Recently Published Reviews

“This is a book of criticism, not theory,” Susie Linfield announces on page xiv. I agree: The Cruel Radiance is not a theoretical book nor is it intended for people working with theories of photography. The targeted audience seems rather to be students of photojournalism concerned with questions about the ethics of looking at war and violence. Professor at the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, Linfield wrote her book, in large part, against the work of Susan Sontag, her “postmodern and poststructuralist heirs,” and their “sour, arrogant disdain for the traditions, the practice, and the ideals… Full Review

When John Addington Symonds described the Renaissance for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he did not mention perspective. Admittedly, the visual arts were rather sweepingly described. But the idea that the Renaissance inaugurated a scientific view of the world came later. Jacques Mesnil in 1927, for instance, described how medieval work had held the observer’s attention by force of the religious subject, and how perspective made it possible to establish a coherence within and beyond the picture space on aesthetic grounds alone. This new device served “to reinforce the unity of the work and to communicate its… Full Review

David Harvey is best known as the author of The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, published in 1989 (London: Blackwell), and a bestseller from the beginning. Without seeking to belittle the role of culture, Harvey underlines in this book that a comprehension of the economic basis of postmodernity is vital to any sound understanding of this phenomenon. A geographer by degree, he turned to social geography after an initial positivist period. He then adopted a more critical and socially oriented stance, with a strong Marxist component. Within this more materialist approach, one of… Full Review

One could hardly say that there is nothing to read on the history of colors, yet one might argue that most of what has been published reiterates a minor litany of sorts, namely, an antagonistic narrative, deeply embedded in the canonical values of Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Kant, with recurrent flare-ups crystallised around a few proper nouns that disguise with symmetry the academic hierarchy between drawing and color: Florence and Venice, Poussin and Rubens, Ingres and Delacroix. The long-standing reputation of color as an element resisting quantification, a secondary element emblematic of ineffable quality, has… Full Review

In the summer 2010 issue of Artforum, dedicated to “the museum revisited,” Kathy Halbreich, associate director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, shared the new standards she has brought to the museum’s program, prominent among them a desire to engage actively with “the issues that shape [their visitors’] lives,” enriching the viewer’s experience with “newly relevant” systems of “distribution and display” (Artforum 48, no. 10 [Summer 2010]: 278). Apparently her worthy mandate has not yet penetrated to the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, where the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, organized by Roxana… Full Review

Ann Marie Yasin’s first book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community, “explores the intersection between two key developments of the fourth to seventh centuries C.E.: the construction of monumental churches and the veneration of saints.” While it is not based on original excavation or newly discovered documents, the book successfully imposes order and new meanings on a vast array of material that spans the Mediterranean. Why it appears in a series on “Greek Culture in the Roman World” is unclear, given that some sixty percent of its illustrations pertain to North Africa… Full Review

In 2004, the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought, for an undisclosed sum that was reported to be more than $45 million, a small panel painting—the so-called Stoclet, or Stroganoff, Madonna—that was widely assumed to have been the last work by Duccio in private hands. Four years later, after a rigorous investigation of the panel, Keith Christiansen, the museum’s curator of European paintings, published an extended essay on the work in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. Subsequently, Christiansen’s article was republished as this slender, generously illustrated book. In a way, Christiansen’s book is rather like the painting that… Full Review

In writing Michelangelo’s Vita in 1568, Giorgio Vasari remarked that in his old age the revered sculptor burned many of his drawings, discarding everything he considered less than a perfect creation, thereby destroying any evidence that could have left his monumental greatness in doubt. Although modern scholars frequently question the veracity of Vasari’s anecdotes, this one rings true for two reasons. On the one hand, it is a well-known fact that Michelangelo was an exacting artist, for whom only the finest creations were worth preserving. On the other, and perhaps even more important, one must acknowledge that all artists “edit”… Full Review

Karline McLain’s interdisciplinary study of the premier comic book series in India, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK, founded 1967), masterfully engages in three related projects of import for art history and for South Asian studies. First, her book investigates the reception of popular visual culture, the global transmission of images and visual literacy, the tension between canonized religious texts and the production of images, the appropriation of (high) art for nationalist causes and for popular audiences, and the struggle to put text and image together on a page in the service of an entertaining narrative. Second, she courageously takes on issues… Full Review

Sculpture is no longer quite the poor relation in eighteenth-century French art studies which it once was. Although the academic curriculum still requires a considerable knowledge of Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jacques-Louis David but only, at best, a passing familiarity with Antoine Coysevox or Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, the literature on French sculpture available to those teaching courses on French art is far more substantial than it was twenty years ago. Building on the foundations laid by François Souchal, a series of impressive exhibitions curated by both French and American scholars—notably Guilhem Scherf, James Draper, and Anne Poulet—have given a new prominence to… Full Review

It must have been a challenge to find a cover illustration for The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History since, according to Lauren Hackworth Petersen’s strict standard, only a handful of the approximately fifteen first–second century CE monuments discussed are verifiably those of freedmen (liberti). For Petersen, only those who made their legal status as liberti explicit in their inscriptions are to be counted, although, save for imperial freedmen, such formulations became increasingly rare during the first century. Petersen also dismisses other indicators of freed status—Greek cognomina as former slave names (87, 97) and membership in the… Full Review

Juliet Koss's Modernism after Wagner is a groundbreaking addition to studies in the history and theory of artistic modernism. Her work traces the fortunes of Richard Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), beginning with his writings in the late 1840s. Throughout her book, Koss explores the various understandings and misunderstandings that continue to dog Wagner's legacy to the present day. Assailed by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century and later embraced by Adolf Hitler, Wagner and his dream of a total work of art were dealt a series of critical blows. Most devastating were those delivered… Full Review

Baroque 09 was a yearlong series of cultural events in the United Kingdom that celebrated the era’s art, music and culture. The Victoria and Albert Museum participated with the well-received exhibition, Baroque 1620–1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence, which ran from April 4 to July 19, 2009. Michael Snodin and Nigel Llewellyn’s volume of the same name serves as the catalogue for the exhibition. The book is more than this, however, as the catalogue itself comprises only twenty-eight pages located toward the back of the book. The preceding three hundred pages attempt to reconstruct the Baroque and present… Full Review

On January 23, 1710, a royal proclamation written by Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1670–1733), announced the formation of a new porcelain manufactory established under his patronage within the walls of the Albrechtsburg Castle in the town of Meissen located a short distance from the Saxon capital city of Dresden. The proclamation heralded the discovery by the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682–1719) of a formula for high-fired porcelain of a type commonly known as hard paste that had been developed in China centuries earlier and that was coveted throughout Europe from the time of its arrival… Full Review

The Derveni Krater by Beryl Barr-Sharrar brings together many diverse elements related to this spectacular metal vessel. This is not the first scholarly monograph about the krater. It was the subject of a dissertation that appeared in 1978 by Eugenia Giouri for the University of Thessaloniki, and Barr-Sharrar gives credit to Giouri’s pioneering work. Barr-Sharrar’s volume is, however, the first in-depth study of the Derveni Krater that is easily available to readers outside of Greece. Filled with super illustrations, it includes information that has come to light since 1978 from numerous sources, including her own papers and publications. She knows… Full Review