Recently Published Reviews

This dual retrospective of Mira Schendel (Brazilian, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988) and Léon Ferrari (Argentine, b. 1920) was without a doubt a major contribution to the expanding canon of experimental art from the sixties. Spanning Schendel’s career from the late 1950s through the late 1980s and Ferrari’s production from the late 1950s through 2007, the two hundred pieces in a variety of media, but predominantly on paper, assembled in the exhibition and exquisitely installed by MoMA curator Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas pleased non-specialized audiences as well as connoisseurs. Upon entering the Renne de Harnoncourt galleries of the museum, viewers could see a… Full Review

Judith Ostrowitz’s first book, Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), took as its subject the complex relationships to tradition maintained by contemporary native artists in the Pacific Northwest as they produce new artworks for a multicultural audience. Ostrowitz’s second book, Interventions: Native American Art for Far-flung Territories, pursues the related question of how contemporary native artists situate their work in global venues (which are by definition cross-cultural) and how contemporary native artists mediate between local tribal demands for the protection of indigenous knowledge and cultural property and the ravenous hunger… Full Review

A statue of Sir Hans Sloane stands at the center of London’s Chelsea Physic Garden where all variety of plants vie for attention. Sloane demonstrated his talent for gathering specimens (like those over which his statue presides) in his resplendently detailed title, Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles Etc. of the Last of those Islands (vol.1 ,1707; vol. 2, 1725) which serves as both travel log and visual natural history, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century desire to index the world… Full Review

How do artists depict the act of looking or listening, even when the object of attention is not visible in the image? What does the experience of beauty, both seen and heard, look like? And how does the image convey the aesthetic experience of the artist’s subject to the beholder? These questions were the subject of an interdisciplinary course held at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007 that culminated in an exhibition and catalogue of prints, paintings, drawings, sculpture, and music from nineteenth-century France. The catalogue includes a preface by Anthony Hirschel, director of the Smart Museum… Full Review

Although the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) may be among the most appreciated (and reproduced) images in Japanese art, rarely have they been treated with the care and attention exhibited in Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo by Melanie Trede and Lorenz Bichler in a masterful production by Taschen. The subject is Hiroshige’s well-known set, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei ), dating from 1856 to 1858. The volume opens with an essay by Trede setting the period context, purpose, and reception of the prints, and is followed with illustrations and descriptions by Trede and… Full Review

In the opening pages of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960, Bill Anthes describes in no uncertain terms the contribution he expects the book to make to the field of twentieth-century art scholarship: he asserts that, though the study focuses on American Indian painting in the immediate postwar period, his is “not merely a recovery project with the goal of adding a few neglected figures to the canon of American modernism.” Rather, he insists that “bringing Native American modernism to the foreground rewrites the canon and the key terms of American modernism” (xiii). Over the course of six chapters… Full Review

Artists figure conspicuously among Honoré de Balzac’s characters. The maniacal Frenhofer and fatally naive Sarrasine may be the most familiar to art historians, though painters and sculptors play key roles in several of the stories and novels that comprise La Comédie humaine. Some of these characters, like Joseph Bridau and Wenceslas Steinbock, recur, their lives and artworks contributing in important ways to Balzac’s morally ambiguous tales of post-Revolutionary France. It is as metaphorical counterparts to the artifice of contemporary society that Diana Knight positions these narratives of artistic identity and creative expression. The ability of artworks to seduce, deceive… Full Review

It is still rare for electronic publications in art history to be reviewed in the same venues as print media, in spite of the fact that more and more scholars are publishing online as a solution to the crisis in academic publishing. It is a crisis that disproportionately affects art history—due to the legalities and expenses involved in reproducing images—and medieval art history even more, as a result of the unimaginative assumptions about the marginality of the Middle Ages to twenty-first century concerns. It is fitting and heartening, therefore, that caa.reviews has begun to note the appearance of significant e-publications… Full Review

Guardians of Republicanism, a masterful examination of the political life of the Valori family of Florence as it was recounted in Florentine historiography, is as much a story of historiographic record as it is one of family memory. Mark Jurdjevic presents the Valori as at once emblematic of the complicated political negotiation pursued by Florentine oligarchic families and distinctive in their long-lived adherence to a “hybrid form of republicanism that insisted upon the compatibility” of the humanistic ideas of Marsilio Ficino with the Christian reforms of Girolamo Savonarola even into the seventeenth century (9). According to Jurdjevic, the Valori… Full Review

What are the terms of seeing and believing? Or more specifically, how do pictures shape and direct religious faith? Kristin Schwain takes up these questions in Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age, focusing on four different American artists—Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner, F. (Fred) Holland Day, and Abbott Handerson Thayer—and explaining how they "drew on religious beliefs and practices to explore new relationships between viewers and objects, and how beholders looked to art to experience transcendence and save their souls" (2). As Schwain persuasively argues, each not only repeatedly engaged with the prevalent religious… Full Review

In Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, Alan Braddock examines how dominant period concepts about cultural difference shaped the late Victorian American painter’s work. During his excavation of this complex body of thought, Braddock digs deep into the history of ideas, beneath the more familiar strata of modern anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas early in the last century. Unlike the cultural relativism of Boas and his many famous students at Columbia, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, this older intellectual tradition depended heavily on social evolutionist discourse and biological models to account for cultural forms considered specific to… Full Review

At first glance, the “three founding texts” arrayed in Modern Swedish Design seem oddly matched. “Beauty in the Home” was first published by feminist and educational theorist Ellen Key in the Christmas, 1897, number of a magazine for women. Art historian Gregor Paulsson’s Better Things for Everyday Life (1919) is a self-described work of “propaganda” addressed to designers, manufacturers, and retailers. And the cryptically titled photo-essay, acceptera (1931)—a work usually described as Sweden’s “modernist manifesto”—was published by Paulsson along with a team of prominent architects: Gunnar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Sven Markelius, Eskil Sundahl, and Uno Åhrén. Despite the thematic and… Full Review

With two independent exhibitions in 2008 devoted to the Baroque portrait bust—Heads on Shoulders: Portrait Busts in the Low Countries, 1600–1800, at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; and Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Canada—the genre of early modern portrait sculpture celebrated an unparalleled year. There has never been a specialized exhibition of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s portrait busts. For logistical and economic reasons, shows featuring early modern European sculpture, let alone portrait busts, are rare. Even more exceptional is their exhibition in… Full Review

For more than eight decades, scholarly interest in the Burgundian abbey of Cluny has focused on the first 250 years of the monastery’s history, from its founding in 910 on the site of what had once been a Roman villa through the reign of its influential twelfth-century abbot Peter the Venerable (d. 1156). It is thus intriguing to find Janet Marquardt focusing instead on aspects of the abbey’s demise and recovery during the restoration of France’s monumental heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has made an interesting and overdue choice, one that positions Cluny in a newer narrative… Full Review

In 1987, when the first volume (Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean) of the History of Cartography series was published, the study of maps was a much different field than it is today. At the biennial International Conference on the History of Cartography, organized by the map-history journal Imago Mundi, presentations by dealers, collectors, and specialists in geography far outnumbered those from scholars in the humanities. The relationship between art history and mapmaking was only beginning to be seriously explored, most notably by Juergen Schulz (“Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making… Full Review