Recently Published Reviews

What are the terms of seeing and believing? Or more specifically, how do pictures shape and direct religious faith? Kristin Schwain takes up these questions in Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age, focusing on four different American artists—Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner, F. (Fred) Holland Day, and Abbott Handerson Thayer—and explaining how they "drew on religious beliefs and practices to explore new relationships between viewers and objects, and how beholders looked to art to experience transcendence and save their souls" (2). As Schwain persuasively argues, each not only repeatedly engaged with the prevalent religious… Full Review

In Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, Alan Braddock examines how dominant period concepts about cultural difference shaped the late Victorian American painter’s work. During his excavation of this complex body of thought, Braddock digs deep into the history of ideas, beneath the more familiar strata of modern anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas early in the last century. Unlike the cultural relativism of Boas and his many famous students at Columbia, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, this older intellectual tradition depended heavily on social evolutionist discourse and biological models to account for cultural forms considered specific to… Full Review

At first glance, the “three founding texts” arrayed in Modern Swedish Design seem oddly matched. “Beauty in the Home” was first published by feminist and educational theorist Ellen Key in the Christmas, 1897, number of a magazine for women. Art historian Gregor Paulsson’s Better Things for Everyday Life (1919) is a self-described work of “propaganda” addressed to designers, manufacturers, and retailers. And the cryptically titled photo-essay, acceptera (1931)—a work usually described as Sweden’s “modernist manifesto”—was published by Paulsson along with a team of prominent architects: Gunnar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Sven Markelius, Eskil Sundahl, and Uno Åhrén. Despite the thematic and… Full Review

With two independent exhibitions in 2008 devoted to the Baroque portrait bust—Heads on Shoulders: Portrait Busts in the Low Countries, 1600–1800, at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; and Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Canada—the genre of early modern portrait sculpture celebrated an unparalleled year. There has never been a specialized exhibition of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s portrait busts. For logistical and economic reasons, shows featuring early modern European sculpture, let alone portrait busts, are rare. Even more exceptional is their exhibition in… Full Review

For more than eight decades, scholarly interest in the Burgundian abbey of Cluny has focused on the first 250 years of the monastery’s history, from its founding in 910 on the site of what had once been a Roman villa through the reign of its influential twelfth-century abbot Peter the Venerable (d. 1156). It is thus intriguing to find Janet Marquardt focusing instead on aspects of the abbey’s demise and recovery during the restoration of France’s monumental heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has made an interesting and overdue choice, one that positions Cluny in a newer narrative… Full Review

In 1987, when the first volume (Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean) of the History of Cartography series was published, the study of maps was a much different field than it is today. At the biennial International Conference on the History of Cartography, organized by the map-history journal Imago Mundi, presentations by dealers, collectors, and specialists in geography far outnumbered those from scholars in the humanities. The relationship between art history and mapmaking was only beginning to be seriously explored, most notably by Juergen Schulz (“Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making… Full Review

In a conceptually wide-reaching and useful introduction to Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, editors Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg ask, “Can the settee speak?” (2). That this question remains relatively novel suggests the importance of the book. Their answer, of course, is affirmative; and the twelve essays that constitute this collection provide ample new, thoughtful, and frequently surprising revelations about what exactly eighteenth-century furniture said to a broad range of makers, users, and audiences. Written by scholars in the fields of history, literary studies, and art history, the essays… Full Review

The Eight and American Modernisms was the latest exhibition that sought to find some kind of unifying thread to bind together eight artists—Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan—whose formal association lasted roughly a year and whose art has bedeviled the efforts of art historians to assess the importance of their contribution, collectively or as individuals. When the artists banded together in 1908 to exhibit their paintings at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, they were linked more by friendship than by any overarching stylistic or aesthetic program. Some… Full Review

The stated goal of Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe is ambitious: “to make a significant contribution not only to the study of the cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe in the industrial period, but also to the examination of image’s dominance in modern culture and, ultimately, to the unending project of representing modernity” (xix). Editors Minsoo Kang and Amy Woodson-Boulton are to be commended for undertaking this challenging topic, and assembling a diverse group of authors whose scholarly disciplines range from art history to literature and the history of science. Although the… Full Review

The exhibition The Dancer: Degas, Forain, Toulouse-Lautrec, assembled by Annette Dixon, curator of prints and drawings at the Portland Art Museum, brought together a stunning group of works in various media—paintings, sculptures, drawings, and lithographs—by three artists whose careers were defined in large measure by their attraction to the subject of dance. For those of us who were unable to see this show in person, its catalogue presents exquisite, large-scale color reproductions that allow the reader to note subtle nuances of line, facture, and support. These illustrations are especially valuable as The Dancer mixes old chestnuts such as Edgar… Full Review

The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain, which can only be seen at the National Gallery of Art, offers an excellent sequel to a series of recent exhibitions on Spanish themes, including the wonderful El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, which was on view last year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Nasher Museum at Duke University (click here for review). But whereas that exhibition attempted to provide a comprehensive overview of Spanish artistic accomplishments during the early seventeenth century, The Art of Power… Full Review

The Prints of Jacob Lawrence, 1963–2000, showcased eighty-one prints by the master African American artist in a crowd-pleasing exhibition that provided a platform for one of the lesser-known parts of Lawrence’s extensive oeuvre. The screenprints, lithographs, etchings, drypoints, and single woodcut displayed in the show represented almost the entirety of Lawrence’s output as a printmaker and were brought together courtesy of the DC Moore Gallery in New York for this show at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. While the images, most of which are large and colorful in the artist’s trademark graphic figurative style, are filled with the… Full Review

The critical reception of Martin Kippenberger's work is indiscernible from that of his persona. Kippenberger died of cancer in 1997 at the age of forty-four. But his myth lives on, carefully perpetuated by his peers and by a cohort of assistants who were involved in not only the production of his work but also the production of its meaning, and faithfully disseminated in the circulation systems that Kippenberger's work addressed or that became at times the work itself. (His reintegration of self-designed promotional material for exhibitions, like posters and announcement cards, into an ongoing output signals the importance he ascribed… Full Review

“Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” (58). Urgency is an unusual accomplice to art-historical inquiry: what might prompt it now, and why should it require a “world history of art,” whatever that might be? David Carrier sees desired states of being such as world peace endangered by “the political struggles that threaten to destroy the very possibility of international cooperation” (xxvi). Academics, he believes, should respond to such threats by rethinking their disciplines as genuinely global projects. In a… Full Review

In recent decades, medieval and Renaissance textile scholarship has received greater recognition and appreciation by the art-historical community. One of the latest publications to add to this developing field is Lisa Monnas’s new book. One of the first things to note about this impressive volume is the abundant number of superb color images—they are truly breathtaking. Aside from the remarkable aesthetic attributes of the volume, Monnas’s detailed study investigates the cultural and artistic connections between silk textiles and fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings in which silk fabrics are represented. In addition to relating extant textiles to the paintings, Monnas examines… Full Review