- Chronology
- Before 1500 BCE
- 1500 BCE to 500 BCE
- 500 BCE to 500 CE
- Sixth to Tenth Century
- Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
- Fifteenth Century
- Sixteenth Century
- Seventeenth Century
- Eighteenth Century
- Nineteenth Century
- Twentieth Century
- Twenty-first Century
- Geographic Area
- Africa
- Caribbean
- Central America
- Central and North Asia
- East Asia
- North America
- Northern Europe
- Oceania/Australia
- South America
- South Asia/South East Asia
- Southern Europe and Mediterranean
- West Asia
- Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice
- Aesthetics
- African American/African Diaspora
- Ancient Egyptian/Near Eastern Art
- Ancient Greek/Roman Art
- Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation
- Art Education/Pedagogy/Art Therapy
- Art of the Ancient Americas
- Artistic Practice/Creativity
- Asian American/Asian Diaspora
- Ceramics/Metals/Fiber Arts/Glass
- Colonial and Modern Latin America
- Comparative
- Conceptual Art
- Decorative Arts
- Design History
- Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media
- Digital Scholarship/History
- Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice
- Fiber Arts and Textiles
- Film/Video/Animation
- Folk Art/Vernacular Art
- Genders/Sexualities/Feminisms
- Graphic/Industrial/Object Design
- Indigenous Peoples
- Installation/Environmental Art
- Islamic Art
- Latinx
- Material Culture
- Multimedia/Intermedia
- Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration
- Native American/First Nations
- Painting
- Patronage, Art Collecting
- Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice
- Photography
- Politics/Economics
- Queer/Gay Art
- Race/Ethnicity
- Religion/Cosmology/Spirituality
- Sculpture
- Sound Art
- Survey
- Theory/Historiography/Methodology
- 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
"I have to say that an encounter between progress and reaction, between being uncompromising and opportunistic, fascinates me equally strongly today." The artist and theater director Tadeusz Kantor wrote these words in 1964 touching upon one of the most important issues faced by artists in our modern times that transcends national divisions, the choice between conformism and rebellion. From the Polish perspective, such a choice has a strong grounding in Poland's turbulent history as it is a country that constantly reshaped its borders, and appeared and disappeared on the map of Europe. As a consequence history has put Polish identity…
Full Review
November 16, 2000
The intellectual as social critic has a long and respected tradition. The works of Dante and Milton, Lessing and Rousseau, Stowe and Hugo vibrate with the intense political passions that motivated each writer to pick up their pens. At the end of the nineteenth century, Zola's defense of Dreyfuss set a standard for engagement. The intellectual used his or her mastery of communication to challenge the lies of a corrupt government. American intervention into the Vietnamese civil war sparked poets, theater workers, and filmmakers to produce some of their finest work as they tried to live up to the responsibilities…
Full Review
November 10, 2000
Chloe Chard's Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour has obvious topical import for art and architectural historians of the early modern to modern periods. Instigated in part by a postcolonial turn in criticism, the varied artifacts of European expansion have captured the attention of scholars across disciplines. But before this rather recent interdisciplinary interest, art and architectural historians have been, as Chard mentions, some of the few scholars to pay special notice to the accounts of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century travelers who made the tour of Italy to collect and, in many cases, produce works out of encounters with the…
Full Review
November 9, 2000
Lady Hawarden's light-filled photographs of her adolescent daughters posed in sparsely furnished rooms of her London home are curious, complicated, and often inexplicable. Along with Julia Margaret Cameron, Hawarden's near contemporary, Hawarden is now considered one of the most significant female photographers in nineteenth-century Britain, and she is the subject of not one but two recent monographs and a 1999 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This is long overdue as Cameron has already been the subject of numerous books and international exhibitions. The reasons for this imbalance are many: for one, Hawarden's surviving oeuvre resides principally at the…
Full Review
November 8, 2000
In the heart of McGill University, in downtown Montreal, sits a remarkable building. Supposedly Canada's first purpose-built natural history museum at the time of its opening in 1882, the Redpath Museum is now a particularly popular place with children because of its splendid Albertosaurus libratus, among other dinosaur remains. Our four-year old son, in fact, calls it the "Dino Museum." Many McGill students, unfortunately, have never been inside. Perhaps this is because the rich collections of the Redpath Museum are difficult to discern from the building's exterior, which has always seemed to me to be a sort of Greek-temple-meets-Crystal-Palace
I…
Full Review
November 7, 2000
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1881) repeatedly noted in his voluminous journals the wonders of the eye and the extraordinary advances in vision achieved during his lifetime as artist, inventor, and scientist. In 1837 he titled the revelations accorded by a walk with a landscape painter or with a telescope as "New Eyes." By 1871 he proclaimed five miracles of the age citing the astronomer's spectroscope and the photograph among them. No wonder in an isolated sentence in his journals Emerson ultimately pronounced, "Our age is ocular." The alterations Emerson contributed to in the ideas of vision and witnessed in the means…
Full Review
November 5, 2000
"Why were there no great women artists?" pondered Linda Nochlin in 1971. Since that famous query, art historians have unearthed many talented women artists, while simultaneously challenging the criteria by which we evaluate their works. This volume of eight essays contributes to that ongoing excavation and reassessment in several important ways. The essays document the life, works, and influence of a little-known female painter in sixteenth-century Florence, the Dominican nun-artist Suor Plautilla Nelli. Although her extant corpus is small--only four large paintings can be securely attributed to her hand--Nelli gained initial fame as one of Vasari's biographical subjects. Following that…
Full Review
October 25, 2000
The study of 16th-century Venetian sculpture was, and still is, badly neglected. Even so eminent an artist as Alessandro Vittoria (Trent, 1525 Venice, 1608) has not yet been accorded the attention his achievements deserve. It is, therefore, with great expectations that one picks up the promisingly important-looking book by Thomas Martin.
The book is based on Martin's doctoral dissertation (Columbia University, 1988) and is divided in two parts: the study itself, in which Martin tries to approach the complex problem of the classicizing portrait bust in Venice and to examine Vittoria's role in developing the genre, and a…
Full Review
October 24, 2000
Greg Thomas's book Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau provides the reader with a long-awaited reevaluation of French landscape painting before the Impressionist period. While the study of Impressionism has sometimes become synonymous with French landscape painting during the nineteenth century, very little has been done, apart from the recent exhibitions of Camille Corot's work, to reassess the artistic contribution of the preceding generation of landscape painters.
By concentrating on the landscapes of Théodore Rousseau, Greg Thomas's book contributes new insights about the career of a relatively neglected artist of the nineteenth century.…
Full Review
October 24, 2000
This book is an amazing compendium of information concerning the reevaluation of painting and sculpture as parts of the liberal arts during the early Renaissance (1290-1520); architecture is all but excluded because its position was already rather elevated. The observation in itself is not new; assessment of the graphic arts was a leitmotif of art historical scholarship throughout the twentieth century. What is impressive is the myriad aperçus Ames-Lewis has amassed and divided into eleven salient categories, each developed in well-illustrated and annotated chapters. These chapters, he proposes, when taken together, produce an image of the ambient life of talented…
Full Review
October 20, 2000
Like other post-conceptual artists of her generation who adapted the 1960s' formal convention of the series to sustained analytical investigations of social phenomena (think of Allan Sekula's Aerospace Folktales, for example, or Mary Kelly's Postpartum Document), Martha Rosler has produced a body of work over the last thirty-five years that has proven difficult to assimilate to the promotional ways and means of the art world. From her photodocumentary-cum-image/text work The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1973-74), through videos such as Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) and critical essays such as "Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers" (1979), to…
Full Review
September 29, 2000
This is a terrific collection of essays that provides a valuable opportunity to review the intellectual development and ambitions of one of the leading critics of our time. It offers access to the author's enterprise from a distinctive vantage point: saving for a second volume his influential period and approach studies--essays such as "Formalism and Historicity" (1977), "Allegorical Procedures" (1982), and "Cold War Constructivism" (1990)--and his well-known "from/to" critical developmental surveys of art movements--such as "From Faktura to Factography" (1984), "From Gadget Video to Agit Video" (1985), and his forceful summary essay on Conceptual Art subtitled, "From the Aesthetic of…
Full Review
September 27, 2000
"Art history is what one Jew tells another Jew about goyishe (i.e.--Christian) art." This, at any rate, is how my teacher, Stephen S. Kayser, flippantly spoke of his discipline. Kayser, a member of the German émigré generation, author of an important study on Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece and founding director of the Jewish Museum in New York, was not far from wrong. Highly acculturated Jews have been disproportionately represented in the ranks of art historians. Among the "greats" of art history, one may think of Berenson, Goldschmidt, Panofsky, Warburg, Gombrich, Schapiro, Krautheimer, and this list is far from complete. While Jews…
Full Review
September 24, 2000
John Gage's book Color and Culture appeared with considerable acclaim in 1994, and it won that year's Mitchell Prize for art history. It was a dense, ambitious, yet readable exploration of color in Western art from the Classical era to the 20th century--or rather, of ideas about color, since Gage gave more attention to writings about the subject than to actual examples of practice. For instance, he devoted far more space to Matisse's "Notes d'un peintre" (1908) and other written and spoken observations about his approach to color than to the painting Red Studio (1911), used to illustrate Matisse's notions…
Full Review
September 20, 2000
Modestly reproduced, Sebastian Vrancx's unfamiliar Harbor with the Children of Mercury (Musée Massey, Tarbes) is an unlikely opener for this provocative and intelligent book, which seeks to establish the market as a central concern of pictorial culture in Antwerp between 1550 and 1650. It is a mark of Elizabeth Honig's distinction as a writer that, through three paragraphs of precise description, she convinces the reader that this apparently innocuous painting of the tricks of all those who labor under the aegis of Mercury, from quacks and merchants to actors and artists, epitomizes the self-consciousness with which Flemish artists painted arguments…
Full Review
September 8, 2000
Load More