Recently Published Reviews

During the 1880s, George de Forest Brush produced a unique series of paintings of the American Indian. The exhibition George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings, organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Seattle Art Museum, put this series on display, with almost all of Brush’s major Indian paintings shown together for the first time. The paintings are remarkable for their combination of an intense style of French Academic realism and American subject matter. The accompanying catalogue is a collection of five critical essays devoted to the series, with an emphasis on the complex relationship… Full Review

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in twenty-five years of curating shows, I can’t recall a single artist mentioning Greenberg, let alone taking his ideas seriously.” This remark––made by the chief curator of a major U.S. museum of contemporary art during a coffee break at the “Clement Greenberg at 100: Looking Back to Modern Art” symposium––helped me gain some perspective on the event. So did the introduction by the organizers, Miguel de Baca and Prudence Peiffer, graduate students in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, both working on the art of the 1960s. How, then, might they… Full Review

El siglo XIX en el Prado (The Nineteenth Century in the Prado), the hefty catalogue for the exhibition of the same name, documents some ninety-five paintings and twelve sculptures from the Spanish museum. Thoroughly researched and generously illustrated, the catalogue is an important step forward in making the nineteenth-century paintings and sculptures in the Prado collections available for study. Except for Goya, Fortuny, and Sorolla, most of these artists are almost completely unknown outside the Iberian Peninsula. A shortened version of the catalogue, which lacks an essay on the institutional history of the collection as well as a compendium… Full Review

One intellectual consequence of the social and political upheavals of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe was the speculative search for meaningful patterns of historical development. Inspired by lofty notions of the artist as a poet-philosopher, a few exceptional painters joined the effort, producing grandiose schemes of “universal history.” Daniel Guernsey explores this material using four case studies: James Barry’s The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture (1777–1784), the mural cycle that he painted for the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London; Eugène Delacroix’s hemicycle and cupola decorations charting the rise and fall of ancient… Full Review

Comparison stands as one of the central foundations of art history. Well before the Wolfllinian model of left and right slides dominated classroom lectures, writers such as Pliny the Elder told stories of comparison and its more worldly iteration, competition between artists. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of rivalry predominates aesthetic appraisals and theoretical discussions of Italian Renaissance art and artists, giving rise to a critical category referred to as the paragone, or comparison, in which different media, regions, and artists serve as counterpoints. Common dyads in the comparison include painting and sculpture, colore and disegno, Venice and Florence… Full Review

The Saint John's Bible: A Modern Vision through Medieval Methods treated its audience to a journey through a “Bible for the 21st century,” to quote an exhibition wall text. The project is the fruit of a decade-long collaboration undertaken by an international team of master calligraphers and a community of theologians and scholars from Saint John's University and Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. This exhibition was the first to place selected pages from the seven-volume Saint John’s Bible within the broader context of the book arts through time and across world cultures. The 22 bifolio openings displayed here, selected from… Full Review

It is just ten years since Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist from London University, published his Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). It was a small book, animated by a big idea: that recently established neurological facts about vision could go a long way toward explaining how the visual arts work. He suggested, for example, that artists interested in motion tend to paint with a more restricted palette than artists who focus on immobility, and that this tendency arises from the fact that perceptions of color, form, and motion are registered in different… Full Review

In making art, Jimmie Durham sometimes lets his materials do the sculpting. As Encore tranquillité (2008) reveals, the forces he unleashes from seemingly lifeless objects can be startling. The work features an enormous rock settled atop the smashed halves of a small, single-engine airplane. Originally displayed in an old Russian airfield outside of Berlin, it was relocated to the foyer on the second floor of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris as the centerpiece of Rejected Stones, a major exhibition of Durham’s “European” works from the past sixteen years. The piece also made an appearance on… Full Review

There are few works of art produced in the United States since the Second World War that have experienced a more uneven and generally unusual reception than The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria of 1977. Alongside Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), The Lightning Field iconically defines the type of large, site-specific Earthwork characteristic of Land Art’s critical and popular ascension in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet despite its centrality to the formation of Land Art, critics and scholars treat The Lightning Field more often as a splashy illustration for book jackets and magazine… Full Review

Kenneth Bendiner’s Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present presents a novel survey of food imagery in many guises—as still life; market, kitchen, and genre scenes; abstractions; and even landscapes. Covering art from the past six centuries in the West, he emphasizes paintings, while including a few works in other media (manuscripts, fresco, watercolor, and sculpture). The well-chosen illustrations—ranging from the Limbourg Brothers’ January (1413–16) in the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, to two examples from 1996 by Wim Delvoye and Damien Hirst (Susan, Out for a Pizza—Back in Five Minutes—George and This Little… Full Review

How did the concept of “Anti-Art” arise in the context of postwar Japan, and what problems did it address in the postwar art world? The postwar period in Japan was a time of intense debate and speculation; this included a search for terms describing new art practices that stepped outside established genres such as painting and sculpture. Artists brought artworks out of private spaces and into everyday places such as city streets, trains, and parks. In a 1966 letter to the editor of the Dokusho Shinbun (Reading Newspaper), the artist Jirō Takamatsu identified a shift in the relationship between art… Full Review

The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam is a beautifully mapped journey. Visual metaphors for travel abound in the expansive design and double-page color layouts reproducing the spaces and social relations synonymous with the train: crowded stations, private compartments, tourist spectacles, conquest narratives. Interspersed throughout the book are eye-filling details that mirror the fragmented, mobilized gaze of the traveler. The text includes a generous selection of paintings, some well known, others not. But it is the wealth of posters, photographs, and prints that convey the economic ties between the railway industry, mechanical reproduction, and visual consumption. Together, the book’s… Full Review

Writing in the aftermath of the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight remarked that, “America’s favorite pastime (after baseball) is to periodically flirt with the strangling embrace of the loyalty oath” (Last Chance for Eden, Los Angeles: Art Issues. Press, 1995). In Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles, historian Sara Schrank documents the role of visual art in provoking such reactionary political forces throughout the history of twentieth-century Los Angeles. She locates moments when artists and progressive arts professionals challenged the… Full Review

In his introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Paint Made Flesh, curator Mark Scala writes that the show seeks to trace a history of “the depicted body as a metaphor for the relationship between self and society as it has changed throughout the decades following World War II” (1). It does so admirably, if incompletely, and without making the recalibrations to larger understandings of postwar painting that seem to be its latent promise. As such, it is an exhibition both wildly pleasurable and quietly frustrating, leaving viewers with the sense that the magnificent group of works is something… Full Review

In 1927, a horrible flood debilitated an enormous swath of land flanking the Mississippi River, reaching from southern Missouri down through Louisiana and into the Delta, causing almost $125 million in damage. Thirteen years later, Life magazine commissioned the Regionalist artist John Steuart Curry to depict a scene in which then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover witnesses and oversees the government’s rescue efforts on the banks of the deluged Mississippi. The magazine reproduced the over five-feet-wide painting on May 6, 1942, as part of its Modern American History series, which had previously punctuated important historical events with illustrations of works by… Full Review