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

Browse Recent Reviews

Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler, eds.
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022. 168 pp.; 19 b/w ills. Paper $18.95 (978-0-271-09328-4)
Although the study of premodern art history often relies on fragmentary evidence, the absent object remains curiously understudied—acknowledged but rarely examined as a critical component to the shape of art history itself. When the object of study is gone—inaccessible through deliberate destruction or the events of time—the art historian must confront this loss doubly: as evidence and as absence. The collection of essays in the compact and provocative book, Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were, not only addresses this art historical problem as its central line of inquiry but it also reveals how, as editors Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler suggest, that ‘‘attending… Full Review
May 22, 2023
Thumbnail
Sarah Louise Cowan
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 280 pp.; 98 color ills.; 12 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300264296)
In Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, the first monograph devoted to the artist, activist, and MoMA curator, Sarah Louise Cowan focuses on Howardena Pindell’s paintings and collages made between the late 1960s and early 1980s, underscoring her forays into sculpture and video along the way. In doing so, Cowan traces the artist’s ambivalent exploration of modernist form. Teasing out Pindell’s alignment with and strategic revisions of all-over painting, the grid and surface treatments, Cowan ultimately unspools modernist grammar from the narrow, yet nevertheless dominant history of midcentury abstraction developed within mostly white male artistic enclaves. In turn, modernism as a… Full Review
May 17, 2023
Thumbnail
Alessandra Giannotti
Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2021. 116 pp.; 50 color ills. Paper €30.00 (9788822267771)
In 1907, the Chicago heiress Hortense Mitchell Acton and her British husband, Arthur Acton, bought La Pietra, a Renaissance villa in the hills outside Florence, as a home where they might live surrounded by their growing art collection. Among the many treasures they gathered within its walls were eight sixteenth-century terracotta sculptures of religious subjects, examples of a type of decorative object commonly found within Florentine Renaissance homes. The works were made independently of one another by different artists and only assembled as a group by the Actons in the twentieth century. Nearly all stand under two feet high, and… Full Review
May 15, 2023
Thumbnail
Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023
The paradox of Monochrome Multitudes is more than titular: Of multitudes there are many, as all but one of the galleries of the Smart Museum are taken up by this ambitious review of the outsized genre. Indeed, much of the work is not truly singular in color at all but tinted, toned, or shaded within a hue, if not outright multicolored. To account for the coming cacophony, we are made to understand at the outset that the exhibition aims to revisit “this notoriously hermetic art to reveal its creative possibilities and complicate its histories” without attempting a comprehensive survey. In… Full Review
Thumbnail
Joanne Allen
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 367 pp.; 180 color ills. Cloth $100.00 (9781108985659)
Most people tempted by the title of this book probably know something about choir screens, especially those in Florence. We, as the author acknowledges, all owe a profound debt to Marica Hall’s work on Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, initially presented in Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce (Oxford University Press, 1979). Her explanations for the dismantling of the screens in those two Florentine mendicant churches has shaped our collective understanding of Florentine tramezzi. Joanne Allen’s new book expands exponentially on that topic. She outlines the history, function, and meaning… Full Review
May 8, 2023
Thumbnail
Carla Acevedo-Yates, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: DelMonico Books, 2022. 288 pp. Cloth $65.00 (978-1636810614)
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, November 19, 2022–April 23, 2023; ICA Boston, October 5, 2023–February 24, 2024
Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Iris Colburn, Isabel Casso, and Nolan Jimbo, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the Caribbean diaspora not as a given, but as a framework for critiquing the homogenizing consequences of categories imposed upon its makers and their visual practices. As Acevedo-Yates declares in her catalog essay, Forecast Form seeks to “challenge the very legibility of so-called Caribbean art itself—what it is, how it looks, and who makes it” (24). Commencing its reframing of the Caribbean, the exhibition starts in the fourth-floor lobby with two large-scale… Full Review
May 3, 2023
Thumbnail
Catherine Hall-van den Elsen
Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021. 144 pp.; 83 color ills.; 4 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9781606067321)
This book examines the all too unusual case of the sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652–1706), who successfully navigated the challenges of being a woman artist in early modern Spain. The role of women in art throughout Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been under-researched until recently. Spanish art too, has remained less well known or studied in the Anglophone world, compared with Italian art. Sculpture in Spain, which in this period was generally polychromed, has only lately begun to attract the attention it deserves. Catherine Hall’s book provides a welcome new contribution to all these fields. In it, she… Full Review
May 1, 2023
Thumbnail
LaNitra M. Berger
New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. 192 pp.; 46 ills. Hardback $110.00 (9781350187498)
Author’s note: Historical terminologies of racial classification, including “Black” and “Coloured,” which were instantiated by the Population Registration Act of 1950, in South Africa, are used throughout Berger’s book so as not to erase the violence of policies enacted under apartheid. Maid in Uniform, a 1955 portrait of a Black South African domestic worker, is arguably one of the strongest works by painter Irma Stern (1894–1966). Dressed in the uniform typical of her profession, Stern’s defiantly unwilling subject purses her lips and crosses her arms; her eyes demur from the viewer. The maid’s expression signals the complex social relations… Full Review
April 28, 2023
Thumbnail
Jennifer M. Feltman and Sarah Thompson, eds.
London: Routledge, 2019. 344 pp. Cloth $160.00 (9780815396734)
What happens after the initial creative act? In her introduction to The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, Jennifer Feltman calls attention to the fact that art historical writing since Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects has typically prioritized the time of a work’s creation, and instead situates the case studies included in the edited volume in the time between then and now. The book makes the case that works we now label “medieval” are never exclusively so, as they have been transformed in later years, whether materially, semantically, or both. Overall, the collection… Full Review
April 27, 2023
Thumbnail
David Ekserdjian
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 496 pp.; 250 ills. Hardcover $75.00 (9780300253641)
David Ekserdjian describes his new and important book, The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative, as a work of “almost demented ambition” (6). The description is apt. A thorough introduction, seven chapters, a conclusion, two appendices, and the usual scholarly apparatus adds up to just over 400 pages of tightly-packed, double-columned text. And that text sets out to provide an almost encyclopedic account of the most frequently produced type of art object in Renaissance Italy. Accordingly, the author references “well over a thousand” (61) works of art. These involve the whole of the Italian peninsula, date from circa… Full Review
April 24, 2023
Thumbnail