Recently Published Reviews

In his seminal collection of essays The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois, preeminent educator, scholar, and founder of the NAACP, traced a genealogy of black life in the United States as a way to demystify for his readers “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.” Assembling a collage of narratives that wove poignant personal recollections with a collective history of slavery, racial oppression, civil rights, race leadership, religion, social progress, and black cultural expression, Du Bois solemnly concluded that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem… Full Review

Rare is the traveler who won't admit that one of the joys of exploring a "new world" is bringing home cherished souvenirs. Conversely, sometimes access to a place is limited to an armchair traveler's fantasies about a precious relic, which signifies, imaginatively, a distant land. Such was the case for the Medici in Florence, who are known to have collected feather cloaks from Brazil, and for Albrecht Dürer, who marveled at objects exhibited in Brussels from "the new land of gold" (13). As Edward J. Sullivan discusses in The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas, objects… Full Review

Jakarta, today a metropolis of twelve million inhabitants, was once the center of the Dutch colonial empire. Known in the seventeenth century as Batavia, the “Queen of the East,” the city headquartered the Dutch East Indies Company, one of the world’s first multinational corporations. Following Indonesian independence in 1945, it became the “exemplary center” of Sukarno, the first president of the decolonized nation, who turned the main boulevard of Jakarta into an exhibit of modernist buildings and urban spaces. Today, like many capital cities of Asian countries, Jakarta is a world city and the center of Indonesia’s government, business activity… Full Review

In 1823, two British architects, Samuel Angell and William Harris, ventured to excavate at Selinunte in the course of their tour of Sicily, and came upon many fragments of sculptured metopes from the Archaic temple now known as “Temple C.” Although local officials tried to stop them, they continued their work, and attempted to export their finds to England, destined for the British Museum. Now in the shadow of the activities of Lord Elgin, Angell and Harris’s shipments were diverted to Palermo, where they remain to this day in the Archaeological Museum. The three better-preserved metopes (depicting a… Full Review

It is an open secret that many museums, large and small, owe the strength of their collections to women patrons, yet few scholars to date have studied women as serious art collectors and tastemakers. Biographies exist of individuals from Catherine the Great to Peggy Guggenheim, but the collection and arrangement of beautiful things was a more widespread pastime among women than biographers suggest. The most deeply historicized, contextualized study of women patrons thus far concerns the Renaissance; we still have much to learn about how gender, art, politics, and collecting interrelated in the modern era. It seems entirely appropriate, therefore… Full Review

The recent Iranian presidential election and the untimely death of popular music icon Michael Jackson make an odd pair, to say the least. Yet, these two events, which dominated media coverage and drew international audiences during the summer of 2009, point to a fundamental shift in the relationship between social knowledge, public spectacle, politics, and photography. The widespread audience for photographic media, no longer just a body of spectators, is now engaged as both the producer and consumer of the photographic public sphere. As a result, official exhibitions, governmental programs, museums, and the press are straining to keep pace with… Full Review

The Colosseum, more than any other building from ancient Rome, is routinely the subject of both scholarly and popular texts. While it seems that important studies are published on this structure every year, rarely does any attain the status of definitive text. Katherine Welch’s The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum is such a book. Welch’s splendid volume is a culmination of her amphitheatre studies and provides a much-needed examination of the building type’s origins in Republican Rome and its development up to and including the Colosseum. In her introduction Welch sets out her intentions—to examine the… Full Review

Many years ago one of my dissertation advisors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University proclaimed that there was no such thing as Jewish art in antiquity and the late Roman world, there was only Jewish iconography. His claim reflected the view of the generation of scholars that Steven Fine characterizes, somewhat ungenerously, as following the “Jews don’t do art” school of thought (2). The leading figure in this historiography is Erwin R. Goodenough, whose monumental Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (13 vols., New York: Pantheon, 1953–68), argued that Jewish imagery was created by “another… Full Review

What constitutes modernity? More to the point, what did modernity mean to the Impressionists? What concept of it did they admit or celebrate in their paintings? The usual and by now routine answers to these questions revolve around the subject of bourgeois recreation. Beginning with Meyer Schapiro’s essay “The Nature of Abstract Art” (Marxist Quarterly 1 [January–March 1937]: 77–98) and continuing a half-century later in the work of T. J. Clark (The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, New York: Knopf, 1984) and Robert Herbert (Impressionism: Art, Leisure and… Full Review

More than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the last attempts to write the Gothic Summa. I think particularly of Jean Bony’s French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), much criticized at the time for its “modernistic” viewpoint and for detaching buildings from their historical context in the construction of the big, style-based story of Gothic; also relevant is Die gotische Architektur in Frankreich 1130–1270 by Dieter Kimpel and Robert Suckale (Descrizione libro: Hirmer Verlag, 1985), which veered in the opposite direction, locating architecture within ideologies of power and… Full Review

In Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), Millard Meiss argued that Tuscan society regarded the various calamities of the mid-trecento as divine punishment for its worldly ways, which led to a rejection of what he regarded as the human-centered, naturalistic pictorial style of early trecento art and a revival of the spiritually-centered, abstract style of the previous century. Early criticism notwithstanding (Benjamin Rowland, Jr., The Art Bulletin 34 (1952): 319–22), Meiss’s theory became the paradigm under which a generation of historians worked. However, in the 1970s, challenges to the theory mounted, beginning… Full Review

What is the meaning of the guillotine? The question crossed my mind as I read through the material that makes up this heterogeneous yet fascinating volume, along with some others: What is the ethical weight of dismemberment? How much of pain and loss survives in the remains of broken things, how much of a thrilling sense of freedom? The Fragment: An Incomplete History, which contains ten essays written by scholars of art history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, numismatics, topography, and film, with one contribution by the artist Cornelia Parker, provokes such questions. Of course to not finish something because… Full Review

Scenes of everyday life, commonly called genre scenes, were enormously popular in early nineteenth-century Britain. But their narrative emphasis, often with a strong moral message, and their humorous anecdotal detail damaged their reception in the modern era. As a result, this important subject has generally been neglected in serious art-historical studies. David Solkin’s new book, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, happily rectifies this. While steeped in recent scholarship, Solkin brings a wealth of new information, a remarkably observant eye, and an insightful, even adventurous analysis to this material… Full Review

“Do not live in a town without a temple,” says the Tamil epigraph with which Gods on the Move begins. In the Tamil region of South India, large temple complexes can be recognized today in almost every small and big city by their red-and-white striped walls; tall, gaudily painted gateways (gopuras); and a bustle of pilgrims, beggars, and flower-sellers. Branfoot’s interest in the subject was piqued by marketplaces in Cairo, as he states in the acknowledgments. The book explains how and why temples became similarly pervasive spaces for public gathering in the Tamil region; it does so by… Full Review

J. Paul Getty purchased his first work of art, a painting, in 1931 and, eight years later, his first antiquity. Collector’s Choice: J. Paul Getty and His Antiquities, on view at the Getty Villa in Malibu, thus marked the seventieth anniversary of the initiation of a renowned and still-expanding collection. The exhibition was a natural for the museum, particularly since the construction of the Getty Center has allowed the Villa to devote itself entirely to the art of the ancient world. Where better to think about Getty’s collecting habits than deep inside the building he designed, an environment inspired… Full Review