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

Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa, eds.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 264 pp.; 47 color ills.; 24 b/w ills. Cloth $34.95 (9780262028875)
In 2015 a book of edited conference papers appeared that could have a widespread and profound impact on both architectural practice and education. Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design is a persuasive introduction to research in brain science and its application to environmental design that stems from the founding of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (AANFA) in 2003, an outgrowth of the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows research program. Juhani Pallasmaa, a Finnish architect and teacher well known for his work on multiple sensory awareness and architecture as a craft, is… Full Review
September 22, 2017
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Mark Mussari
New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 193 pp.; 33 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9781474223720)
Hygge is hot. According to the New York Times (December 24, 2016) and the Guardian (October 18, November 22, December 16, 2016), the Danish concept, which translates roughly to coziness, is the lifestyle trend of the moment. Hygge is so popular that it made the Oxford Dictionary’s shortlist for 2016 “word of the year.” A number of recent books outline the concept, explain its history, and instruct on how to develop it in your own home. Hygge-dedicated websites sell blankets, candles, and other comfy accoutrements designed to cultivate comfortable conviviality. It is hardly the first time a Danish lifestyle… Full Review
September 22, 2017
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Carolyn E. Tate
The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and the Culture of the Western Hemisphere. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. 359 pp.; 268 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780292728523)
In Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture, Carolyn E. Tate eschews the well-trodden path of the iconography of rulership to reveal the central role of the unborn, women, gestation, birth, and regeneration in the art and ideation of the Formative-period peoples of Mesoamerica. Based on this imagery, specifically its fidelity to embryo and fetus representations, she argues that empirical observation played a prominent role in Formative-period epistemologies of gender and creation. While regeneration and renewal have long been recognized, other major themes in Mesoamerican art such as women, children, and related issues have often been overlooked or minimized. Tate addresses these… Full Review
September 22, 2017
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Sol Henaro, Mónica Mayer, Karen Cordero, Griselda Pollock, and et. al.
Exh. cat. Mexico City and Barcelona: MUAC-UNAM, Alumnos 47 and Editorial RM and RM Verlag, 2016. 272 pp. Paper Mex$300.00 (9786070251757)
Exhibition schedule: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City February 6, 2015—July 31, 2016
It is rare when a retrospective exhibition centers on collective artistic production rather than the traditional focus on a singular (and most frequently male) artist. Si tiene dudas . . . pregunte: Una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer / When in Doubt . . . Ask: A Retrocollective of Mónica Mayer, held at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, successfully worked to highlight a pioneering figure in feminist art practice in Mexico while it simultaneously destabilized expectations of the retrospective format by emphasizing the role of collective artistic practice in Mayer’s work. Since the… Full Review
September 20, 2017
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Frances Gage
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. 248 pp.; 48 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Cloth $89.95 (9780271071039)
Frances Gage’s Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art investigates the medical rationales for collecting art that are scattered throughout a well-known treatise by Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), Pope Urban VIII’s physician. Mancini’s medical thought was retardataire in the era of the Lincei, but his artistic connoisseurship was innovative. Thanks to Gage’s book, Mancini can now be appreciated for adding painters to Sandra Cavallo’s categories of “artisans of the body.” Following an introduction, biographical notes, and a chapter indicating the confluence of medicine and art in seicento Rome’s visual culture, three chapters… Full Review
September 15, 2017
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Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds.
Blackwell Companions to Art History. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 584 pp.; 86 b/w ills. Cloth $195.00 (9781444339130)
Meant to serve as a pedagogical tool to “stimulate comparative contemplation about broad and basic issues in the history of art” (1), A Companion to Chinese Art, edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, is a collection of twenty-five essays by some of the leading scholars of Chinese art history, history, and literature. It adopts a thematic structure, devoting five essays to each of five general topics commonly taught within art-historical surveys—production and distribution, representation and reality, theories and terms, objects and persons, and word and image. The volume brings a much-needed interdisciplinary update to older scholarship… Full Review
September 15, 2017
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Christine Van Assche and Clarrie Wallis, eds.
Exh. cat. London: Tate Publishing, 2016. 196 pp.; 250 color ills. Paper $47.00 (9781849763608)
Exhibition schedule: Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 24–September 28, 2015; Tate Modern, London, May 4–August 21, 2016; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, October 7, 2016–February 26, 2017
Mona Hatoum is a potentially paradoxical example of the contemporary artist working on the international scene today: On the one hand, she embraces various media and aesthetics in a pared-down, Duchampian approach to material and conceptual-based practices. On the other hand, she is a Palestinian woman who was forced into exile in London due to civil unrest in the Middle East in the 1970s, and thus an artist whose life experience is anything but clean and neat. It might be easy to presume, then, that Hatoum’s artistic agenda is strongly political, and yet her art almost uniformly (and cleverly) toys… Full Review
September 15, 2017
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Howard Williams, Joanne Kirton, and Meggen Gondek, eds.
Rochester: Boydell Press, 2015. 293 pp.; 67 b/w ills. Cloth $99.00 (9781783270743)
The eight essays in Early Medieval Stone Monuments: Materiality, Biography, Landscape, along with a substantial introduction by editors Howard Williams, Joanne Kirton, and Meggen Gondek, offer original insights on the objectness of early medieval sculpture: they describe physical encounters with monuments, mnemonic qualities of stone, and multiple reuses of artworks, medieval and post-medieval. A main strength of the volume is its thematic, rather than geographic or chronological, orientation. Three chapters concern sculpture in Scotland, one England, two Scandinavia, and two Ireland, and the introduction foregrounds two Welsh examples. This allows for comparison of commemorative strategies and social memory practices… Full Review
September 15, 2017
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Emily Braun
Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2015. 250 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780892075232)
Exhibition schedule: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 9, 2015–January 6, 2016; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf, March 5–July 3, 2016
Alberto Burri (1915–1995) had an extremely successful career almost from the get go, and his work was widely exhibited during most of it. However, if over the past thirty or so years one wished to see work by Burri in the flesh, one needed to make strenuous efforts to do so, for example by going to the artist’s native Città di Castello in Italy where Burri established the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri in 1978, and subsequently placed late work on permanent display in the Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco. Otherwise, this artist’s work is difficult to find in museum and… Full Review
September 15, 2017
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Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson, eds.
Intellect Live. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2016. 336 pp.; 160 color ills. Paper $28.50 (9781783205899)
I never met Adrian Howells. I never let him wash my feet, hold me, or invite me to launder my clothes with him. Touching, and being touched, by a stranger within the context of a performance has evoked both empathy and apprehension in me, and often raises the question of who is meant to benefit from such an awkward, constructed form of engagement. When confronted with a one-to-one performance, the fear of harm, physical or emotional discomfort, and embarrassment wrestles with my curiosity, potential for titillation, and general interest in the complexities of human interactions. In intimate performances… Full Review
September 8, 2017
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Kobena Mercer
Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 384 pp.; 111 color ills. Paper $29.95 (9780822360940)
Kobena Mercer’s Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s gathers eighteen essays written in the span of twenty years, from 1992 to 2012, which offer an extraordinarily rich journey into the intellectual process of one of the most significant critics to emerge from the British cultural studies tradition in the 1980s. This is a journey of discovery and exploration of the work of artists of the black diaspora working under the sign of the “postcolonial modern,” as indexed by the collection’s very title, i.e., Travel and See, which is an inscription Mercer found on a sea… Full Review
September 8, 2017
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Sabine T. Kriebel
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 352 pp. Cloth $65.00 (9780520276185)
Sabine Kriebel’s book Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield is a study characterized by its exceptional rigor and intellectual intensity. Although written in a meticulously sculpted language, precise and full of imagery, this work does not claim to be a definitive, closed, or unequivocal object. Focusing on the monteur John Heartfield, a major artist who curiously has received little scholarly attention until now, Revolutionary Beauty does not belong to the monographic genre, nor is it yet another formalist study. Rather, it explores a medium—photomontage—laden with a substantial critical and interpretive past. Even though the volume focuses on the… Full Review
September 8, 2017
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Charles Palermo
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. 384 pp.; 16 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780520282469)
“Look at the Christs of Gauguin,” Émile Bernard once complained in an 1891 letter to Émile Schuffenecker, “they are human, they are of this world. Christ absolutely did not cry silly tears on beautiful, veiny hands. All that is Gauguin, which is to say self-worship, pure secularism, Renan.” For Bernard, an artist who had already returned to a devout Catholicism, a humanized image of Christ derived from the liberal theology of the day—Ernest Renan’s unmiraculous Vie de Jésus (1863) looms large—lacked both religious and artistic weight. And the one problem folded into the other. Paul Gauguin’s modernism was as much… Full Review
September 1, 2017
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Timothy Hyde
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 384 pp.; 11 color ills.; 69 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (9780816678112)
The political efficacy of architecture and urban planning is brought to the fore in Timothy Hyde’s cogent analysis of architecture and constitutionalism in Republican-era Cuba (1933–59). Focused primarily on Havana, Hyde brilliantly accounts for the relationship between legal discourse and architectural production. Divided into three parts, the book claims a tripartite of trajectories: the textual, the graphic, and the physical. The first part of the book explores the creation of the 1940 Constitution of Cuba, a key political document in the founding of the modern Cuban state. Cuba’s 1933 revolution led to the immediate dissolution of the 1901 Platt Amendment… Full Review
September 1, 2017
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Logan Wagner, Hal Box, and Susan Kline Morehead
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 273 pp.; 332 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780292719163)
Mexican plazas are the “public living rooms” of urban centers large and small, and they have been shaped by social intercourse for over four thousand years, sometimes rhythmically and slowly, sometimes violently and suddenly. These communal spaces still resonate with Pre-Columbian symbolism, as Logan Wagner, Hal Box, and Susan Kline Morehead demonstrate in Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza: From Primordial Sea to Public Space. Whereas the pioneering studies of colonial Spanish architecture in the past century brought attention to architectural forms, Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza instead attends to the open volumes shaped by architecture, arguing that… Full Review
September 1, 2017
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