Browse Recent Reviews

Noting the manner in which Leon Battista Alberti treated the column in his architecture, French philosopher Hubert Damisch commented on its ambiguity: at times structural element, at times a nonstructural, expressive point of punctuation. If there is one motif recurrently embedded in Damisch’s writings on architecture, it is the column and its potent identity as a fixture of ambiguity and multiple meanings. The column is rendered structurally elemental, as it is conceptually, and presents two important points of departure for thinking about architecture critically. The first, tied to the issue of structure and form, is the column’s function as an… Full Review

After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997 looks at Indian and diasporic art from the last seventy years. Occupying much of the Queens Museum’s capacious ground floor, the exhibition, curated by art historian Arshiya Lokhandwala, is spatially as well as thematically organized along two now-axiomatic fault lines of recent Indian history: India’s independence in 1947 and the opening of India’s markets to international commercial interests under former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the 1990s. The year 1997 marked the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, which has spurred critical inquiry into the state of the nation and figures as one… Full Review

Clementine Hunter: A Sketchbook, showcases twenty-six previously unseen paintings by renowned Louisiana artist, Clementine Hunter. The oil-on-paper sketches were completed in 1945, shortly after Hunter first began painting. She spent most of her adult life as a domestic and picking cotton on Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches Parish. Collector Richard Gasperi purchased the sketches from the Henry family during the 1970s. They were displayed for the first time in 2014 as part of the Gasperi Collection exhibition. In the introduction, Gasperi tells a riveting story about the survival of the paintings. On August 28, 2005, he was forced to choose from… Full Review

El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics was published to accompany an exhibition of works by Senegalese painter, curator, and cultural activist El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, generally known as El Hadji Sy or El Sy (born Dakar, Senegal, 1954). El Hadji Sy has been a key player in the complex contemporary construction of African artistic thinking and practice ever since the Senegalese government under Léopold Sédar Senghor (President of the Republic of Senegal, 1960–80) became heavily involved in the promotion of the country’s culture within the conceptual framework of négritude, first developed in Paris in the 1930s by black… Full Review

How does a history of art in Africa get written? This writing has to negotiate the shoals and reefs of both its own history of writing but also and perhaps more importantly the framing of its subject matter by another history of art—that of European modernism. The shoals are well known. They come in the form of prescriptions (to students): Do not use the word tribe—it belongs to a colonial era of framing people through their language and material culture that bears little relation to the actual history of identity formation. Do not use the word traditional—it shuts… Full Review

Catherine Roach’s Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain announces its quirky theme in its title: paintings that appear within paintings. Such pictures provide a guilty pleasure for the art historian, providing—in Roach’s words—“the delighted surprise that comes from identifying an image from memory and seeing it made strange” (19). Yet Roach’s book demonstrates that this is not just an art-historical gimmick or a simple riddle. Rather, through such pictures, artists make significant statements about art and nationhood, and propose their own art histories. The issue of art and nationhood is particularly relevant to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, where there was much discussion… Full Review

Andrea del Sarto manages to be both the painter’s painter and the draughtsman’s draughtsman. Best known for paintings, such as the so-called Madonna of the Harpies, that combine Leonardo da Vinci’s sense of the expressive possibilities of chiaroscuro with a strong feeling for the innate beauty of resonant chromatic harmony—a painterly achievement of extraordinary intuitive brilliance—he is also one of the greatest draughtsmen who ever lived. Francesco Bocchi, an underrated writer on art of the later sixteenth century, placed Andrea on equal footing with Michelangelo and Raphael in terms of his contribution to the perfection of painting, observing that… Full Review

This generously illustrated volume is a welcome contribution to scholarship on seventeenth-century Chinese landscape painting and artistic expressions of loyalism to the fallen Ming dynasty (1368–1644) after the rise of the Manchu Qing (1644–1911). In highlighting geo-narrative, a previously unrecognized category of site-specific painting, Kindall has richly contextualized the distinctive works of Huang Xiangjian, a Suzhou artist who gained fame for his extraordinary filial piety. For several years after the Qing conquest, Huang had no news of his father, Huang Kongzhao (1589–1678), a Ming official sent in 1643 to serve in the far southwest, over a thousand miles away. In… Full Review

In the Wake examines how Japanese photographers have processed the disasters of March 11, 2011. On that day, three cataclysmic and interrelated events fell upon Japan like disastrous dominos: first, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded in the country shifted the earth’s axis several inches and devastated northeast Japan; second, a powerful tsunami resulting from the disruption of the Pacific Ocean floor inundated the Tōhoku region with waves measuring more than 130 feet high; third, emergency cooling systems of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant failed due to the tsunami, releasing contaminants into the environment. These catastrophes had immediate… Full Review

In August 1933, twenty-two-year-old René Brimo traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to research his dissertation in the history of art for the University of Paris. Using Harvard as his base, he planned to study the history of collecting in the United States. His subject, cannily chosen, would enable him to combine academic ambition with commercial interests. In an era of burgeoning internationalism in intellectual circles, he was eager to expand his scholarly contacts. And as the son of a successful art dealer being groomed to head the business, he would have academic license to seek out privately owned works and potential… Full Review