Recently Published Reviews

Writing in the 1930s, Italian artist, writer, and musician Alberto Savinio described the invention of photography as “a moment of transformation in the history of humanity that in some ways surpasses the conquest of Constantinople and the discovery of America” (quoted in Diego Mormorio, Una invenzione fatale, Palermo: Sellerio, 1985, 13). Although Savinio comes close, it is hard to overstate the importance of the ways in which photography offered entirely new ways of seeing the world to an unprecedented number of people. The new medium’s cultural impact in Italy was profound, and the country (unified only in 1860 and… Full Review

In this tiny volume Paul Barolsky seeks to demonstrate the “powerful influence of fiction in the history of art and the history of the artist” (ix). Although modern art-historical scholarship has, since its inception in the nineteenth century, emulated the scientific method (in order to establish its legitimacy as an academic practice), Barolsky finds fault with the consistent use of this approach when dealing with many of the primary sources that serve as the basis for evidence. He contends that, in the past, imaginative literature contributed greatly to the history of art and that scholars have often taken it at… Full Review

The image of a donor holding an architectural model is a familiar feature in medieval art, and yet it is a deceptively challenging subject for comprehensive study. While there are many preserved examples in a variety of media spanning the entire Middle Ages, there are also many documented, but now lost, examples for which both the date and compositional elements are often questionable. In short, the record is far from complete. Even among the extant representations, the ways in which the buildings are depicted range widely, both in terms of viewpoints (i.e., from the side, front, or back) and of… Full Review

The sixteenth-century painter, architect, and print designer Hans Vredeman de Vries (1526–1609) has not been ignored by recent art history. Two exhibitions—in Antwerp and Schloss Brake—in 2002, an international symposium in 2004, with catalogues, proceedings, and other publications and detailed studies of parts of his oeuvre, edited by Heiner Borggrefe, Piet Lombaerde, and others, have secured the artist’s firm position in the current view of northern Renaissance art history. Christopher P. Heuer’s The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries, published on the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, is the first book-length… Full Review

Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture by Sonya S. Lee is the first book-length study of the nirvana image in Chinese art, examining carefully chosen works from the sixth to twelfth centuries. In her exploration of this motif, which represents the final extinction of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni, Lee’s methodological approach mediates the interactions between the monastic community, lay patrons, and artisans in articulating the particular resonance that this motif had in China, where it materialized in a broader range of architectural, material, and visual forms than had been the case in South and Central Asia… Full Review

In texts and poetry of ancient China, the Yellow Springs refers to the subterranean realm of the dead and was thus “the imagined location of innumerable graves” (7). Wu Hung’s Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs presents a long-awaited synthesis of developments in tomb art in China from the Neolithic period through the Song Dynasty, or the third millennium BCE though the fourteenth century (and in some instances, even into the succeeding Ming and Qing dynasties). Such broad, sweeping studies are rarely attempted, but the core of this book is in fact a compilation of some three decades… Full Review

In Writing Art History, Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville have produced a timely book. It is neatly paradoxical. It worries about the “professionalization” of art history in research universities. Its principal readership, however, will be professional art historians in research universities. It protests pedagogical methodologism in art history—the reduction of theory to teachable methods, or “methodology.” But its own method of deconstructive close reading and rhetorical analysis is conspicuous. It has been widely legitimated as one way—maybe the best—to read good writing in the history and criticism of art, “theory” or not. These tensions are not fatal, however. They… Full Review

Contemporary Korean art has garnered a place in the narrative of Western contemporary art with Nam June Paik and Ufan Lee, who had retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 and 2011, respectively. Although both were born in Korea, they left at a young age. Along with these two stars, the recent story of contemporary Korean art has focused on Lee Bul, Do Ho Suh, and Kimsooja, among others, who have likewise attracted attention at international art institutions and fairs in recent years. Generally excluded in the Western narrative are the talented young or established artists who live and… Full Review

Ingrid Vermeulen undertakes an important self-reflexive task in Picturing Art History: the examination of the transition from unillustrated to illustrated texts about art. Surprisingly, that transformation had little to do with technological changes. Using three specific publications as examples, she argues that eighteenth-century scholars increasingly came to conceive of the artistic past not as a series of biographies of artists, but rather as a seamless “chain” of artworks in which historical progress can, and indeed must, be seen to be fully understood. Vermeulen tracks her topic through four related questions: What types of images were considered appropriate to the… Full Review

Based on Michael Dorsch’s doctoral dissertation (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2001), French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–80 explores the aftermath of what Victor Hugo called France’s “Terrible Year” as reflected in the field of sculpture. Memorialized in many cases by artists who had themselves endured the long standoff (from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871), the commemoration of the siege of Paris forced French artists to confront difficult and unfamiliar themes. Both privately and in public, painters and sculptors struggled to devise personifications appropriate to the representation of Resistance, Defense, and Defeat. Among the maquettes… Full Review

The Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art has been many things to many people. Designed by Thomas Jeckyll as a dining room with leather walls and intricate shelving, and radically redecorated by James McNeill Whistler in 1876–77, it originally grew around Whistler’s Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–64) and showcased the blue-and-white Chinese porcelain of Whistler’s London patron Frederick Leyland. In 1904 it was purchased by Charles Lang Freer and installed in a special wing of his Detroit home. By that point, Freer had already begun to envision the room in his future museum, and it has… Full Review

Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations focuses on the artists associated with the major figures of what the Anglo-Saxon world has called “French Theory,” conceived in a broad way, and corresponding mainly to the 1970s. The various chapters are confrontations between Jean-Paul Sartre and Robert Lapoujade or Leonardo Cremonini, Pierre Bourdieu and Bernard Rancillac, Louis Althusser and Lucio Fanti, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Gérard Fromanger, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Monory, Jacques Derrida and Valerio Adami. The goal is to draw attention to these artists, far less known than the thinkers. The relationship then appears… Full Review

The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, published in Cambridge University Press’s Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance series, follows those on Rome, edited by Marcia B. Hall (2005), and Venice and the Veneto, edited by Peter Humphrey (2008), while two forthcoming volumes will address Naples and Florence. The series is conceived as a broadly contextual account of art of all kinds in Italy, 1300–1600. The key to this approach is patronage. Each of the authors of Court Cities of Northern Italy looks at patrons as… Full Review

The exhibition Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan focuses on sculptural fragments from, and the subsequent digital reconstruction of, the Buddhist cave temple site of Xiangtangshan, located in Hebei Province in northern China. The inception of the site dates to the short-lived yet prolific Northern Qi Dynasty (550–577), the subject of the accompanying international conference held at the Freer Gallery on June 3–5, 2011. The name Xiangtangshan may be translated as “Mountain of Echoing Halls.” The name seems fitting, as the exhibition and accompanying illustrated catalogue examine the site as it reverberated during three distinct historical… Full Review

Curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, The American Style: The Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis was a delightful and instructive exhibition. In one ample room, divided by projecting vitrines and one partial transverse wall, they displayed paintings, drawings, prints, furniture, ceramics, glass, photographs, and even current wallpaper. Various forms of classical revival became widely acknowledged from the late 1870s onward as the best and truest American expression in architecture and domestic design. Albrecht and Mellins suggested that the catalyst was the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, but they demonstrated that later expositions reinforced and developed ideas… Full Review