Recently Published Reviews

Can there be a more enigmatic corpus in art writing than that of the German critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940)? In Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art, Sebastian Zeidler presents not only a detailed, rigorous analysis of Einstein’s fragmentary, gnomic writings, but a provocative extrapolation of their potentials. Einstein—the book’s acknowledged “hero”—imparted to his criticism an idiosyncratic, urgent density, by turns profound and obscure, informed by a heterogeneous array of readings in art history, ethnology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. His was a discourse animated by “complicated complexity” (122), to quote one of the many unpublished manuscripts… Full Review

Many unkind words and nasty looks have been exchanged in recent years over the ethnic and sex-and-gender principles of curatorial selection. Some artists declined to be shown in Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and El Museo del Barrio in New York in 2008, refusing to be grouped by their race and ethnicity. The exhibition Our America: Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2013 was criticized for being too general, too all-inclusive, and not edgy or “Latino” enough. Seeking to sidestep the… Full Review

In 1966 Sol LeWitt wrote, “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is that it is relatively uninteresting” (LeWitt, “The Cube,” Art in America, Summer 1966). Rice University Art Gallery (a space that has now been repurposed), like many contemporary art spaces, was a modest white cube, and LeWitt’s installation Glossy and Flat Black Squares purposely played off of its seemingly “uninteresting” architectural container.  When LeWitt repeated the assertion in 1967, he elaborated: “The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. . . . Released from… Full Review

“What Art Unveils” is the title of an essay by cognitive scientist and philosopher Alva Noë printed in the opinion pages of the New York Times on October 5, 2015, the year his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature was published. The op-ed states some of the book’s basic arguments: art, for Noë, is a human “making activity,” but a special activity, a “research practice” that “unveils us to ourselves.” Art begins (and design stops) “when we are unable to take the background of our familiar technologies and activities for granted, and when we can no longer take for… Full Review

I do not usually care much about the clothes that artists wear or what their living rooms look like. But after reading Wanda Corn’s new book about Georgia O’Keeffe, I will certainly pay more attention. Previous O’Keeffe scholars have delved deeply into the artist’s personal and professional relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, speculated on her sexuality as expressed in her flower imagery, and dissected her skull paintings. None, however, have so fully detailed the contents of her closet. Written in conjunction with an innovative exhibition of both her art and her clothes, Corn’s book provides an in-depth study of the importance… Full Review

In 1954, Ellsworth Kelly returned from his years in Paris to live and work in New York. By 1956, he settled on the Coenties Slip, at the very bottom of Manhattan, near his friend from Paris the abstract painter Fred Mitchell. Robert Indiana moved up the street later that year. In 1957, Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman arrived there through word of mouth. In the early nineteenth century, the Coenties Slip had been one of many inlets of water just wide and long enough to hold docked trading ships on the active waterfront at the turn of the… Full Review

For her new body of work, almost entirely composed of, or engaging with, durational media, such as video and film, Mickalene Thomas has re-created the same intimate, female domestic spaces of communion and solidarity as she sets up in her studio for her photo shoots. Islands of patterned carpet with ottomans covered by the familiar 1970s textiles invite the viewer to sit and interact with versions of her personal library, comprising books by Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin, among others. Conceived as an immersive and interactive environment—Thomas imagined, for example, that people could take home some… Full Review

The Pizzuti Collection’s Visions from India comprises two exhibitions: Transforming Vision: 21st Century Art from the Pizzuti Collection, the larger in scope and size, showcases significant holdings of very recent Indian art; The Progressive Master: Francis Newton Souza from the Rajadhyaksha Collection, includes thirty works by the sought-after Indian modernist painter. These exhibitions, tucked away in a private nonprofit museum in Columbus, Ohio, present some excellent examples of Indian modern and contemporary art, while also making visible how private collecting of Indian art has been facilitated in the United States in recent decades. In the short catalogue… Full Review

Fugitive Objects features impressive scholarship, skillfully engaging a great variety of sources: philosophical texts, literary works, sculptures, and paintings, as well as objects, texts, and images from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular culture. But at the same time, unlike many other scholarly works, it also tells an exciting story, full of suspense, which at times makes the book a genuine page-turner. In Hegelian terms, this story could be summarized by another title, “The Story of Sculpture after the End of Sculpture.” It is fitting to refer to Hegel here, because Catriona MacLeod herself, in the first chapter, draws on both Hegel’s… Full Review

As befits a study of the appearance of documents, Jessica Berenbeim’s Art of Documentation: Documents and Visual Culture in Medieval England is beautifully designed and richly illustrated. It also makes an important contribution to the study of medieval manuscripts, breaking out of traditional disciplinary categorizations to offer new insights that will be of relevance to both art historians and historians. Indeed, the form and function of medieval documents has become an interdisciplinary blind spot. Art historians are often tempted to focus on illumination, at the expense of questions about the overall design of charters or books, and sometimes ignore the… Full Review

Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971, the first museum exhibition to chronicle the eleven-year run of Virginia Dwan’s bicoastal gallery, anticipates the promised gift of the art dealer’s collection to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC. During a period of incredible transformation in American and European art, Dwan was at the forefront, mounting exhibitions that helped define trends as diverse as Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and land art. Dwan innovated in other ways as well: she was the first American dealer to operate simultaneously a gallery on each coast, with locations in Los… Full Review

When one thinks of architecture in the contemporary Middle East, a mosque is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Today, critics and journalists are more focused on the starchitect museums of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island or the record-setting towers of Dubai and Kuala Lumpur than on places of communal worship. In her volume The Transnational Mosque, however, Kishwar Rizvi counters this perception and contends that mosque architecture is equally a space where the sociopolitical dynamics of the region can be observed and evaluated, especially considering religion’s comeback in social discourse around the world over the past… Full Review

Few college instructors or students of art history today are likely to be unfamiliar with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s expansive Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. With over one thousand thematic essays written by experts in the field, as well as more than 7,600 pages featuring artworks from the Met’s collection, the timeline is a formidable and immensely popular online resource.[i] Parallel to its larger rebranding efforts in 2016, the Met launched its new edition of the timeline, featuring a brand-new, ultra-clean interface designed by the New York–based firm CHIPS. The timeline now offers a user experience… Full Review

The Inca Empire, its art, architecture, and culture, often serves as a benchmark for scholarly and popular understanding of ancient Andean culture. For better, and often for worse, scholars are reliant upon the records, and therefore the cultural lens, of Spanish conquerors to interpret those they conquered. Each chapter of Art and Vision in the Inca Empire begins with a Spanish author’s observation written about key moments of the encounter at Cajamarca, a northern city far from Cusco, the Inca capital in the highlands, where Atawallpa was encamped on his march north to conquer those who had been resisting subjugation… Full Review

Yoonmi Nam’s Still was a simple, direct exhibition: three lithographs, three sculptures, and three Japanese woodblock prints (mokuhanga) displayed a single white room. While the sculptures rested on white perimeter plinths, Nam’s lithographs and woodblocks held the walls, delivering spare, nearly diagrammatic flora composed swimmingly on creamy paper. The presentation was elegant and normcore basic, except that the sculptures were facsimiles of throwaways, appearing to be bagged takeout food containers on their way to both table and trash. These tableaux were aptly titled Take Out, with parenthetical identifiers that repeated the obsequies printed on the bags: “Thank… Full Review