Recently Published Reviews

Bracingly original, Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s study positions Stéphane Mallarmé as a poet of engagement, for whom the book represented a critical instrument for social change. Contesting twentieth-century theorists who shape-shifted Mallarmé into a hermetic aesthete or a nihilist subversive, Arnar situates him within nineteenth-century debates about print culture and readership, and she views his conception of the book as an active response to the crises of fin-de-siècle France. Plotting her study around the poet’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance), she approaches it from cross-linked historical and theoretical perspectives… Full Review

James H. Rubin’s newest book is a luxurious survey of Édouard Manet’s life and work, sumptuous in its three hundred color reproductions and lavish in its generous length of more than four hundred pages that allows the author to elaborate on his ideas about the artist. Intended for both the professional scholar and the non-specialist reader, Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye traces the artist’s impact on his own generation and analyzes the variety of interpretations to which his art has been subjected up to the present day. Rubin decided not to focus exclusively on any one methodology, in order… Full Review

Alexander Nagel’s The Controversy of Renaissance Art is nothing if not ambitious. Winner of the College Art Association’s 2012 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, it proposes no less than a reconfiguration of how we study the art of Italy from the first half of the sixteenth century. Italian High Renaissance art has certainly not been neglected in the discipline of art history, but Nagel opens his book with the observation that contesting “the centrality of the Renaissance in the history of art used to be a call arms. Now the battle is largely over” (1). Instead of seeking to recenter… Full Review

In 1972, Garry Neill Kennedy, then president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax, wrote a short text for a themed issue of Studio International focused on “aspects of art education.” Kennedy’s one-page description of NSCAD is a dense block of type that lists, among other things, basic physical and historical facts about the college and Canada; the names of the college’s students, faculty, staff, visiting artists, and administrators; and details of its finances as well as exhibition and publishing programs. He includes a range of playful data points: the total weight of the student… Full Review

In 1863, Hudson River School landscape painter Albert Bierstadt embarked on an expedition to California and the Pacific Northwest. Influenced by the photographs of Carleton Watkins and accompanied by the journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who chronicled the voyage for the New York Evening Post and the Atlantic Monthly, Bierstadt and his companion spent more than a month in the Yosemite Valley before traveling by steamboat, horseback, wagon, and rail into the new state of Oregon and through the Washington Territory. Seven years later, in his Manhattan studio, the artist produced a dramatic, large-scale painting of the western coastal scenery… Full Review

Francesca Woodman was three months shy of her twenty-third birthday when she took her own life in 1981, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA) surprisingly extensive retrospective of her work, curated by Corey Keller, is haunted by this fact. One reason is the attention and acclaim that has been given to Scott Willis’s 2010 documentary titled The Woodmans, which chronicled the family romance of artistic competition surrounding Francesca’s short life and career, noting among many other things that she jumped to her death five days before her father George was to enjoy the opening of a… Full Review

What conceptual, political, and artistic foundation stood behind Tony Conrad’s decision in 1965 to create The Flicker, an enervating, even mind-altering, real-time visual experience which would both contest and manifest a newly configured regime of power presiding over the contemporary subject? This is the question, and, in a sense, the pretext for Branden W. Joseph’s Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage, a thoroughgoing revision of the artistic terrain of the 1960s and its historicization. Joseph’s sub-subtitle, “(A ‘Minor’ History),” itself bracketed and internally qualified with quotation marks, points to the author’s means: meticulous… Full Review

Liz Wells is best known for editing two of the most frequently used anthologies in courses devoted to the history and practice of photography: The Photography Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002) and Photography: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2009). She is also a coeditor of the journal Photographies, launched in 2008, and has curated several exhibitions of contemporary landscape photography. Her first monographic publication, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity collects six of Wells’s essays on photography’s intersection with landscape as both representation and lived experience. Land Matters draws upon a lengthy catalogue of previous… Full Review

Eager to ascertain the pure motives of and exact origins for modernism, early twentieth-century architectural scholarship left behind the untenable notion of architecture’s absolute departure from historic ideals as its practitioners moved resolutely toward a functionalist aesthetic. Historians of the past decade have attempted to correct such a narrow perspective by broadening their inquiry into the roots of modernism. Their expansion of the field of analysis to include nineteenth-century intellectual and visual culture as a whole has allowed modern architecture to emerge as a rich and complex phenomenon that transcended mere material and technical considerations. Lauren S. Weingarden’s… Full Review

There are rare instances in which portraiture succeeds in conveying not only an individual’s personality, but also something greater, something like what John M. Rosenfield calls “the immediacy of life itself” (11). The striking portrait sculpture of the Japanese monk Shunjōbō Chōgen on the cover of Rosenfield’s Portraits of Chōgen: The Transformation of Buddhist Art in Early Medieval Japan meets these lofty standards. Produced around the time of its subject’s death in 1206, the work embodies the artistic transformation in Japan occurring over the last decades of the twelfth century and into the early thirteenth century, when the otherworldly idealism… Full Review

In Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation: Equicola’s Seasons of Desire, Anthony Colantuono examines erotic images of seminal importance to Renaissance iconography and sensibility. His investigations encompass a wide-ranging spectrum of literary and artistic sources concerned with mythology, medicine, witchcraft, and astrology, many of which have not been previously explored in this context. The book’s basic premise is that the theme of Mario Equicola’s program for the Camerino d'Alabastro, commissioned by Duke Alfonso d'Este in 1511, and of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), Equicola's source of inspiration according to Colantuono, is the neo-Aristotelian theory of the… Full Review

The collages of Kurt Schwitters—layered arrays of newsprint, packaging labels, advertisement fragments, train schedules, ticket stubs, envelopes, receipts, and even candy wrappers, all tacked down and anchored by expressionist paint—are surprisingly prescient for the postwar period, even proleptic. Although produced between 1918 and 1947, they nonetheless register a communications environment familiar to the second half of the twentieth century; their readymade accumulations of word and image suggest a relentless media barrage and advertising assault, a constant flow of data and information. Schwitters called these collage works “Merz”—a neologism he coined from the second syllable of the German word Kommerz… Full Review

The opening sentence of this lavishly produced book authoritatively announces that it intends to look at the one hundred and eighty or so surviving churches that were built in Ireland between the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century and the early stages of the Romanesque period—around 1100. As Tomás Ó Carragáin points out in his introduction, which is really a brief historiography of the subject, scholars have previously relied on the pivotal publications by George Petrie, the Earl of Dunraven, Arthur Charles Champneys, and Harold G. Leask.[1] Churches in Early Medieval Ireland: Architecture, Ritual and Memory is a welcome… Full Review

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada is an invaluable contribution to critical scholarship on the social history of photography in Canada and, more broadly, to methodological and conceptual issues involved in researching photography. Editors Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard have produced a volume that is essential reading for scholars, curators, archivists, artists, and photographers studying the role of photography in the changing topography of national identity. The contributors examine collections of photographs in Canadian archives and galleries that have contributed to the visual legacies of Canada’s past and continue to shape the country’s “imagined geography” (a concept from Edward… Full Review

In the eleven essays contained within The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism, scholars address a longstanding issue in cultural history and the arts—the perception of different cultures in the Mediterranean and the representation of their peoples by Europeans in the early modern period. Early modern Westerners displayed difficulty in categorizing their non-European neighbors, as artists who traveled, as well as those who incorporated non-Westerners into their imagery at home, were influenced not only by the visual sources on which they based their compositions, but also by propagandistic literature, the geopolitics of their… Full Review