Recently Published Reviews

What does it mean to picture atrocity, to take photographs of death, destruction, and suffering, to hold those iconic images in our minds? Nearly forty years ago, Susan Sontag took up such questions in her essay “In Plato’s Cave” (in On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), questions that would haunt her writing to the very end, be it in her last collection of meditations on the medium of photography, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), or in its addendum, the 2004 essay “Regarding the Torture of Others” published in the… Full Review

As a practice based in ideas, ephemeral actions, and linguistic provocations, Conceptual art has been made knowable through photography. Photography served to document pieces like Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series (1969), in which the artist released a succession of gaseous substances into the atmosphere; the medium also informed the very structure of projects such as Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971), in which Piper took a picture in the mirror every day to assure herself of her existence during a summer of fasting and reading only Kant, yielding a serial representation of her changing body. If Conceptual art is… Full Review

Consult the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, edited by John Hannavy (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2008), and you will not find an entry on English record and survey photography, nor is the subject mentioned in the lengthy article on “survey photography.” But there is a biographical entry on Sir John Benjamin Stone, and it includes a curious editorial comment: “That Stone is not more celebrated should be a national shame, for he presented England with its history” (1351). Stone (1838–1914) was the founder of the National Photographic Record Association, one of dozens of British turn-of-the-century survey initiatives that… Full Review

Anyone who approaches Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), expecting to encounter the familiar collection of lush, awe-inspiring photographs of monumental Earthworks remotely situated in the American Southwest (concomitant with the usual array of drawings, models, and videos documenting these iconic projects) finds instead a hugely informative and compelling exhibition that considerably broadens her or his conception of this tendency that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organized by Phillip Kaiser, MOCA's senior curator, who has since left Los Angeles to become director… Full Review

For two books on American photography and fiction, Marcy J. Dinius’s The Camera and the Press and Stuart Burrows’s A Familiar Strangeness could not be more different. The approach of The Camera and the Press is historical, with a concentration on the medium of daguerreotypy. Dinius draws on a rich variety of archival sources, including daguerreotype images, advertisements, and periodical literature, to illuminate the ways that the production, reception, and materiality of daguerreotypes affected their cultural significance. By contrast, A Familiar Strangeness considers photography generally as an expression of modernity—as a form of mass reproduction. Rather than examining a specific… Full Review

Although Willem de Kooning has been a central figure in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) canon for over sixty years, he has never fit comfortably into the story of modern art it has advanced. Accordingly, in de Kooning: A Retrospective, MoMA presents de Kooning as a difficult artist whose work has long been misunderstood. Organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, the retrospective offers a new interpretation that aims to challenge many of the generally accepted ideas about de Kooning's life and work, from his initial critical reception to the significance of his controversial… Full Review

In James Cahill’s own words, the goal of Pictures for Use and Pleasure is to facilitate “further, deeper, and altogether better studies” of the proposed category of vernacular paintings (199). The interest is in finding, sorting, and identifying such paintings according to their subject areas; in making (corrective) attributions with suggested dates, artists’ names, and styles; and in offering interpretations with respect to function, aesthetic concern, and regional variation. The paintings studied were kept mostly in the private quarters of elite households, the inner and secondary palace complexes, and in urban places of pleasure frequented by male elite. Their artists… Full Review

The field of Roman cartography has undergone a renaissance in recent years. This is due not only to the publication of books like The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Richard J. A. Talbert, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), but also to a fundamental shift in how scholars understand the function of Roman maps. For decades, scholars assumed that the Romans used maps much like we do, as navigational aids to facilitate travel and warfare. This assumption, however, has proven to be both anachronistic and inaccurate. Unlike modern people, the Romans rarely used maps for navigation, instead… Full Review

Haim Steinbach’s latest artists’ book incorporates several of his sculptural themes into the codex form, exploring the choice and display of mass-market products and creating a dialectic between photobook and sculptural book. Object is a board book comprised of sixty-one color photographs featuring Steinbach’s signature found objects, mostly shot one per page, head-on, and silhouetted against a white background. Approximately the size and thickness of a stack of LP record albums, the book is made fully sculptural with rounded fore-edges and, most dramatically, a hole die-cut through the whole thing. This tension between book and sculpture constitutes the (empty) core… Full Review

This collection of essays (eleven in English, three in French) contributed by fourteen scholars of art history and Christian liturgy from eight countries is focused on the development of altarpieces/retables in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as explored at a 2006 symposium in Gröningen, Germany. Findings are derived from physical remains and records of creation and use, and reveal affinities and diversities across scattered European sites, while providing bases for further study of a previously under-explored but prominent type of late medieval decoration. In their introduction, editors Justin E. A. Kroesen and Victor M. Schmidt emphasize the importance… Full Review

From Vasari’s epitome of “grazia” at the culmination of art’s third, most perfect era to Wölfflin’s paragon of the Classic style, Raphael’s paintings have exemplified definitive formal perfection. Their sacred subject matter seemed incidental to this aesthetic achievement, so completely does the expression of beauty subsume the mere articulation of devotional content. Christian Kleinbub, in his magisterial book, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael, thoroughly upends this outmoded view of the artist. He demonstrates how Raphael conceived his religious imagery, and especially visionary subjects, to mediate higher levels of spiritual contemplation. Kleinbub addresses the tension between the mimetic aims… Full Review

The focus of Anna Contadini’s A World of Beasts is the sole extant manuscript of the Kitāb Na‘t al-Ḥayawān (“Book of the Characteristics of Animals”), an Arabic treatise on the distinctive qualities of animals and their therapeutic value. Datable on stylistic grounds to ca. 1225 CE, “the Na‘t” was acquired by the British Museum in 1884 and is now held by the British Library under shelfmark Or. 2784. Contadini’s investigation exposes the manuscript as a unique witness to the convergence of Islamic illustrative traditions, pseudo-Aristotelian animal lore, and Greco-Arabic medical knowledge. In eight chapters and three appendices, she offers… Full Review

Stephen C. Pinson earned his PhD degree from Harvard University in 2002 with a dissertation on Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre that forms the nucleus of this book, nourished by over fifteen years of research and elaboration in several articles. Speculating Daguerre has been eagerly awaited; the last book-length study of Daguerre’s art, in any language, was Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, first published in 1956 and revised in 1968 (New York: Dover). As Pinson notes, the Gernsheims’ book was primarily biographical and documentary. Like several smaller publications, it relied heavily… Full Review

Greg M. Thomas’s comprehensive Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art intelligently expands upon ground recently covered by others in scholarly literature: images of French nineteenth-century childhood. The finest parts of the book are his discussions of works by Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, about which he unearths new factual detail, and provides persuasive original readings of paintings both familiar and not. Drawing upon a wide socio-historical framework, Thomas analyzes images from the world of commodities associated with childhood, especially toys. His overarching thesis, that Impressionist images of childhood reveal the fundamental dilemma of the modern subject—“trying… Full Review

The three museums that hosted The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900 appeared to be staging three different exhibitions. Curators Stephen Calloway at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Yves Badetz at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris championed the late blooming “decadent” aspect of the Aesthetic Movement that the Victorians derided, contending that it was the definitive expression of an aesthetic disposition. Calloway’s curatorial selections and catalogue essays highlighted sensuous works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and Aubrey Beardsley, among others. Unlike Badetz, however, he recreated period rooms and crowded the V&A’s exhibition galleries with… Full Review