Recently Published Reviews

“How various he is!” Thomas Gainsborough’s tribute to Joshua Reynolds applies equally well to their successor in grand-manner portraiture. It is one of the signal achievements of Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance that it removes any lingering traces of the negative stereotype: Lawrence the slick, formulaic sycophant who prostituted his gifts in the service of a decadent Regency elite. In its place this wide-ranging exhibition and thoughtful catalogue substitute a dynamic, probing, and inventive explorer of human psychology—one who is keenly attentive to the interplay of surface and depth, social mask and private self. Even Lawrence’s most public statements… Full Review

This is a big book in every sense. In seven long and detailed chapters Noble offers nothing less than a survey and analysis of Byzantine and Carolingian theology around the question of the place of images in religious worship, with a dash of historiography thrown in for good measure. It is a thought-provoking study which places the issues in historical, political, and social contexts, and raises crucial questions about the relationships between Byzantium and the West. It is a book that should change the ways that we think about issues concerning art in the eighth and ninth centuries. Images,… Full Review

From the onset of the world economic crisis in 1929 until the end of the Second World War in 1945, artists in Europe and the Americas took positions in the struggles between parliamentary democracies, fascist dictatorships, and left-wing regimes. The single best-known artistic product of that historical moment is undoubtedly Picasso’s Guernica, which was hung in the modernist pavilion of the embattled Spanish Republic at the World Exposition in Paris in the summer of 1937. However, the Spanish display was overshadowed at that time by the towering neoclassical pavilion of National Socialist Germany and the dynamic masses of its… Full Review

In her important work, Ravenna in Late Antiquity, Deborah Deliyannis provides a detailed synthesis of the available material on Ravenna from the Roman period through until AD 850. As she briefly mentions at the end of her review of earlier scholarship, “There has as yet been no sustained scholarly treatment of Ravenna, in English, and this book is intended to address that void” (13). Deliyannis does exactly this, combining textual, archaeological, and artistic evidence in a clear and sophisticated way for readers who were perhaps put off by the extensive German text of F. W. Deichmann’s earlier synthesis (F… Full Review

It is not a coincidence that these three recent publications on photography in China all begin with a lament on the obstacles involved with studying this subject. Indeed, since there is rarely a concentrated archive of photo studios or photographers in China, information can only be gleaned from newspaper advertisements, travel writing, correspondence, and ephemera. Actual photographs are not abundant either, as political chaos over the past century resulted in their significant loss and destruction. The extant photographic materials in Chinese public collections are generally inaccessible; those in private collections are increasingly visible, thanks to the popular Old Photographs series… Full Review

In my first Native art history class in the mid-1990s, my professor introduced the work of Carl Beam, theretofore unknown to me. She presented Self Portrait in My Christian Dior Bathing Suit (1978–1980), which depicts the artist in a Speedo-style swimsuit, standing legs apart with one hand on his hip and inscribed with a handwritten statement expressing his authority and claim to the work. It conveys humor, irony, incisiveness, and defiance. To my mind, then gripped by postcolonial and feminist cultural critiques, the painting crystallized issues of representation and refusal, and did so in beautifully executed washes of watercolor. I… Full Review

Two recent exhibitions, one in Boston and the other in New York City, highlighted the central role that printmaking has played in South African art for the past half century and provided an exciting introduction to its varied achievements. In South Africa, where art has frequently served as a vehicle for protesting political oppression, printmaking has been valued for producing multiples that can be widely disseminated by resistance organizations. In addition, in a country where the majority of the population has until recently been provided with a “bantu” education, certain processes, such as linocut, have provided an inexpensive vehicle for… Full Review

Among the most fanciful objects commissioned by the French monarchy is a pair of Sèvres porcelain pails designed for Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy at the Château de Rambouillet. They are shaped like tinettes—wooden buckets used on ordinary dairy farms for making fresh cheese—and painted with wood grain to imitate their rustic models. Like Marie-Antoinette’s mock hamlet at Trianon, the Rambouillet pails are outlandish inventions of the pastoral movement in literature and art, which celebrated naturalness with contrived theatricality. As the ill-fated monarch so cruelly experienced, bourgeois sensibilities soon lashed out at this noble ostentation. To pre-Revolutionary critics of the society… Full Review

Sumptuous in format and timely, given recent attention to European-Ottoman exchanges, the four volumes considered here benefit from Erik Fischer’s lifelong engagement with Melchior Lorck (also Lorichs), the scholarship of Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen, and a contribution by Marco Iuliano. Volume 1 consists of a complete survey of the artist’s oeuvre in the form of thumbnail images, a biographical essay, and documents. The second and third volumes consist of a facsimile of The Turkish Publication, published posthumously in 1626, and a catalogue raisonné, with woodcuts, engravings, drawings, and paintings generated from the artist’s sojourn in Istanbul… Full Review

The title of Elizabeth Siegel’s Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums derives from an unsigned article, “Photomania,” published in Harper’s Weekly (February 16, 1861), and cited by Siegel as evidence of the popular appeal of the carte de visite album in the United States. As the article crowed, the album sold by savvy “makers of fancy goods” was allowing collectors of cartes de visite “to create their own ‘gallery of friendship and fame.’” The mania for albums was widespread, “making them ‘quite universal, and as fast as they are brought to us are taken… Full Review

Sir Philip Sassoon organized the first exhibition of the English conversation piece in 1930. Describing this type of painting as “a representation of two or more persons in a state of dramatic or psychological relation to each other,” Sassoon displayed over 150 eighteenth-century pictures in his own house. Following Sassoon’s identification of the genre, books and exhibitions about the conversation piece appeared steadily between the 1930s and 1980s. More recently, studies on the emergence of the modern consumer society and the bourgeois public sphere have renewed interest in the picture type because of its depictions of fine material possessions and… Full Review

“Why Rajput paintings look the way that they do” is the enormous concept that Molly Emma Aitken addresses in The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting. Fortunately for readers entering into her innovative and complex thinking, Aitken is especially gifted in her word choice, graphically evocative, and the book is filled with well-reproduced images of stunning Rajput paintings. Her descriptions of the paintings and the artists who produced them give both the seasoned scholar and uninitiated reader a series of intriguing ideas to ponder. Aitken’s premise is concisely explained in her introduction: conventions used in Rajput painting… Full Review

The issues at stake in Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts could not be more pressing. Published in 2008, this short overview of America’s government, university, corporate, and private donor-based arts patronage structures—together with some of their European precursors and global alternatives—arrives at a moment when the House Republican Study Committee (among others) has proposed the elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the governors of Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina are advocating a complete defunding of the arts at the state level. It is precisely this context, however, that makes it difficult to embrace Garber’s… Full Review

Because it is the first wide-ranging account of its kind to be produced by the Museum of Modern Art, I particularly wanted Modern Women to be a milestone for feminist art history. I was thus all the more disappointed when it fell slightly short of this goal. Cornelia Butler, the MoMA curator and co-editor (with Alexandra Schwartz) of the volume, encourages readers to think in such optimistic feminist terms in her introductory essay, and Aruna D’Souza, in considering MoMA’s feminist future, even suggests that the museum might consider how it could become a “site for community-building and for the utopian… Full Review

If Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) can be called the “Father of the Comic Strip,” then David Kunzle is surely its godfather, for it is to him that we owe the establishment of the comic strip as a subject for scholarship. His two-volume History of the Comic Strip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973–90), today a collector’s item, is still unsurpassed as the basic text about this art form, and he has now published two additional books that also are destined to become basic reference works. The first, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, is a monograph on the artist… Full Review