Recently Published Reviews

Jane Mayo Roos’s beautifully illustrated new book, Auguste Rodin, surveys the key events of the sculptor’s career, focusing on his development as a professional sculptor, a journey that continued throughout his adult life. The thoughtful and well-conceived presentation delves into Rodin’s complicated family life and his cobbled-together education in the arts, and debunks some previously held myths about the sculptor. While it remains a challenge for any art historian to offer an original analysis of Rodin’s life and work, about which so much has been written, Roos covers familiar terrain with a fresh eye, and highlights aspects of his… Full Review

This ambitious book by Glenn Peers explores five case studies of framing. These frames delimit various aspects of Byzantine visual culture: pectoral crosses, manuscript illumination, church decoration, and icon revetments all figure here. “Frames” thus is not being used to signify the tidy border of an artwork, and not necessarily even a material or represented entity, but instead bespeaks a larger, conceptual paradigm. We have seen a wealth of studies in recent years looking at frames of both a literal and more notional sort, but less work in this vein has addressed the premodern era. Peers’s frames are heuristic devices… Full Review

If “the history of the modern artist is, in short, the story of artistic obsession,” as Paul Barolsky writes in A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso, then the author, whose long and distinguished scholarly career has focused on the artist and the early texts in which he has been represented, reveals a similar, and understandable, tendency. As Barolsky acknowledges, the book represents “a synthesis of a lifetime of thinking about the idea of the artist.” Here the idea of the artist retains its Eurocentric flavor, the expected result of the very historiography upon which Barolsky… Full Review

The last U.S. exhibition dedicated to the “three godless artists of Nuremberg”—Georg Pencz, Hans Sebald Beham, and Barthel Beham—was mounted by Stephen Goddard at the Spencer Museum of Art in 1988 as The World in Miniature: Engravings by the German Little Masters, 1500–1550; however, as its title indicated, that exhibition and its accompanying catalogue viewed these artists as “little masters,” both lesser followers of Albrecht Dürer and virtuoso miniaturist engravers. A delayed but opposite reaction, Grand Scale (by this reviewer with Elizabeth Wyckoff at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, 2008), involved staging another aspect of these… Full Review

Cynthea J. Bogel’s book With a Single Glance is a page-turner. As dedicated as I am to the topic of premodern Japanese religion, it is not often that I stay up later than I intended, engrossed in the unfolding story. That was my experience of Bogel’s book. Yes, it is erudite and, yes, the plates are gorgeous, but most of all it is a fun read. The book is at the same time deep and breezy. Bogel aims to show that Kûkai, the great Buddhist saint, imported a new language of visuality to Japan. Some of this he brought… Full Review

Contributions to Anglophone scholarship in the past decade have included more than a handful of narratives focused on Mexico’s post-Revolutionary artistic movements. Moreover, photography’s place in the general art-historical account has come to redefine the terms of discussion around what served as that emerging nation’s particular forms of modernism. Histories of photography in Mexico have been intellectually indebted to the persuasive writerly performances associated with the late Carlos Monsiváis and Olivier Debroise. They have gained also from publications like Andrea Noble’s Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000) and subsequent pioneering work by Esther Gabara… Full Review

In her short biographical work Father and Daughter: Jonathan and Maria Spilsbury (London: Epworth, 1952), Ruth Young, a descendant of Maria Spilsbury (Spilsbury-Taylor, after her marriage in 1808), recounts a delightful anecdote in which the future King George IV visited Spilsbury’s studio on St. George’s Row, London. Impatient with how slowly work was progressing on his commission which, to his judgment, seemed complete, he exclaimed, “Really, Mrs. Taylor, I swear that you can do no more to that! You’ve finished it and a damned good picture it is.” Unconvinced, Spilsbury sought a second opinion from her maid. Upon close inspection… Full Review

The most famous works of eighteenth-century Roman architecture and urbanism, such as the Trevi Fountain or the Spanish Steps, have always seemed more at home at the end of histories of Baroque architecture than at the start of histories of modern architecture; there, one is more likely to encounter Laugier's hut or Soufflot's Sainte-Geneviève. The idea that the architectural initiative passed from Rome to the north sometime around 1700 extends back to the eighteenth century itself, and was rarely questioned in the century-long tradition of formalist architectural history inaugurated in the late nineteenth century. But while eighteenth-century Rome has had… Full Review

The title of this superb volume does not fully prepare the reader for its broad scope of relevance well beyond the site of Aurangabad for an understanding of Indian art, religious communities, and socio-economic history spanning eight hundred years from the first century BCE to the seventh century CE. One would expect from the title a focused monograph on the sculptures carved at the cave temples at Aurangabad in India’s Western Deccan, in the present-day state of Maharashtra, dating primarily to the sixth century. Pia Brancaccio not only provides a much-needed focused study, but she also follows the ramifications of… Full Review

David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy is the first major presentation of Smith’s work on the West Coast since the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) own memorial exhibition held in 1965, which consisted of a dozen works from the Cubi series and two Zigs, all executed in the last years of his life, from 1961 to 1965. The present exhibition seeks to set these late works in context by demonstrating that Smith’s use of geometric form in these sculptures did not represent a departure for the artist, as has often been claimed, but was the culmination of a… Full Review

De l’imaginaire au musée: Les arts d’Afrique à Paris et à New York (1931–2006) considers the political and ideological contexts that shaped institutional display of the arts of Africa since the 1930s. Based on Maureen Murphy’s 2005 dissertation, the framework of this engaging study is the parallel but distinctive evolution of French and U.S. museums’ presentation of African artifacts as ethnographic objects or as works of art. Following a loose chronology, Murphy carefully unpacks the “imaginary” perception of Africa through its treatment in literature, popular imagery, and exhibitions. In the introduction, Murphy distances herself from an art history… Full Review

Malian designer and artist Kandioura Coulibaly “interpret[s] the stories that are told by the material culture” (106) he uses in his costumes and jewelry. In Janet Goldner’s conversation with Coulibaly, entitled “Using the Past to Sculpt the Costume of the Future: An Interview with Kandioura Coulibaly” and collected in Contemporary African Fashion, readers discover how his work—and his aim to construct a museum of fashion—emerges from a process of reconstructing and recovering a hidden history, one often overlooked in accounts of Africa’s complicated chronology. Seeing fashion as an organizing system, he describes how it is woven from the physical… Full Review

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) once remarked, “I’m not a reductive artist, I’m a generative artist” (Moira Roth, “An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973),” in Eugenie Tsai, ed., Robert Smithson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 88). The Smithson Effect, an exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts exploring Smithson’s afterlife in the work of other artists since the 1990s, proves that his generative quality exceeded even his own lifetime. With The Smithson Effect, curator Jill Dawsey brings together twenty-two contemporary artists whose work either appropriates Smithson’s or explores his central concepts in new directions. This visually arresting… Full Review

This book is a collection of nine essays and a short preface analyzing some aspects of the connections between Philippe de Champaigne, the convent of Port-Royal, and Jansenism. The editor, Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc, contributed two essays; the last one (“La Foi et les œuvres. Postface sur l’œuvre peint de Philippe de Champaigne et ses possibles liens avec la spiritualité de Port-Royal”) functions as a postscript. It provides a useful context for the collection by summarizing the literature and explaining the approaches scholars have used (in the past and here) while proposing Cojannot-Le Blanc’s own interpretation, to which I will return… Full Review

Assyrian relief sculpture forms well-known parts of the collections of several major art museums. Lesser known, perhaps, is the fact that many smaller institutions can also boast of collections of these antiquities. Unfortunately, the sculpture at these smaller museums has not often been fully researched or even adequately published. Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography goes a considerable way toward remedying this situation with respect to the materials from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In addition to dozens of large, high-quality color photographs of the Hood's sculpture, Assyrian Reliefs also includes nine… Full Review