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Judith Ostrowitz’s first book, Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), took as its subject the complex relationships to tradition maintained by contemporary native artists in the Pacific Northwest as they produce new artworks for a multicultural audience. Ostrowitz’s second book, Interventions: Native American Art for Far-flung Territories, pursues the related question of how contemporary native artists situate their work in global venues (which are by definition cross-cultural) and how contemporary native artists mediate between local tribal demands for the protection of indigenous knowledge and cultural property and the ravenous hunger… Full Review

A statue of Sir Hans Sloane stands at the center of London’s Chelsea Physic Garden where all variety of plants vie for attention. Sloane demonstrated his talent for gathering specimens (like those over which his statue presides) in his resplendently detailed title, Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles Etc. of the Last of those Islands (vol.1 ,1707; vol. 2, 1725) which serves as both travel log and visual natural history, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century desire to index the world… Full Review

How do artists depict the act of looking or listening, even when the object of attention is not visible in the image? What does the experience of beauty, both seen and heard, look like? And how does the image convey the aesthetic experience of the artist’s subject to the beholder? These questions were the subject of an interdisciplinary course held at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007 that culminated in an exhibition and catalogue of prints, paintings, drawings, sculpture, and music from nineteenth-century France. The catalogue includes a preface by Anthony Hirschel, director of the Smart Museum… Full Review

Although the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) may be among the most appreciated (and reproduced) images in Japanese art, rarely have they been treated with the care and attention exhibited in Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo by Melanie Trede and Lorenz Bichler in a masterful production by Taschen. The subject is Hiroshige’s well-known set, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei ), dating from 1856 to 1858. The volume opens with an essay by Trede setting the period context, purpose, and reception of the prints, and is followed with illustrations and descriptions by Trede and… Full Review

In the opening pages of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960, Bill Anthes describes in no uncertain terms the contribution he expects the book to make to the field of twentieth-century art scholarship: he asserts that, though the study focuses on American Indian painting in the immediate postwar period, his is “not merely a recovery project with the goal of adding a few neglected figures to the canon of American modernism.” Rather, he insists that “bringing Native American modernism to the foreground rewrites the canon and the key terms of American modernism” (xiii). Over the course of six chapters… Full Review

Artists figure conspicuously among Honoré de Balzac’s characters. The maniacal Frenhofer and fatally naive Sarrasine may be the most familiar to art historians, though painters and sculptors play key roles in several of the stories and novels that comprise La Comédie humaine. Some of these characters, like Joseph Bridau and Wenceslas Steinbock, recur, their lives and artworks contributing in important ways to Balzac’s morally ambiguous tales of post-Revolutionary France. It is as metaphorical counterparts to the artifice of contemporary society that Diana Knight positions these narratives of artistic identity and creative expression. The ability of artworks to seduce, deceive… Full Review

It is still rare for electronic publications in art history to be reviewed in the same venues as print media, in spite of the fact that more and more scholars are publishing online as a solution to the crisis in academic publishing. It is a crisis that disproportionately affects art history—due to the legalities and expenses involved in reproducing images—and medieval art history even more, as a result of the unimaginative assumptions about the marginality of the Middle Ages to twenty-first century concerns. It is fitting and heartening, therefore, that caa.reviews has begun to note the appearance of significant e-publications… Full Review

Guardians of Republicanism, a masterful examination of the political life of the Valori family of Florence as it was recounted in Florentine historiography, is as much a story of historiographic record as it is one of family memory. Mark Jurdjevic presents the Valori as at once emblematic of the complicated political negotiation pursued by Florentine oligarchic families and distinctive in their long-lived adherence to a “hybrid form of republicanism that insisted upon the compatibility” of the humanistic ideas of Marsilio Ficino with the Christian reforms of Girolamo Savonarola even into the seventeenth century (9). According to Jurdjevic, the Valori… Full Review

What are the terms of seeing and believing? Or more specifically, how do pictures shape and direct religious faith? Kristin Schwain takes up these questions in Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age, focusing on four different American artists—Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner, F. (Fred) Holland Day, and Abbott Handerson Thayer—and explaining how they "drew on religious beliefs and practices to explore new relationships between viewers and objects, and how beholders looked to art to experience transcendence and save their souls" (2). As Schwain persuasively argues, each not only repeatedly engaged with the prevalent religious… Full Review

In Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, Alan Braddock examines how dominant period concepts about cultural difference shaped the late Victorian American painter’s work. During his excavation of this complex body of thought, Braddock digs deep into the history of ideas, beneath the more familiar strata of modern anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas early in the last century. Unlike the cultural relativism of Boas and his many famous students at Columbia, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, this older intellectual tradition depended heavily on social evolutionist discourse and biological models to account for cultural forms considered specific to… Full Review