, and museum directors as the most “American” style of painting. Critics, notably Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, enshrined the movement’s artists and their canvases covered in pours and drips as expressions of personal freedom and a peculiarly American subjectivity. Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1945–1975 provides a welcome disruption. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb are present in the catalog texts and didactic labels, but none of their works hang on the walls. Action/Abstraction Redefined is the first in-depth presentation of how contemporary Native artists intersected with Abstract… Full Review
August 7, 2023
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