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

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff
Exh. cat. Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum, 2013. 288 pp.; 214 color ills.; 57 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 ((9780764965821)
Exhibition schedule: Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, June 9–September 1, 2013; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, January 14–March 29, 2014; Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, DC, April 26–August 17, 2014; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, September 14, 2014–January 11, 2015
In 1956, rector Charles Olson invited Bay Area poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988) and his partner, Jess (Burgess Collins, 1923–2004), to teach at Black Mountain College and exchange ideas on avant-garde poetry. Inspired by Olson’s concept of “composition by field,” i.e., of verse organized by nonlinear, spontaneous associations, Duncan entitled his 1960 collection of poems The Opening of the Field. An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle applies this vision of imaginative interconnection to a stimulating group of works in varied media. Deeply rooted in myth and romanticism, Olson would have appreciated its broad cultural scope, grounded… Full Review
January 8, 2014
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Kristin B. Aavitsland
Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 300 pp.; 14 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $124.95 (9781409438182)
Kristin B. Aavitsland’s Imagining the Human Condition in Medieval Rome examines a cycle of late thirteenth-century frescoes discovered in 1965 at the Cistercian abbey of Tre Fontane outside Rome. Found on the outside of the eastern wall of a medieval dormitory, at the time used as a terrace, the cycle was in poor condition. Their discovery was a revelation, countering the prevalent idea that the iconoclastic Cistercians eschewed figural imagery. The cycle is in fact the earliest known figural monumental decoration in a Cistercian setting. During a restoration in 1970–71, the frescoes were mounted on canvas and moved, which left… Full Review
January 2, 2014
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Dorothy Metzger Habel
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. 248 pp.; 119 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780271055732)
Dorothy Metzger Habel is unafraid to take the road well traveled by her academic forebears, even such renowned ones as Richard Krautheimer. This was true of her 2002 book on the urban development of Rome under Alexander VII (The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII, New York: Cambridge University Press), and it is equally true of her new book, “When All of Rome Was Under Construction”: The Building Process of Baroque Rome. What makes her latest study so exciting is that she offers a fresh perspective on the architectural and urban history of… Full Review
January 2, 2014
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Richard T. Neer
New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012. 400 pp.; 432 color ills.; 116 b/w ills. Paper $100.00 (9780500288771)
Richard Neer’s latest book, Greek Art and Archaeology: A New History, c. 2500–c. 150 BCE, takes a refreshingly contemporary approach to the study of ancient Greek material culture. As the title suggests, the textbook surveys over two millennia of Greek history, from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period. While the purview is hardly unique, Neer aims to present a “new history” of the discipline through his broad, inclusive understanding of the Greek world and the significance of its artistic production. The strengths of this volume lie in its highly practical format, nuanced treatment of the material, and interdisciplinary… Full Review
January 2, 2014
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Irving Lavin
Visible Spirit: The Art of Gianlorenzo Bernini, vol. 3.. London: Pindar Press, 2013. 386 pp.; 272 color ills. Cloth $390.00 (9781904597469)
Scholars are fortunate to now have a convenient new edition containing all of Irving Lavin's numerous articles on the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Published under the collective title Visible Spirit: The Art of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the third and final volume is Bernini at St. Peter's: The Pilgrimage. Unlike the preceding volumes, it represents a single monograph unto itself, printed in a much larger format with a great deal of unpublished material and excellent color photography. Lavin's thesis concerning the many works of art that he subjects to detailed visual and historical examination is that "Bernini's career at… Full Review
December 27, 2013
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Lorenzo Pericolo
Studies in Baroque Art.. Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller, 2011. 654 pp.; 336 color ills. Cloth $290.00 (9781905375486)
Lorenzo Pericolo’s Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting is part of a recent trend in Caravaggio studies focusing on the artist’s narrative technique and the intentionally ambiguous meaning of his paintings. Prominent examples include Valeska von Rosen’s Caravaggio und die Grenze des Darstellbaren. Ambiguität, Ironie und Performativiät in der Malerei um 1600 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), and, to a certain degree, Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), along with Itay Sapir’s Ténèbres sans leçons: esthétique et épistémologie de la peinture ténébriste romaine 1595-1610 (Peter Lang: International Academic Publishers, 2012). … Full Review
December 27, 2013
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Guido Beltramini, Davide Gasparotto, and Adolfo Tura, eds.
Exh. cat. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013. 456 pp.; 196 color ills.; 8 b/w ills. Paper $44.00 (9788831715096)
Exhibition schedule: Palazzo del Monte di Pietà, Padua, February 2–May 19, 2013
As this outstanding exhibition on view in Padua demonstrated, Pietro Bembo (b. Venice, 1470; d. Rome, 1547)—humanist, author, lover, courtier, collector, papal secretary, and cardinal—was one of those exceptionally rare people who seems to have experienced at firsthand a large proportion of the great cultural events of his time. When Angelo Poliziano visited northern Italy in 1491 looking for unknown ancient texts for Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine humanist studied alongside the young Bembo, annotating an incunabulum of Terence’s Comedies while also consulting a rare codex by the author (cat. 1.3). During the emotion-laden years in which Bembo wrote his… Full Review
December 27, 2013
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Georges Bataille
Ed Stuart Kendall; trans Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall New York: Zone Books, 2009. 224 pp.; 15 ills. Paper $19.95 (9781890951566)
Georges Bataille’s writings on prehistoric art are known to the English-reading public mainly through two major books: Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art (trans. Austryn Wainhouse, Milan: Skira, 1955) was one of the earliest presentations of Lascaux to be illustrated with lavish color photographs; and The Tears of Eros (published posthumously in French in 1961, and in English in 1989 [trans. Peter Connor, San Francisco: City Lights]) started with a meditation on Paleolithic female figurines. It is less known that Bataille’s complete works in French include many other writings on the subject, ranging from book reviews to notes… Full Review
December 27, 2013
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Claire L. Lyons, Michael Bennett, and Clemente Marconi, eds.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013. 288 pp.; 144 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9781606061336)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April 3–August 19, 2013; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, September 30, 2013–January 5, 2014; Palazzo Ajutamicristo, Palermo, February 14–June 15, 2014
Sicilian Greeks—who adopted a collective identity as “Sikeliotes”—celebrated a decisive victory over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera in 480 BCE, by tradition on the same day the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis (Herodotus 7.166). In 212 BCE Marcellus sacked Syracuse and brought Sicily under Roman domination. Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome, curated by Claire Lyons and Alexandra Sofroniew, focuses on this key period, when Sicily, situated geographically at a pivotal intersection between Greece, Italy, and North Africa, experienced a spectacular golden age of cultural productivity. Rather than the traditional Athenocentric narrative, which begins… Full Review
December 20, 2013
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Stephanie Schrader, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013. 128 pp.; 47 color ills.; 5 b/w ills. Paper $20.00 (9781606061312)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, March 5–June 9, 2013
Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia was a small exhibition with a big ambition. Roughly twenty objects including drawings, paintings, prints, costumes, and illustrated books were arranged in two galleries to suggest a comprehensive outlook of how Asia was conceived by Europeans in the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Special attention was given to Man in Korean Costume (ca. 1617), Peter Paul Rubens’s famed drawing owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum. The first section of the exhibition focused on how European missionaries encountered and viewed Asia—China, in particular—and how Rubens’s depictions helped to transmit such views as the… Full Review
December 20, 2013
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Genevieve Warwick
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 224 pp.; 24 color ills.; 42 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780300187069)
With Bernini: Art as Theatre, Genevieve Warwick has produced one of the most significant contributions to the recent surge of literature on Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Her fascinating book is articulate and thoughtful, its arguments sound and convincing. It incorporates a wide body of scholarly literature and mines archives and primary sources to provide new looks at well-known objects. Warwick presents an innovative understanding of the aesthetic culture of seventeenth-century Rome, reconstructing the visual expectations of Bernini’s audience and the settings in which his objects were made and displayed. Bernini’s art has often been described somewhat dismissively as theatrical, suggesting… Full Review
December 20, 2013
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Richard Taws
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. 288 pp.; 24 color ills.; 66 b/w ills. Cloth $74.95 (9780271054186)
Richard Taws’s The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France makes a compellingly original contribution to the study of the visual and material culture of the French Revolution. This book takes as its subject a body of objects that have traditionally failed to garner sustained interest within the discipline of art history, which has preferred to focus on exemplary practitioners such as Jacques-Louis David and works of art made in the durable medium of oil painting. The Politics of the Provisional asks what might be learned about the French Revolution if attention is turned from singular masterpieces… Full Review
December 20, 2013
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Daniel H. Magilow
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. 200 pp.; 45 ills. Cloth $64.95 (9780271054223)
Sarah E. James
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 280 pp.; 10 color ills.; 170 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300184440)
Daniel H. Magilow’s The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany and Sarah E. James’s Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain investigate photography in its serial form, recruiting case studies from twentieth-century Germany to explore their claims. Counter to the rather substantive body of research on photomontage that interrogates the semiotics and somatics of juxtaposed, cropped, found, and staged photographs, these recent contributions to the history and theory of photography explore the meanings and subject positions engendered by pictorial succession. More emphatically than the montage of photographs on a single plane, the structure of photographic… Full Review
December 20, 2013
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Christine Sciacca, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012. 448 pp.; 240 color ills. 240 $65.00 (9781606061268)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, November 13, 2012–February 10, 2013; Art Gallery of Ontario, March 16–June 16, 2013
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 was a momentous undertaking, an assembly of over one hundred works, most created for Florentine religious institutions. There is a hefty catalogue that will become an essential resource, not only for beautiful plates but for scholarly commentary. The bold title promised a panoramic vision. Even allowing for the customary hyperbole of exhibition titles, it did not disappoint. A primary objective of curator Christine Sciacca and her team was to argue on behalf of a view of trecento painting that extends beyond panels and frescoes to include paintings in… Full Review
December 11, 2013
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Karen Milbourne
Exh. cat. New York: Monacelli Press, 2013. 288 pp.; many color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781580933704)
Exhibition schedule: National Museum for African Art, Smithsonian Institution, April 22, 2013–January 5, 2014
In an era of constant discussion about climate change, rising sea levels, land degradation, energy use, and competition for land rights, the National Museum of African Art show Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa takes on a topic of urgent public interest. Curator Karen Milbourne has broken the exhibition into different conceptual approaches to “earth”— as a source for art materials or material wealth, the home of both human and ancestral realms in many cosmologies, and a place for geopolitical debates about ownership, identity, and belonging. The result is a show that asks many… Full Review
December 11, 2013
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