Recently Published Reviews

No matter what the relationship between art and medicine, I would rather keep it on the aesthetic plain. . . . Why don’t you show your paintings and the thesis in a medical hospital —Betty Parsons, letter to Forrest Bess, 1958 Female patron: The paintings up there are amazing! Male patron: Did you look at the stuff in the middle? Female patron: No. Male patron: Super weird. —exchange in Berkeley Art Museum gift shop, September 2014 Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, the latest retrospective of Forrest Bess’s (1911–1977) work, is one animal on the… Full Review

Jennifer A. Greenhill’s Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age offers most everything one could wish from a scholarly monograph: discerning judgment, telling anecdotes, historical insights grounded in close visual and intertextual analysis. In describing ways in which late nineteenth-century artists as different as Winslow Homer, Enoch Wood Perry, William Holbrook Beard, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Haberle managed to produce serious art while catering to a “growing public appetite for humor” (2), Greenhill herself strikes an equivalent balance. Consistently erudite, frequently entertaining, benefitting from the wisdom of her choice to focus at length on a relatively few… Full Review

As signaled by its title, visitors to the exhibition The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux learned that the artist (1827–1875) had many: an obsession for art at a young age; an enthusiasm for portraiture; a desire for major government-sponsored commissions; and fervor for work. His was also a life full of passions unrealized, as he died from pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-eight. Yet Carpeaux’s impact on nineteenth-century sculpture was significant. His works fill museums and streets in Paris and in his birthplace of Valenciennes, and he influenced a younger generation of sculptors, including Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin. … Full Review

“While George Seurat was the founder of the Neo-Impressionist movement, he was not the first to create portraits in the style”: so announces an initial wall text for Face to Face: The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886–1904 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, curated by Ellen W. Lee and Jane Block. These words accompany a line of four portraits (one by Vincent van Gogh, two by Albert Dubois-Pillets, and one by Achille Laugé), which in turn reveal exciting curatorial minds at work—Face to Face is not yet another exhibition with an object list recycling famous works by famous names. Despite Paul… Full Review

Scholarly literature on the architectural monuments and urban infrastructure of early modern Rome abounds. What distinguishes this collection of essays is its focus on overlooked sites, e.g., the fish market rather than the Trevi Fountain, the ill-formed piazza in front of the Palazzo Zuccari rather than the Piazza del Popolo. The objective, as editor David R. Marshall puts it simply, is to study the sites and sights of Rome, its places (as distinct from its monuments) and, more importantly, the appearance of those places. After looking long and hard at the city of Rome, the essayists make fresh inroads in… Full Review

This multi-author, multi-century account of the evolution of the portrait collection of the New York Chamber of Commerce arrives at an opportune moment. As lead author Karl Kusserow notes at the outset of his introduction, the financial scandals and crises that have defined much of the current century make this volume a timely consideration of how business elites articulate and consolidate identities public and private, and how they address “the predicament of portraying power in a democracy” (6). Picturing Power also joins a recent flurry of rewarding and thoughtful studies of collections and exhibitions in the United States that redirect… Full Review

The Art of Video Games exhibition raises an intriguing question: How should a curator go about making the argument that a medium long associated with mass culture deserves to be taken seriously as an art form? Considering the possible approaches to such a situation, we can look to precedents—cinema provides an obvious analogue. Cinema’s initial tentative steps into the space of the museum during the first half of the twentieth century were governed by a conservative philosophy of curatorial selectivity: early exhibitions were often limited to a small group of exemplary works that seemed appropriately highbrow, appropriately challenging, and, importantly… Full Review

It is fitting that the first major retrospective of John Altoon’s work takes place in his hometown, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), since the show’s assembly necessitated considerable sleuthing by curator Carol S. Eliel, often with the aid of Altoon’s Los Angeles-based contemporaries. John Altoon, a compact show featuring eighteen works on canvas and fifty on paper or board, fills five galleries of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum and offers the first comprehensive look at the artist’s prolific oeuvre, or what remains of it (Altoon destroyed much of what he made during the short period… Full Review

How “literate” was Raphael’s art? This question stands at the core of David Rijser’s Raphael’s Poetics, an ambitious study dedicated to the polymorphic relation—as the subtitle goes—between art and poetry in High Renaissance Rome. Divided into four chapters, each devoted to a major work by Raphael, and accompanied by a methodological interlude (surprisingly situated toward the end), the book is a partially revised version of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Institute for Culture and History at the University of Amsterdam in 2006. As a result of Rijser’s multidisciplinary background (he is an intellectual historian with a specific interest… Full Review

For many, the high point of this retrospective of Josef Koudelka’s work will be the series of images of the Soviet invasion of Prague in August of 1968. The photographer had just returned to the city from a trip photographing Roma communities when the seven-day invasion began. Weaving in and among the crowds of protestors, his camera loaded with yards of East German movie film, he managed to capture the fragile power of such instances of collective heroism. Images of conflict between the heavily armed invading forces and the very human Czech resistance combine with those of cleverly detourned propaganda… Full Review

The exhibition A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography, along with curator Anne M. Lyden’s fine catalogue of the same name, bring together the remarkable photography collections of the Royal Collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, as well as one notable photograph from a private collection. The exhibition and in particular the catalogue’s essays are insightful and thought-provoking, raising a number of fascinating issues about art, class, democracy, power, tradition, gender, and ways of knowing and seeing in the photographic age. This opportunity to examine the birth of that period both… Full Review

Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection elegantly showcases a recent donation gifted to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It brings Native art into the spotlight alongside the institution’s diverse holdings from its permanent collection, and celebrates the beauty of objects often unknown to both the general art museumgoer and established art connoisseur. The exhibition features a large selection of ceramic works and textiles by Native artists from the southwestern United States, as well as pieces from the Pacific Northwest and the Great Plains. The title itself evokes images of the… Full Review

Just beyond the main galleries of the Art of the Americas Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is a small room featuring eight large painting by Sam Doyle (1906–1985). The paintings are created from everyday materials, making them distinct from the oil paintings, art deco objects, and mid-century modern furniture in the neighboring galleries. Using house paint on found wood and metal to create figurative and text-based paintings, Doyle portrayed famous African American entertainers and athletes as well as legendary figures, friends, and family from his Gullah birthplace on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. The intimate… Full Review

Toward the end of their introduction to the catalogue that accompanied Passion and Virtuosity: Hendrik Goltzius and the Art of Engraving, curators William Breazeale and Victoria Sancho Lobis quote what is certainly the single most incisive sentence in the whole of the Goltzius literature, first framed in Karel van Mander’s 1604 Het Schilder-Boek: “All these things . . . prove that Goltzius is a rare Proteus or Vertumnus in art, because he can transform himself to all forms of working methods” (9). With the Passion and Virtuosity exhibition and catalogue Breazeale and Sancho Lobis aim to illuminate “all… Full Review

The focus of Huey Copeland’s Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness is specific: artworks produced during roughly a three-year period whose subject matter deals with “the peculiar institution.” Copeland sets his sights on four cases: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992–93), Lorna Simpson’s Five Rooms (1991), Glenn Ligon’s To Disembark (1993), and Renée Green’s Sites of Genealogy (1990) and Mise-en-Scène (1991). No expense seems to have been spared: the book is large-format and lavishly illustrated. Its size and glossy pages make it a pleasure to hold. From a formal standpoint, the objects relate closely, as… Full Review