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

Annett Busch and Anselm Franke, eds.
Exh. cat. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2015. 220 pp.; 50 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Paper $29.00 (9788364177255)
Exhibition schedule: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, September 19–November 24, 2013; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, June 12–August 23, 2015
After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration—a book that puts the question of a starting point at its heart—wears a black-on-black cover. The black title is pressed in to the book’s black surface, barely discernible save for its slight gloss. On the back of the book, a large circle ringed in that same glossy black looms over a blackened oval. Riffs on these shapes appear in the book’s interior to separate the sections; they appear as white against black, reconfigured, layered, and partitioned. These design elements are suggestive of After Year Zero’s central preoccupations: universalisms new and old, de-centering… Full Review
February 1, 2018
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Jeffrey Weiss, Daniel Buren, and Whitney Davis
Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2015. 264 pp.; 436 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780892075195)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 6–May 3, 2015
I first saw On Kawara’s work in person in 1998 at the retrospective exhibition Whole and Parts 1964–1995 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. At the time I was a graduate student in that city, and my memory of the show is marked by the architecture of the museum, with its rectangular spaces and high ceilings, where each of his bodies of work was assigned a separate space, objectivizing them and creating a sense of preciousness. Overall, the symmetric configuration of the spaces gave the impression that his work had arrived at a final destination, where it was… Full Review
February 1, 2018
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Danielle B. Joyner
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. 256 pp.; 36 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Hardcover $89.95 (9780271070889)
In Painting the Hortus Deliciarum: Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time, Danielle B. Joyner has tackled one of the most challenging topics in Romanesque studies, the illuminated manuscript compilation known as the “Garden of Delights.” Created ca. 1175–85 by Abbess Herrad for the Augustinian convent of Saint Odile at Hohenberg in Alsace, and destroyed in the bombardment of Strasbourg in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, this highly important Romanesque work survives only in copies and descriptions. Students of Romanesque art and culture will welcome this volume not only for its thoughtful insights but also for its beautifully reproduced illustrations… Full Review
January 31, 2018
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Eric M. Ramírez-Weaver
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017. 296 pp.; 35 color ills.; 82  b/w ills. Cloth $89.95 (9780271071268)
Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, as well as one of his key courtiers, Alcuin, flattered the ruler with praise for his interest, indeed expertise, in science generally and astronomy in particular. In 809 CE a group of computistic scholars, apparently under the leadership of Adalhard of Corbie, gathered at Aachen and produced a handbook containing both texts and images that were intended to be helpful in understanding the calendar and, on the basis of that knowledge, of properly arranging the liturgical year. The Carolingians embarked on a program of spiritual and societal regeneration. Correct worship was essential for that program’s success. The… Full Review
January 31, 2018
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Celeste-Marie Bernier
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. 552 pp.; 32 color ills.; 35 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9781439912737)
In Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin, Celeste-Marie Bernier has written an intellectual and cultural biography of the artist. Her study is a deeply researched, archival-focused examination of the ways in which war, military service, race, identity, and art making were inextricably bound together for Horace Pippin (1888–1946). Suffering and Sunset is also polemical, challenging white-dominated archival and historical structures and official histories that have ignored and negated both the black male artist and the African American combat soldier. Understanding World War I as the defining experience for Pippin, Bernier reconsiders… Full Review
January 30, 2018
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Virginia M. Fields, John M. D. Pohl, and Victoria I. Lyall
Exh. cat. 256 pp.; 240 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781857597417)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 1, 2012–July 1, 2012.
In recent decades, American and European museums have mounted major exhibitions highlighting individual Mesoamerican cultures, notably the Olmec, the Maya, and the Aztecs. Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico has a different focus. Using the culture hero Quetzalcoatl as its pivot, the exhibition and accompanying book investigate cultural and artistic traditions across Mesoamerica, and even beyond, during the period immediately preceding the Spanish conquest, known as the Postclassic (AD 950–1521). The exhibition was originally planned by curator Virginia M. Fields of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who sadly did not live to… Full Review
January 30, 2018
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Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne, eds.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 464 pp.; 206 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780691167282)
The heft of this volume and the comeliness of its jacket forecast the import and “handsome elegance” (334) of its contents. Richly illustrated, meticulously edited, and exquisitely produced, the object itself fuses ornament with substance in a kind of metonymic representation of its main argument. This work consists of twenty-six contributions grouped into seven sections, of which four reflect chronological groupings of medieval, early-modern, modern, and contemporary topics, while the remaining parts focus on conceptual themes. Geographically, the “global” reference in the publication’s subtitle is well justified, since the places discussed in its essays span several continents (the Islamic world… Full Review
January 29, 2018
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Keller Easterling
New York: Verso Books, 2014. 252 pp. Paperback $13.96 (9781784783648)
Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space is a palimpsest of a book. It is rich with stories of intricate entanglements among capital, space, and politics; it provides a probing analysis focused on how this evidence allows for a new understanding of how the world operates. And it claims a role, albeit somewhat vaguely, for the agency of designers and others in crafting counter-narratives and insurgent practices. Easterling’s strength is in her convincing descriptions that flip the background into the foreground—we thought we knew how economies were optimized, but the process of optimization elicits hefty resonance. She describes the… Full Review
January 29, 2018
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Éric Alliez
Trans Robin Mackay Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015. 472 pp. Paperback $49.00 (9781783480685)
Philosophically inflected histories of modern painting take many forms. French phenomenology shapes one of the richest and most deeply ingrained of these. Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye offers an alternative to this standard way of charting European painting from roughly 1825 to 1900. His account is alternative in that it shifts emphasis decidedly away from what has become comme il faut in such philosophical studies, i.e., approaches that give pride of place to “impressionism” as an ordering concept. Alliez wants to resist this way of parsing the development of modern painting, and the artists and works he discusses are chosen to… Full Review
January 26, 2018
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Joseph Conrad and Fiona Banner
Four Corners Familiars. London: Four Corners Books, 2016. 312 pp.; 22 color ills.; 134 b/w ills. Paperback $35.00 (9781909829053)
On Fiona Banner’s website, her publication Heart of Darkness is referred to as a magazine. On the publisher’s website it is referred to as a book in magazine format. Straddling these two categories, Heart of Darkness embodies multiple dualities and contrasting conditions, in line with the body of work Banner has been developing over the past two decades. The publication is part of Four Corners Books’ series Familiars, which pairs a classic novel with a contemporary artist’s interpretation of the text, resulting in highly experimental new editions. Banner’s Heart of Darkness, based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, is the twelfth… Full Review
January 25, 2018
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Hubert Damisch
Ed Anthony Vidler Writing Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016. 392 pp.; 61 b/w ills. Paperback $30.95 (9780262528580)
Noting the manner in which Leon Battista Alberti treated the column in his architecture, French philosopher Hubert Damisch commented on its ambiguity: at times structural element, at times a nonstructural, expressive point of punctuation. If there is one motif recurrently embedded in Damisch’s writings on architecture, it is the column and its potent identity as a fixture of ambiguity and multiple meanings. The column is rendered structurally elemental, as it is conceptually, and presents two important points of departure for thinking about architecture critically. The first, tied to the issue of structure and form, is the column’s function as an… Full Review
January 24, 2018
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Exhibition schedule: Queens Museum, March 8, 2015—September 13, 2015
Queens Museum, March 8–September 13, 2015
After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997 looks at Indian and diasporic art from the last seventy years. Occupying much of the Queens Museum’s capacious ground floor, the exhibition, curated by art historian Arshiya Lokhandwala, is spatially as well as thematically organized along two now-axiomatic fault lines of recent Indian history: India’s independence in 1947 and the opening of India’s markets to international commercial interests under former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the 1990s. The year 1997 marked the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, which has spurred critical inquiry into the state of the nation and figures as one… Full Review
January 23, 2018
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Richard Gasperi
Exh. cat. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press and Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 2015. 64 pp.; 50 color ills. Cloth $25.00 (9781608010363)
Exhibition schedule: Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, October 4, 2014–February 22, 2015
Clementine Hunter: A Sketchbook, showcases twenty-six previously unseen paintings by renowned Louisiana artist, Clementine Hunter. The oil-on-paper sketches were completed in 1945, shortly after Hunter first began painting. She spent most of her adult life as a domestic and picking cotton on Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches Parish. Collector Richard Gasperi purchased the sketches from the Henry family during the 1970s. They were displayed for the first time in 2014 as part of the Gasperi Collection exhibition. In the introduction, Gasperi tells a riveting story about the survival of the paintings. On August 28, 2005, he was forced to choose from… Full Review
January 22, 2018
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Clémentine Deliss and Yvette Mutumba, eds.
Exh. cat. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015. 408 pp.; 300 color ills. Paper $50.00 (9783037348413)
Exhibition schedule: Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt, March 5–October 10, 2015
El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics was published to accompany an exhibition of works by Senegalese painter, curator, and cultural activist El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, generally known as El Hadji Sy or El Sy (born Dakar, Senegal, 1954). El Hadji Sy has been a key player in the complex contemporary construction of African artistic thinking and practice ever since the Senegalese government under Léopold Sédar Senghor (President of the Republic of Senegal, 1960–80) became heavily involved in the promotion of the country’s culture within the conceptual framework of négritude, first developed in Paris in the 1930s by black… Full Review
January 19, 2018
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Eberhard Fischer and Lorenz Homberger, eds.
Exh. cat. Zurich: Museum Reitberg in association with Scheidegger and Spiess, 2014. 240 pp.; 262 color ills.; 42 b/w ills. Cloth $39.00 (9783858817617)
Exhibition schedule: Museum Rietberg, Zurich, February 14–June 1, 2014; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, June 27–October 5, 2014; De Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, October 25, 2014–February 15, 2015; Musée du quai Branly, Paris, April 7–July 26, 2015
How does a history of art in Africa get written? This writing has to negotiate the shoals and reefs of both its own history of writing but also and perhaps more importantly the framing of its subject matter by another history of art—that of European modernism. The shoals are well known. They come in the form of prescriptions (to students): Do not use the word tribe—it belongs to a colonial era of framing people through their language and material culture that bears little relation to the actual history of identity formation. Do not use the word traditional—it shuts… Full Review
January 18, 2018
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