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At the dawn of abstraction in the early twentieth century, it was not unusual for artists and critics to locate in the decorative or ornamental a model of pure form. At the same time, the decorative’s varied associations with the “decorative arts,” “craft,” the domestic realm, femininity, utility, and the everyday always rendered it suspect as an art free from the material realm. Ultimately, the decorative as a source for the modernist notion of art’s purity or autonomy was aggressively suppressed by modern artists and critics. Ernst Gombrich observed, “There is nothing the abstract painter . . . dislike[s] more… Full Review

Even today, in an age of virtual realities, it is difficult to view Jan van Eyck’s Virgin of Canon van der Paele of 1436 without being shaken by it. The level of illusionism attained in this picture is, bluntly put, mind-boggling. Jan has rendered an entirely credible interior space—cropped on all four sides by the sides of the painting—receding behind the picture plane and ending at a distance that appears measurable. This fictive space, representing the choir of a Romanesque church with an ambulatory wrapped around it, is occupied by figures that are three-dimensional in all but actuality. There are… Full Review

Hilla Rebay’s life lends itself to biography. Rebay (1890–1967) was a colorful and controversial figure in the transatlantic art world, a modern woman well connected in avant-garde and society circles. As narratives about her life convey, she had first-hand knowledge of movements such as Jugendstil, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and trends in abstraction. Rebay was ambitious, and that drive resulted in the formation of a world-renowned assemblage of works by Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Chagall, and Moholy-Nagy—to name but a few of the modern masters—that would become the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection. But it was her role as artist—modernist and portrait… Full Review

Something there is that doesn’t love the survey of art history textbook. Just as with Robert Frost’s more pentametric unloved wall, everyone has a different opinion of just what it should keep in, or keep out. It’s a statistical fact that very few of the many aspiring tomes published in this category succeed in being accepted as required reading in big-enrollment introductory courses, thus rewarding underpaid professors with long-term royalty income. Even more discouraging to the hopeful authors, and unlike the never irrelevant and always assignable monograph even when out of print, the survey text once remaindered is no longer… Full Review

In the middle of the last century, Nicola Ottokar (“Criteri d’ordine, di regolarità e d’organizzazione nell'urbanistica ed in genere nella vita fiorentina dei secoli xiii-xiv,” Archivio storico italiano 98.1, 1940: 101–106) and Wolfgang Braunfels (Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst in der Toskana, Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1953) demonstrated the fruitfulness of consulting the statutes of medieval Italian cities for insights into their urban form. Although art historians have continued to mine these sources in the intervening years, the last decade has brought an explosion of new research not only on medieval and Renaissance urbanism in Italy but also in the history of… Full Review

Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle describes the efforts of art theorist and educator Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) to develop a national painting style in Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912). It focuses on the ways in which that goal manifested itself in the educational institutions and painting themes and styles he was involved in creating in association with his collaborator Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908). Victoria Weston’s extensive research, coupled with her concise writing style, places Okakura and his group within the heightened consciousness of national identity that defines the Meiji era and adds depth to an understanding… Full Review

The image world of the Kennedy era is so ripe for critical reexamination that after reading David Lubin’s innovative study I kept wondering why it took this long to be tackled. Between JFK’s orchestrated rise to the limelight in the early 1950s and unexpected yet captured-on-camera murder in November 1963, could one find a better turning point in modern U.S. history than the second, neo-Camelot decade of Cold War America? In the tradition of Fitzgerald, many eulogize the period as the end of American innocence, while a disenchanted minority leans toward Malcolm X’s judgment of “the chickens coming home to… Full Review

Elizabeth Childs’s Daumier and Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign should appeal to a wide variety of readers, from the Honoré Daumier specialist to the undergraduate student of nineteenth-century art. Supplementing previous scholarly work on Daumier and on mid-nineteenth-century caricature and press censorship, including Judith Wechsler’s consideration of the significance and interpretation of physical characteristics in A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) and Childs’s own case study of the suppression of freedom of expression in “Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature” (Art Journal… Full Review

At the beginning of the twenty-first century it seems that history might be repeating itself with a call to a return to aesthetics. Not so much the aesthetics of the philosophers as the domain of the aesthetic itself. At the beginning of the twentieth century philosophical aesthetics had run out of steam: the German idealists had made themselves too remote from the practice of art to be of any use to art history. Alois Riegl felt that aesthetics had to be done again, this time from art. Max Dessoir felt that a united effort had to be made by psychologists… Full Review

As an inherently heterogeneous practice, installation art presents a challenge to those who would define it and write its history. The task is both to determine its consistent attributes without being too exclusive and to parse the expanding number of works described as “installation art” into categories coherent enough to provide a critical framework. To complicate matters, these generally ephemeral pieces have often been only poorly documented in photographs and first-hand accounts. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that the approaches and potential audiences for the four books under review are so varied: they range from broad surveys to… Full Review