Browse Recent Reviews

Ara Merjian’s commanding monograph, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris, opens with a reading of Self-Portrait with Double, a picture de Chirico made in 1919, shortly before his epochal retour à l’ordre. In the painting, the artist sits beside a table in a perfunctory room, fixing the viewer with a sober, portentous stare and gesturing toward a marble slab held upright on the tabletop. True to the picture’s title, a ghostly doppelgänger looms in the space just behind his counterpart, its doughy face turned in profile, clasping empty air with an outstretched hand… Full Review

Visitors to the exhibition Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia—the final venue of an international, five-year tour—were greeted by a larger-than-life photographic portrait of the architect, his striking profile and silver hair outlined against the dark background, finger thoughtfully touching his lips and barely concealing a bemused smile. Cocurated by Stanislaus von Moos and Jochen Eisenbrand for the Vitra Design Museum, the exhibition and the lavishly illustrated catalogue with contributions by major scholars probed the many facets of this enigmatic, uncategorizable architect who daringly looked back to the classical past to… Full Review

The art-historical literature on Italian Renaissance courts has traditionally been one of in-depth studies of individual court cities and specific artists. Alison Cole’s lucidly written book summarizes some of this literature for a general audience, focusing on the courts of Naples, Urbino, Ferrara, Mantua, and Milan during the fifteenth century. The work is a revised edition of the author’s 1995 book Virtue and Magnificence: Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts, expanded to reflect recent scholarship. Cole approaches her subject primarily from an art-historical perspective, highlighting the varieties of media, styles, and uses of art at court while presenting a… Full Review

Eight years after the first cases of AIDS came to light in the United States, and six years before combined antiretroviral therapy was introduced, the photographer Nan Goldin organized the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space, New York. This event, an outcry from an East Village community besieged by the AIDS epidemic, is at the core of Sophie Junge’s detailed study Art against AIDS. Consequentially, the book does not open with an introduction but with installation shots of the 1989–90 exhibition. The photographs detail the sculptural works, paintings, photographs, collages, and drawings spread out within two spacious… Full Review

Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs is a ten-year retrospective of selections of Thomas’s paintings and photographs from 2001 to 2011. The book was the basis for the exhibition Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête presented at the Aperture Foundation Gallery in New York from January 28 to March 17, 2016. The large-format photograph on the book’s cover, Din, une très belle négresse #1 (2012), is a study in mustard, black, white, and gray of a portrait of a woman in front of a graphic floral print background. Her soft, rounded natural hairstyle compliments the circular shape of her shell pendant and… Full Review

The exhibition Kul’ttovary: Bringing Culture into the Soviet Home at Florida State University (FSU) was a welcome contribution in the area of Soviet design history. In narratives about this period, familiar tropes about lack of choice and low-quality, reverse-engineered copies are often contrasted with the iconic products of the United States, such as an Eames chair or the ’57 Chevy. However, this juxtaposition often involves thinking about design through certain Western assumptions, and can get in the way of a more thorough exploration of the history of Soviet material culture, a world precisely not driven by the values… Full Review

Medieval reliquaries—metalwork and bejeweled objects housing the relics of saints—often inspire analyses predicated on theories of signs, meaning, and the relationship of text to visual matter. Reliquaries demand such modes of inquiry. They layer their signifying strategies, which range from enamel images to patterned jewel inlay to poetic inscription to crystal windows mediating the display of the enshrined relic. Because they participate in so many sign systems, relics and reliquaries attract interdisciplinary approaches, such as mine (2008) and Robyn Malo’s (2013), which lend the perspective of literary and textual studies to the signifying strategies of reliquaries, relics, and their attendant… Full Review

Suzanne Hudson’s contribution to the One Work series by Afterall (a research center of the University of the Arts London, located at Central Saint Martins) is focused on Night Sea, a painting by Agnes Martin (1912–2004) that Martin completed in 1963. The series is unique in its focus on the critical elaboration, by notable authors in the field, of individual works of art. Suzanne Hudson, associate professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, has also written critical texts on painting, including Painting Now (2015) as well as Robert Ryman: Used Paint (2009). Additionally… Full Review

Between 1935 and 1944 the US Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) commissioned a collection of 170,000 photographs. Ostensibly a public relations project to promote Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s resettlement programs for poor farmers during the Great Depression, they are a record of rural life and economic anxieties that were mediated by an intervention of industrialized public services. Now these images, along with some later additions, are a digitized collection of photographs and metadata that have been archived by the Library of Congress (LoC). This collection is also the primary object of inquiry… Full Review

Late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century art in northern Europe is often noted for its similarities to Classical art, as evidenced most famously in Nicholas of Verdun’s altar at Klosterneuberg, of 1181; the sculpture of Laon and Chartres; and the Ingeborg Psalter, of ca. 1195. The idea of a “Year 1200 Style,” however, as Konrad Hoffman dubbed it in his catalogue for the The Year 1200 exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970, has been considered problematic from the earliest days, with Willibald Sauerländer calling it overly “vague and formalistic” (review of “‘The Year 1200,’ a Centennial Exhibition… Full Review