Recently Published Reviews

Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius, organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Italy, aims to explore an aspect of Leonardo’s wide-ranging interests long acknowledged but still poorly understood. That Leonardo studied from, theorized on, and made designs for sculpture has been established through his drawings and writings yet is frustratingly absent in surviving works. This small but rich exhibition aims to bridge this gap by displaying well-known drawings alongside three-dimensional works by… Full Review

In 1870, a North Adams, MA, shoe manufacturer named Calvin Sampson faced a labor crisis. His mostly French Canadian workforce had organized themselves into a union and had gone out on strike, demanding a closed shop and the right to tie their wages to Sampson’s profits. Sampson sent his superintendent to San Francisco to hire strikebreakers. On June 13, 1870, 12,000 local residents gathered at the North Adams train station to await the arrival of Sampson’s new recruits: seventy-five Chinese laborers, mostly under twenty years old. Miraculously, the newcomers made it to Sampson’s factory unscathed. Sampson’s first act, oddly enough… Full Review

The three volumes constituting The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture are based upon The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner (London: Macmillan, 1996). The entries from those sections dealing with Islamic art and architecture have been pulled out, and often rearranged under new titles. Notably, the long entry on “Islamic art” on pp. 94–561 of vol. 16 of the Dictionary has been divided into appropriate subtopics, and each listed alphabetically. Some new entries have been added, but the 1996 texts have in most cases remained as they were, although supplemented with additional bibliography. The illustrations are… Full Review

Though Anne Truitt’s art has not shaped art-historical and critical debates at the level of many of her contemporaries, whether Morris Louis, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, and others, her work warrants all the attention the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden devoted to her in this retrospective exhibition, Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Curated by Kristen Hileman, it included drawings, paintings, and sculptures by the artist from the early 1960s to 2004, the year of her death. The Hirshhorn installed Truitt’s art chronologically, which highlights how she rather quickly discovered and, with few exceptions, persisted in pursuing what would… Full Review

Renaissance art historians conventionally work in terms of types. Artistic production to a large extent can be thought of in terms of basic forms or categories—portrait, altarpiece, devotional image, etc.—customized according to the requirements of patrons. The artistic culture of Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century saw the production of many objects that frustrate that approach by being insistently sui generis. Among them are a pair of marble reliefs: one signed by the sculptor/architect Tullio Lombardo around 1495, presently in the Ca’d’Oro in Venice, and another, clearly by the same artist, in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in… Full Review

Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence, a major exhibition at the Clark Art Institute curated by Debra Bricker Balken, began with an intriguing juxtaposition. Opposite the introductory text, one found Arthur Dove’s Moon (1935) mounted side by side with Georgia O’Keeffe’s last and most abstract Jack-in-the-Pulpit, VI (1930). These paintings show the two artists working in distinct styles within the modernist arc of nature abstraction. Yet the show’s organizing premise, that Dove profoundly affected O’Keeffe’s early artistic development, was here counterbalanced by a conversation. We saw the two in dialogue at mid-career, hardly referencing the deep Depression at the door, exploring… Full Review

Classical mimesis, the privileged aesthetic model for antiquity, involved a combination of imitation, invention, and idealization. To paint the ideal beauty of Helen of Troy, for example, the fourth-century BCE Greek artist Zeuxis copied and combined the best features of five live female models. In Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis, Elizabeth C. Mansfield argues that the myth of Zeuxis selecting models is “about” classical mimesis itself, and the fundamental contradiction between its means, copying from the real, and its end, a visual rendering of the ideal. The story has held a preeminent place in Western art… Full Review

Cézanne and Beyond is the impressive catalogue published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009. Conceived as a companion to the catalogue of the 1995–96 Cézanne retrospective, also shown in Philadelphia, which spelled out the critical fortunes of Cézanne’s art during his lifetime, this volume focuses exclusively on the artistic reception of Cézanne’s art as seen in the work of sixteen artists ranging from Henri Matisse to Jeff Wall. Joseph Rishel and Katherine Sachs, the editors of Cézanne and Beyond (and the major organizers of the exhibition), make clear in the… Full Review

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is ideally suited for an exhibition devoted to the theme of “Watteau, Music, and Theater” because two of Watteau’s most incisive treatments of these themes reside in its collection: the solitary singer Mezzetin (ca. 1718–20) and the tragic-comic French Comedians (ca. 1720–21). Both works also display Watteau’s ineffable fusion of performance and humanity, artifice and nature, and gestures both rote and heartfelt. The exhibition, rich in drawings as well as paintings loaned from a wide variety of institutions and private collections, allowed viewers to ponder the artist’s compelling transformation of music and theater into an… Full Review

In 1661, in his mid-fifties, Rembrandt van Rijn painted himself as the Christian apostle Paul (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). Typical for the artist, this late work circled back to an interest that had occupied him since the beginning of his career (e.g., Two Old Men [Peter and Paul?] in Disputation [1628, Melbourne]). Typically, too, Rembrandt took the opportunity to transform this exotically garbed figure into an essay in unsparing self-reflection. Significantly, however, of nearly seventy self-portraits this is the only one in which the artist assumed the guise of an identifiable Biblical character. Thus, his self-identification with Paul is not to be… Full Review

Near the end of Seeing Mexico Photographed, Leonard Folgarait names the subject of inquiry that unfurls in his meticulously elaborated study of post-revolutionary Mexico: “photographic thinking” (180). We can say that this meditative book is itself an experiment in such thinking, which the author simultaneously describes and enacts in three distinctive chapters. While the historical period is more or less the same as his important study, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940: Art of the New Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), the methodology and the knowledge produced here represent significant departures from this earlier work… Full Review

In her new book, Empire, Architecture and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914, Zeynep Çelik has taken on a complex and ambitious task: the comparative examination of empire building in two different contexts, the French colonies of North Africa and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. This is a messy, even unruly comparison given the different political structures and geographies involved, complicated further by the uneven resources and disparate structures of the archives on which the project depends, as Çelik herself acknowledges (10). However, Çelik is uniquely positioned to write such a work, given her impressive earlier publications that… Full Review

Rabun Taylor, although he does not claim as much, provides us with a sort of cultural poetics of mirrors and reflection in the Roman world. In other words, he does not offer us another typology or iconography of ancient mirrors (we have those already); nor does he dwell long on ancient thinking about the optics of reflection. Instead, he investigates the place of mirrors and reflection in the Roman imagination—especially their metaphorical use as agents of transformation. The subject requires him to be conversant with both textual sources and artistic depictions of the theme, and Taylor moves back and forth… Full Review

Given its location in Chicago, the Renaissance Society was the perfect venue for Allan Sekula’s Polonia and Other Fables, forty photographs and accompanying texts three years in the making. The exhibition represented a joint commission between the Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw. Polonia refers to Poles living outside their country, and Chicago is host to the largest population outside of Warsaw. For centuries, Poland has been dominated by other nations, by the church, and, as this exhibition showed, by the interests of Western multi-national corporations and the U.S. military-industrial complex. Polish identity perennially… Full Review

Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World defied conventional boundaries of what constitutes “Spanish” art. It was a refreshingly intelligent exhibition, and ideally will set new standards for how the field is studied. It presented the imagery of Catholicism as a common denominator of Spanish identity in Old World and New. The stunning selection of objects was presented in six thematic sections to remind viewers of their original raison d’être: “In Defense of Images,” “True Likeness,” “Moving Images,” “With the Eyes of the Soul,” “Visualizing Sanctity,” and “Living with Images.” Ronda Kasl, Senior Curator of Painting… Full Review