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The press release for the US Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale described Robert Colescott (1925–2009) as “arguably the most important American figurative painter of his generation.” The qualifier, “arguably,” is significant, because since the 1990s few scholars have been making that argument. A lifelong teacher, Colescott didn’t begin to make a name for himself until 1971, at the age of forty-six, with outrageous, satirical paintings about race, sexuality, and power in art history and in American culture generally. By the 1980s, Colescott had become a subject of frequent controversy for his art historical parodies, which took aim at the… Full Review

In Surrealism at Play, Susan Laxton weaves an alternate history of Surrealism through the concept of play, a historically underacknowledged (yet, in her telling, constitutive) element of the movement. This is serious play: play as process not product, as action and experience. Play undergirds the Surrealists’ ambition not only to remake the art of making art but also to reform intersubjective relations and modern experience; it is a critical force available precisely because it is “not work, not serious, not part of normal life, unreal, inauthentic” (12). Laxton’s crucial interlocutor is Walter Benjamin. Indeed, one could understand her project… Full Review

A curious pocket-size manuscript made in colonial Mexico, now in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has long eluded synthetic assessment, for good reason: its diminutive size belies the complex, hybrid contents—over one hundred pages thick with information in various forms by different hands, previously dismissed as apparently miscellaneous. Recorded primarily in an Aztec pictorial system of writing around 1580, its seemingly incongruent sections engage a range of subjects drawn from both native and European traditions. In this superb monograph by Lori Boornazian Diel, the Codex Mexicanus has finally found its integration. In fact, this study does much… Full Review

Following up on her 2004 book on Paul Klee and the decorative in modern art (Cambridge University Press), Jenny Anger’s latest volume recounts the history of Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm (1910–32), a Berlin-based cultural venture bringing together art, performance, theater, periodical publishing, teaching, and bookselling, thus continuing her exploration of an expansive notion of modernism that works against essentializing conceptions of the different arts. Simultaneously, the volume looks across the Atlantic to tell the story of the Société Anonyme (1920–50), an undertaking by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray that was modeled on Der Sturm. One of the book’s… Full Review

This splendidly illustrated exhibition catalog is devoted to one particularly prominent Attic vase painter, the so-named Berlin Painter. Whereas an exhibition on one artist may still count as a logical choice by curators of an art museum, such a focus on the oeuvre of one individual has become highly unusual within scholarly approaches to Greek art and visual culture over recent decades. The catalog addresses both an art-museum public and scholars of Greek art and archaeology. Nevertheless, a large part of this book responds more specifically to the interests of vase painting research in Sir John Beazley’s connoisseurial tradition—a tradition… Full Review

As suggested by the title of her erudite and intellectually ambitious new book, Malika Maskarinec argues that form is a dynamic concept in modern German philosophical aesthetics. Using the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s notion of Formkraft as a critical lens, Maskarinec reads not only the aesthetic theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg Simmel, Theodor Lipps, and Paul Klee but also the experimental writings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin, in terms of a dynamic whereby form-as-force defies (but also in large part depends on) gravity. Despite some terminological slippage (gravity is frequently equated with the weight of matter; form is now… Full Review

Felipe Pereda’s study Crime and Illusion: The Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age offers the reader both an enlightening and a frustrating experience: enlightening in that it provides new insights into the contexts of an important group of Golden Age Spanish religious works, and frustrating due to the author’s repeated attempts to force his investigations into a difficult and ultimately unsustainable theoretical framework. At the outset Pereda states that, instead of having a thesis, his book investigates “a series of singular images from the so-called [Spanish] Golden Age.” It also seeks to understand “the laws that underlie” aspects… Full Review

In spite of decades of scholarship on the history of the book in the age of print, the central mystery that plagues any given history of the book or a book remains the elusive nature of readers’ reception and interpretation of both words and pictures. While the works of Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Lisa Jardine, and Anthony Grafton have contributed substantially to the history of reading in Western Europe, there are many questions that remain about the nature of book reception. Such questions are particularly salient when the texts in question are thought to have initiated paradigm shifts in the… Full Review

As the title suggests, Emily C. Burns’s Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France is an evocative look at the “transnational frontiers” where visual art and cultural performance intersected alongside notions of identity, nation, and belonging for French citizens, American image-makers, and Native American performers between 1865 and 1914. This is a powerful study that focuses on different conceptions, depictions, and deployments of “the American West,” which Burns rightly notes is “a slippery concept” when considered within an international setting. By tracing the circulation of visual and material culture of the American West in France at that time, Burns considers… Full Review

Social housing constructed in Middle Eastern cities since the 1940s has been presented as a solution to several pressing problems, from the crisis of slums and inadequate accommodations for industrial workers to the urban segregation and inequality sustained by colonial housing policies. Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity, edited by Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour, discusses the conditions that call for social housing as well as the societal ramifications of the domestic designs that engage with global “transnational modernity” in urban planning and services. Each region discussed in the book—Tunisia and Egypt in… Full Review