Recently Published Reviews

A celebrated protagonist of nineteenth-century French architecture, Henri Labrouste (1801–1875) has been rigorously reappraised by subsequent generations of architects and architectural historians. In the mid-twentieth century, architectural historian and critic Sigfried Giedion likened Labrouste’s application of exposed cast iron in the interiors of his two Parisian libraries, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1838–50) and the Bibliothèque nationale (1854–75), to such industrial marvels of the nineteenth century as exhibition halls and train sheds, arguing that the industrial aspects of Labrouste’s building represented formal precursors of twentieth-century modernist architecture. In 1975, the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) curator of the Department of Architecture and… Full Review

In 1990, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries—a blockbuster show that, for U.S. audiences, more or less defined the state of the field of Mexican art history—barely acknowledged that Mexican artists had wrestled with the avant-garde. Five of Diego Rivera's Cubist pictures were included, but, having been done in Europe, they stood apart; only Frida Kahlo's (misleadingly named) La Adelita, Pancho Villa, and Frida (1927) gave any sense that artists in the post-revolutionary period were interested in something other than rappel à l'ordre classicism, hyper-nationalist or not. In her new and beautiful monograph, … Full Review

In December 2009, the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin acquired a remarkable research collection: the contents of the Magnum New York photo library. The collection, initially purchased by computer manufacturer Michael Dell and his hedge fund MSD Capital, L.P., and then donated in full to the HRC in September 2013, consists of over 200,000 press photographs, many of which are now considered icons of the twentieth century. The photographs were taken by individuals associated with the preeminent international photography agency Magnum Photos, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David… Full Review

In his dedicatory preface to the emperor Titus (AD 77), Pliny described his goals in writing the Natural History with capacious reflection: My subject is a barren one—the world of nature, or in other words life. . . . Moreover, the path is not a beaten highway of authorship, nor one in which the mind is eager to range: there is not one person to be found among us who has made the same venture, nor yet one among the Greeks who has tackled single-handed all departments of the subject. . . . It is a difficult task… Full Review

If the grandiose title Why Photography Matters rings a bell somewhere in your memory, it is because Jerry L. Thompson hoped it would. His brief polemic declares itself a response to Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) (click here for review), which Thompson found over-long and misguided. Fried’s tome has produced much debate among scholars, to be sure. Many have taken issue with its implication that photography found a way to matter as “art” only with recent developments in large-scale tableau production, when most photo historians contend photography… Full Review

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) nearly yearlong James Turrell: A Retrospective opened concurrently with two other major exhibitions of the artist’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Initially conceived independently by the three institutions, these exhibitions were aligned more to strengthen the visibility of Turrell’s work than to present a coordinated account of it. The MFAH show was first imagined in 2002 after the opening of Turrell’s The Light Inside in 2000, a permanent installation within the tunnel linking the museum’s two buildings. Its 2013… Full Review

Photographs, especially when experienced as reproductions in a book, have slippery identities teetering between the qualities of each material object and its represented subject. In contexts where collections, especially those in established public institutions, are scarce or difficult to access, the history of photography has tended to become an account of the subjects of pictures rather than the processes and practice of a medium. This tendency has been especially exaggerated in historical accounts of photography in the Middle East. Origin stories for photography in the Middle East often begin with a description of Napoleon’s colonial excursion to Egypt in 1798… Full Review

Analyses of Madeleine Albright’s brooches, Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, and Callista Gingrich’s “helmet hair” in the American press underscore the role style can play in commentaries on personality and, more consequentially, in the world of political machinations. In this study of Caterina Sforza’s patronage, Joyce de Vries carefully examines how style was used for similar purposes during an earlier period. On a portrait medal (figs. 1–5), for example, Caterina’s hair is shown bound behind her head, and its decorative ribbons indicate her beauty and conformity to fashion. The hairstyle, with a few locks curling around the face, recalls that of Livia… Full Review

If one were pressed to position a single artistic project at the center of the relationship between sculpture and photography, Brassaï’s Sculptures involontaires seems a good choice. Indeed, both volumes reviewed here—one a catalogue for an exhibition originating at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the other a collection of essays in Ashgate’s “Studies in Surrealism” series—pivot around Brassaï’s photographs, which were collaborations with Salvador Dalí, who supplied their captions and published them in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in December 1933. As Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly write in their introduction to Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to… Full Review

Stephanie C. Leone’s The Pamphilj and the Arts brings together sixteen essays examining the biography of Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj (1653–1730), as well as his and his family’s patronage of the visual arts and music. The papers were first assembled for a conference on the Pamphilj and the arts held at Boston College in 2010. The combined expertise of the interdisciplinary scholars assembled by Leone (art historians, musicologists, historians, philologists, linguists, and archivists) reveals a vivid portrait of Pamphilj, whose biography and patronage have been neglected since Lina Montalto’s Un mecenate in Roma barocca: il cardinale Benedetto Pamphilj (Florence: Sansoni, 1955)… Full Review

For keen-eyed visitors, the exhibition URS FISCHER, mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), last summer, began at the ticket booth located on the museum’s street-level outdoor plaza. There viewers encountered a sign that read, “Please note that one sculpture in URS FISCHER contains a combination of substances which produce mold,” preparing them both to appreciate and be wary of the artist’s sculptural aesthetic of decay, often literalized through the use of decomposing organic materials (fruit, bread), melting wax, or crudely formed works that give the impression they could fall apart at any moment… Full Review

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), home to a sizeable part of the Paul Mellon Collection of Sporting Art and the largest permanent display of British sporting art in the world, provides an ideal venue for a show dedicated to the presentation of sporting prints. While there have been recent exhibitions on sporting painting and sculpture, including Country Pursuits at VMFA in 2007, this is the first large-scale exhibition on prints outside of galleries and auction houses. Accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue, the exhibition endeavors to locate this genre within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artistic… Full Review

When the French daily Libération published its November 14, 2013, print edition “sans photo,” marking photography’s absence with empty white fields, did its public, as it read that day’s “paper,” take note? Or did it encounter this smart protest against the decline of the photojournalist’s profession as a meme, liking and sharing it on smartphone screens? Did Libération strip its website and app edition of photographs too? Such questions are not easy to answer in retrospect, as homepages do not appear to be archived, and who, if anyone, loaded a screenshot onto a blog? The state of photojournalism in the… Full Review

In his latest publication, Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors: An Insight into the Artist’s Last Decade, Hugh Belsey highlights the spirited independence and skillful professional maneuvering of the artist he has researched for most of his career. More specifically, Belsey points out how Thomas Gainsborough’s attitudes and decisions, especially in relation to his rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as the Royal Academy, clarify the creation of the celebrated Cottage Door (ca. 1780) painting in the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and two subsequent similar versions. Indeed, the book coincides with the exhibition of all three canvases together for… Full Review

With the publication in 1778 of A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, antiquarian, writer, and ordained Jesuit priest Thomas West (1720?–1779) contributed to and capitalized on the growing interest in exploring the aesthetic significance of British landscape. The first edition was a success, but West died before seeing the book go into a second, which was expanded and made “decently perspicuous and correct” by the writer William Cockin (1736–1801) (reprinted in 4th ed., London: W. Richardson, 1789, 90). Despite the Guide’s initial success, Cockin included in the preface a curiously belittling description of the… Full Review