Recently Published Reviews

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that in order to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. Similarly, in order to write a good doctoral thesis, you have to choose a good subject. This book, like many another first book in the history of art, is the author's doctoral thesis (Yale, 1988) writ large, and she certainly picked a fantastic topic. The result is one of the most useful books ever written on Italian Renaissance drawings, albeit—it has to be admitted—scarcely one of the most approachable. In saying this, I do not… Full Review

Byzantium lies far removed from most twenty-first-century sensibilities, an exotic historical relic of the premodern world. No doubt its most enduring architectural legacy is its churches, scores of which still stand in crowded neighborhoods or rural isolation across the east Mediterranean. These are typically small, frequently domed, and elaborately decorated structures that shape a truly distinctive liturgical environment. The survival of this basic idea in many Orthodox churches today suggests the persistence of a fundamental cultural truth, an almost mystical embodiment of the cosmos as conceived by the medieval mind. Viewed less sympathetically, these compact buildings represent the meager fruit… Full Review

Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century is the catalogue for a small but well-focused exhibition of contemporary Chinese art held at the Smart Museum, University of Chicago, from February 18 to April 18, 1999 and subsequently exhibited at the University of Oregon Museum of Art and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College. Author and exhibition curator, Wu Hung, Harrie Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at University of Chicago, begins his book with a reflection upon the general state of the field. His introduction, "Pushing the Limits, Chinese Experimental Art, 1949 to 1999,"… Full Review

Emily Braun's book is a milestone in the study of fascist art and politics, not only because Sironi played a seminal role in the development of fascist aesthetics but also due to the theoretical sophistication she brings to her analysis of fascism's cultural politics. Braun frames Sironi's production in terms of Roger Griffin's palingenetic concept of fascism, a generic term deriving from "palin," meaning "again" or "anew," and genesis, suggesting creation or birth. At the core of fascist politics was a palingenetic call for a period of renewal or regeneration after a phase of crisis or decline. Fascists addressed both… Full Review

This book is by turn fascinating, informative, challenging and frustrating. Its focus lies with fourth to fifth century Christian texts describing the lives and habits of ascetic monks, above all in Egypt. Frank's interest lies in journeys to people rather than journeys to places. Her concern is not with the objects of pilgrimage, saints and holy places, but with the pilgrim's own experiences and the sharing of that experience with the reader of the text. Frank constructs these texts in a variety of ways: she analyses them as travelogues, as pilgrimage texts, and as stories written to give lay audiences… Full Review

It is almost a platitude for reviewers to greet books and exhibitions about the Bloomsbury artists with the dismayed question, What new about this group can possibly be seen or said? This response is unjust. In fact, the exhibition The Art of Bloomsbury, originated in London's Tate Gallery and circulated in somewhat reduced form through two American venues—the Huntington Library and the Yale Center for British Art—is the first comprehensive survey of the art of Bloomsbury's central figures: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant. The exhibition benefited from the knowledgeable curatorship of Richard Shone, author of… Full Review

It is almost a platitude for reviewers to greet books and exhibitions about the Bloomsbury artists with the dismayed question, What new about this group can possibly be seen or said? This response is unjust. In fact, the exhibition The Art of Bloomsbury, originated in London's Tate Gallery and circulated in somewhat reduced form through two American venues—the Huntington Library and the Yale Center for British Art—is the first comprehensive survey of the art of Bloomsbury's central figures: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant. The exhibition benefited from the knowledgeable curatorship of Richard Shone, author of… Full Review

"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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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