Recently Published Reviews

There comes a moment in every architectural history class when an undergraduate asks how exactly did architects work out the science or mathematics of some major monument. It is not a moment I eagerly anticipate, and I suspect I am not alone. Especially in the large introductory classes I teach each year, my emphasis is on the broad cultural issues of architecture, the ways in which buildings shape human experience and respond to historical pressures. I am trying to engage students who are not necessarily art history or architecture majors and those who are in the class to satisfy some… Full Review

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many writers, such as the economist Stanley Jevons, viewed museums as agents of social reform, but today many scholars have focused on reforming museums and their collecting practices. Specifically, museums’ acquisitions of ancient objects have sparked contentious disputes about these institutions’ responsibilities. These debates are presented in Robin F. Rhodes’s The Acquisition and Exhibition of Classical Antiquities, an edited book of essays from a symposium held at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame on 24 February 2007. This work addresses the collection and display of licit… Full Review

Color—its optical properties, its physiological effects, its natural and human origins, its cultural and emotional associations—has been John Gage’s subject of choice for several decades, and no one has worked in this area more, or more fruitfully, than he. Gage’s most recent book is apparently narrower in scope but turns out to be more comprehensive in its claims than his Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (New York: Bulfinch, 1993) and Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Those earlier studies explored the symbolic and practical functions of color throughout… Full Review

David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America ends with the cultural phenomenon whose emergence it explains: the Victorian parlor, described by T. S. Arthur in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1849 as a sort of Daguerreian Gallery stuffed with mass-produced goods from Hitchcock chairs and bronze shelf clocks to colorful, machine-woven carpets and illustrated books. Each of these commodities, Jaffee demonstrates, “took its meaning from the ensemble” (323). Contrary to what one might expect, he argues, this emergent middle-class aesthetic had its origins not in the city but in the New England countryside—a claim he… Full Review

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s composite paintings are surely among the most entertaining images produced in Europe during the sixteenth century. Twenty-first century viewers respond to them immediately with delight and curiosity, and usually also remark on how much they are like Surrealist paintings. The same sorts of responses are found in art-historical scholarship. Renaissance studies has long neglected Arcimboldo altogether, with the result that his paintings remained to be effectively studied within their own context. In Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann seeks to rectify this lacuna in art-historical scholarship and to elucidate the deeper meaning… Full Review

Issues of high and low—fine art versus popular culture—ran rampant through Art in the Streets, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The first major U.S. museum exhibition devoted to exploring the history of graffiti and street art, it took any number of risks with regard to the challenges it posed to conventional notions of museum art. The exhibition succeeded in large measure and was at once raucous, thought provoking, and illuminating. Not surprisingly, it drew impressive crowds. At its best, the exhibition expanded definitions of art, revealing meaning and beauty in the most humble circumstances… Full Review

Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti, editors of Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe, begin their introduction by reminding the reader that many early modern people did not live exclusively in houses. Instead, the period saw large numbers of women and men from diverse social backgrounds who experienced a variety of domestic arrangements in different types of institutions for part or all of their lives. The slight change of the book’s title from that of the 2004 conference at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum entitled “Domestic and Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe” from which it emerged reflects an… Full Review

Renewed scholarly interest in ancient clay figurines from Egypt, the Near East, and the broader Mediterranean world has driven a recent resurgence in coroplastic studies. Until recently, several factors limited these studies. Many of these figurines were uncovered in large-scale excavations during the early twentieth-century, when recording techniques and excavator priorities meant that context was only cursorily documented, if at all. Furthermore, many pieces in modern museums were acquired from the art market and have no provenance. As a result, research on figurine date and function has been limited, concentrating on stylistic analysis and (less frequently) methods of production. However… Full Review

When describing the carved artworks of the Aboriginal people of the Arctic regions, the anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter once observed: “A distinctive mark of the traditional art is that many of the ivory carvings, generally of sea mammals, won’t stand up, but roll clumsily about. Each lacks a single, favored point of view, hence, a base. Indeed, they aren’t intended to be set in place and viewed, but rather to be worn or handled, turned this way and that. The carver himself explains his effort as a token of thanks for food or services received from the animal’s spirit” (16)… Full Review

Organized in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, The Great American Hall of Wonders at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) celebrated the United States as an exceptional nation. Spanning the entire nineteenth century, but primarily the transcontinental, expansionist period of 1826–1876, the exhibition represented the nation’s citizens in possession of unparalleled democratic liberties and socio-economic opportunities, as they utilized their technological and scientific ingenuity to harness an abundance of natural resources. Echoing Philadelphia’s diverse Centennial Exhibition of 1876, SAAM’s thematically arranged rooms, formerly home to the Patent Office, displayed portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings… Full Review

To the modern day reader, hospitals and scientific societies might seem to be unlikely settings for exhibiting and discussing contemporary art. In The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism, Craig Ashley Hanson shows how it made perfect sense that such venues would foster art theory and practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The leading role in this book is played by the figure of the virtuoso, whose eclectic interests were united under the umbrella of curiosity. Encompassing activities as wide ranging as medicine (learned and unlearned), classical studies, and art collecting, patronage, practice, and… Full Review

Cherise Smith’s Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deveare Smith and John P. Bowles’s Adrian Piper: Race, Gender and Embodiment each explore performance, identity, and the role that the body plays in both. More than isolated studies of artists, however, these texts are equally concerned with the discourses that surround them. Through her survey of four female artists working in performance from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, Smith offers an analysis of the ideological, social, and artistic contexts in which these artists negotiate the boundaries of race, gender, and… Full Review

Kirsten Pai Buick has been establishing herself as the authority on Mary Edmonia Lewis over the past decade and a half with a series of monographic articles and a dissertation (University of Michigan, 1999). Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject is her anticipated full-length examination of this sculptor’s career. It is a thoughtful, groundbreaking study that should be a must-read for anyone interested in art of the United States and in a nuanced treatment of race, ethnicity, and gender. Buick’s book challenges late twentieth-century identity politics of current art… Full Review

Christiana Payne’s John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter is part of a broader trend in current scholarship to reevaluate the Pre-Raphaelites. Important texts such as Timothy Barringer’s Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) have focused new attention on the radical nature of the movement and the contested concept of artistic “realism.” In the past decade, major monographic exhibitions of the movement’s founding artists John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as a number of specialized scholarly studies, have expanded what Prettejohn… Full Review

In an era when attention is fractured into multiple platforms and diffused by multiple media, the singularity of Jim Nutt’s artistic vision stands out: for twenty-plus years—as was made evident in a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago—Nutt has been deliberately and meticulously absorbed with painting the female face. Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character, as curator Lynne Warren clarified both in her selections and in the accompanying text, was not a traditional retrospective. Though the exhibition included works from over forty-five years of Nutt’s painting career, providing viewers with an overview of the more diversely… Full Review