Recently Published Reviews

What did Wassily Kandinsky mean by “the spiritual in art”? In his long-canonical treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Melerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), the artist does not quite say, though he clearly conceives it in some opposition to the creeping materialism that he assails as the defining feature of the modern world. Scholars, seeking a tighter definition, have often seized on a short, early passage in the text that explicitly evokes Theosophy, even as they have also linked the painter to Eastern mysticism and diverse… Full Review

“Photography is not an Art. Neither is painting nor sculpture, literature nor music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings; the tools he uses in his creative art.” So Alfred Stieglitz provocatively proclaimed in his article “Is Photography a Failure?” printed in New York’s The Sun on March 14, 1922. For Stieglitz, a photographic image was a “picture” (rather than a mere “photograph,” which was the generic term he used to describe anything “drawn by the rays of light”) when it had succeeded as a work of art. Interestingly, almost half a century later… Full Review

As one walks down Oxford Road, the central artery of the University of Manchester’s campus, the imposing Gothic revival structure of the Manchester Museum creates a powerful impression of the ambitions of Victorian science. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti’s Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum goes inside Alfred Waterhouse’s building to interrogate the history of the institution as seen through the display of its specimens. In so doing, Alberti’s stated aim is to overlay a traditional approach to museology—that of focusing on a single institution—with an examination of the political and cultural forces at work. For Alberti… Full Review

This important collection of essays originated in a symposium entitled “The Muse in the Marble: Plastic Arts and Aesthetic Theories in the Seventeenth Century” held at the American Academy in Rome in 2004. Anthony Colantuono, one of the two organizers, had the original idea to publish the papers. In 2008, he enlisted the help of Steven F. Ostrow, and the project gradually expanded, with several new essays commissioned from leading scholars. As the editors state in their preface, they aimed to create a volume that “would engage issues concerning the theory and production, reception, and interpretation of early modern Roman… Full Review

A museum exhibition on nineteenth-century chromolithography and the landscape of the American West must negotiate its way through key challenges. When the discipline of art history routinely emphasizes the innovation and novelty of artistic developments, imagery of mountains and natural wonders can strike scholars and museumgoers as familiar territory and therefore unworthy of attention. Moreover, in an era that celebrates globalization, the western landscape might bear a whiff of provincialism, complicated by questions about how the United States, under the spell of Manifest Destiny, invested the terrain with now unfashionable cultural meanings. In these circumstances, prints risk becoming mere images… Full Review

The surfaces of John Zurier’s spare, abstract paintings are breathtaking—thin washes of icy blue, brushy layers of deep aubergine, swathes of opaque electric orange—but the edges are where the action is. Sometimes color runs over the side of the picture plane and is folded around the back of the stretcher bars; other times it stops just short, leaving a sliver of raw jute exposed. In Votilækur (2014), for example, a few strong vertical lines lie beneath a cool aqua pigment washed over a tall canvas. The veil of color seems to cover the entire surface, but it is not a… Full Review

The “Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” the Vienna School of Art History, hardly needs an introduction today, as anyone interested in the history of academic art-history writing will have come across at least some of the recent literature in several languages, mostly devoted to one or other of the school’s chief protagonists, be it Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, Hans Sedlmayr, or Ernst Gombrich. Julius von Schlosser’s account, still the most useful brief introduction, is now available in English (Julius von Schlosser, “The Vienna School of the History of Art” (1934), translated by Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography 1 [December 2009])… Full Review

This Is War! Graphic Arts from the Great War, 1914–1918 joins a number of exhibitions taking advantage of the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I to explore this conflict and its representations. The Portland Art Museum focuses its contribution on the graphic arts, as the museum’s rich collection of prints, posters, and works on paper, along with a number of recent acquisitions, has enabled it to stage a comprehensive exhibition that demonstrates the great variety of graphic representations of the war. While marquee artists are represented by very good, even excellent examples, their works hang alongside… Full Review

Scholarship across the disciplines on death and commemoration in the early modern era is rich. A significant new contribution is Minou Schraven’s Festive Funerals in Early Modern Italy: The Art and Culture of Conspicuous Commemoration. The volume focuses on the development of funeral apparati—ephemeral decorations for the celebration of requiem masses on behalf of ecclesiastical princes and heads of state—in sixteenth-century Rome, which evolved into increasingly spectacular displays. These formal changes paralleled new attitudes regarding commemoration and devotion as well as shifts in ideological and institutional claims of the papacy. Funeral apparati encompassed a wide range… Full Review

At least since Plato’s claim that it is the foundation of true knowledge, light has been identified by the Western philosophical canon as the source of universal wisdom. It is this implied connection between physical light and rationality that prompts Dag Petersson to assert in The Art of Reconciliation that photography is the visual counterpart of dialectical logic, because dialectics and photography both are forms of light-writing. In order to substantiate his view of photography as the “self portrait” of dialectics (xv), Petersson’s first move is to explain that dialectics is a rigorously symmetrical mode of reasoning that… Full Review

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby’s The Cult of St Clare of Assisi in Early Modern Italy is a broad survey and analysis of materials documenting the extraordinary life and robust cult of St. Clare of Assisi (1193–1253) in Italian visual culture. Drawing on diverse representations of St. Clare, ranging from medieval reliquary cabinets, seals, tapestries, and frescoes to monumental baroque sculpture and altarpieces, Debby maps shifts and transformations in the iconography of St. Clare in the service of religious and political initiatives across early modern Italy. She focuses particularly on the diffusion of images of St. Clare as a model for Catholic… Full Review

In a world where vast collections of digital image libraries like Artstor allow works of art from any place or time to be accessed and saved on hard drives, we need not consider the weight, scale, and fragility of objects, nor how they travel from the nebulous space of “the cloud” to our screens. In Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America, Jennifer Roberts argues that we should not ignore the materiality of images or the often fraught processes of transporting them in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. In three chapters she demonstrates that John Singleton Copley… Full Review

Is there a post-postmodern approach to the art of Thomas Hart Benton, the opinionated, controversial polymath? One that expands an understanding of this larger-than-life artist in humanistic terms while laying bare his manifold contradictions: the short man who drew elongated bodies; the Parisian-trained painter who disavowed the avant-garde and its “cubes”; the man of ideas who read John Dewey while lambasting urban intelligentsia; and, last but not least, the scion of politicians who eschewed public service to travel around the country to reach out to the everyman? In the 1970s and 1980s, art historians strove to unfix Benton’s status as… Full Review

Before even reaching the five main galleries dedicated to Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), visitors encounter the tangled mass of neon-green and sea-blue crocheted strands of Sheila Pepe’s “site-responsive” sculpture, Put Me Down Gently (2014), cascading down the atrium walls. The work extends to the elevator shaft, where more parachute cords, laces, and yarn become visible through the glass of the car as it ascends the length of the building. Though not covering every surface, the fiber envelopes the space, its inherent materiality challenging the hard, clean architecture of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed… Full Review

Although popular culture and its incidental pleasures are constantly consumed, such things are not usually assessed with the same meticulous and critical lenses trained upon other forms of culture. Indeed, despite the victories of cultural studies, there is still less ink spilt (or keys tapped) on close academic analyses of pop culture than objects classed as “art.” Carol Magee’s Africa in the American Imagination is a welcome—and exemplary—exception to the rule (though certainly scholars such as Sidney Kasfir have addressed similar pop-cultural topics [Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity, Bloomington: Indiana University… Full Review