Recently Published Reviews

The concept of interdisciplinarity seems increasingly unavoidable in modern academia—but then, who would want to avoid it? As the relevance of the humanities is more and more frequently questioned, and cash-strapped universities are creatively reorganizing liberal arts departments in ways that might indeed encourage a widespread unification of intellectually contiguous disciplines such as art history, literature, and history, one has everything to gain in joining forces with colleagues across the disciplines. Art historians (especially in the field of Renaissance art) have of course been engaged for more than a century with interdisciplinary inquiry involving an integration of sources, contexts, and… Full Review

The 1970s is a decade whose image has not yet crystallized. As Rosalind Krauss reported at the time in “Notes on the Index,” seventies art in America was “diversified, split, factionalized” (October 3 [Spring 1977]: 68). Despite art history’s attempts to trace a clear picture that would bring this “willful eclecticism” into some explanatory order, the decade that followed the Minimalist and Conceptualist reductions of the 1960s and preceded the excesses of the 1980s continues to pose challenges to viewers and students of contemporary art. The Whitney Museum’s ambitious exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and… Full Review

For Westerners in the nineteenth century, and even for some today, art and architecture of ancient and far-flung peoples stood as evidence of cultural sophistication upon which to pronounce a global hierarchy of culture, from “primitive” societies of colonized peoples to their own advanced civilizations. The artworks considered most significant in determining that hierarchy were those classified as “monumental,” that is, elaborate architecture and stone sculpture. It was in this environment that Pre-Columbian arts gained scholarly attention. Explorers trekking through dense forests in Central America encountered awesome ruins of the stone and stucco Classic Maya cities, their plazas filled with… Full Review

In her introduction to Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History, Leslie Webster states that “the aim of this book is to give an accessible overview that covers the entire Anglo-Saxon period, placing it within a broader cultural and historical context, and incorporating the new discoveries and new thinking of recent years” (10). For an intended audience of beginning students and the interested public, Webster takes a thematic approach, with chapters entitled “Reading the Image, Seeing the Text”; “Rome Reinvented: The Early Inheritance”; “Rome Reinvented: The Impact of Christianity”; “Celtic Connections, Eastern Influences: Sixth to Ninth Centuries”; “Art and Power: From… Full Review

Robin L. Thomas’s elegantly written and richly illustrated account of the urban transformation of Naples during the reign of Charles of Bourbon (1734–59) highlights the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’s place on the map of eighteenth-century Europe. Although other major European cities have received ample attention from scholars of early modern architecture, Naples has suffered from relative scholarly neglect despite its status as one of Europe’s largest and most culturally vibrant capitals. Furthermore, the few historical accounts of early modern Neapolitan architecture have tended to focus on questions of style rather than on the city’s participation in… Full Review

A compelling mid-career survey for the Shanghai-based artist and filmmaker, Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013 showcased several key works by the artist who is perhaps best known for his stylistically noir films that focus upon the ongoing social complexities facing a generation of Chinese born after the Cultural Revolution. The second iteration of a traveling retrospective that first opened at the Kunsthalle Zürich in April 2013, works exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive included several films by Yang as well as photographs, multi-channel video installations, and a selection of archival materials documenting the artist’s prodigious… Full Review

So much attention has been given to the spiritual aspect of Indian art that it may seem a cliché to search for the sacred in its diverse and many works, yet an important element of Parul Pandya Dhar’s recent book, The Torana in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture, is how it makes a compelling case for just such quests. This is not, however, because the author makes “meaning” to be the most important criteria of her study. Rather, it is Dhar’s careful and wide-ranging consideration of the forms of toranas, which she defines as arched portals or festoons… Full Review

Any review of Anne Leader’s The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery should begin with the fact that it is physically impressive at more than three hundred pages with over two hundred high-quality color photographs. In this beautiful setting Leader sets out to explain the early quattrocento changes that occurred in the oldest Florentine monastic foundation, the Benedictine abbey known for centuries simply as the Badia. She does this by considering three different aspects of the Badia’s history between roughly 1420 and 1440: the arrival of the Portuguese Abbot Gomezio di Giovanni and the impact of… Full Review

Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) lived through the tumultuous transition from Imperial to Republican China while uneasily jostling no fewer than five different personal profiles: a knowledgeable reformer who pushed for the Chinese adaptation of foreign methods in agriculture and education by editing newspapers and book series between 1896 and 1910 that promoted these ideas; a classical scholar who understood the importance of the recently discovered Dunhuang images, texts, and artifacts, along with new archaeological finds in the form of inscribed oracle bones to shift the text-focused traditional connoisseurship to the new disciplines of “archaeology” and “art history”; a businessman who financed… Full Review

It has become commonplace in reviews such as this to invoke the significant advances in Maya scholarship that the work under consideration has benefitted from and which it exemplifies. This is due to the fact that, through extraordinary achievements in the decipherment of ancient Mayan writing and the relatively regular discovery of important artworks and artifacts (or even entire cities) by archaeologists, modern understanding of the ancient Maya has progressed at a breathtaking pace over the past generation. Indeed, it would be difficult to understand the importance of the exhibition and book Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the… Full Review

The fourth exhibition dedicated to the work of Marc Chagall and mounted by the Jewish Museum since 1965 (with the three most recent—in 1996, 2001, and 2008—also organized by senior curator Susan Tumarkin Goodman), Chagall: Love, War, and Exile trained a specific focus on the artist’s work in France during the run-up to World War II and the difficult war years he spent in New York. The show was organized into four sections, “Time is a River,” “War and Exile,” “The Jewish Jesus,” and “The Colors of Love,” and consisted of thirty-one oil paintings and twenty-two works on paper, as… Full Review

Claire F. Fox’s latest book, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War, adds fresh perspective to the ongoing scholarly reconsideration of twentieth-century Pan Americanism and U.S. cultural diplomacy through its selected period of study and contemporary methodology. Fox examines the institutional agenda, cultural activities, and continental influence of the Pan American Union (PAU; today the Organization of American States) in the early years of the Cold War. Formed in 1890, the PAU was an inter-governmental organization of national and state delegates whose primary objective was to promote regional solidarity and cooperation among the countries of Latin America… Full Review

Although scholarship on public art in the United States has expanded in recent years, few studies address the sculptural reminders of American involvement in the First World War. Jennifer Wingate’s Sculpting Doughboys: Memory, Gender, and Taste in America’s World War I Memorials corrects this scholarly lacuna by examining memorials created in the 1920s and 1930s dedicated to the “Great War.” As her title implies, the majority of these sculptures depict American infantrymen, known colloquially then and now as “doughboys.” According to Wingate, this book “aims not to recover and celebrate the militaristic ideals promoted by many war memorials, but to… Full Review

Disdain for Belgium is so commonplace in Paris that the very mention of “les belges” can cause a smirk. A small but ambitious exhibition at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art demonstrated that, far from sharing this prejudice, Gustave Courbet had an attachment to Belgium, where his work was admired and imitated. In 1866, the painter wrote to the Belgian merchant Arthur Stevens: “I consider Belgium my country” (quoted in the exhibition catalogue, 11). He might have visited Belgium as early as 1840; he was there in 1844 and 1847, and he made four or five more trips… Full Review

Andrew Hopkins’s latest book is the first full-length English-language study of the great seventeenth-century Venetian architect Baldassare Longhena. It follows two recent Italian monographs, by Martina Frank (Baldassare Longhena, Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2004), along with Hopkins's own study, revised and translated in the work under review (Baldassare Longhena 1597–1682, Milan: Electa, 2006). Despite the wealth of literature on sixteenth-century Venetian art and architecture, the Venetian Baroque has remained a relatively neglected field in Anglo-American scholarship. Only Longhena’s best-known work, the church of S. Maria della Salute, has received significant attention, most… Full Review