Recently Published Reviews

Bruce Nauman’s masterful Topological Gardens, which was the United States entry in the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale de Venezia, not surprisingly won the Golden Lion Award for best national pavilion. Breaking from most previous U.S. exhibitions at the biennale, Nauman’s amounts to a not-so-mini-survey and is spread, also uncharacteristically, over three venues—the United States Pavilion in the Giardini, the Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, and the Università Ca’ Foscari, the latter two being the sites, respectively, of Days and Giorni, a pair of new sound installations. Also at Ca' Foscari is Untitled (1970/2009), a videotaped re-interpretation… Full Review

Carole Paul’s The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour is an analysis of the shifting attitudes toward collection and display—form, content, and contexts—in the world of Settecento Rome. With a focus on the Borghese’s Galleria Terrena, the suites where most of the family’s paintings hung, and the Casino Nobile, home to the sculptures, Paul examines the interrelated narratives of aristocratic patronage, grand tour sociability, the international aesthetic landscape, and the development of museums. Her arguments rest on a detailed reading of the redesign of the Borghese galleries under Prince Marcantonio Borghese IV… Full Review

In the introduction to African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present, Celeste-Marie Bernier positions her study in relation to a widely recognized problem within African American art history and criticism: In my view, far too many critics celebrate African American artists solely for their ability to survive political disenfranchisement, racist brutality and cultural annihilation, rather than for the ground-breaking formal qualities and aesthetic properties of their art. Traditionally in African American art criticism, artistic issues have been discounted in favour of their sociological, biographical and historical implications. Similarly, attempts by scholars to define a black… Full Review

For this exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, assembled over 130 works by more than 100 artists to present the first large-scale exhibition of artists’ books in Los Angeles since 1978. But To Illustrate and Multiply was not a historical survey of artists’ books. Despite the expanse of works included, the exhibition was decidedly contemporary in scope—the earliest book on view was Ray Johnson’s The Paper Snake from 1965, and many of the books presented were created even more recently. This is not to say that the exhibition failed to provide an important perspective onto the history… Full Review

So often our preliminary encounter with an exhibition sets our expectations and attitude about the work. This is particularly true for shows where that initial encounter occurs prior to actually seeing the art. My introduction to William Kentridge: Five Themes at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was very much influenced by hearing muffled music as I walked through the galleries of works on paper that were part of the exhibition’s first section, “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio.” Haunting and somewhat melodramatic, the alluring sound (by Phillip Miller) materialized as accompaniment to Kentridge’s multi-screen installation, 7 Fragments for… Full Review

When Pop art emerged in the early 1960s it was greeted by both its critics and its defenders as a celebration of the various facets of popular American culture featured in the works themselves. By the end of the decade, however, some critics and historians were already arguing against the hegemonic view of the movement by claiming that certain of its practitioners, at least, were using popular subjects and styles to challenge mainstream cultural values. Michael Lobel’s monograph on the early work of James Rosenquist is the latest addition to that ongoing scholarly current. Since its exhibition in… Full Review

The Japanese term surimono refers to privately commissioned prints intended for circulation to a limited group of individuals in connection with some special occasion or significant event. As such, they reflected the interests of the groups to which they were sent, and they almost always differed in distinctive ways from contemporary commercial prints put out by the same publishers. There are a number of features that set them apart. One is the expensive pigments and meticulous techniques employed in their printing. Another is that most—though not absolutely all—bear poetic inscriptions. This is a feature that surimono share with numerous earlier… Full Review

This past winter and spring, the Williams College Art Museum mounted two photography shows based on work from its own collection. The first, Beyond the Familiar, was the more survey-like and pedagogical (with several Williams graduate students serving as curators), bringing together 12 photographers with samples from their most signature projects, about 120 pictures in all. The pictures and photographers come from widely different places and times: Felice Beato’s Views of Japan, Edward Curtis’s pictures of Native Americans, and P. H. Emerson’s Pictures of East Anglian Life, representing work from the nineteenth century; August Sander’s People of… Full Review

Alison Stewart has a bone to pick with both academic publishers and art-historical scholarship. Although scholarly research demonstrates that painting in the first half of the sixteenth century was one among many artistic media, such as woodblock prints, tapestry, stained glass, metalwork, etc., art historians and publishing houses distinguish painting from the other arts and give preference to it, following an inclination that did not exist in the early modern period. For example, Stewart claims that one could easily deduce from modern literature that Pieter Bruegel the Elder invented the theme of peasant festivities. Bruegel’s paintings of peasants are taken… Full Review

The brilliant women of this book’s title were the remarkable writers and artists in eighteenth-century England known as bluestockings, a name first applied to both sexes for the blue worsted stockings worn by a gentleman who attended the literary salon hosted by Elizabeth Montagu, one of the original bluestockings. By the 1770s, however, the term was associated specifically with intellectual women. Co-authors Elizabeth Eger, lecturer in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature at King’s College London, and Lucy Peltz, eighteenth-century curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, produced this attractive volume to accompany the exhibition of the same name. The book traces… Full Review

Until recently, those wishing to study St. Peter’s, arguably the most important Catholic church in the world, would have had to fill a bookcase with publications in various languages to encompass its long and complicated history. In 2000, a four-volume work appeared in English and Italian editions that provided one of the first major syntheses: St. Peter’s in the Vatican, edited by Antonio Pinelli (Modena: Pannini Editore), is comprised by two text volumes (one of essays and a second with entries) and two volumes of color photographs of each and every corner of New St. Peter’s. With its emphasis… Full Review

The workshops of Aphrodisias and their products have long held an important place in the study of the sculpture and statuary of Roman Asia Minor. The ongoing excavations at this site have yielded many fine examples of relief and freestanding sculpture, some of which have been published previously in preliminary reports. R. R. R. Smith and his collaborators have produced the second major publication of Aphrodisian sculpture (after R. R. R. Smith, Aphrodisias I, The Monument of C. Julius Zoilos, Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 1993). This volume, which covers work excavated through 2004 and includes both previously… Full Review

Debates over cultural patrimony and the ownership of ancient art make headlines today. Margaret Miles’s Art as Plunder reminds readers that this was also the case in late Republican Rome. Her book promises to explore “the origins of art as cultural property and the competing claims that arise when it is seized, appropriated, and collected by a stronger authority” (1). Miles investigates ancient attitudes and expectations about loot, ranging from the Sumerian period to the early Byzantine era, with special attention to those articulated by Cicero in his Verrine orations. But that’s not all. Turning to the modern reception of… Full Review

Performance, which can be generically described as the enactment of a ceremony, ritual, play, or work of music, dance, or visual art, has only recently been explored as an interpretive framework in medieval studies. Tracing its origins to research undertaken in the 1940s and 1950s, performance theory crystallized as a distinctive interdisciplinary field in the 1980s and 1990s, encompassing anthropology, art history, communication arts, critical gender studies, ethnic studies, film studies, linguistics, literature, and theater studies. Although performance can be construed as adhering to an orderly structure, recent scholarship has emphasized its liminality, its capacity to cross boundaries and resist… Full Review

Mounted by the Petit Palais in collaboration with the City of Paris’s Musée de la Vie Romantique, William Blake: The Visionary Genius of English Romanticism—featuring over 150 works borrowed from major British collections, the Louvre, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others—was the first French retrospective devoted to Blake since 1947. This overdue exhibition was expansive and thorough, if not inspirational; it was beautifully installed in the Petit Palais’s well-appointed special exhibition rooms, but the roughly thematic groupings were at times opaque or barely articulated. Arguably, Blake is as much a poet as a visual artist, and… Full Review