Browse Recent Reviews

The idea of writing a “cultural biography” of the Serpent Column is brilliant. Over the 2500 years of its history, this monument stood in the center of two of the most significant environments of the ancient world: the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi and the Circus of Constantinople. It witnessed their transformations, and it underwent important alterations itself, both in its physical appearance and in the meanings associated to it. After a first chapter dealing with the history of its discovery and tentative reconstructions, seven more chapters narrate the life of the column, dealing with its different locations (§ 1… Full Review

Craig Clunas opens the introduction to Chinese Painting and Its Audiences with a monumental understatement: it is a book that some might feel has “a narrow focus, but it has somewhat wider aims” (1). The published form of the 2012 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences is neatly structured into six chapters. It starts with an introductory “Beginning and Ending” that confronts the reader with the prospect that Chinese painting, as an ontological entity, is a fabrication, a subjective construction determined by an outsider’s perspective, and follows with chapters centered on five internal… Full Review

Of the principal areas of study constituting Latin American art history, i.e., ancient, colonial, modern, and contemporary, the nineteenth century remains under examined. Situated precariously between the Spanish viceregal period and modern nationhood, this turbulent yet pivotal stage in Mexico’s history has lagged in terms of scholarly attention, particularly in art history. Art historians in Mexico, such as Jean Charlot, Justino Fernández, Fausto Ramírez Rojas, Esther Acevedo, and Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama have done much of the heavy lifting in terms of writing about art in nineteenth-century Mexico. Meanwhile, in the United States, Stacie G. Widdifield has led the way, with… Full Review

In recent decades, specialists of both American and Japanese arts have turned their attention to the history of these two countries’ artistic interactions from the nineteenth century through the present. Scholars of Japan have also explored twentieth-century avant-garde Japanese arts. Concurrently, art history has increasingly expanded to embrace a field more aptly termed “visual culture studies,” which incorporates the analysis of mass-market commercial products. These efforts have resulted in fresh insights into the ways in which American and Japanese cultures have intersected through their visual materials. The exhibition catalogue reviewed here reflects these new scholarly directions. It enlarges upon the… Full Review

In 1839, shortly after publishing “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil,” William Henry Fox Talbot sent a letter along with thirty-six examples of photogenic drawings to Antonio Bertoloni, a botanist in Bologna, Italy. Talbot undoubtedly desired to alert colleagues to his invention in the wake of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s announcement of his own photographic process on January 7th that year, and Bertoloni dutifully assembled the materials into an album for posterity, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New… Full Review

Representations of war and soldierly actions have assuredly fascinated entire generations, especially during fragile political contexts such as revolutions and governmental changes. Rarely, however, has military imagery been dealt with from a critical art historical perspective. Military imagery has typically been understood in terms of its official ideological role and its capacity as a tool for the state to guide public opinion. Katie Hornstein has managed to invert this tendency. Her book on war imagery in the first half of the nineteenth century in France provides not only a brilliant discussion of the diversity of visual resources and references that… Full Review

In the past three decades, there has been a welcome increase in literature on nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American photography. While much pathbreaking scholarship has been produced, art historians have acknowledged only a fraction of black photographers active in the pre–Civil Rights era. Taking the city of Memphis as her case study, Earnestine Lovelle Jenkins contributes a much-needed and richly researched monograph to the history of African American photography. Organized into ten chapters split between three parts, Jenkins’s book covers photographs of black Memphians from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century. Part 1, “Memphis: From Slavery to Freedom,”… Full Review

With this book, one of the more prolific Maya archaeologists makes a significant art historical contribution, providing evidence of the impact of adolescent males in ancient Maya society as preeminent subjects and patrons of art and texts, particularly during the Classic period (300–850 CE). Indeed, according to the author, young males “energized and reinforced courtly societies” of the ancient Maya realm (6). Over six chapters, plus extensive and detailed endnotes, the work fully combines epigraphy, art history, and archaeological data into a comprehensive synthesis that provides a new perspective on gender among the ancient Maya, a topic that until now… Full Review

24 HRS in Photos (2011), an art installation by Dutch photographer, curator, and designer Erik Kessels, gives us a means of looking at the contemporary state of photography. To create it, Kessels printed out every picture uploaded to Flickr, the image-sharing website, on a single day. The resulting mountains of photos reached to the ceiling in one location, poured through doorways in another, and avalanched over furniture in a third. The flood of images makes material the constant production and circulation of digital photographs in our current moment, and it is easy to respond with a sense of fatigue, a… Full Review

The Alhambra has long been an accessible entryway into a powerful kind of Orientalist romanticism, capturing the minds and words of writers, rulers, artists, and art historians alike. Constructed at the end of the ninth century, expanded as a palace in the twelfth and thirteenth under the Nasrid dynasty (1230–1492), before falling into disrepair from the Reconquista until the nineteenth century, the Alhambra inspired Europeans with its arabesque ornamental scheme and poetic Arabic epigraphy. But as Olga Bush points out in Reframing the Alhambra, the records and descriptions from such sources often tell us more about the authors themselves… Full Review