Recently Published Reviews

Thought-provoking and intriguing, The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900, seen by this reviewer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, is the kind of exhibition museums should organize more often. It is primarily a works-on-paper show, featuring around one hundred prints, three drawings, four illustrated books, and ten sculptures. Including objects made during the last half of the nineteenth century, this display presents a broad range of artists: the French Rodolphe Bresdin, the Belgian James Ensor, the Swedish Anders Zorn, and the German Käthe Kollwitz to name only a few. Although this show proves… Full Review

Historically the book has served as a locus for the interaction of disparate forces. Dimensionally complex, it has been a place where material, cultural, structural, philosophical, temporal, mechanical, and aesthetic elements can encounter, react, assert, concede, proselytize, and reconcile. That the poet Charles Baudelaire can compare himself to a beggar nourishing his vermin while doing so in formal alexandrine meter, that the book can act in one moment as a container of authority and in the next as an agitator for change merely illustrate the interplay of forces at work within the book form. What makes artists’ books different… Full Review

Artists’ books are a strange genre in contemporary art, hovering between several different disciplines and having multiple histories. One of the persistent arguments in the field concerns the definition of an artist’s book. A reductive form of this argument might be: is it a craft practice or is it some kind of conceptual art form? Arguing definitions in the abstract is a fruitless and pointless activity, but examining the work of specific artists is rewarding and informative. The publication of a catalogue of work produced at the Visual Studies Workshop Press presents an opportunity to consider a diverse range of… Full Review

Over the last two decades much important research has been done on Spanish portraiture of the early modern period and court portraiture in particular. A feature of this research has been its interdisciplinary approach, such as Juan Miguel Serrera’s seminal essay on the uses of portraiture (“Alonso Sánchez Coello y la mecánica del retrato de corte,” in Alonso Sánchez Coello, exh. cat., Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 1990, 38–63) and Javier Portús Pérez’s groundbreaking publications on the representation of art and artists in the literature of the Golden Age (see, for example, Pintura y pensamiento en la España de… Full Review

Anyone who has ever wondered why and how representations of the human nude became so central to Renaissance and post-Renaissance Western art will derive great pleasure from this catalogue, which documents an exhibition of fifty-six drawings from the impressive collection of the Crocker Art Museum. The works splendidly demonstrate the skillful use of pen-and-ink and wash techniques as well as combinations of black, red, and white chalks, most by renowned artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacques-Louis David, and Albrecht Dürer, along with masterly works by less familiar artists. Its numerous high-quality reproductions, informative essays, and catalogue entries for each… Full Review

Lori Boornazian Diel’s study of the colonial Mexican manuscript known as the Tira de Tepechpan is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly literature examining colonial historical documents, both pictorial and textual. The Tira de Tepechpan is an annals-style manuscript documenting the history and ruling lineage of the central Mexican town of Tepechpan. It was probably begun around 1553 and its imagery completed ca. 1590/96, with written annotations in Nahuatl added at an unknown time. Its various contributors organized the historical information along a continuous line of year dates taken from the fifty-two-year Mexican calendar. The manuscript, which… Full Review

Over the past twenty years or so, Paul Gauguin’s imagery has drawn a good deal of interest from scholars who have analyzed it from feminist, post-colonial, and socio-historical perspectives. Taken together, the contributions of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Griselda Pollock, and Stephen Eisenman have deepened our understanding of the ways in which Gauguin operated uneasily within Western, patriarchal, imperialist norms and structures. For her part, Debora Silverman has anchored his work in nineteenth-century Catholic theology and visual culture (Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” Art in America 77 [July 1989]: 119–128, 161; Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Color of Art History… Full Review

On July 25, 2009, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) in Minneapolis held its first ever Book Art Biennial. Consisting of a speaker, two panels, several exhibitions, and the awarding of the inaugural MCBA Prize, the biennial brought together book artists and advocates in an intimate environment to share their ideas about the efficacy of artists' books as agents of social change and tools of activism. John Risseeuw opened the conference with a keynote address entitled “John Risseeuw: Making a Difference?” Well known for his socially and politically conscious artworks, including his Paper Landmine Print Project (2002), Risseeuw… Full Review

Those unfamiliar with earlier publications by Jérôme Baschet, a member of the Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, might well approach this modest little paperback in expectation of a useful but uninspiring handbook devoted to the matching of written text and visual image. Defined by Erwin Panofsky as preliminary to the true interpretation of meaning, iconography has too often been conceived in practice as a matter of identification and description; more recently, it has slipped out of favor with the advent of interpretive models that liberate the image from passive dependence… Full Review

“Both at the moment of the Revolution and long after its official end,” writes Trish Loughran in The Republic in Print, “the challenge posed by national dispersion would be the most recurrent problem in American political economy” (62). The “United States” had to be constructed as a self-evident, self-identical entity during precisely the period that its populations were dispersing most rapidly over a vast geographical space. How did anything like unity—rhetorical or actual—emerge from conditions characterized primarily by difference, distance, delay, and displacement? Standard accounts of print culture in the early national period stress the role of print as… Full Review

In his historiographic essay “American Histories of Photography,” Anthony Lee claims that the photographic field is “mercurial and eclectic” in both “interests and methods.” This happens, he asserts, “partly because its subject has continually proved to be a moving target . . . and partly because the contours of photography’s multiple histories have touched on so many areas of inquiry—aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and more. For these and other reasons, the American history of photography is and always was a hybrid affair, pillaging its questions and attitudes from many sources in an effort to get hold of its subject” (Anthony W… Full Review

For decades, the art of the northern Netherlands has received far less attention than that of its southern counterpart. Even the study of early Netherlandish painting has focused almost exclusively on visual imagery produced in Flanders or by Flemish artists. A new trend, however, seems to be emerging. In 2008, the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam held a major exhibition, Vroege Hollanders, focusing on late fifteenth-century Dutch painting. The last exhibition devoted to this imagery, Middeleeuwse kunst der Noordelijke Nederlanden, had occurred in 1958. John Decker’s The Technology of Salvation and the Art of Geertgen tot… Full Review

The postcard reproduction of John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888) is a perennial bestseller at the Tate Britain gift shop. This popularity mirrors Victorian public response to the artist’s work, which was greeted with acclaim at the Royal Academy throughout the late nineteenth century. In the intervening years, however, Waterhouse's popular appeal has become divorced from artistic and scholarly opinion, and there has been little academic attention paid to his painting or his continued popularity. It is now his turn to be rescued from this critical oblivion by the rising tide of scholarly reappraisal of Victorian and Academic… Full Review

The twenty-first-century visitor to the gardens of Versailles has at least one thing in common with Louis XIV, the Bourbon king of France responsible for their creation in the third and fourth quarters of the seventeenth century: Upon leaving the chateau and proceeding into the gardens, one is unclear which route along the alleés and through the bosquets is optimal for experiencing the essence of the park. As Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin establish in Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV, the king himself was of many minds regarding how best to visit… Full Review

Images in Spite of All is devoted to four images, specifically, the only four of the one-and-a-half million surviving photographs of the Nazi camps to depict the actual process of mass killing. Shot within and immediately outside the gas chambers at Auschwitz’s crematorium V, the images show naked women prisoners herded into the gas chambers and the mass cremation of corpses. Smuggled out of Auschwitz by the Polish resistance, the photographs were taken under the most extreme conditions of prohibition by members of the Sonderkommando, the special squad of prisoners compelled in the face of their own impending death to… Full Review