Recently Published Reviews

Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 is an ambitious book comprised of a series of analytical interventions pertaining to modern India’s visual arts and cultural heritage, and it demonstrates Rebecca Brown’s scholarly sophistication in grappling with wide-ranging conceptual and aesthetic criteria. The central thesis concerns the cultivation—among artists, filmmakers, and architects—of a critical engagement with the legacies of colonization and nationalism during the three decades that followed Independence and Partition. This engagement is framed as being relevant to studies of “the postcolonial condition in all of its complex relations to colonialism, modernity, and national identity” (2). The thesis… Full Review

Following an efflorescence of critical work on the subject over the last twenty-five years, the European Grand Tour has emerged as a focus of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship. The significance of ancient and Renaissance art to the Grand Tour itinerary—together with the emergence of modern display practices and attendant opportunities for the exercise of aesthetic judgment—have conspired to guarantee the Grand Tour's special appeal to art historians. The subject's enduring interest is surely also due to the fact that it has proven especially fertile ground for art history's disciplinary move toward thinking beyond national borders. The Grand Tour was founded on… Full Review

The necessary precondition for a world art history is the close study of cultural exchanges. Even nowadays, when you can travel from New York to Beijing in less than a day, the distance between America’s and China’s visual cultures is still immense. When such travel was much slower, and curators were not much concerned with exotic art, the diverse artistic traditions were relatively self-sufficient. But once Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the globe, it was inevitable that those artifacts called works of art would move from their places of origin to other cultures. The world had become one, which is to… Full Review

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty was an extensive retrospective composed of over 150 works created by the artist over the last 45 years. To access this exhibition on the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art (LACMA) campus, I walked through the Ahmanson Building, past EATLACMA, by the contemporary LA artist collective Fallen Fruit, down a set of stairs to cross beneath Smoke, Tony Smith’s soaring hexagonal 1967 sculpture, which quite literally fills the atrium. Exiting that building I walked out onto an outdoor pavilion still under construction, which, I noticed rather ironically, is called the BP Grand Entrance… Full Review

Physicists are poised to articulate a historic “theory of everything” that will tie together gravity, light, and all the rest of the stuff that makes up the universe as merely different manifestations of the same essential subatomic reality. Mark Dion is that rarest of artists whose body of work is arguing for a parallel aesthetic breakthrough: the revelation that not only are sculpture, painting, drawing, and the rest accepted forms of contemporary art, but so too are activities like historical research, interventions, publications, performances, relational aesthetics, collaboration, pedagogy, institutional critique, natural history, anthropology, cultural detritus, and satire, to name just… Full Review

At the outset of this monumental study Margot Fassler takes pains to position herself in relation to Chartes’s “major industry,” the making of history. In keeping with recent scholarly trends, she takes as axiomatic that history is akin to a performance, thoroughly informed by the cultural system in which it is produced (most recently, see Robert A. Maxwell, ed., Representing History, 1000–1500: Art, Music, History, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010; this volume includes a contribution by Fassler). During the Middle Ages, she argues, the liturgical and visual arts often played a key role in this process… Full Review

The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy was published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name held at the Middlebury College Museum of Art and Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in 2009. As Richard Saunders, the director of Middlebury’s museum, explains, the exhibition was inspired by the museum’s acquisition in 2005 of a panel painting by the Florentine painter Lippo d’Andrea (ca. 1370–1451) of the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari (cat. 4). Such acquisitions and exhibitions of historic art are particularly important for colleges and universities to… Full Review

The 2009 American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) conference on “New Darshans: Seeing Southern Asian Religiosity and Visuality Across Disciplines” was wide in scope and interest: it featured thirty-five papers; covered periods from the second century B.C.E. to today; and focused on geographic areas from Rajasthan to Bengal, from Tibet and Himachal Pradesh to Tamilnad, and included Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Chattisgarh, and even areas outside the subcontinent like Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, and the United States. “New darshans” were investigated through a stunning array of media: stūpa slabs; caves; temples, and their walls and pillars; relics; images; ivories; pilgrimage… Full Review

For most people, the familiar poster of Barack Obama with the caption, “HOPE,” introduced them to the work of the street artist and graphic designer, Shepard Fairey. This unofficial poster, which resulted from Fairey’s grassroots efforts, provoked a well-publicized lawsuit by the Associated Press over Fairey’s use of a copyrighted photograph by Mannie Garcia as the basis for the red-white-and-blue image of Obama on his poster. This poster, the same image slightly changed for the cover of Time magazine’s person-of-the-year issue (December 29, 2008), as well as Obama’s letter of February 22, 2008, thanking Fairey for his support, were included… Full Review

It is somehow appropriate that I began writing this review on a plane. In an attempt to squeeze in a few extra productive hours between a busy conference and a hectic end of the semester, I resort to technology: not just the jet engine that propels me across the continent at the speed of over four hundred mph, but also the netbook computer and the available on-board internet, which allow me to instantly access my notes stored on a distant hard drive. It is an exhilarating experience, but it is also exhausting, as I cannot but long for the days… Full Review

Two new books on Michelangelo Buonarroti explore his life and work from different yet complementary vantage points. With Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times, William Wallace offers a new biography that aims to present a balanced portrait to counter persistent characterizations of the artist as “an isolated, tortured genius, with few friends, an unappreciative family, and impossibly demanding patrons” (7). To this end, Wallace relies heavily on Michelangelo’s correspondence, professional records, and poetry as well as letters written among family members and friends and related documents including contracts, accounting records, and the highly influential biographies by Ascanio… Full Review

In recent years, revisions of Hans Belting’s groundbreaking Bild und Kult (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), arguably the most influential book published in the fields of medieval and byzantine art history in the last fifty years, led to two divergent paths. On the one hand, countless studies demonstrated that even in the “era of art” since the fifteenth century, the “image” with its claims of “magical” presence survived. On the other hand, medievalists revealed the enormous amount of self-reflexivity in pre-Renaissance art. Both lines of research, however, did not seriously challenge Belting’s conceptual dualism. In Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and… Full Review

Focusing on the work of two key figures in the development of modern art in Barcelona at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Picasso versus Rusiñol exhibition offered insights into a number of significant cultural and historical themes. To begin with it explored Picasso's artistic formation and creative development through a study of his juvenilia, even if this term did not always seem applicable to many of the paintings displayed. Beyond tracing the trajectory of works marking Picasso's becoming an artist, the exhibition developed a wider perspective on this theme by exploring his relationship with the painter, collector, and… Full Review

This richly illustrated catalogue, produced in conjunction with the exhibition Sacred Spain, offers new perspectives that promise to revitalize the study of religious art in Spain and the Americas. The subject certainly warrants critical attention. As the organizer, Ronda Kasl, senior curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, points out in her introduction, art in the Spanish empire was “overwhelmingly religious” (12). Kasl and her co-authors sidestep the well-worn method of iconography in favor of two new approaches inspired by trends in religious studies: 1) examining religious art “through the lens of belief and its lived experience” (12); 2)… Full Review

In the preface to his futurist memoir, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer (1933), the poet Benedikt Livshits strangely seems to denounce the entire enterprise of his narrative: Futurist aesthetics were founded on the fallacious concept of the racial character of art. The subsequent development of these views led Marinetti to Fascism. The Russian budetliane never went as far in their passion for the East, but even they were not unblemished by their nationalist desires. Of course, in our day and age, there is no longer any sense in demonstrating the bankruptcy of racial theories. But I have… Full Review