Recently Published Reviews

So much controversy has surrounded the creation of the Crystal Bridges Museum that it almost inevitably colors the perception of its remarkable new building in Bentonville, Arkansas. One of the causes, of course, is the origin of most of the museum’s enormous endowment: the Walmart fortune. Even a cursory Google search quickly reveals the fault lines of the debate: detractors point out the hypocrisy of financing a philanthropic high-culture celebration of American art from the profits of a corporation known for its poor labor practices, cheap disposable goods, and outsourcing of production to China. Apologists argue that the real reason… Full Review

Few today would dispute the fact that the Japanese collective Gutai Art Association (1954–1972) is the most renowned postwar avant-garde movement coming out of East Asia. If, on the one hand, Gutai’s assertively internationalist attitude ultimately paid off, on the other, its members often paid a high price for embracing internationalism when what was expected from a Japanese avant-garde collective was mainly the particular and exotic. Ming Tiampo’s excellent Gutai: Decentering Modernism, the first English-language monograph on Gutai, explores Gutai’s internationalism as a structuring element in the group’s long and diverse creative trajectory. In doing so, the book contributes… Full Review

Among the many pleasures involved in viewing Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, California, is the fact that this exhibition has come hard on the heels of State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, a brainy, spirited exhibition that covered roughly the same time period and featured photographs, films and videos, performance documentation, and installation works representing the Conceptual art movement as it appeared in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. Galleries that had been filled with verbally oriented and often witty works that discarded… Full Review

Jacqueline Francis dedicates her book, Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America, to Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber, the three interwar-era artists who serve as her principle case studies. This gesture is not only touching (who among us doesn’t feel indebted to “our” artists?); it also indicates something about Francis’s stakes. Like so many studies of minority American artists before this one, Making Race is fundamentally a restorative project. But unlike earlier scholarship, which sought to admit more artists to the art-historical canon, Making Race pursues something different—and more exciting. Deploying the lessons of critical… Full Review

Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, edited by Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg, is devoted to the representation of Jews and Judaism in Christian art, with an emphasis on contemporaneous ecclesiastical anxieties on issues concerned with both Christianity and Judaism. The exceptions are one essay on a Jewish subject created by a Christian and another on the architecture of the Venetian ghetto. The essays are framed by Nirenberg’s introduction and final chapter, “The Judaism of Christian Art,” in which he discusses a major theme of the book: that Christians regard art made for… Full Review

David Clarke’s Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World is composed of six essays in three sections: “Trajectories: Chinese Artists and the West,” “Imported Genres,” and “Returning Home: Cities between China and the World.” Earlier versions of five of the essays have appeared before, as has some of the information in the first. It is a good idea for a scholar to bring together individual essays and chronologically discontinuous views in a single volume since these then become more easily available for reference and present a kind of informational penumbra for the topics they discuss. The usefulness of this… Full Review

The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art, during its stop at the Crocker Art Museum, presented a panoramic display of drawing as an art form from the sixteenth to eighteenth century in Italy. It also included a fine selection of intaglio and woodcut prints. Drawn from the collection of Giuliano Ceseri—who has loaned his collection to the Georgia Museum of Art—and from the collection of the Georgia Museum, the exhibition, curated by Robert Randolf Coleman and Babette Bohn, presented a wide-ranging approach to works on paper from the period, and did so… Full Review

In Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China, Jonathan Hay strives to understand how the human body senses and interacts with ornament, or “pleasurable things,” as the essayist and comic writer Li Yu (1610–1680) put it. Hay imagines how the hand and eye connected with the shape and texture of a decorated cup or figurine, how a moving body experienced an “object landscape” in a residential interior where luxury goods were displayed and used. Moving outside conventional studies in connoisseurship and technology, Hay juxtaposes objects made from a variety of materials, ranging from ceramics and paintings to… Full Review

The newly commissioned, site-specific installation, Figura que defina su propio horizonte (Figure Who Defines His Own Horizon), by the Cuban-born artist José Bedia is an apt centerpiece to his career survey, Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia. A diminutive figure in dark bronze—a trickster as well as a reference to the artist himself, with a horned head and smoking a cigarette—is chained by the ankle to a tree stump. The chain and stump are a restraint, but in the context of Bedia’s idiosyncratic iconography, they are also an umbilical or tether that links the artist to… Full Review

When she died at the age of 91 in 1968, Meta Warrick Fuller left behind a long and productive life as a sculptor, but she also bequeathed a formidable challenge to art historians. In 1910, a warehouse fire destroyed her early sculptures, including the student work she made while at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts and the sculptures from her three years (1899–1902) studying in Paris. The formative works stored in that warehouse are known today only through black-and-white photographs. Further complicating the scholar’s task is the fact that Fuller’s most public sculptures were made for fairs… Full Review

Two recent books on visual culture and civil rights envision the pathway through race and nation as an endeavor privileging the visual and utilizing the corporeal. However, these books diverge at the point of “seeing,” with Maurice Berger investing in the expansive range of twentieth-century visual culture as it pertains to African Americans and Martin Berger zeroing in on what he calls “the complex social dynamics of the civil rights movement” (4). The latter, in other words, examines how images aided and abetted racial hegemony and comfort, racial expectation, and national investment. Both For All the World to See… Full Review

Siena has long been recognized as one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe, and it is for this reason that in 1995 its entire historic center was added to the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Between the advent of the commune in the twelfth century and the fall of the Guelph regime of the Nine Governors in 1355, the Sienese authorities erected architectural monuments of great significance, including the Palazzo Pubblico, new ramparts and gates, and several large-scale fountains, while the aristocratic and merchant elite constructed towers, tower-houses (casetorri), and… Full Review

No Impressionist was more innovative than Edgar Degas. Oblique glimpses of dancers in limelight, candid vignettes of brothel mores, and roughshod runs over respectable standards of finish still provide grist to students of Degas, whether in the library or studio. At the same time, the grounding of his art in expertise at drawing the nude sets him apart as the most traditional of the Impressionist group. Thus, his discomfort with being called an Impressionist, after Degas’s associates adopted the name derisively coined in Louis Leroy’s satirical review of the 1874 exhibition of the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs… Full Review

The title Renaissance Theories of Vision immediately brings to mind a myriad of representational systems known collectively as perspective but more specifically labeled by type: atmospheric, single-point and multiple-point (also referred to as linear, scientific, and mathematical), intuitive, oblique, and reverse. Simultaneously, it conjures recollected textbook images of converging orthogonals superimposed on schematized masterworks like Fra Angelico’s San Marco Altarpiece (ca. 1438–40) and Pietro Perugino’s Sistine Chapel fresco Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter (1482). These fifteenth-century visions of carefully structured spaces inhabited by figures placed in calculated spatial and proportional relationship to one another as well as to… Full Review

Their story is legendary in Miami. Don and Mera Rubell began collecting art in 1967, when they lived in New York City. Their modest budget came from Mera’s salary as a Head Start teacher, and their acquisitions strategy consisted largely of purchasing work that excited their passions. The untimely passing of Don’s brother, Steve Rubell, in 1989, left them with a considerable inheritance with which to expand their collecting, and in 1996, they opened the Rubell Family Collection to the public in their adopted home, Miami. The Rubell Family Collection pioneered a new institutional model of private art collections… Full Review