Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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André Lortie, ed.
Exh. cat. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture in association with Douglas & McIntyre Publishing Group, 2004. 216 pp.; 252 ills. Paper Can55.00 (1553650751)
The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name, which was on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal from October 2004 to September 2005. The catalogue presents a new study of a significant period of change in a major North American city. Like other CCA catalogues, it is a carefully produced book with high-quality illustrations. It includes a fascinating collection of visual material, and the essays are valuable contributions to the literature on architecture and urban planning in the 1960s, as well as to scholarship on Montreal. The project focuses… Full Review
October 26, 2005
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Toni Stooss, ed.
Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2004. 1008 pp.; 455 color ills.; 485 b/w ills. Cloth $175.00 (393380728X)
This deluxe two-volume boxed set is a catalogue raisonné documenting Ilya Kabakov’s important and influential work as an installation artist. Yet in keeping with the current practice of institutional critique, which turns every corner of the institution of art into an exhibition space in order to make those corners visible in a new way, it is much more. Included are descriptions of 155 installations executed between 1983 and 2000, along with preparatory drawings, installation photographs, and information about the exhibitions in which they appeared and the museums that own them. The bulk of the book consists of extensive commentaries by… Full Review
October 25, 2005
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Susan Groag Bell
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 271 pp.; 8 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0520234103)
Author Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–c. 1430) is no longer the obscure figure she was three decades ago when Susan Groag Bell began her research for The Lost Tapestries of the ‘City of Ladies’: Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy. Indeed, although Christine’s texts were widely commissioned for court libraries in fifteenth-century Europe, by the middle of the sixteenth century they had already fallen out of favor. Not until feminist scholars of the early 1980s began to uncover and mine a larger body of evidence for medieval women as writers, readers, patrons, and interpreters of literature was Christine propelled back… Full Review
October 19, 2005
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Tryna Lyons
Bloomington and Ahmedabad, India: Indiana University Press in association with Mapin Publications, 2004. 360 pp.; 88 color ills.; 163 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0253344174)
Tryna Lyons’s The Artists of Nathadwara vividly renders a community of traditional painters. It brings to life a profession that the field of South Asian art studies has tended to sidestep in its focus on objects. Early in the last century, Ananda Coomaraswamy created a vision of the artist as an anonymous yogin, meditating on internalized canons to make his imagery. It was a romantic ideal that still makes itself felt, even though a number of scholars of South Asian art have since turned their attention to individual artists, using inscriptions and archival data to discover information on real… Full Review
October 18, 2005
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Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004. 608 pp.; 300 color ills.; 225 b/w ills. Cloth (0300102690)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June 20–September 12, 2004
The exhibition catalogue Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea seeks simultaneously to remedy faulty perceptions of the modern art of Latin America and to revolutionize the writing of its history. Focusing on two periods of heightened aesthetic inquiry—the 1920s and 1930s, and the decades immediately following the Second World War—it is required reading for anyone concerned with the art produced in this vast region or with twentieth-century art in general The title of the award-winning exhibition invokes the famous drawing published in 1936 by Joaquín Torres-García in which he inverted the map… Full Review
October 5, 2005
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Kees Zandvliet
Exh. cat. Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Uitgevers, 2004. 464 pp.; 245 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. €29.95 (9040087172)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, October 10, 2002–February 9, 2003
“Encounter”—the operative word, to my mind, of the title under review—has transformed, in a relatively brief period of time, from a strikingly innovative and promising concept to a somewhat enigmatic, if not altogether elusive, scholarly term of choice, which is increasingly, perhaps even blandly, invoked to describe the meeting between Europe and the wider world in the early modern period. Which is to say, the relatively fresh field of “encounter studies” is already—don’t blink!—ripe for revision. A bit of backstory: The study of Europe’s engagement with the non-European world—particularly during the pivotal moment of global expansion… Full Review
June 29, 2005
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Samantha Baskind
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 280 pp.; 9 color ills.; 61 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (0807828483)
At the outset of her study on Soyer and Jewish identity, Samantha Baskind acknowledges the knotty complications of her venture: “Raphael Soyer did not want to be known as a Jewish artist…. So why am I … writing a book on Soyer and Jewish art” (1–2)? Despite the urban realist’s persistent denial that his religious and cultural heritage influenced his art, this book makes a compelling case for its primacy. While the artist preferred and promoted the labels “American” and “New York” in association with himself and his art, Baskind digs deeper to show how Soyer’s works were informed by… Full Review
June 29, 2005
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Fiona Donovan
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 196 pp.; 30 color ills.; 79 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300095066)
Peter Paul Rubens acted on an international stage of grand proportions. His journeys, together with his massive output and universal interests, reflect a life of exceptional scope. Born in Germany and raised in the Southern Netherlands, Rubens traveled throughout the continent and England as both artist and diplomat. A life so rich in variety and achievement is not easily encompassed in a monograph. A catalogue raisonnée of Rubens’s works has required twenty-seven volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, categorized by series, subjects, and commissions and written by a small army of scholars. Rubens’s life and work have also been… Full Review
June 28, 2005
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Philip Jacks
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. 440 pp.; 12 color ills.; 145 b/w ills. Cloth $98.95 (0271019247)
In the middle years of the fifteenth century, the Florentine-born Tommaso Spinelli (1398–1472) became a prominent banker in Rome and sponsored numerous building projects and other artistic enterprises, especially in Florence. This book gives an overview of the Spinelli family, concentrating on Tommaso and discussing in detail his business activities and his donations to the church of Santa Croce, the cloister and infirmary that he built there, the palace nearby, and his villa in the hills east of the city. Some of these matters had already been touched upon by Filippo Moisè (Santa Croce di Firenze: Illustrazione storico-artistica [Florence… Full Review
June 14, 2005
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Susan Foister
London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 320 pp.; 40 color ills.; 180 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300102801)
No one would mistake an artist with a name like Hans Holbein for an Englishman. Yet, as Susan Foister’s new book sets out to demonstrate, Holbein the Younger not only flourished during his tenure in England but also produced works integrally connected to the artistic context of the Tudor period. In Holbein and England, Foister hopes to revise common assumptions by reframing the artist geographically, arguing that Holbein’s experiences in Germany informed his English work and that early-sixteenth-century England was no backwater for the visual arts Misconceptions and unfamiliarity have assured a dearth of literature about English art of… Full Review
June 14, 2005
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