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Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere’s compact Vessels of Influence: China and Porcelain in Medieval and Early Modern Japan manages to contain three strikingly distinct chapters, as well as a long introduction that counts as a fourth component. Although the four segments are interrelated, it is easy to imagine that each would appeal to a separate reader for a different reason. Whether read in isolation or in sequence, they are highly informative concerning the impact of the long presence of Chinese porcelain—“vessels of influence”—in Japan. Rousmaniere’s book is especially important for introducing the findings of Japanese archaeologists and art historians—a realm of discourse… Full Review

In his book Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) (click here for review), Paul Binski writes perceptively about the complexity, quality, and originality of the sculpture of Reims cathedral. In his estimation, this body of art, from its corbels to its tympana, sets new standards for architectural decoration in subject matter, formal adventurousness, and expressivity. For the art historian wishing to probe Binski’s claims in greater detail, the sculpture of Reims provides a set of archaeological and interpretive challenges that are simultaneously compelling and daunting. One must look both… Full Review

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed several publications devoted to individual Chinese paintings. They hark back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Sherman Lee and Wen Fong collaborated to write Streams and Mountains Without End: A Northern Sung Handscroll and Its Significance in the History of Early Chinese Painting (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1955) and Chu-tsing Li wrote The Autumn Colors on the Ch’iao and Hua Mountains: A Landscape by Chao Meng-fu (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1965), two monographs that helped frame the study of Chinese painting in those and subsequent decades. The present crop of monographs on single… Full Review

Suffusing his working process, his subject matter, and his address to the viewer, violence is central to the montage-based work of the German artist John Heartfield. It is on clear display, for example, in the missing limbs, firearm, and prominent vagina dentata with which he and his fellow Berlin Dadaist George Grosz assembled the sculptural self-portrait The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture) in 1920. One witnesses it also in his 1928 poster The Hand Has 5 Fingers promoting the German Communist Party’s “List 5” in the upcoming Reichstag elections by way of threat, with a tremendous… Full Review

Photography in Africa has long had a dual role as a tool of explorers and colonial officials and as a new “modern” object that slowly worked its way into the daily lives of many African peoples. It has been used extensively to document fieldwork in Africa, and in turn the photograph as a material image has become an important topic of study. Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, a collection of essays edited by Richard Vokes, is a valuable addition to the growing library of books about photography in Africa—which also includes Erin Haney’s Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion Books… Full Review

Yukio Lippit’s fine book examines the ways in which certain leaders of the Kano house (or school) in seventeenth-century Japan adapted to competition and enhanced the prestige of its painters and, ultimately, of the painting profession as a whole. By the 1600s, the Kano were part of a society in which warriors had placed their status group at the top of a rigid social hierarchy with some room for movement below but not up into it. The structure was not, however, all-encompassing, nor did it absolutely determine matters of prestige, wealth, and influence. Members of the nobility and monks, for… Full Review

Originally published in 1979, Vicente Lleó Cañal’s Nueva Roma: Mitología y humanismo en el Renacimiento sevillano represented a breakthrough in the history of Spanish art. Along with Jonathan Brown’s Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Nueva Roma was among the first sustained discussions of the social and intellectual bonds forged among Sevillian men of letters, artists, and patrons. Lleó also charted new territory by exploring how humanistic learning informed local architecture, painting, sculpture, and broader aspects of visual culture. In the decades since the book was originally published, scholars have made great strides in… Full Review

In 1839, when François Arago first presented the photographic processes of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Nièpce to the French Chamber of Deputies, he declared photography’s utility to the field of archaeology. Thus, photography’s link to archaeology was recognized almost from the outset. In his new book, Photography and Archaeology, Frederick N. Bohrer specifically argues that photography maintains an archaeological way of seeing. As these fields developed through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bohrer argues, they symbiotically influenced each other in a number of ways. He focuses mostly on the roles of photography in the “object-based” practice of archaeology… Full Review

Near the end of her new study on the group portraits of Henri Fantin-Latour, Bridget Alsdorf notes: “The history of nineteenth-century French art is a field fascinated by movements and collective politics, yet still dominated by accounts of singular artists and oeuvres. Although we depend on groups to give structure to history, as artists depended on them to provide camaraderie and support, it has proved difficult to imagine the artistic self as formed fundamentally by way of others” (227). Her book Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting goes a long way toward rectifying… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue for Diego Velázquez: The Early Court Portraits is the third published in an ongoing partnership between the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. Each year visitors to the Texas museum are treated to a new, small exhibition that centers on a work brought to the United States from Spain. El Greco and José de Ribera starred in the first two installments of this series, and in 2012 it was Velázquez’s turn, represented by the Prado’s important early full-length Portrait of Philip IV (ca. 1623–28). The choice could… Full Review