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

Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia, February 6–April 8, 2018
In the introduction to The Pencil of Nature (1844), British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot tells the origin story of “photogenic drawing.” While honeymooning, he attempted to sketch Lake Como with the aid of a camera lucida. But his “faithless pencil” left only traces of the refracted landscape; the marks were “melancholy to behold.” As if updating Pliny’s tale of art originating with the tracing of a lover’s shadow, Talbot resolved to fix nature’s phantasmagoric images. In 1841, he patented the calotype, the first paper-based chemical photographic process. Unlike its popular French competitor, the metal-based daguerreotype, the calotype process… Full Review
August 12, 2022
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Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, January 28–August 7, 2022
In The Power of Maps (1992), cartographer Denis Wood writes, “The world we take for granted—the real world—is made like this, out of the accumulated thought and labor of the past. It is presented to us on the platter of the map, presented, that is, made present, so that whatever invisible, unattainable, erasable past or future can become part of our living . . . now . . . here” (7). This accumulation of the past made relevant to those in the present is examined in Maya Lin’s current exhibition at Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA).  … Full Review
August 8, 2022
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Alessia Frassani, ed.
Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021. 280 pp. Cloth €118.00 (9789004467453)
A growing body of scholarship on Indigenous visual culture of colonial Latin America has come about since the Columbus Quincentenary. Much of it calls attention to the active participation of Indigenous artists, patrons, and other marginalized groups in the production and consumption of objects and images. Significantly, it challenges earlier scholarship in the field, much of which advanced the problematic idea that the European conquest of the Americas was successful in eradicating key aspects of Indigenous ideology, cosmology, and artistic practices. The eleven scholarly essays that comprise Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas contribute to this critical… Full Review
July 20, 2022
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Sylvia Houghteling
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 280 pp.; 162 color ills. Hardcover $65.00 (978069121578)
In early modern South Asia the sale of cloth was the second highest financial generator in the economic market. As a commodity it was prized across the world. Moreover, it was an important status symbol, connecting the far flung outposts of the Mughal Empire (1526–1858). It is therefore surprising that a history of South Asian textiles from this pivotal period has never been written before now. Fortunately, what Sylvia Houghteling presents in The Art of Cloth in Mughal India is more than a straightforward narrative. Rather, it maps a history of a specific art form while offering a multilayered methodological… Full Review
July 15, 2022
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David Hemsoll
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. 352 pp.; 250 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300225761)
Can we uncover the intention of the artist? With Emulating Antiquity: Renaissance Buildings from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, David Hemsoll has written a detailed new volume that proposes a definitively positive answer within the domain of Renaissance architecture in Florence and Rome. His interest lies primarily in one aspect of the architecture of the period: its relationship to the antique prototypes that provided source material for many works. He posits, with infectious optimism, that a close reading of the full oeuvres of the five architects under consideration will permit “a full and detailed account . . . of how and… Full Review
July 13, 2022
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Mary Weismantel
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 288 pp.; 66 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9781477323212)
The visual culture of sex is a fundamental tool for studying sexuality among ancient societies. The study of sexuality is, in fact, also the study of social structure as it relates to the culture, history, and ideology of a society. The sexualized image is a primary source equal to text or oral tradition, and it should be analyzed carefully. Studying sexuality can reveal social features that could not be otherwise revealed, as demonstrated in the Barbara L. Voss and Robert A. Schmidt-edited volume Archaeologies of Sexualities (2000). Mary Weismantel’s Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots shows readers both… Full Review
July 8, 2022
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Barbara Johns
University of Washington Press, 2021. 192 pp.; 156 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780998911236)
Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, WA, October 21, 2021–February 20, 2022
For many accomplished Japanese Americans in the aftermath of World War II incarceration, public visibility was a vexed proposition at best, and professional success meant dwelling somewhere in the shadows between celebration and forgetting. In the case of the influential Seattle-based painter Kenjiro Nomura (1896–1956), whose career had cycled between obscurity and national recognition even before the war, this ambiguous status has persisted through at least two or three posthumous efforts to establish his significance. Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist’s Journey, a fine recent exhibition and companion volume from the Cascadia Art Museum, may finally do so. … Full Review
July 6, 2022
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Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, December 10, 2021–March 20, 2022
Defining the art of a region in the twenty-first century is a thorny and onerous task. Like many professionals in the age of telecommuting, gig work, and academic precarity, artists relocate often. Similarly, influences stem from far and wide, making the old art historical distinctions of style as defined by geographical proximity difficult to apply in this day and age. The Regional, an exhibition jointly organized by Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) and Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, attempts to provide a snapshot of the art of today in the American Midwest. The museum directors’… Full Review
June 28, 2022
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Andreas Beyer, et al.
Exh. cat. Basel: Foundation Beyeler, 2021. 400 pp.; 300 color ills. Cloth CHF72.00 (9783775746571)
In the latter part of 2021, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel mounted the most important retrospective exhibition on Goya in recent decades. Curated by Martin Schwander—who is also the editor of the catalog—and developed by Isabela Mora and Sam Keller in collaboration with the Prado Museum, it gathered 181 Goya works, including seventy-seven paintings, fifty-three prints, and fifty-one drawings. It was a unique opportunity for those able to attend the fully booked exhibition, since many of the works have rarely been shown outside of Spain, and many come from private collections. This is the first retrospective exhibition of Goya’s work… Full Review
June 24, 2022
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Kristoffer Neville
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. 256 pp.; 15 color ills.; 65 b/w ills.; 82 ills. Cloth $89.95 (9780271082257)
In the opening pages of his recent survey of early modern Scandinavian art and architecture, Kristoffer Neville argues that “the Danish and Swedish courts were fully integrated in Central European culture and played leading roles in the larger region from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century” (6). Rather than emphasize the uniqueness of Scandinavian artistic production in this period, Neville’s project is to excavate an often overlooked unity between closely related territories that have undergone an artificial separation in the writing of German, Danish, and Swedish national art histories. By revealing the impact of the Scandinavian monarchies in the German-speaking… Full Review
June 21, 2022
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Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA, April 9, 2022–July 17, 2022
One might expect an exhibition focused on ten years of an artist’s practice to present a narrow slice of work, a partial—unsatisfying, even—picture of a lifelong creative evolution. Such a focus may seem best presented in book form. Yet Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (co-organized by the Menil Collection in Houston) exemplifies how a focused art historical examination of a particular portion of an artist’s career can make a successful exhibition. Saint Phalle is perhaps an especially noteworthy subject for such a presentation—over the course of a decade, changes in… Full Review
June 17, 2022
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Mark McDonald
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 320 pp.; 166 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781588397140)
There can be a tendency to portray Francisco Goya—frequently celebrated as the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns—as an artist existing outside of time. Goya’s Graphic Imagination firmly situates Goya in his artistic and cultural milieu while simultaneously teaching us to look closely and marvel anew at the boundless imagination and technical prowess of his graphic production. The catalog’s associated exhibition (which this author did not see) drew from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s remarkable holdings of Goya’s graphic work with supplemental loans from the Museo Nacional del Prado, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, New… Full Review
June 15, 2022
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Craig Staff
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 200 pp.; 20 color ills. Cloth $49.00 (9781789382884)
Painting, History and Meaning is an ambitious book that seeks to redress conventional understandings of temporality within the study of contemporary painting. Craig Staff takes his “interpretative framework” (4) from the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s notion that painting occupies several “sites of time” simultaneously. Staff seeks neither to replicate the arbitrary attitude to temporality apparent in some works of postmodern eclecticism nor to reduce painting to the linear history of progress inherent in modernism and modernist criticism. His approach is rather to construct an alternative that opens up the differences in time inherent in the object that is the painting. Drawing… Full Review
June 9, 2022
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Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss
Getty Research Institute, 2021. 256 pp.; 80 color ills.; 34 b/w ills. Paper $60.00 (9781606067307)
Contrary to the legal maxim that there were no enslaved people in France, during the reign of Louis XIV acts of enslavement were visualized in an array of artistic media. For instance, Charles Le Brun’s design for the sculptural ornamentation of the stern of the flagship Royal Louis (ca. 1680) features a gilded bas-relief of the king in the guise of a Roman conqueror, flanked by two manacled figures whose characteristic topknot and turban respectively identify them as Turcs; beyond allegory, this image invokes a real practice of enslavement. Art historian Meredith Martin and historian Gillian Weiss confront the… Full Review
May 31, 2022
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Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 200 pp.; 27 b/w ills. Cloth $27.40 (9780226802060)
Much of the literature engaging the repatriation of museum collections has focused on claims made by postcolonial nation-states, or by Indigenous communities in settler-colonial contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Latin America, specifically, has been relatively absent from these debates because of the enduring legacies of Indigenism as a key politics of nation making, justifying the appropriation of Indigenous cultural production in favor of the nation. The very few instances of repatriation in the region have been negotiated between specific museums and private collectors, who have returned objects to countries of origin, rather than through… Full Review
May 26, 2022
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