Recently Published Reviews

Lawren Harris is among the most famous Canadian painters. The general public in Canada know him as one of the members of the Group of Seven, artists who exhibited together in the 1920s, popularizing a new, colorful, modernist style of painting that celebrated the Canadian landscape. But Harris’s celebrity status stops at the border. The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, attempts to bring this star of Canadian art to the attention of a U.S. audience. While the exhibition was shown first at… Full Review

Matisse in the Barnes Foundation continues a laudable program to publish the holdings of this renowned collection of modern European, African, and American art in systematic, scholarly catalogues. Yve-Alain Bois, long one of the most compelling writers on Henri Matisse, is the project director, editor, and lead author, joined by Karen K. Butler and Claudine Grammont. Conservation and condition issues, now a welcome concern in many major museum publications, are treated by Barbara A. Buckley and Jennifer Mass (for paintings) and Thomas Primeau (for works on paper). Every one of the Barnes Foundation’s fifty-nine artworks by Matisse is reproduced… Full Review

The role of modernity in influencing vision has produced such a wealth of insightful scholarship that it can be surprising when a new study contributes substantially to the field. Jason Weems’s Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest provides an engaging and thoughtful analysis of how the elevated vantage point helped to create the modern Midwestern landscape and, in turn, informed the region’s identity. Weems explores how the aerial, synoptic view of the prairie fostered changes in the perception of that landscape through a series of case studies beginning with the piecemeal pioneer settlement of individual farms that… Full Review

Rachel Cohen’s clear, concise, and gracefully written retelling of the life of Bernard Berenson is far more manageable than Ernest Samuels’s long, magisterial biography published in 1979 (Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). It would be unfair to think a much shorter account would cover any part of Berenson’s life in equal depth to Samuels’s study, but a reader might reasonably form that expectation about at least one aspect of it, for Cohen’s book is part of a Yale series of biographies entitled Jewish Lives. Whether these are life stories… Full Review

In his iconic 1964 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Leo Marx surveyed early American literature and painting to uncover a uniquely American understanding of the collective landscape. Elizabeth Milroy—framing her lens on early Philadelphia—has produced an equally authoritative and compelling portrait of how a city’s actual landscape fabric has been fashioned through a process of negotiating and representing a dominant idea about landscape’s place in American culture. It is as if these two works, separated by a half century, were meant to be read together: one laying out a… Full Review

Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece offered visitors a rare opportunity to engage with Rembrandt’s painted Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629) and the three surviving sheets of preparatory drawings associated with it. The exhibition marked the first time that the painting, long held in an English private collection and, as the exhibition’s title suggested, regarded as a decisive work for the artist’s subsequent development, was shown in the United States. For context, the show included alongside the painting and preparatory drawings a wide array of some three dozen prints and drawings, many from the Morgan’s own inimitable collection, as well… Full Review

Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos), a site-specific installation created by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, is a post-colonial inversion and commentary on the complicated state of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations. This iteration of what appears to be an ongoing project also develops one of their consistent themes: light as illumination, energy, and power. Dan Flavin’s iconic Minimalist, fluorescent-light sculpture Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake) made in 1965 was originally used by Allora and Calzadilla as part of a 2003 exhibition at the Americas Society. In their earlier version, a solar-energy battery bank charged by the sun in Puerto Rico… Full Review

The architecture of shrines has been neglected in Islamic architecture scholarship until recently. Among others, Kishwar Rizvi and John Curry have demonstrated how architectural patronage and the writing of hagiographies are intricate political acts and deserve a common analysis (Kishwar Rizvi, The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: Architecture, Religion and Power in Early Modern Iran, London: I.B. Tauris, 2011; and John J. Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350–1650, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Zeynep Yürekli successfully utilizes and furthers this methodology in Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman… Full Review

Robert DeCaroli’s book bears the title Image Problems. But I read the text as Image Answers, for DeCaroli provides some remarkable insights into the conception and production of images by mining textual sources, both Buddhist and Brahmanical, in enormously impressive ways. For almost as long as the history of South Asian art has been studied, the question of when and where the Buddha image was first created—invented, some even might say—has been central. Given the long history of image worship, if that is the right way of phrasing it, in the West, the assumption has been that this innovation… Full Review

The titles of these two books aptly indicate the ambiguity that has always plagued any attempt to classify the work of Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941). Is he the modernist architect who advocated concrete construction, the machine, and eschewed ornamented surfaces, or is he the artisan architect who upheld the teachings of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and John Ruskin, followed Gothic principles, and produced scores of ornamental designs for furniture, wallpaper, and textiles? Nikolaus Pevsner attempted to synthesize these currents in Voysey’s work by including him in his landmark Pioneers of the Modern Movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). There… Full Review

Patricia Blessing’s Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 seeks to place the monuments within their immediate social and political landscape. Departing from previous approaches to the subject that have stressed continuities with architectural traditions of the prior Seljuk and later Ottoman period, Blessing instead emphasizes the local circumstances in which the monuments were produced. She considers how building forms and decoration were shaped by the particular circumstances of each patron, as well as by the rich and diverse architecture of prior Seljuk Anatolia, Ilkhanid Iran, and the medieval South Caucasus. Fundamentally, Blessing… Full Review

Anri Sala: Answer Me, organized by the New Museum’s artistic director Massimiliano Gioni and associate curators Margot Norton and Natalie Bell, is the artist’s first comprehensive survey exhibition in the United States. Sala (b. 1974) is an Albanian artist who lives and works in Berlin and uses primarily video to investigate the underlying structure of music and sound. Many of his works deal with emotional histories of architectural spaces as told by live and recorded musical performances. Answer Me fills three floors of the museum and is organized thematically—a minimalistic and technologically sophisticated presentation on the fourth floor;… Full Review

Exhibitions of architecture have recently moved from the margins to the center of architectural history and theory. This shift reflects a greater tendency in scholarship to focus less on individual buildings and more on issues such as the institutional structures that underpin architectural practice, theoretical discourse and its dissemination, as well as architecture’s relationship to its publics and to mass media. These three themes provide the structure for the edited volume Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, which collects fifteen essays grouped in three sections entitled “Discourse,” “Institutions,” and “Circulation.” The volume contains the contributions to a 2013… Full Review

Anyone who cares about the representation of night in the modern era will want to have this beautiful book for the images alone, and anyone who can read French will profit from the strong analysis of nocturnal art and politics. Hélène Valance has written a much-needed history of how image makers reacted to the ways in which the American night was lit, exploited, and commercialized from the turn of the twentieth century until the U.S. entry into World War I—between the “closing” of the frontier and the new American presence on an international stage. The prewar night was a battleground… Full Review

Author’s note: When writing this review last summer, I could not foresee that it would be published just as depictions of anti-black violence in the Whitney Biennial were provoking international debate. These urgent conversations evoke the politics of race, representation, and privilege that animate Susan E. Cahan’s Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power and underscore the value of recovering this underexamined history. This month, July 2016, police officers shot Alton B. Sperling and Philando Castile, both African American, at point-blank range on successive days. Then a sniper used a peaceful #BlackLivesMatter protest in… Full Review