Recently Published Reviews

Since John Tagg published his first book, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), he has been one of the most recognized figures in photographic theory. He is part of a brilliant generation of Anglo-American authors who emerged from the 1968 political movement, appeared in the public arena in the context of the 1970s New Art History, and whose contribution to a theorization of photography using the tools of Marxism, poststructuralism, Gramscian cultural studies, feminism, and psychoanalysis remains unsurpassed. Tagg himself recently formulated the project of this group in these terms: “we… Full Review

While the essays in Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, edited by Elizabeth Mansfield (New York: Routledge, 2002), explored art history's beginnings as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, her latest edited volume on the subject, Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, examines its recent past. The consistently high-quality contributions link principles and assumptions that have structured art-historical study with current dilemmas and developments. Key for Mansfield is the notion of art history as institution as embodied in a group of identifiable "organizing principles" able to shape conduct and propagate "particular… Full Review

Audiences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African art can frequently be found pressing their noses up against museum-cabinet glass trying to find a better view of the object. This is because one of the most exciting aspects of African sculptural work is the complex surface detail. Even more aggravating for the viewer, the exhibition label often features a non-descript text noting that the work is made of “wood and organic matter.” But what is it? Surely the museum tested the object to identify these different sculptural surfaces. Editors Leonard Kahan, Donna Page, and Pascal James Imperato seek to placate the audience’s… Full Review

One critical question for exhibiting past art is its contemporary relevance. Instead of asserting a work’s temporal transcendence, a more convincing way to prove its enduring life is to show that it can still captivate an audience and contribute to the creation and appreciation of art today. This is the approach taken by the exhibition Looking for Antonio Mak, an extraordinary show that brought an unprecedented vitality to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Centered on the much-esteemed late sculptor, the exhibition prompted an engaging conversation between Mak, eight collaborating artists, and the audience. Antonio Mak Hin-yeung (1951–1994)… Full Review

The health of a discipline is often revealed in the questions it asks of itself, and in its self-consciousness about its origins and development over time. Internationalizing the History of American Art, edited by Barbara Groseclose and Jochen Wierich, is marked throughout by such questioning and self-examination. It distinguishes itself from other overviews of the development of the history of American art by its critical examination of “the transmission and exchange of ideas about American art and its history in an international context” (1),[1] a context embodied, in part, in the biographies of the authors included in the anthology… Full Review

Literature and photography grew up together, François Brunet observes in his valuable survey of interactions between the two forms. At the invention of photography in 1839, literature was taking shape as a specialized type of writing, most often fiction and poetry, “an individual pursuit with a reflexive, aesthetic ambition, as well as a claim to deliver truths about society” (10). Consequently, William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844–46) deserves to be understood not only as the first photography book but as an assertion of “photography as experience,” as “expression of the self,” along the lines of contemporaneous literary explorations… Full Review

Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius, organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Italy, aims to explore an aspect of Leonardo’s wide-ranging interests long acknowledged but still poorly understood. That Leonardo studied from, theorized on, and made designs for sculpture has been established through his drawings and writings yet is frustratingly absent in surviving works. This small but rich exhibition aims to bridge this gap by displaying well-known drawings alongside three-dimensional works by… Full Review

In 1870, a North Adams, MA, shoe manufacturer named Calvin Sampson faced a labor crisis. His mostly French Canadian workforce had organized themselves into a union and had gone out on strike, demanding a closed shop and the right to tie their wages to Sampson’s profits. Sampson sent his superintendent to San Francisco to hire strikebreakers. On June 13, 1870, 12,000 local residents gathered at the North Adams train station to await the arrival of Sampson’s new recruits: seventy-five Chinese laborers, mostly under twenty years old. Miraculously, the newcomers made it to Sampson’s factory unscathed. Sampson’s first act, oddly enough… Full Review

The three volumes constituting The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture are based upon The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner (London: Macmillan, 1996). The entries from those sections dealing with Islamic art and architecture have been pulled out, and often rearranged under new titles. Notably, the long entry on “Islamic art” on pp. 94–561 of vol. 16 of the Dictionary has been divided into appropriate subtopics, and each listed alphabetically. Some new entries have been added, but the 1996 texts have in most cases remained as they were, although supplemented with additional bibliography. The illustrations are… Full Review

Though Anne Truitt’s art has not shaped art-historical and critical debates at the level of many of her contemporaries, whether Morris Louis, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, and others, her work warrants all the attention the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden devoted to her in this retrospective exhibition, Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Curated by Kristen Hileman, it included drawings, paintings, and sculptures by the artist from the early 1960s to 2004, the year of her death. The Hirshhorn installed Truitt’s art chronologically, which highlights how she rather quickly discovered and, with few exceptions, persisted in pursuing what would… Full Review

Renaissance art historians conventionally work in terms of types. Artistic production to a large extent can be thought of in terms of basic forms or categories—portrait, altarpiece, devotional image, etc.—customized according to the requirements of patrons. The artistic culture of Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century saw the production of many objects that frustrate that approach by being insistently sui generis. Among them are a pair of marble reliefs: one signed by the sculptor/architect Tullio Lombardo around 1495, presently in the Ca’d’Oro in Venice, and another, clearly by the same artist, in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in… Full Review

Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence, a major exhibition at the Clark Art Institute curated by Debra Bricker Balken, began with an intriguing juxtaposition. Opposite the introductory text, one found Arthur Dove’s Moon (1935) mounted side by side with Georgia O’Keeffe’s last and most abstract Jack-in-the-Pulpit, VI (1930). These paintings show the two artists working in distinct styles within the modernist arc of nature abstraction. Yet the show’s organizing premise, that Dove profoundly affected O’Keeffe’s early artistic development, was here counterbalanced by a conversation. We saw the two in dialogue at mid-career, hardly referencing the deep Depression at the door, exploring… Full Review

Classical mimesis, the privileged aesthetic model for antiquity, involved a combination of imitation, invention, and idealization. To paint the ideal beauty of Helen of Troy, for example, the fourth-century BCE Greek artist Zeuxis copied and combined the best features of five live female models. In Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis, Elizabeth C. Mansfield argues that the myth of Zeuxis selecting models is “about” classical mimesis itself, and the fundamental contradiction between its means, copying from the real, and its end, a visual rendering of the ideal. The story has held a preeminent place in Western art… Full Review

Cézanne and Beyond is the impressive catalogue published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009. Conceived as a companion to the catalogue of the 1995–96 Cézanne retrospective, also shown in Philadelphia, which spelled out the critical fortunes of Cézanne’s art during his lifetime, this volume focuses exclusively on the artistic reception of Cézanne’s art as seen in the work of sixteen artists ranging from Henri Matisse to Jeff Wall. Joseph Rishel and Katherine Sachs, the editors of Cézanne and Beyond (and the major organizers of the exhibition), make clear in the… Full Review

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is ideally suited for an exhibition devoted to the theme of “Watteau, Music, and Theater” because two of Watteau’s most incisive treatments of these themes reside in its collection: the solitary singer Mezzetin (ca. 1718–20) and the tragic-comic French Comedians (ca. 1720–21). Both works also display Watteau’s ineffable fusion of performance and humanity, artifice and nature, and gestures both rote and heartfelt. The exhibition, rich in drawings as well as paintings loaned from a wide variety of institutions and private collections, allowed viewers to ponder the artist’s compelling transformation of music and theater into an… Full Review