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In the preface to his futurist memoir, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer (1933), the poet Benedikt Livshits strangely seems to denounce the entire enterprise of his narrative: Futurist aesthetics were founded on the fallacious concept of the racial character of art. The subsequent development of these views led Marinetti to Fascism. The Russian budetliane never went as far in their passion for the East, but even they were not unblemished by their nationalist desires. Of course, in our day and age, there is no longer any sense in demonstrating the bankruptcy of racial theories. But I have… Full Review

This slim volume provides a valuable contribution to the study of the art of the fourteenth century. Beth Williamson presents the iconographic theme of the Madonna of Humility and offers “both a new methodology and a new meaning of the image itself” (11). Whereas art historians frequently set out to revise a disciplinary narrative or adjust a category or genre by giving prominence to a neglected work or assigning importance to the role of such an object in re-contouring the establishment of the motif, Williamson sets a more ambitious task for herself by proposing to re-evaluate the composition of the… Full Review

Natalie Adamson’s Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944–1964 provides a thoroughly researched account of postwar debates about the School of Paris. It describes the various redefinitions of the school after World War II as inconsistent and directly conflicting, such that the school exists largely as a set of competing discourses, a discursive “complex” in Adamson’s description (3). In the late 1940s, artistic discourse was strongly divided as Communist painters like André Fougeron and critics like Louis Aragon and Jean Marcenac launched New Realism in defense of figurative painting as part of a French humanist tradition… Full Review

Anyone living in the West who has ever attended a performance of Chinese Beijing opera will immediately notice that the actors wear elaborate headdresses above their brightly painted faces and that rich costumes clothe their bodies on a stark stage with few props. While listening to thus attired actors sing unfamiliar tunes accompanied by Asian instruments, the audience will follow with its gaze their exaggerated body movement and stylized hand gestures. Without question, the costumes present the most accessible information about the characters and the unfolding drama. But that doesn’t make them any more understandable. Alexandra Bond’s Beijing Opera… Full Review

John M. MacKenzie’s Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities is a hugely detailed exploration of colonial museums that narrates their establishment during the nineteenth century in Canada, South Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, while at the same time interrogating their purposes in communicating the messages and global reach of the power of the British Empire. The book also points to the changes in political influence and organization that the museum institution reflected and was subject to during the shift and ultimate demise of British colonial power that stretched into the twentieth century. MacKenzie’s… Full Review

The Social Work of Museums offers exactly what the title implies: a comprehensive survey of museums as a social work context. Lois Silverman, who is trained as both a social worker and museum scholar, undertook this work because, “it is long past time for museums to survey, organize, and integrate systematically from a theoretically grounded social work perspective the growing body of museum knowledge and practice currently scattered around the globe” (39). The result is no dry encyclopedia but a sympathetic call to action. Silverman artfully weaves together a number of seemingly disparate threads: international case studies of practice, including… Full Review

Few readers, I imagine, were surprised to discover that Yvonne Rainer’s stunning 2006 memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)—a sprawling book intertwining the artist’s early personal and artistic developments, rendering them inseparable—would conclude with an epilogue. Such a coda typically affords authors an opportunity to wrap up their ideas and cast a retrospective gaze over the whole of a book once its myriad elements have settled into shape. Rainer’s conclusion would seem only to follow protocol, in a sense. And yet this particular postscript, like so much of her production, effectively displaces expectations around such conventions… Full Review

From the time of its invention, photography has caused trouble for art. Now, in a belated stroke of reciprocity, art is causing trouble for photography. Early signs included photography’s absorption into museum collections and its embrace by the art market. Then came art historians, fueled by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, arguing that photography had eclipsed painting and sculpture to become art’s medium ne plus ultra. One of the most recent and influential contributions to this line of argument, Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) (click… Full Review

To begin with, I confess that I have some difficulties accommodating myself to wide art-historical surveys such as Alessia Trivellone’s L’Hérétique imaginé, which covers a span of six centuries with the aim of tracing a coherent development of a sole subject, the heretic. I am not stating that my skepticism will diminish if the survey is chronologically narrower or comprehending more subjects; the point is, rather, that I find serious problems with every sort of “coherent development.” The division of the volume into four sections corresponds more or less with what Trivellone maintains to be a coherent… Full Review

These two books, which describe how painters made a living in seventeenth-century Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Naples, synthesize the work of many dedicated scholars, including some by the authors themselves. As Patrizia Cavazzini notes in her introduction, most research on Italian painting has favored major painters and their patrons, neglecting the large supporting cast who also made a living as painters and decorators in Rome and elsewhere. Some worked assisting painters charged with covering extensive wall surfaces with religious or mythological scenes, providing illusionistic architectural frameworks [quadratura], or adding generic landscape vistas or patches of al antica… Full Review