Recently Published Reviews

Robert Aguirre should be commended for calling our attention to the less-studied area of the circulation between, and symbolic function of, collections and displays in nineteenth-century Britain and parts of Latin America. Largely centered on nationalist discourses, Aguirre's very useful and informative Informal Empire explains the ways that England, in the place of direct military colonization of post-independence Mexico and Central America, and in the face of increasing interventions by the United States, nonetheless managed to play a vital, if not controlling, economic role in those regions. England did so, Aguirre argues, through the appropriation, trans-Atlantic exchange, and display of… Full Review

The two titles of this exhibition curated by Phillip Dennis Cate are in many respects contradictory. The subtitle, Sculpture in Paris from Daumier to Rodin, is utterly banal and could apply to any of the dozens of exhibitions mounted in the past thirty years on the sculpture of the second half of the nineteenth century: an assemblage of masterworks, of famous names, of marbles and bronzes. But the main title, Breaking the Mold, announces an entirely different agenda: It recalls the moment when, at the end of the bronze-founding process, the clay form that surrounds the poured metal… Full Review

Christopher Whitehead’s well-researched book, The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery, contributes significantly to the narrative of Britain’s first public museum. The National Gallery was originally conceived in the early nineteenth century as a public institution accessible to the general population. As the museum evolved throughout the nineteenth century, an attempt was made to accommodate the often conflicting desires and ideas of museologists, artists, donors, politicians, and the public. A debate arose during the mid-nineteenth century over the appearance and function of the public art museum. Should it be a public educational… Full Review

Chinese Steles is an exceptional work, useful for those unfamiliar with the genre of steles yet thorough enough to satisfy a scholarly need for depth. Dorothy Wong presents her study in a very coherent fashion: beginning with an overview of the stele within a broader Chinese historical context before moving on to consider the form as it was appropriated by Buddhist and Northern Wei concerns. With the brunt of the study focused on Buddhist steles, Wong effectively argues for an appropriation of the medium to relay the new Buddhist message, and she uses a regional construct to chart the connections… Full Review

This handsome catalogue accompanied an exhibition of Italian drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year. The show featured one hundred-and-fifty drawings from the permanent collection, whereas the book catalogues eighty of these drawings, ranging in date from c. 1539 to 2001. The publication includes a long essay by Ann Percy, curator of drawings at Philadelphia, tracing the formation of the collection. Seventy-eight of the eighty catalogue entries were written by Mimi Cazort, former curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery in Ottawa; one entry was written by E. James Mundy and one by Ann Percy. Both… Full Review

From Dispersal to Collection, the subtitle of David Roxburgh’s The Persian Album, 1400–1600, cleverly alludes to several different aspects of this beautifully produced book on the albums of the court elite in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iran. Its multivalent resonance hints at the text’s intellectual richness. Building on the foundations of codicology, Roxburgh shows that the albums themselves reveal how aesthetics and art history were understood in Timurid and Safavid court culture At the simplest level, “from dispersal to collection” refers to the process by which the albums as material objects were produced. These albums are bound codices containing… Full Review

Anyone familiar with the history of Bolognese classical Baroque art will appreciate the challenge of assembling a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and drawings of the Carracci, a family whose illustrious members included not only Ludovico, founder of a new school of painting, but also his younger cousins, Annibale and Agostino. The fact that Ludovico was the most unconventional and least understood of the Carracci clan makes Babette Bohn’s long-awaited, comprehensive, and lavishly illustrated monograph most welcome. Part of the series L’Arte del Disegno, it is a significant addition to modern critical studies of the Carracci and their drawings… Full Review

As many financially strapped theater chain owners will attest, the digital revolution—specifically in the form of DVDs, satellite and cable television, and widescreen HDTVs—has radically impacted film viewing and purchasing habits, transforming a once exclusively public activity into a far more pragmatic and private one. Not only are we able to reasonably simulate the spectacle of the movie-going experience within the comforts of our own living room at a fraction of the cost, but we are no longer bound by the etiquette of viewing films in unfolding real time surrounded by total strangers. We can pause, mute, and fast forward… Full Review

The first of four volumes that will contain the collected essays of the doyen of Islamic scholars, Oleg Grabar’s Early Islamic Art has twenty selections. The fascinating introduction, which is too brief, explains how, starting as a medievalist, Grabar entered the field of Islamic studies. Arriving just at the end of the era when European imperialism dominated scholarship, he had the privilege, denied, alas, to scholars nowadays, to travel widely and do archeological excavations. In those days, “with slow mail, few airplanes, no television, expensive and unreliable telephones, radios that still needed electric plugs in walls . . ." (xxv)… Full Review

The exhibition Mir Iskusstva: Russia’s Age of Elegance at the Princeton University Art Museum coincides with several recent exhibitions on aspects of Russian art, mostly contemporary, that have been inspired by last year’s big Russia! show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The Princeton exhibition stands out, however, as a crucially important addition to the Guggenheim blockbuster, because it represents a major historic epoch in Russian art and culture that was almost overlooked by the organizers of the Guggenheim show. Mir Iskusstva, or World of Art, was not only the name of a group of artists formed around a periodical with… Full Review

SAFE: Design Takes on Risk managed to organize an unwieldy set of objects ranging from respirators for firemen, giant foil bags for temporary housing, manhole covers, and even disposable sheets for prostitutes who have to make beds on the fly. While curators Paola Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini divided the exhibition into categories, it was the theme of safety and security, real or imagined, that unified the exhibition. The central problem the exhibition addresses is the difficulty in sorting out phantasms from real threats. Contending that most ”safety items” are ignored entirely or lie outside the realm of everyday attention—for… Full Review

As Victoria’s long reign drew to a close, John Everett Millais, who died in 1896, was probably the most widely popular artist in England, and George Frederic Watts, who lived on until 1904, the most respected. Millais was Sir Henry Tate’s favorite painter, and nine major paintings by him, ranging from the early Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia (1851–52) to later public favorites such as The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870), entered the Tate Gallery, which opened in 1897, as gifts of the founder or his widow. Henry Tate owned no works by Watts, but between 1897 and 1903 the artist more than compensated… Full Review

Why do early Netherlandish paintings attract so much high-pressure interpretation? This has been a matter not just of an abundance and complexity of scholarly response, but also a repeated concentration on individual objects. While the gaze of current art history settles more readily on bodies of material (oeuvres, periods, themes, collections, etc.), the scholarship of early Netherlandish art has an abiding, though far from exclusive, taste for deep accounts of single paintings. The question rises anew with the appearance of Bret Rothstein’s Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting, which dwells chiefly on four famous works:… Full Review

The later phases of Jacques-Louis David’s career have received far less attention than his earlier work during the Ancien Régime and Revolution. Art in general during Napoleon’s Consulate and Empire has, perhaps surprisingly, been comparatively neglected until recently. Philippe Bordes’s exhibition and catalogue are an extremely valuable contribution to the reassessment of David’s later career and to an understanding of art in France in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Bordes, a professor at the Université Lyon 2, was the founding director of the Musée de la Révolution française in Vizille and has published extensively on David and French… Full Review

To Delight the Eye is a charming exhibition of six major paintings and twenty-four drawings donated to the Fogg Art Museum by the Harvard alumnus Charles E. Dunlap (1889–1966). The exhibition, mounted by Alvin L. Clark, Jr., the Jeffery E. Horvitz Research Curator in the Department of Drawings at the Fogg, focuses primarily on artworks produced during the reigns of Louis XV (r. 1715–74) and his successor, Louis XVI (r. 1774–93), but extends into the nineteenth century with drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Clark has authored an accompanying brochure (Harvard University Art Museums Gallery Series, no. 48, 2005) that summarizes the… Full Review