Recently Published Reviews

An exhibition devoted to tracing an artist’s cross-cultural influence often bears the risk of trying to do too much. Featuring sixty-five works, Matisse and American Art at the Montclair Art Museum juxtaposed nineteen paintings and works on paper by Matisse with a vast selection of objects by thirty-four American artists. With works by artists as diverse as Arthur Dove, Andy Warhol, and Faith Ringgold, exhibition organizers aimed to explore the French master’s impact on American modernism from 1905 to today—a tall order, to say the least. Yet cocurators Gail Stavitsky and John Cauman ultimately succeeded in revealing the extraordinary breadth… Full Review

Kellie Jones’s South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s illuminates a blind spot in existing histories of contemporary art in Los Angeles. Those who know Los Angeles know that the area “south of Pico”—dominated by the north-south arteries of Central and Crenshaw avenues, which connect the neighborhoods of Watts, Compton, Leimert Park, and Baldwin Hills—has historically been the center of black life in the city. As Jones writes, Pico Boulevard is a physical “demarcation of division” that also represents a “hidden history of blackness” (15). Written in highly readable, compellingly detailed prose, South… Full Review

Given that in recent decades many scholars have called for attention to the diverse traditions and overlooked contributions of a global art history, it is fair to ask, do we need another major exhibition devoted to Impressionism? There have been French Impressionist studies penned by a coterie of distinguished scholars across the globe that should satisfy most any methodological perspective or preference for a certain theme or stylistic practice. Recent shows have explored subthemes ranging from the movement’s key dealers and the ongoing recuperation of various “unheralded” Impressionists to the obvious subjects of blossoms and snowfields. And the work of… Full Review

When teaching a course on the art of Mesopotamia, perhaps the greatest challenge has been the absence of a current textbook on the subject. As Zainab Bahrani notes in her introduction, “since the mid-twentieth century, books on Mesopotamian art have fallen out of favor” (8). This lack may be explained by the opinion of some scholars that the ancient Near East produced no art at all, on the assumption that the category of “art” excludes objects created for other purposes. The standard text in the field, Henri Frankfort’s The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, was first published… Full Review

In late December 2015, American abstract master Ellsworth Kelly passed away at the age of 92. A month and a half before his death, Kelly had said to The Guardian that he “want[ed] to live another 15 years.” This zest for life came from his unwavering commitment to art making. In a career that spanned almost seven decades, Kelly produced over 1150 paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and large-scale commissions—works of bold shape and color that reveal his distinctive approach to abstraction inspired by visual experience. He also left behind numerous drawings, collages, and sketchbooks that document a wealth of ideas, some… Full Review

In the present cultural moment, the unearthing of previously obscure queer heroes is a much-needed balm to the rightward swing of the political pendulum. When asked to write this review, I admittedly came seeking some of that particular brand of soothing. I approached Joseph Grigely’s edited volume Oceans of Love: The Uncontainable Gregory Battcock as a curiosity of those heady days of queer New York, before the pall of the plague years descended upon us all. My experience of the text was filtered through that golden glow we so often ascribe to a largely imagined better time. It is certainly… Full Review

In the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts appears a portrait of an Afro-Caribbean woman bearing a platter of tropical fruit and seated in front of a mountainous landscape. She is likely Marie-Thérèse Zémire, enslaved in Haiti and then in Montreal by the Québec-born François Malépart de Beaucourt. Beaucourt, an artist by trade, painted Zémire in 1786. The painting was originally titled Portrait of a Negro Slave and was renamed Portrait of a Haitian Woman by museum curators in the twentieth century. Yet little in the painting or its present title, as Charmaine Nelson points out, alludes to the historical fact… Full Review

An ambitious exhibition, Matisse/Diebenkorn delivers on its goal to delineate the influence of Henri Matisse (1869–1954) on Richard Diebenkorn (1922–93), showing a remarkably significant number of parallels between two modern, avant-garde artists. However, it does much more, and not only in its review of Diebenkorn: it also provides a nuanced consideration of the concept of influence, thereby making a significant contribution to the field of American art, as well as comparative museum display. Co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Matisse/Diebenkorn is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated, scholarly catalogue. Edited by Janet… Full Review

In February 2015, music artist Jidenna released the video to his first single, “Classic Man.” Directed by Alan Ferguson, the video opens with Jidenna getting dressed: he tightens his tie up to his club collar, fastens his cuff links, and steps into his cap-toe oxfords. In a subsequent scene, he walks the streets of Brooklyn surrounded by a group of well-dressed black men in suits. When he spots two young men being handcuffed by two police officers, he intervenes. We don’t know what he says, as the track of the song is still playing, but viewers see Jidenna smile cordially… Full Review

The role that religion has played in the cultural production of the last three centuries is something that many art historians have been slow to recognize and/or hesitant to acknowledge. The potential pitfalls of pursuing this subject are myriad, the most obvious being that of appearing to endorse any theological doctrine—a cardinal sin against post-Enlightenment scholarly disinterestedness. For historians of modern art, consideration of religion is particularly difficult given the extent to which the avant-garde has counted works with overt religious content as inferior or kitsch. However, a number of scholars—among them James Elkins, David Morgan, and Mark C. Taylor—have… Full Review

Pier Paolo Pasolini concluded his 1971 film The Decameron, adapted from Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century text, with a question: “Why complete a work,” the director asks, playing a disciple of Giotto in the film, “when it’s so beautiful just to dream it?” Pasolini’s character poses the question while gazing up at a recently completed fresco, and his thoughts have already turned to a future project, glimpsed earlier in a dream. After the line is delivered, the film ends and the credits role. It is a double-edged question, then, one that marks the completion of fresco and film alike, of the painter’s… Full Review

The Off-Staging of William Forsythe’s Dance in the Museum Stellentstellen (2016) and Acquisition (2016) by William Forsythe. Stellentstellen, performed by Rauf (Rubberlegz) Yasit and Riley Watts. Acquisition, presented by students of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 16, 2016. Reviewed by Paola Escobar, Yanting Li, Julia Meyer, Marissa Osato, and Ariel Osterweis Introduction When approached by Juliet Bellow to write this review, I suspected that the multisited yet simultaneously performed Stellentstellen (2016) and Acquisition (2016) would be most appropriately considered by a multiplicity of voices, and I solicited… Full Review

One of the critic Mario Praz’s (1896–1982) achievements is that he applied art-historical methods to interiors. His writing elevated the status of interiors to positions previously held by painting, sculpture, and architecture. Praz’s books from the 1960s constituted a call that the “minor” arena of decorative arts be taken seriously. Yet, with notable exceptions, his efforts to edge the decorative arts, chiefly furniture, onto an equal plane with art and architecture went largely unheeded. In the opening years of the twenty-first century, that is changing, and one evidence of this shift is the publication of The Politics of Furniture: Identity,… Full Review

Lisa Farrington’s African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History is invaluable for those teaching surveys of African American art as well as any reader interested in the subject. Staple publications in this area include Sharon Patton’s African-American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Richard J. Powell’s Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997; reproduced in its second edition as Black Art: A Cultural History [New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002]), rich sources now fifteen to twenty years old and in need of augmentation, particularly in light of the amazing spectrum of… Full Review

In last year’s exhibition of Chilean art at the Carpenter Center for Visual Art at Harvard University, absence signaled the latency of bodies that feel pain, that suffer longing, or, in a powerful twist, that even travel from 1970s Santiago to present-day Boston. In the works on view in Embodied Absence: Chilean Art of the 1970s Now, artists used the tactics of conceptual art to respond to the traumas inflicted on citizens after the socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet established in 1974. Contemporary bodies were also present: three… Full Review