Browse Recent Book Reviews

The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival is a book that will be read with great interest by all historians of Islamic art and will have a broad appeal to those interested in the relationship between medieval cultural or political formations and the dissemination of artistic forms. Ambitious in scope and innovative in approach, it is a handsome tome, well written and illustrated. Its two great a priori merits lie in the collation of an array of important material previously scattered through a wide range of diverse sources, and in an analysis that challenges both Islamists and Orientalists… Full Review

The subtitle of this beautifully produced and authoritative book--”Artist and Artisan”--betrays an uneasiness typical of the times in which we live, when the concept of the artist per se has to be qualified or defended. An artist has to be something more, value added, both artist and artisan, as in fact almost all artists were in the late quattrocento. But what does this really mean? Is Jean Cadogan simply trying to suggest that Domenico Ghirlandaio worked not only with his mind (artist), but also with his hands (artisan), that he was both less and more than a pure artist--a craftsman… Full Review

Long undervalued, Hellenistic Greece has in recent years experienced a renaissance of interest. No longer considered decadent, the literature and art of the three centuries from the spectacular conquests of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC to the fall of the last independent kingdom of his successors to the Romans in 31 BC now receive serious consideration. Although Hellenistic art is not accorded as much space in textbooks as Archaic or Classical, the achievements of Hellenistic architects, sculptors, and painters are widely appreciated. Accounts of Greek (and for that matter Roman) art, however, continue to be dominated… Full Review

In its perspective and physical scale, this long-awaited study of Germaine Krull (1897–1985) provides a portrait, in more than miniature, of the present moment in photographic publishing. The art market, the academy, and the exhibition-viewing public provide eager audiences for exhaustive monographs of prolific modern-era photographers, especially talented ones who, like Krull, have never received individual scholarly attention in the years postdating the duotone standard. (Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity serves as the catalogue for an exhibition with one American and four European venues.) In addition to the visual and historic… Full Review

Gender and Art (edited by Gill Perry) and The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (edited by Paul Wood) are erudite, useful, elegantly packaged, and critically astute books. Informed by a felicitous mix of marxism, feminism, and other poststructuralist models for exploring meaning formation and cultural value, they show how far art history has come over the last twenty years. As two of the six titles in the series Art and Its Histories, their publication coincides with and supports a series of courses bearing the same name offered by London's Open University (the other Open University/Yale texts cover the following topics: the… Full Review

As the first comprehensive histories of women’s artistic production in the United States, these ambitious and well-researched books initiate an important dialogue about women, creativity, and the visual arts. Surprisingly, neither of these authors are art historians: Laura R. Prieto is assistant professor of history and women’s studies at Simmons College, and Kirsten Swinth is associate professor of history at Fordham University. In fact, Swinth makes a point in Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 of distinguishing herself from art historians whose “concern...has been with art--with the development of styles and patterns of artistic… Full Review

Chinese Art: Modern Expressions comprises papers and commentaries from an international symposium held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2001. The publication brings together research by leading scholars on a variety of topics pertaining to Chinese modern art and encompasses a number of methodological orientations. Although the papers stay within the conventional time frame for China’s modern period, that is, between the mid-nineteenth and the third quarter of the twentieth century, they individually and collectively negotiate a nuanced reading of the period predicated upon shifting paradigms and fluid geocultural boundaries. David Wang’s… Full Review

Where Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about the visual arts are scattered throughout his copious writings and have had little direct bearing on the course or practice of art history, Rampley’s other protagonists—Walter Benjamin and Aby M. Warburg—wrote systematically on the visual and are today much discussed in the discipline. Yet despite the many differences among these important figures, and between these two publications, the coincident appearance of Rampley’s very rewarding studies makes a comparison possible. Nietzsche, Aesthetics, and Modernity is a full and persuasive reassessment of Nietzsche’s thinking on the aesthetic. Nietzsche’s writing is frequently opaque, but Rampley’s… Full Review

A greedy bon vivant, a bumbling police chief, a child abuser, an aging and decrepit prostitute, a self-important criminologist: these are just a few of the motley characters who populate Eugenia Parry’s recent volume of short essays, Crime Album Stories: Paris 1886–1902. Historians of photography no doubt will be already familiar with Parry’s extensive contributions to the scholarship of nineteenth-century photography: as the author and coauthor of several important studies on the use of the calotype in France and on the work of Gustave LeGray and Edgar Degas, among others, Parry has dedicated her professional life to the research… Full Review

Ever since Linda Nochlin published her groundbreaking article questioning “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (ArtNews [January 1971]: 22–39), scholars have sought to understand and to change the sociocultural forces that shaped an all-male history of art. One of the first steps in that process was to recover from obscurity the lives and art of creative women, an aspect of feminist scholarship that continues with the publication of Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875–1900. While never entirely lost from sight, Wheeler’s place in art history has not previously been so well defined… Full Review