Recently Published Reviews

Today, J. M. W. Turner is arguably the most widely recognized artist of nineteenth-century Britain. He has been much on display during the past few years, thanks to several major exhibitions and their accompanying publications: J. M. W. Turner (Ian Warrell, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2007), Turner and the Masters (David Solkin, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2009), and Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude (Ian Warrell, ed., London: National Gallery, 2012). The first of these exhibitions brought Turner’s works before U.S. audiences and provided a fresh evaluation of his career; the latter two focused on the artist’s intense engagement… Full Review

The development of photography over the course of the nineteenth century was a development of vision. For the first time, a person, via a mechanical device, could transcribe reality, freeze it, as it were, into an external, two-dimensional image. Thus, rather than providing an objective recording of reality, photography presented viewers with a new way of seeing reality. The manner in which artists utilized this new vision is the subject of Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard, an exhibition curated by Elizabeth W. Easton, Edwin Becker, Eliza Rathbone, and Ellen W. Lee. It features an impressive array of… Full Review

Taking Time: Chardin’s “Boy Building a House of Cards” and Other Paintings is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition mounted at Waddesdon Manor, the country house in Buckinghamshire, England, built in the nineteenth century for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Today the manor is run jointly by the National Trust and a charitable Rothschild Family Trust headed by Jacob Rothschild, 4th Lord Rothschild. In 2007, the trust purchased Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards (1735). Taking Time celebrates the arrival of Chardin’s painting to Waddesdon Manor, where it joins another famous genre painting by Chardin, Girl with a Shuttlecock (1737)… Full Review

It used to be simpler. When Beaumont Newhall published his first English-language surveys of the history of photography in the 1930s and 1940s, most of the art-historical establishment did not consider photography a legitimate art, and when a modernist did think about the relation of the camera to art, it was often under a cloud of worry that some established painter would be revealed to have used a photograph as his source. Newhall thus began his project from a position of deficit: photography, as he understood it, could be expressive but was fundamentally different from painting and the graphic arts… Full Review

Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome, edited by Jill Burke, consists of twelve essays that emerged from a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. They take the art of Rome in the first decades of the sixteenth century as their subject, and collectively foment reconsideration of the notion of “High Renaissance” style. In accord with current scholarship and survey texts, the term “High Renaissance” is understood as a product of historiography only loosely related to the historical period in question and is therefore placed in quotations throughout the… Full Review

The Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, annually inspires millions of people to congregate at a single place in a manner that is unique among world religions. The British Museum’s 2012 exhibition on the subject was accompanied by two publications that bring together the religious, political, economic, and visual histories of the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from the seventh century through present times. For the main catalogue, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, exhibition curator and editor Venetia Porter invited scholars of religious studies, comparative religion, history, cultural criticism, and… Full Review

In her provocative new book, Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin presents an innovative approach to visual and photographic studies. Her essays form interrelated and often fascinatingly oblique case studies pertaining to the use of photography and its metaphorical affect as tactility and touch. Olin offers deep embraces of photographic discourse in James Agee and Walker Evans’s New Deal-era text and photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; James VanDerZee's Harlem photographs produced during the 1920s and 1930s; photographic references in the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and W. G. Sebald; "empowerment" projects such… Full Review

The complicated relationship between war and photography is the subject of a massive exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Entitled War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, the exhibition includes more than 500 objects (pared down from over 2,000 initially under consideration) that range from photographs and photographic equipment to books, magazines, and albums. Produced by more than 280 photographers from 28 nations, the exhibition covers wars that occurred over six continents, beginning with the Mexican-American War in 1846 and culminating with the 2011 civil war in Libya. Yet, rather than organize this extensive material chronologically… Full Review

In 1953 German art historian Otto von Simson, writing in the pages of The Art Bulletin, heralded Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition (ca. 1435) in the Prado as "the birth of tragedy in Christian art" (Otto G. von Simson, “Compassio and Co-Redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent From the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 [March 1953]: 9–16). Well-timed to coincide with post-war philosophy's Nietzsche revival, the claim was grounded in a conventional scholarly alignment of visual fact (the famous rhyme of Christ and Mary's bodies) and prevailing currents of religious culture (in particular the… Full Review

“How did images produce religious truth in the later Middle Ages?” Adam Kumler’s Translating Truth is an ambitious book that tries to answer this question through an examination of visual responses to the search for religious knowledge among the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Kumler analyzes a series of exceptional manuscripts containing vernacular texts and images made for a lay clientele in France and England within the new “horizon of expectations” regarding education of the laity that emerged from the Fourth Lateran Council’s reform. Through the mediation of archbishops and bishops who supervised parochial clergy, the reformers sought… Full Review

Chinese characters have assumed a position of supreme cultural power and authority within traditional Chinese society since their creation more than five thousand years ago, and calligraphy, the art of writing characters, is among the most ancient, venerated, and lasting Chinese art forms. Today, every child in China practices calligraphy in public schools or with private tutors. In public parks, retirees dip giant brushes (sometimes even mops) into water and write calligraphy on the ground as a means of physical exercise as well as art practice. Bookstores feature a large selection of guidebooks on calligraphy, most of them reproductions of… Full Review

In 1931, seeking to distinguish between a radically modern art and the flood of belle peinture that was submerging the French capital, the expatriate critic Carl Einstein unleashed an unsparing diagnosis in an essay entitled “The Little Picture Factory.” “In Paris,” he wrote, “the fabrication of pictures without worldview or risk is baser than the traffic in young women, for the facile dauber is rewarded by no punishment, only comfortable income” (Carl Einstein, “Kleine Bildefabrik,” Weltkunst 5 [April 1931]: 2–3). As Keith Holz sums up in “After Locarno: German Artists in the Parisian Picture Factory,” included in Academics, Pompiers, Official… Full Review

Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1865, James Henry Breasted (d. 1935) became the most famous American Egyptologist of his generation. He was known not only for his historical scholarship, embodied in A History of Egypt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), a massive book published in 1905, and the five volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), published in 1906–07—achievements that led to his appointment to the first professorship in Egyptology in the United States, which he assumed at the University of Chicago in 1905. He was also widely known for many semi-popular and popular articles, guides… Full Review

Some sweet day, a three-week program presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the fall of 2012, featured six dance performances by contemporary choreographers, as well as interstitial installations and lively discussion sessions. (Select performances and the three response sessions streamed live on MoMA’s website. Archival videos of the performances will be made available online at a future date.) Presented in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, a challenging gallery site, the programming for Some sweet day prompted questions often triggered by performance exhibitions: How should dancers, actors, or musicians navigate the shift from black-box theaters to white-cube galleries? Can… Full Review

Nigel Hiscock has devoted a substantial portion of his career to an exceedingly difficult study: the symbolism of medieval ecclesiastical architecture. As a result, he must wrestle with a frustrating historiography whose pendulum swings between the assumption and denial of meaning in medieval architectural form; a spotty documentary record whose contributors, little concerned with questions of interest to modern scholars, rarely reference subjects like architectural training or the symbolic intent of plans; and data collection and analysis that, until the arrival of digitization, meant painstaking manual measurement and calculation. The Symbol at Your Door, intended to complement Hiscock’s The… Full Review