Recently Published Reviews

The advent of digitization has created methods of cultural production that bring new considerations to the relationships between ideas, artifacts, and audiences. Looking at the San Diego Museum of Art’s exhibition Piranesi, Rome, and the Arts of Design, conceived by Michele De Lucchi, one can observe the effects of digitization, as the eighteenth-century designer and fabulist’s work is expressed though twenty-first-century opportunities. The show goes far beyond previously typical methods of curation, creating entirely new incarnations of Piranesi’s work. The result is an exhibition of eighteenth-century work with the resonance of a twenty-first-century cultural spectacle. Its ambitions tread into… Full Review

The publication of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) marked the rebirth of the Mediterranean, both as an object of study and as the space characterizing a given object of study. Since then, the sea and its many corruptions, from antiquity to early modernity, has fallen under the lens of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, as well as art and architectural historians. Mediterranean Studies became increasingly multi- and interdisciplinary, with a growing number of scholars interested in cross-cultural interaction and exchange. Indeed, it has grown so exponentially that one can… Full Review

In Harmony: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art, an exhibition at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, celebrated the university’s acquisition of Norma Jean Calderwood’s impressive, yet largely unpublished, private collection of Persianate art. Mary McWilliams, the Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art, certainly faced challenges in cohesively displaying this private collection, which consists of a disparate array of over 140 objects and spans a thousand years of production history. However, the exhibition ultimately provided a thoughtful and welcome display of Islamic art during a time in which Harvard’s permanent Islamic collection is… Full Review

Illuminated manuscripts offer the best-surviving evidence of Jewish artistic production in the Middle Ages, bearing witness to the tastes of their Jewish patrons, the skills of Jewish scribes, and the aesthetic acuity of Jewish readers and viewers. Jews did not live in isolation, and the artists responsible for the decoration of their books—who were not necessarily Jewish but may have been—both drew from and contributed to the artistic conventions of the dominant culture. Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries, an exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2012–13 and online via the Jewish museum website… Full Review

The American author and artist Henry Darger, Jr. (1892–1973) lived in almost total seclusion for most of his adult life, earning subsistence income as a hospital custodian. His real life’s work, discovered posthumously, is the 15,145 page, single-spaced, illustrated manuscript for The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Darger’s epic and its accompanying graphics depict a fantasy universe in which the heroic Vivian Girls, young hermaphroditic sisters endowed with magical powers, venture to protect their world from attack by… Full Review

Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? is the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name that was mounted in 2011 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. With this project, Georges Didi-Huberman continues his exploration of the links between desire, collecting, images, and redemption (or at least remembrance). Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is the point of instigation for the exhibition and catalogue. Didi-Huberman has already written extensively on Warburg, whom he seems to claim as a kindred spirit. Warburg’s work resisted both scientism and aestheticism, though he was fully capable of dogged… Full Review

Jo Applin’s Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America argues for a more pluralistic take on American sculpture in the 1960s than the established dominant narrative figured in historical overviews such as Passages in Modern Sculpture by Rosalind Krauss (New York: Viking Press, 1977) or The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist by Alex Potts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), which privileges Minimalism. At the moment of this writing when mainstream contemporary art discourse seems to love Minimal art more than ever (James Turrell recently filled the Guggenheim rotunda while Carl Andre graced the cover of Artforum), Applin’s book… Full Review

In Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts Amelia Jones offers a rebuttal to the frequent claim that we are beyond identity and identity politics. Beliefs about identity are tied to the visual register—people make assumptions about other people based on what they look like. Seeing Differently opens with a recent and tragic example: the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian worker in London, who was murdered by the London police when he was mistaken for the suicide bomber Hussain Osman (xx–xxi). Jones uses the shocking circumstances of Menezes’s murder in order to… Full Review

Devin Fore’s Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature is an important book that addresses with real erudition and insight some very important issues regarding realism and modernism in European art, writing, and theater in the period between the two world wars. It offers a particularly compelling rethinking of the supposed return to realism in the later 1920s and the 1930s, focusing on Germany, where debate on the subject was played out with unusual intensity and sophistication. Fore argues persuasively against the standard view that there was a rehumanization of art and a return to order as avant-garde… Full Review

Art as Politics in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena is a wide-ranging attempt to identify several Sienese artistic commissions and individual motifs as politically meaningful, by which editors Timothy B. Smith and Judith B. Steinhoff mean, “the creation and deployment of visual art and architecture to embody political ideals, promote political agendas, or otherwise serve the concerns of government” (1). More precisely, the book concerns the role of art and architecture in the creation and promulgation of a civic identity for Siena. This is a laudable goal since the vast majority of Sienese art-historical literature has mostly ignored the subject… Full Review

The Romanesque cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos has long merited a scholarly study on the scale of Palace of the Mind: The Cloister of Silos and Spanish Sculpture of the Twelfth Century. Housed in a Benedictine monastery whose own history is deeply entwined with that of the Castilian kingdom, the cloister holds an enduring place in modern narratives of the genesis of Romanesque art. Its importance is owed both to the precocious, if somewhat controversial, documentation traditionally associated with it and to the exceptional sophistication of its sculpted capitals and pier reliefs, especially those of the cloister’s first… Full Review

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere’s compact Vessels of Influence: China and Porcelain in Medieval and Early Modern Japan manages to contain three strikingly distinct chapters, as well as a long introduction that counts as a fourth component. Although the four segments are interrelated, it is easy to imagine that each would appeal to a separate reader for a different reason. Whether read in isolation or in sequence, they are highly informative concerning the impact of the long presence of Chinese porcelain—“vessels of influence”—in Japan. Rousmaniere’s book is especially important for introducing the findings of Japanese archaeologists and art historians—a realm of discourse… Full Review

In his book Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) (click here for review), Paul Binski writes perceptively about the complexity, quality, and originality of the sculpture of Reims cathedral. In his estimation, this body of art, from its corbels to its tympana, sets new standards for architectural decoration in subject matter, formal adventurousness, and expressivity. For the art historian wishing to probe Binski’s claims in greater detail, the sculpture of Reims provides a set of archaeological and interpretive challenges that are simultaneously compelling and daunting. One must look both… Full Review

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed several publications devoted to individual Chinese paintings. They hark back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Sherman Lee and Wen Fong collaborated to write Streams and Mountains Without End: A Northern Sung Handscroll and Its Significance in the History of Early Chinese Painting (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1955) and Chu-tsing Li wrote The Autumn Colors on the Ch’iao and Hua Mountains: A Landscape by Chao Meng-fu (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1965), two monographs that helped frame the study of Chinese painting in those and subsequent decades. The present crop of monographs on single… Full Review

Suffusing his working process, his subject matter, and his address to the viewer, violence is central to the montage-based work of the German artist John Heartfield. It is on clear display, for example, in the missing limbs, firearm, and prominent vagina dentata with which he and his fellow Berlin Dadaist George Grosz assembled the sculptural self-portrait The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture) in 1920. One witnesses it also in his 1928 poster The Hand Has 5 Fingers promoting the German Communist Party’s “List 5” in the upcoming Reichstag elections by way of threat, with a tremendous… Full Review