Recently Published Reviews

To the modern day reader, hospitals and scientific societies might seem to be unlikely settings for exhibiting and discussing contemporary art. In The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism, Craig Ashley Hanson shows how it made perfect sense that such venues would foster art theory and practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The leading role in this book is played by the figure of the virtuoso, whose eclectic interests were united under the umbrella of curiosity. Encompassing activities as wide ranging as medicine (learned and unlearned), classical studies, and art collecting, patronage, practice, and… Full Review

Cherise Smith’s Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deveare Smith and John P. Bowles’s Adrian Piper: Race, Gender and Embodiment each explore performance, identity, and the role that the body plays in both. More than isolated studies of artists, however, these texts are equally concerned with the discourses that surround them. Through her survey of four female artists working in performance from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, Smith offers an analysis of the ideological, social, and artistic contexts in which these artists negotiate the boundaries of race, gender, and… Full Review

Kirsten Pai Buick has been establishing herself as the authority on Mary Edmonia Lewis over the past decade and a half with a series of monographic articles and a dissertation (University of Michigan, 1999). Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject is her anticipated full-length examination of this sculptor’s career. It is a thoughtful, groundbreaking study that should be a must-read for anyone interested in art of the United States and in a nuanced treatment of race, ethnicity, and gender. Buick’s book challenges late twentieth-century identity politics of current art… Full Review

Christiana Payne’s John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter is part of a broader trend in current scholarship to reevaluate the Pre-Raphaelites. Important texts such as Timothy Barringer’s Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) have focused new attention on the radical nature of the movement and the contested concept of artistic “realism.” In the past decade, major monographic exhibitions of the movement’s founding artists John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as a number of specialized scholarly studies, have expanded what Prettejohn… Full Review

In an era when attention is fractured into multiple platforms and diffused by multiple media, the singularity of Jim Nutt’s artistic vision stands out: for twenty-plus years—as was made evident in a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago—Nutt has been deliberately and meticulously absorbed with painting the female face. Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character, as curator Lynne Warren clarified both in her selections and in the accompanying text, was not a traditional retrospective. Though the exhibition included works from over forty-five years of Nutt’s painting career, providing viewers with an overview of the more diversely… Full Review

For the first half of the twentieth century, Roman art history was dominated by questions of typology, chronology, and iconography as scholars attempted to articulate what was “Roman” about Roman art. The field has since embraced social-historical analyses, and contextual approaches remain a dominate trend. The variety of methodologies and the vast quantity and range of objects included in the category of Roman art have resulted in an extraordinarily diverse body of scholarship, the key themes of which have been summarized in The Art Bulletin state-of-the-field essays by Brunhilde Ridgway on ancient art and Natalie Kampen on Roman art (Brunhilde… Full Review

The Battle of Lepanto, fought off the coast of Greece on October 7, 1571, between Christians and Turks, with Venice as a major participant, is one of the defining moments of Venetian history. Officially proclaimed a victory by Venice, with a huge panoply of celebratory apparatus, the battle—as later events made clear (a humiliating peace treaty with the Turks followed almost immediately)—was the turning point in the dethroning of Venice as a dominant power on the Italian peninsula and in the Mediterranean. Iain Fenlon, a noted musicologist, has made a specialty of research on the battle—the victory that never was—and… Full Review

The linguistic turn in 1960s and 1970s art has presented an ongoing problem of contextualization: to what extent do our readings of this art need to draw on the histories and interpretive conventions of writing generally and literature specifically? Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Marcel Broodthaers, and many other artists produced experimental writing that exploded the dominant genres of artistic “expression,” the artist statement and the essay. Similarly, works from this period frequently challenged the idea that, for artists, writing was a secondary medium that must take on the role of explaining or contextualizing some ostensibly more real art… Full Review

Portraits were ubiquitous in the cities, towns, and sanctuaries of the Roman empire, as public honors for the living and memorials to the dead. Indeed, as Jane Fejfer’s Roman Portraits in Context shows, portrait statues and busts were arguably one of the most important and prominent forms of Roman public art and played a crucial role in constructing and communicating Roman social and political identity. Fejfer’s aim is to focus on the reconstruction of the socio-historical and physical contexts of portraits, rather than on more traditional scholarly concerns of portrait typology, chronology, and stylistic development, although these topics are dealt… Full Review

Eighteenth-century Europe was home to a dazzling array of architectural interiors, from priest-holes designed to hide ecclesiastics from Protestant authorities in England to the home theaters of courtesans in Paris. Diverse characters populated these domains. Bluestockings gathered in a Chinoiserie room while guests waited to be served refreshments before taking in Europe’s premier public collection of ancient sculpture. Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe examines all of these environments and personages, exploring the role architecture and interiors played in fashioning identity in the eighteenth century. The ten essays that it gathers together seek to demonstrate that these spaces served… Full Review

The title of the volume Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism is captivating for an art historian: it promises an inquiry into the visual components of an important strand of Buddhist discourse. Instead, author Andy Rotman offers an interesting and thorough exploration of the “economy of dharma” in the Divyavadana (produced sometime during the first three centuries CE), with special attention to the role played by the act of seeing in the establishment of faith and devotion. Rotman digs deeply into the theoretical fabric of the Divyavadana; however, he does not include much background… Full Review

In Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics, Elizabeth Chang contends that as a place, a product, and an idea China provided a crucial counterexample to emergent modernist trends of visual and literary realism in Victorian Britain. She argues that, “In the century in which realism reached its greatest heights, the persistence with which authors and artists continued to invoke a defiantly antirealist aesthetic that they claimed to be Chinese demonstrates an aspect of realism’s development that has so far received little attention” (5). The use of the image of China as a foil that serves to reinforce Enlightenment… Full Review

In British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy, Douglas Fordham offers an original and provocative re-interpretation of the emergence of public art and art institutions in eighteenth-century Britain. Scholars have long noted that the 1750s and 1760s were marked by increasing concern about the development and institutionalization of a school of British art. “Why,” Fordham asks, “did the visual arts become a pressing national concern at this moment in Britain’s history?” (1) He argues that any answer to such a question must take into account the “transformative place in British culture” (2) occupied by the Seven… Full Review

The art world wants to be deceived. That is certainly the conclusion one comes away with after reading A Real Van Gogh, Henk Tromp’s thoroughly researched, highly readable, fascinating new book, which uses the history of van Gogh authenticity and forgery debates to discuss what happens in the art world when someone cries wolf. It is not a pretty picture for the expert who deigns to proclaim a work inauthentic. Tromp’s book does an admirable job of balancing a text that is rigorous in its academic research (use of primary source documents, copious citations, application of… Full Review

These three recent books explore an eighteenth-century British engagement with classical archaeology during a time when the practice was transforming from an early modern antiquarianism into a modern scientific discipline. Two of the books are monographic studies of the Society of the Dilettanti, an organization that became known for its support of unprecedented archaeological activity in Greece, while a third outlines how British subjects, some of whom were Dilettanti, undertook archaeological excavations on Italian soil and refurbished, sold, and bought the antiquities found there. In some measure, all the authors note this engagement as integral to shaping British cultural identity… Full Review