Browse Recent Book Reviews

In the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition catalogue When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego, curator Valérie Rousseau highlights the creative expressions and artistic practices of twenty-six individuals and one religious community. With selections that span the late nineteenth century to the present, Rousseau succeeds in opening new discussions on objects and related performative actions of artists referred to as “self-taught” and “art brut.” A great many of these artists, mostly patients from psychiatric facilities in Europe and Latin America, are unknown in the United States. Critics responded positively to the exhibition’s… Full Review

A casual perusal of the monograph Lynette Yiadom-Boakye quickly establishes—in its ratio of image to text—the main objective of the book to be a celebration of the artist’s oeuvre rather than a critical engagement with it. Of the 136 pages in the slim, attractive volume, the substantive text amounts to less than fifty pages while more than fifty-five leaves are devoted to beautifully designed, full-page color reproductions, most of them featuring a single image of Yiadom-Boakye’s compelling, portrait-style pictures of black figures. Moreover, many of these large color plates are set off by blank white leaves on the opposite side… Full Review

In Edwardian London through Japanese Eyes: The Art and Writings of Yoshio Markino, 1897–1915, William S. Rodner presents the first scholarly monograph in English on Yoshio Makino (or “Markino,” as the artist romanized the spelling of his family name). There have been a few publications and exhibitions in Japan on this once popular illustrator in early twentieth-century London, but it is in Rodner’s book that one finds a detailed and engaging account of Markino’s most productive years in London that culminated in his popular illustrated books such as The Colour of London (1907) and A Japanese Artist in London… Full Review

Art historian Eva Díaz’s The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College is a tightly focused examination of the activities of Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. As Mary Emma Harris argues in her foundational history, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), experimentation was integral to Black Mountain College’s pedagogical vision, and scholars have rightly called attention to its importance when evaluating the college’s impact on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s (see, for example, Vincent Katz and Martin… Full Review

This substantial and important volume, edited by J. J. Pollitt, offers a comprehensive and updated survey of the evidence for mural and panel painting in the ancient Mediterranean, from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. The range of material under analysis is quite inclusive: the authors evaluate how a variety of painted media might have related to larger-scale or “free” painting, which in certain periods might be considered a “lost art” (see chapter 2). Those most familiar with the wall painting from Campania and Rome will find a more panoramic view, one that contextualizes Roman wall painting as part… Full Review

The allure of some of the most inspiring digital projects resides in their ability to recreate sites that are now lost to us, by reconstructing, for example, the now dismantled buildings and urban spaces of ancient Rome or the halls of Egyptian temples. Other projects are admired for the opposite capacity to invoke impossible worlds that never existed, bringing dispersed or even lost works of art together in virtual exhibitions, or positing material relationships that can only be imagined through the portal of a screen. Sumathi Ramaswamy’s Going Global in Mughal India occupies the latter realm, using new technologies to… Full Review

Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300 is Suzanne Preston Blier’s most recent book, and represents a culmination of a research arc spanning from her days as a graduate student until the present. Drawing deeply from the existing archive of material published on the city of Ile-Ife (Ife) as well as her own interviews conducted over the first decade of the twenty-first century, Blier amasses a compendium on the city of Ife and the objects produced by its inhabitants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The volume’s bibliography is perhaps the most comprehensive ever… Full Review

Christa Clarke’s African Art in the Barnes Foundation: The Triumph of L’Art nègre and the Harlem Renaissance represents the latest scholarship on objects from the Barnes collection. As the title suggests, Clarke is concerned with recounting the history of Albert C. Barnes’s little-discussed yet incredibly significant collecting of artworks from Africa, as well as the relevance of these objects to the larger institution. Barnes amassed a sizeable and important collection of art at the beginning of the twentieth century and established the eponymous Barnes Foundation with the goal of using his collection as a pedagogical tool for students of the… Full Review

In urban studies, the broader social sciences, and science and technology studies, the human dimensions of water have been at the forefront of a move to break down the divide between nature and society. In particular, the interdisciplinary subfield of urban political ecology has emerged as an influential wave of scholarship seeking to incorporate the social production of nature into theorizations of geographical political economy, with many of its most important studies focusing on the provision of, and access to, water (Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003; Maria Kaika… Full Review

In 1922, André Lhote claimed that Georges Seurat was “one of the lighthouses” then guiding a postwar generation of artists. Such an assertion might be understood simply as an assessment of Seurat’s enduring significance; but in her important new account of the artist, Michelle Foa steers a different approach to Lhote’s metaphor. Lighthouses are, in fact, thematically persistent for Seurat, and Foa bookends her analysis with two examples: the 1886 Hospice and Lighthouse of Honfleur and the 1889 Eiffel Tower (the latter to be understood, rightly, as a kind of urban lighthouse). Pointing to the key fact that lighthouses such… Full Review