Recently Published Reviews

In Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation: Equicola’s Seasons of Desire, Anthony Colantuono examines erotic images of seminal importance to Renaissance iconography and sensibility. His investigations encompass a wide-ranging spectrum of literary and artistic sources concerned with mythology, medicine, witchcraft, and astrology, many of which have not been previously explored in this context. The book’s basic premise is that the theme of Mario Equicola’s program for the Camerino d'Alabastro, commissioned by Duke Alfonso d'Este in 1511, and of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), Equicola's source of inspiration according to Colantuono, is the neo-Aristotelian theory of the… Full Review

The collages of Kurt Schwitters—layered arrays of newsprint, packaging labels, advertisement fragments, train schedules, ticket stubs, envelopes, receipts, and even candy wrappers, all tacked down and anchored by expressionist paint—are surprisingly prescient for the postwar period, even proleptic. Although produced between 1918 and 1947, they nonetheless register a communications environment familiar to the second half of the twentieth century; their readymade accumulations of word and image suggest a relentless media barrage and advertising assault, a constant flow of data and information. Schwitters called these collage works “Merz”—a neologism he coined from the second syllable of the German word Kommerz… Full Review

The opening sentence of this lavishly produced book authoritatively announces that it intends to look at the one hundred and eighty or so surviving churches that were built in Ireland between the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century and the early stages of the Romanesque period—around 1100. As Tomás Ó Carragáin points out in his introduction, which is really a brief historiography of the subject, scholars have previously relied on the pivotal publications by George Petrie, the Earl of Dunraven, Arthur Charles Champneys, and Harold G. Leask.[1] Churches in Early Medieval Ireland: Architecture, Ritual and Memory is a welcome… Full Review

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada is an invaluable contribution to critical scholarship on the social history of photography in Canada and, more broadly, to methodological and conceptual issues involved in researching photography. Editors Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard have produced a volume that is essential reading for scholars, curators, archivists, artists, and photographers studying the role of photography in the changing topography of national identity. The contributors examine collections of photographs in Canadian archives and galleries that have contributed to the visual legacies of Canada’s past and continue to shape the country’s “imagined geography” (a concept from Edward… Full Review

In the eleven essays contained within The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism, scholars address a longstanding issue in cultural history and the arts—the perception of different cultures in the Mediterranean and the representation of their peoples by Europeans in the early modern period. Early modern Westerners displayed difficulty in categorizing their non-European neighbors, as artists who traveled, as well as those who incorporated non-Westerners into their imagery at home, were influenced not only by the visual sources on which they based their compositions, but also by propagandistic literature, the geopolitics of their… Full Review

In Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings by Howling Wolf and Zotom at the Autry National Center, Joyce M. Szabo traces the unique patronage of collector Eva Scott Muse Fényes (1849–1930) during her visits to the military prison at Fort Marion, Florida. This book and its unique focus are the legacy of a scholar who for decades has specialized in studying and publishing on the topic of Native American ledger art and other related visual topics. Szabo is also well known for curating several exhibitions on such work. Specifically, Szabo offers a glimpse into ledger art that… Full Review

The Walter De Maria: Trilogies exhibition at the Menil Collection is a sparse, elegant, and highly controlled experience. Despite this, the show manages to play nimbly with the essential premise of a retrospective, offering three series of new works that are each complete on their own, but reprise and revise older pieces, just as the Menil mines its own institutional legacy.[1] The exhibition begins in the museum’s foyer, where viewers are surrounded by three large monochromatic canvases—one yellow, one red, one blue—that articulate the De Stijl ideal of the integration of painting and architecture to construct a utopian… Full Review

The nude body—simultaneously manifest as classical ideal, titillating form, creative source, and condemned subject—is so central to the history of Renaissance and Baroque art that any study devoted to the topic at large risks the pitfalls of generalization. One way to avoid this snare is to focus more narrowly on the oeuvre of a single artist, a specific theme (like the representation of Christ’s body), or even a seminal individual example such as Jan van Eyck’s Adam and Eve panels from the Ghent Altarpiece (1424–35). Another option is to localize the reception of the nude within a certain geographical region… Full Review

Almost seventy years after World War II, amateur photographs and films about Nazis, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust remain a continued source of popular fascination. In 2008, for instance, The New Yorker published a feature story on a newly discovered photo album that once belonged to Karl Höcker, the adjutant to Richard Baer, the commandant of the Auschwitz I camp. The album shows SS men and women auxiliaries enjoying free time in the summer of 1944, precisely as the factory of death reached the peak of its murderous efficiency. To its creator, these snapshots represented fond memories of sunny… Full Review

Over the last decade there has been a quiet but persistent revolution in scholarship on photography. The growing popularity of the medium as a focus of academic study, coupled with the desire by some researchers to explore histories of photography beyond the mainstream, has seen a groundswell of work being undertaken in regions outside of the United States and Europe. Pushing beyond the limited and generally imperialistic boundaries still apparent in most world histories of photography, Australasian photo-historians are actively contributing to a more global understanding of the medium. This is most evident in Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf’s notable… Full Review

The thirty-seven alabaster figures—most of them roughly sixteen inches tall—that visited the superbly expanded and renovated Virginia Museum of Fine Arts this spring have now completed their second of three years on the road. Having never before been seen as a complete grouping outside of France, in early 2010 the sculptures left Dijon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts for a seven-stop American tour that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and concluded in Richmond. From there they have proceeded to Bruges and now Berlin, two cities added after their voyage began. Organized by the French Regional American Museum Exchange (FRAME) and… Full Review

South Los Angeles. August 1972. A crowd of 100,000 spectators fills the Los Angeles Coliseum to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts uprisings. Jesse Jackson delivers a rousing invocation, inciting the crowd to raise their fists in solidarity. The occasion: Wattstax Music Festival, the black analogue to Woodstock. Footage from this event went largely unnoticed until the 2004 re-release of Wattstax, Mel Stuart’s 1973 documentary of the landmark concert. A mash-up of interviews and live concert footage, Wattstax highlights the urgent political climate of the 1960s and 1970s that fostered emerging discourses around identity, resistance, visibility, and… Full Review

Well-written, magisterially conceived, and impeccably documented, this volume is both a superb introduction to Franz Radziwill, an intriguing figure almost unknown outside Germany, and an authoritative social history of art that thoroughly revises understandings of the world of modernism during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. As he considers the ambiguities and contradictions of Radziwill’s art, politics, and self-presentation, James A. Van Dyke confronts issues of how to write about and exhibit the works of artists who were sympathetic toward or lived under National Socialism. Radically historicized accounts of “Weimar culture” and the Third Reich, Van Dyke argues,… Full Review

In 2009, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, acquired an important tea storage jar at auction. The deep brown stoneware jar has an asymmetric glaze and stands 41.6 centimeters tall. Named “Chigusa,” the jar is believed to have been made in China during the thirteenth or fourteenth century before it was imported to Japan, where it became a prized object for practitioners of the Japanese tea culture (chanoyu). At purchase, the jar was accompanied by extensive documentary material, including inscribed storage boxes and letters. To celebrate the acquisition of this object, the museum organized an online… Full Review

Plagued by migraines and seemingly allergic to the sun-dappled environs in which she spent so many of her years, Joan Didion nonetheless wrote into being a host of characters that participated in a dissolute Golden State fantasy. Her stories from the 1960s evoke the siren cupidity of a nostalgic, decidedly prelapsarian California, even as they admit an illusion fraying at the seams. That her essays from the other side of the long decade comprise such topics as Malibu fires, Jerry Brown, and Sharon Tate might not surprise. Still, her 2003 memoir, Where I Was From (New York: Vintage), tenders a… Full Review