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

Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels
Exh. cat. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2012. 604 pp.; 179 color ills.; 362 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (9780300177381)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 11, 2012–February 2, 2013; Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, March 23–June 3, 2013; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 29–September 29, 2013; Brooklyn Museum, November 8, 2013–February 2, 2014
War/Photography, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) (click here for review), is a massive and important book. Topping out at 606 pages with hundreds of photographs gathered from archives around the world, War/Photography is now and will be for many years a crucial resource for anyone working on war and photography. According to the authors, most notably Anne Wilkes Tucker, the chief curator and engineer of the project, “the primary goal . . . has been to expand the discourse about photographs of armed conflict and… Full Review
September 11, 2013
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René de Guzman, Wu Hung, Yiyun Li, Karen Smith, Bill Berkson, and Stephanie Hanor
Exh. cat. Berkeley and Oakland: University of California Press in association with Oakland Museum of California, 2013. 216 pp.; 140 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780520275218)
Exhibition schedule: Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, March 16–June 30, 2013
Exhibition schedule: Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, January 23–March 17, 2013
Hung Liu’s Offerings at the Mills College Art Museum and Summoning Ghosts at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) offer complementary but distinct selections of works, thus avoiding the potential redundancy of two closely timed exhibitions in Oakland, California. The more intimate exhibition Offerings showcases her explorations in installations that employ recurrent metaphors for journey. Contrastingly, Liu’s retrospective Summoning Ghosts nicely chronicles her evolving imagery and processes for more than twenty-five years. While Liu clearly possesses an affinity and dexterity with paint, more surprisingly, the exhibitions highlight her explorations in mixed media, shape, and installation. Additionally, the exhibitions’ complicated mix… Full Review
September 6, 2013
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Satō Dōshin
Trans Hiroshi Nara Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011. 376 pp.; 17 color ills.; 31 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9781606060599)
Originally published in Japanese in 1999, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty (Meiji Kokka to Kindai Bijutsu: Bi no Seijigaku) by Satō Dōshin was hailed as the culmination of the ongoing attempts by some Japanese art historians, including Satō himself, to adopt a more self-reflexive approach to their own discipline.[1] Throughout the book he argues that, although the narrative of Japanese art history was constructed as a "self-portrait" to be presented to the West, the implicit significance of its origin and reception were never arduously scrutinized almost fifty years into the postwar period. His study… Full Review
September 6, 2013
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Karen M. Gerhart
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. 272 pp.; 11 color ills.; 34 b/w ills. Cloth $39.00 (9780824832612)
Japanese art historians spend a great deal of time analyzing subject matter and style in order to shed light on the significance and production contexts of ancient artifacts. In this regard, the format of a given work, its state of preservation, its setting or provenance, and its inscriptions can provide important information. So, too, can a comparison of works by the same artist, same subject matter, or same subjects and textual sources that document the environment in which these artifacts were created. But what if the object in question originally functioned with the accompaniment of written commentary, such as ritual… Full Review
September 6, 2013
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Deborah Parker
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 156 pp.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780521761406)
Michael Hirst
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. 416 pp.; 25 color ills.; 45 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9780300118612)
Michelangelo is the best-documented person of the early modern period, including his more famous and more powerful contemporaries. Even before he died at the age of 89 on February 18, 1564, the artist boasted three published biographies, a short one by Paolo Giovio published in 1546, and the longer texts by Giorgio Vasari of 1550 and republished in expanded form in 1568, and one by Ascanio Condivi, published in 1553. There are about 1,400 letters to and from the artist, dating from 1496 to four days before his death, in addition to a large amount of ricordi, entries in… Full Review
August 29, 2013
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Thomas A. Denenberg, ed.
Portland, ME: Portland Museum of Art, 2012. 184 pp.; 73 color ills.; 24 b/w ills. Cloth $37.50 (9780300184226)
Exhibition schedule: Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, September 22–December 30, 2012
In January 2006, the Portland Museum of Art acquired Winslow Homer’s studio from the painter’s great-grandnephew. The studio sits above the water on Prouts Neck, a peninsula ten miles south of Portland that separates the northern edge of Saco Bay from Homer’s muse—the rocky, wave-beaten, and occasionally deadly coast of the Atlantic Ocean. During the past six years, with the assistance of architectural historians, engineers, and designers, the museum restored the studio to pristine condition. To celebrate the achievement, this past fall and winter the museum exhibited Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine. Weatherbeaten features paintings, watercolors, prints, and… Full Review
August 29, 2013
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Kathryn E. Delmez, ed.
Exh. cat. Nashville and New Haven: Frist Center for the Visual Arts in association with Yale University Press, 2012. 280 pp.; 137 color ills.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300176896)
Exhibition schedule: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, September 21, 2012–January 13, 2013; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, February 2–May 19, 2013; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, June 30–September 29, 2013; Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, Palo Alto, October 16, 2013–January 5, 2014; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 24–April 23, 2014
The contributors to the exhibition catalogue Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video agree: a mid-career retrospective of Weems’s work has been long deserved. Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes in the book’s foreword that Weems is best known as a visual and verbal rhetorician, a narrator of history, and one who uses photography and video to ask hard questions about identity and American culture. These aspects of Weems’s work provide the book’s contributors with an analytical foundation from which to explore the African American artist’s varied practice. Consequently, editor Kathryn E. Delmez and authors Gates, Franklin Sirmans, Robert… Full Review
August 22, 2013
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Judith W. Mann and Babette Bohn
Exh. cat. St. Louis and New Haven: Saint Louis Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2012. 376 pp.; 214 color ills.; 46 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300174779)
Exhibition schedule: Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, October 21, 2012–January 20, 2013; National Gallery, London, February 27–May 19, 2013 (under the title Barocci: Brilliance and Grace)
To any student of art history for whom the painter Federico Barocci (ca. 1533–1612) had been relatively unknown—one of a shrinking demographic, perhaps, given the scholarly attention to post-Tridentine Italy and to Barocci specifically over the past twenty years—the Saint Louis Art Museum’s exhibition devoted to his artistic activity provided a thorough and visually splendid introduction. The exhibited works spanned almost his entire career, ranging from a compositional drawing (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart/Graphische Sammlung) for Barocci’s earliest extant painting, Saint Cecilia with Saints Mary Magdalen, John the Evangelist, Paul, and Catherine (ca. 1556) in the cathedral of Urbino, to late-career paintings of… Full Review
August 22, 2013
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Ian Jenkins and Victoria Turner
Exh. cat. Portland, OR and London: Portland Art Museum in association with British Museum, 2012. 175 pp.; many color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9781883124359)
Exhibition schedule: Museo Arqueológico de Alicante, Alicante, April 2–October 13, 2009; National Palace Museum, Taipei, October 15, 2010–February 9, 2011; Kobe City Museum, Kobe, March 12–June 12, 2011; National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, July 5–September 25, 2011; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, October 6, 2012–January 6, 2013; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, May 5–October 6, 2013
The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece is an exhibition of about one hundred objects of Greco-Roman art drawn entirely from the collection of the British Museum. The show was in many ways welcome. Public displays of ancient art are in short supply on the West Coast north of Los Angeles, and the British Museum, of course, has one of the world’s great collections of this material. While most of the items included in The Body Beautiful are more often in the British Museum’s storerooms than their display vitrines, the exhibition was not without its stars, such as a red-figure kylix… Full Review
August 15, 2013
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Wendy M. K. Shaw
London: I. B. Tauris, 2011. 224 pp.; 16 color ills.; 83 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781848852884)
Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, eds.
Exh. cat. Istanbul: SALT, 2011. 520 pp.; 97 color ills. Paper $125.00 (9789944731270)
Exhibition schedule: SALT, Istanbul, November 22, 2011–March 11, 2012
Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 and Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic are timely additions to a flourishing discourse on the instruments of modernity within the larger history of Ottoman visual culture. In a tightly edited and richly illustrated volume of sixteen essays, Scramble for the Past situates the practice of archaeology in the empire as a continual tug-of-war played out in global and local arenas of politics, science, and culture. The essays destabilize prevailing hegemonic narratives to make space for and locate Ottoman… Full Review
August 15, 2013
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Donald F. McCallum
Franklin D. Murphy Lecture Series.. Lawrence and Seattle: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas in association with University of Washington Press, 2012. 160 pp.; 50 ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780295991306)
The Hakuhō period (ca. 650–ca. 710) has tended to be treated as a time of transition overshadowed by its preceding Asuka and succeeding Nara periods; indeed, its time span and even existence independent of the Asuka and Nara are controversial. Nevertheless, the corpus of small gilt-bronze Buddhist sculpture, a genre of art pieces characteristic of this era, shows an extremely rich variety in style. Donald F. McCallum’s Hakuhō Sculpture is the first book-length publication exclusively devoted to gilt-bronze Buddhist sculpture from the Hakuhō period. McCallum examines the stylistic evolution of Hakuhō sculpture and reassesses its artistic achievement; he argues that… Full Review
August 15, 2013
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Emanuel Mayer
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 312 pp.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780674050334)
Emanuel Mayer’s ambitious The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE–250 CE is divided into two distinct methodological parts. The first (chapters 1–3) is a synthesis of significant trends in the economic history of the Roman imperial period that emphasizes the abundant presence of a prosperous mercantile class across the Roman Empire. Adopting Max Weber’s definition of the middle class as a well-defined group that “shared cultural traits as well as economic opportunities” (18), Mayer proceeds to collect a wealth of archaeological evidence to demonstrate that ancient cities were dominated by production-oriented commercial classes… Full Review
August 8, 2013
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James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff
Exh. cat. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012. 368 pp.; 283 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300179712)
Exhibition schedule: Art Institute of Chicago, May 23–September 3, 2012; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, October 14, 2012–January 13, 2013; Tate Modern, London, February 21–May 27, 2013; Centre Pompidou, Paris, July 3–November 4, 2013
As one might expect, the retrospective exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s work at the National Gallery of Art is, quite literally, explosive. In spite of their familiarity, the bursts of color and graphism still manage to excite. The surprise of Lichtenstein’s technique and source material may have worn over time, but his oeuvre, laid out across fourteen rooms spanning three decades, offers new moments of revelation. Alongside the well-known cartoon melodramas of love and war are early abstractions in an imitative expressionist style; late, expansive canvases inspired by Chinese landscape painting; peculiar forays into a mock-Art Deco manner; and a vast… Full Review
August 8, 2013
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Claire Bishop
London: Verso, 2012. 390 pp. Paper $29.95 (9781844676903)
There is no other way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic. (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-third Letter) In 2002, Jacques Rancière published an essay in the New Left Review discussing Schiller’s famous fifteenth letter from On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 [March/April 2002]: 133–51). Written in 1795, just after the French Revolution had turned to Terror, Schiller tried to resolve the discrepancy between nature and cultural refinement, positing that the human need to play can bridge… Full Review
August 8, 2013
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Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors, eds.
Cambridge, MA: Villa I Tatti in association with Harvard University Press, 2012. 506 pp.; 288 color ills.; 11 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (9780674064621)
The Florentine Codex, also known as the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1576–77), is unrivaled in its centrality to an understanding of the contact period of central Mexico. Although it has been amply appreciated and studied since the late nineteenth century, its ongoing ethnographic, linguistic, and historical utility cannot be overstated. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún spearheaded the encyclopedic colonial project in collaboration with a team of indigenous scribes and painters. His final edition has a richly laden content recorded in three modes: Spanish, Nahuatl (the Aztec language), and an extraordinary array of images that constitute a… Full Review
August 1, 2013
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