Recently Published Reviews

Intimate Impressionism from the National Gallery of Art is an exhibition of small pictures. By the same token, it is an exhibition about small pictures. Scale matters. Only, for it to matter, for it to develop as an orientation, we have first to break with the usual connotations that accrue to it as a criterion of judgment. Small pictures have their way of drawing us in, of revealing different kinds of relations of people to things; they ask that we view them up close, intimately. In a word, small pictures belong to the interior. That, it would seem, is the… Full Review

The title of John Ott’s book, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority, is a riff on Sarah Burns’s important Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Ott covers much the same ground chronologically as Burns and with the same high ambitions. But while Burns’s focus is a traditional one on the artist as the maker of meaning, Ott turns his attention to the patron. Ott argues that for the most part Americanists have labored in the shadow of Thorstein Veblen… Full Review

Eve Meltzer’s Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn returns readers to the structuralist adventure in art history. To recall something of the stakes and texture of that adventure, consider the following exchange in 1976 between Robert Morris, an artist, and A. A., a blind woman hired to assist him with a series of drawings entitled Blind Time II. [R. M.:] “Letting the page stand as a ground for yourself, an analog, letting the space of the page stand as an analog for yourself—” [A. A.:] “Where are you getting this?” … Full Review

An ambitious statement about American art, Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology examines the intersection of institutional critique, a practice entailing a structural analysis of museums and the art market, and appropriation, a mechanism of recontextualizing found images and ideas. Curators Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton show that the two, despite having originated from distinct strategies of practice and consecutive historical periods (the 1970s and 1980s), have overlapped significantly, as reflected in their reception by the generation of artists that followed. Although the two movements have typically been understood as extending from Conceptual art, the exhibition highlights the… Full Review

The work of the painter René Magritte is well known, if not as art, then at least as image. Magritte himself claimed that looking at a reproduction of his works was every bit as good as looking at a painting. The exhibition Magritte: Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 sets out to disprove this notion, foregrounding the materiality of Magritte’s work alongside his conceptual preoccupations. Foremost among those preoccupations is the resistance—even refusal—of Magritte’s painted objects to operate according to their material constrictions. And so the Menil has set up an appropriately counterintuitive project—the exhibition is physically grounded in our perception… Full Review

How did Diego Velázquez’s formative period in Seville inform his later artistic accomplishments at the Spanish court? What was the role of Francisco Pacheco’s teachings and of his intellectual circle in the artist’s training? And how did Velázquez’s early works engage with Sevillian audiences and the concerns of their local culture? These questions are not new ones to students and historians of Spanish baroque painting. In Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville, Tanya J. Tiffany considers them once again, yet from a refreshing and original perspective. Seeking “to bring an investigation of the cultural and… Full Review

Considering Paul Gauguin’s notable impact on the development of modern art, it seems remarkable that Gauguin: Metamorphoses is his first monographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and only the second major presentation of his art in New York since 1959. Perhaps even more surprising, this show, organized by Starr Figura, the Phyllis Ann and Walter Borten Associate Curator, with Lotte Johnson, curatorial assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, foregoes the expected focus on Gauguin’s paintings. Instead, the paintings play a supporting role, along with wood carvings and ceramics, in an exploration of the theme of transformation in his… Full Review

What is an exhibition for? What can it produce? In its earliest forms in the middle of the eighteenth century—the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the exhibiting societies of London—the exhibition was a collective affair, organized among artists: a form of self-assessment and public presentation mediating between a guild of merchant craftsmen and the unstable fractions within the public that might provide a market for those artists’ work. In this anxious context the emergence of the “solo” exhibition, as curator João Ribas has argued in recent lectures, risked the appearance of careerism, conceit, and self-interest (João… Full Review

William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography attempts to resituate the early history of photography and one of its most important innovators, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), in the context of mid-Victorian science. Developed from a conference held in June 2010 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, this collection of essays, as described in the introduction, examines the relationship of the discovery of photography to the “new [scientific] methods of inscription, recording, classification, visual display, collection, and above all, reproduction” (9–10). Though art historians tend to think of Talbot first and foremost… Full Review

The recent passing of several major figures, including Michael Sullivan (1916–2013) and James Cahill (1926–2014), reminds us of the importance of individuals in advancing the field of Chinese art. As one of the pioneers of Chinese art studies in Europe and North America during the first half of the twentieth century, Finnish-Swedish art historian Osvald Sirén’s (1879–1966) numerous publications helped to propel the field at the time. In Enchanted by Lohans: Osvald Sirén’s Journey into Chinese Art, Minna Törmä reconstructs what she calls the “middle part” of his career, investigating his decision to migrate from studying Italian to Chinese… Full Review

Two benchmark publications from the 1990s—Thomas Lawton’s A Time of Transition: Two Collectors of Chinese Art (Lawrence: University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art, 1991) and Warren I. Cohen’s East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)—are important precursors in considering Lara Jaishree Netting’s A Perpetual Fire: John C. Ferguson and His Quest for Chinese Art and Culture. These volumes provided some of the starting points for thinking about the trajectories of new, multi-disciplinary research into areas such as art dealers, collectors and collecting, exhibitions, and provenance issues related to… Full Review

El Greco’s Italian years, on which Andrew W. Casper’s Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy centers, present scholars with a challenge. Next to no documentation survives for the ten years he spent there. He seems to have received no major commission, the number of works is small, and none are securely dated. Most of El Greco’s Italian paintings have religious subjects, and Casper utilizes this fact to bring order to the material. According to Casper, one of the central artistic problems of the late sixteenth century Counter Reformation was the anxiety that images might be confused… Full Review

Reading An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body by Hans Belting has been remarkably similar to my experiences recording a performance as an art event in western Africa. The handsome book itself, like the African festival, is relatively short. Yet both the book and the ceremony are packed with layers of complex discourse, and become meaningful only when examined within the context of a particular intellectual tradition. Both require interpreters and the occasional suspension of disbelief. As a scholar based in the United States, I have been invited to observe ceremonial displays in Côte d’Ivoire because the participants wished to… Full Review

The central portion of Horst Bredekamp's Theorie des Bildakts ("Theory of the Image-Act") closes with the verbal image of Aby Warburg as the figurehead of a ship, "gaze locked in apotropaic contact with the waves of destruction," alone in propounding the "irritating life" possessed by forms of all sorts (305–6). Warburg’s dictum, "Du lebst und thust mir nichts" (“You live and do nothing to me”), is the implicit epigram to Bredekamp's enterprise—given that Bredekamp frames Warburg’s declaration as more trepidatious adjuration than confident assertion (21–22).[1] Bredekamp maintains that Warburg's thinking about art, craft, vision, and culture "approached more… Full Review

Last year the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel co-organized the provocative exhibition Jordaens and the Antique and published the accompanying catalogue under review here. Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) has long been relegated to a distant third position in the pantheon of seventeenth-century Flemish painters, behind Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Nonetheless, Jordaens outlived both Rubens and Van Dyck by twenty-five years and, as a result, became perhaps the leading Flemish painter for a quarter of a century. Despite achieving considerable fame in his lifetime, Jordaens has remained a bit of a shadow… Full Review