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

Christine Göttler, Bart Ramakers, and Joanna Woodall, eds.
Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 64. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 400 pp.; 180 color ills. Cloth $157.00 (9789004272156)
Nadia Baadj
(Studies in Baroque Art) (Dutch Edition). Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. 208 pp.; 52 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $150.00 (9781909400238)
The history of art in early modern Europe would be unthinkable without Antwerp. And yet until quite recently, Antwerp was a place that nobody talked much about. Scholarship on the southern Netherlandish city (now part of Belgium) long remained the province of local historians, the indefatigable Floris Prims notable among them. And while first Pieter Paul Rubens and then Pieter Bruegel the Elder met with increasing art-historical interest following Belgium’s assertion of independence in 1830, a dogged nationalistic approach to their oeuvres meant that the city in which they lived and worked did not generate much attention in its own… Full Review
June 28, 2017
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Delinda Collier
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 264 pp.; 37 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (9780816694488 )
The topic of remediation has recently come to the forefront of academic study across disciplines ranging from TED talks to symposia merging African art and media studies. It is within this vein that Delinda Collier examines the complexities of remediation in both form and content in Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art. The text centers its discussion of the varied intricacies of analog and digital media by tracking Chokwe mural and sand (sona) arts and symbolism through numerous iterations dating from the 1950s until the early 2000s. With each example, Collier discusses the… Full Review
June 23, 2017
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Malcolm Bull
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 160 pp.; 31 b/w ills. Cloth $24.95 (9780691138848)
What is the truth in painting, and what is truth in reality? Revolving around the learned Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Malcolm Bull’s Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth: Vico and Neapolitan Painting brings us to Naples in the early eighteenth century, offering an analysis of painting and art theory in correlation with the philosophical concepts and insights of Vico’s work on these matters. Vico was educated in rhetoric and law and taught as a professor of rhetoric while writing a series of books, including the groundbreaking New Science (first edition published in 1725, revised in 1730, with a third revised edition published posthumously… Full Review
June 22, 2017
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Bastian Eclercy
Exh. cat. New York: Prestel, 2016. 304 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783791355061)
Exhibition schedule: Städel Museum, Frankfurt, February 24–June 5, 2016
Until recently, extensive thematic exhibitions on the Florentine maniera have been confined to Italian and, more specifically, Tuscan institutions. Elsewhere in Europe, however, the last few years have seen a reanimated interest in Mannerism: the latest, in the spring of 2016, was the large-scale exhibition Maniera: Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Organized by Bastian Eclercy—chief curator of Italian, French, and Spanish painting at the museum—the show focused on Florence as epicenter of “European Mannerism” in the pivotal period between the 1510s—when the Medici’s return to power coincided with the emergence of a new generation… Full Review
June 22, 2017
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Giancarla Periti
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 304 pp.; 100 color ills.; 110 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300214239)
This book about aristocratic nuns and convent patronage offers an interesting characterization of a resulting corpus of “seductive images” of “profane subjects and sensuous forms” in the context of what Giancarla Periti calls “courtly conventual culture” (1). The idea of the courtly convent interior is a clever one, and it certainly provides a touchstone for investigations into patrician nuns, their motivations, their artists, and the visual and perhaps didactic functions of such imagery in Renaissance convents. The trouble is that examples of such courtly conventual culture are not terribly widespread in Renaissance Italy. Periti is therefore compelled to devote most… Full Review
June 21, 2017
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Tom Wolf
Exh. cat. London: D Giles Limited, 2015. 176 pp.; 155 color ills. Cloth $59.95 (9781907804632)
Exhibition schedule: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, April 3–August 30, 2015
Enigmatic and engaging, the work of figurative artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953) combines American folk and Surrealist art with dreamlike perspectives (exhibition catalogue; 16). Influenced by early American art, modernism, and Japanese artistic expressions—such as flatness of form—his pictures are simultaneously rooted in tradition and the avant-garde and often underscore his proclivity toward contradictions (33). An artist frequently overlooked, Kuniyoshi immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1906, eventually residing in New York until his death in 1953. While critics considered him less frequently than his contemporaries, when reviewed, his works were positively received. The 2015 exhibition of his work… Full Review
June 15, 2017
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Marnin Young
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. 272 pp.; 60 color ills.; 75 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300208320)
In Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time, Marnin Young provides an original, compelling argument about how transformations in the perception of temporality fueled a reengagement with Realist painting in France during the late 1870s and 1880s. He charts a range of ways in which time was newly conceptualized in this period, including the move from pre-modern natural cycles to the measured clock of the modern workday; the invention of photographic technologies that could capture movement; the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference that divided world time into twenty-four zones; and political debates surrounding labor, time… Full Review
June 14, 2017
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Steven M. Reiss
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 216 pp.; 80 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780813934976)
What is it about a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house that inspires some owners to endure hardship to see it built and overcome obstacles to prevent its destruction? It is a question implicitly asked and answered by Steven M. Reiss in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House, a skillful retelling of the complex history of a 1,200-square-foot Usonian house (originally known as the Pope House) built in 1941 in Falls Church, Virginia. The book, which is organized into three chronological sections, begins by relating the commission and construction of the house by financially strapped young clients. The second section describes its… Full Review
June 13, 2017
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Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, eds.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 512 pp. Paper $50.95 (9781444338669)
The last decade has seen a profusion of anthologies reckoning with “contemporary art”—a contested term. Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, is the latest one, but certainly not the last. Their desire is to expand the discussion on contemporary art to include a multiplicity of voices. In the process, Dumbadze and Hudson bring together forty-six international writers. The writings are grouped into fourteen “fluid rubrics,” which are chapters that contain three essays each. The editors hope that this anthology lays the “groundwork for successive histories of contemporary art” (2). They attempt to… Full Review
June 9, 2017
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Lawrence Berman
Boston: MFA Publications, 2015. 208 pp.; 52 color ills. Cloth $24.95 (9780878467969)
What is it about antiquities that so compels us to collect them? This is the central question Lawrence Berman asks in The Priest, the Prince, and the Pasha: The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Egyptian Sculpture. To answer this question, Berman focuses on a single object, the so-called Boston Green Head. Approximately four inches in height, broken off from a standing or kneeling statue, the Green Head is a centerpiece in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Indisputably a masterpiece, the sensitivity and skill with which the sculptor modeled the features produced a seemingly… Full Review
June 8, 2017
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Mark Hinchman
Early Modern Cultural Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 420 pp.; 78 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (9780803254138)
More than any other media, architecture has played a fundamental role in the organization of physical reality according to various social, cultural, and ideological templates. As both a product and producer of identity, architectural forms have inscribed the texture of human life onto the natural environment. Thus, Mark Hinchman’s Portrait of an Island: The Architecture and Material Culture of Gorée, Sénégal, 1758–1837 is a welcome addition to contemporary studies of the history of the built environment. Expanding the borders of what might be considered “traditional” architectural scholarship, Hinchman incorporates the material and object-based realm by examining structures in concert with… Full Review
June 8, 2017
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Dushko Petrovich, ed.
New York: Dushko Petrovich, 2015. 20 pp. Paper $20.00
Think of a professor and the clichés tumble out: houndstooth blazer, tortoiseshell glasses, air of aloof superiority. The professor, insulated from worldly concerns by tenure, is an icon of the traditional university, a selling point for students willing to take on debt in exchange for wisdom, and a target of right-wing reformers who scorn the leisurely pace of scholarship. While the professor can’t be described as wealthy in this age of hedge funds, she is at least free from anything resembling a money problem. The professor won’t descend, for example, into a crippling days-long panic at the prospect of having… Full Review
June 7, 2017
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Jean Hélion
New York: Arcade, 2014. 464 pp. Paper $19.95 (9781628723762)
On August 18, 1939, the French abstract painter Jean Hélion wrote to Raymond Queneau from his studio in Rockbridge Baths, Virginia, to say that he was ready to return to France and throw himself back into what he called the “torment of Europe” (Lettres d’Amérique: Correspondance avec Raymond Queneau 1934–1967, Paris: IMEC, 1996, 146). In leaving Paris for New York in 1936 in the aftermath of the collapse of the Popular Front, Hélion had left behind the aesthetic and political convictions of the previous period. From the late 1920s through the mid-1930s, he had been a central part… Full Review
June 1, 2017
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Sheila R. Canby, Deniz Beyazit, Martina Rugiadi, and A. C. S. Peacock
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. 380 pp.; 462 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781588395894)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 27–July 24, 2016
The Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art set out to elucidate how the orders of this world and the next were conceptualized and represented in the Seljuq Empire and its successor states. To a certain extent, Met curators Sheila R. Canby, Deniz Beyazit, and Martina Rugiadi delivered. With over 270 objects, Court and Cosmos is the first major exhibition on the Seljuqs in the United States, and according to Met Director Thomas P. Campbell’s preface to the exhibition catalogue, it is one of the first exhibitions in the world to… Full Review
May 31, 2017
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Gretchen E. Henderson
London: Reaktion Books, 2015. 240 pp.; 67 b/w ills. Cloth $25.00 (9781780235240)
In Ugliness: A Cultural History, Gretchen E. Henderson ventures on a critical journey through the history of ugliness, viewing the concept through the lens of culture and corporeality. Henderson packs an abundance of fascinating case studies and thought-provoking insights into a stimulating conceptual framework, all in the service of her argument about past and contemporary relationships with ugliness. Her aim is not to redefine ugliness but to trace the use and perceptions of it from antiquity to the modern day. Ugliness is not held here strictly within theoretical or aesthetic perspectives; rather, Henderson unpacks the concept with the use… Full Review
May 31, 2017
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