Recently Published Reviews

The exhibition Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT demonstrates a renewed validity for the artist's LED signs, which have long been considered canonical to both contemporary art and feminist discourses. Having made these electronic installations for more than twenty-five years, Holzer seemingly predicted the appearance of the ubiquitous ticker that now streams constantly at the base of television and computer screens. She recognized early on that electronic technology was a crucial site of viewing. The means of delivering information has taken on a whole new significance since the invention of the internet and 9/11. For the exhibition's stop at the Museum of… Full Review

In her rigorous, provocative study, Anna Green engages the issues of modernism, modernity, and spectacle in later nineteenth-century Paris. Approaching the subject from the perspective of a social historian, she draws upon the writings of Charles Baudelaire and anchors her text in the theories of Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, and T. J. Clark. Paintings by Édouard Manet appear throughout the book, and his is often the gaze through which modernity is seen. However, if some of the components of Green’s book sound familiar, it is clear from the beginning that she has taken an original tack… Full Review

The fifteen papers collected in this book were presented at a conference in honor of Walter Cahn at the Index of Christian Art, Princeton, in 2007. As Colum Hourihane notes in his introduction, the term “Romanesque” is fraught with difficulties, and one of the themes that runs through many of the papers is a questioning of just what constitutes Romanesque style. As is usually the case with collections of this kind, however, there is no unifying theme to the volume other than the contributors’ attempts to address the subjects and questions that have been central to Cahn’s work. The… Full Review

In July of 1774, Captain James Cook arrived back in London from his second voyage. With him was a man named Mai, a native of an island called Raiatea in the South Pacific. Cook’s intention was to showcase a human souvenir—a live specimen—who would help the British understand the exotic nature of his circumnavigation. Mai remained in England for two years and returned to the South Pacific in 1776. While in England, he sat for portraits and became a national curiosity. Harriet Guest, in her book about the visual culture that attended Cook’s voyages, quotes Westminster Magazine, which claimed… Full Review

Two related projects are combined in Michael Fried’s well-observed, conceptually ambitious, and beautifully written new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. First, the text presents a formal and theoretical justification of tableau photography since the late 1970s, arguing that the large-scale art photography of Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Luc Delahaye, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rineke Dijkstra, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Candida Höfer, Thomas Demand, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, among others, constitutes a significant trajectory within contemporary art. Second, Fried puts forward an important reevaluation of his own critical and historical account… Full Review

No other museum in the world can match the British Museum for its incomparable collection of ancient Greek architectural sculpture. While the Elgin Marbles are its best known acquisition, it also showcases sculpture from two of the “wonders” of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos and the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, as well as that of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae and the Nereid Monument from Lycia. And who better to assemble and analyze these famous and influential monuments in a single volume than Ian Jenkins, who has been on the curatorial staff of the British Museum… Full Review

For art historians a seemingly incongruous incident can sometimes trigger fresh thinking about what had seemed a familiar historical landscape. Such was the impetus for this study by Christopher Wood: a curious, late fifteenth-century case of apparently bungled connoisseurship. When Conrad Celtis, the celebrated German poet laureate, historian, and antiquarian, discovered a group of over-life-sized sculptures of draped, bearded men at a monastery in the wilderness near Regensburg, he published his find as representations of ancient Druid priests. Druids, however, were never a presence in Germany, and Celtis must have known that these sculptures actually represented medieval Christian apostles and… Full Review

In the opening sentence of her book, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age, Mia Mochizuki reminds us that we often see what we expect to see; consequently, we often readily overlook the unexpected, even when it is right in front of us. The decoration of Dutch Reformed churches, for instance, is typically viewed merely in terms of iconoclastic negation, leaving existing Protestant imagery unnoticed. Although numerous Catholic objects were destroyed in the Protestant war against idols, this did not stop Calvinists from generating new ecclesiastical images, ones that they could call their… Full Review

In Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, Michaela Giebelhausen charts the transformations of religious painting and the “troubled emergence of a unique form of naturalistic religious painting” (2) between the 1840s and the 1860s. Her analysis draws on two types of Victorian text: theories of history painting and biblical criticism. Both were marked by substantial controversies in the decades under investigation and ultimately circled around one unsettling question: What is the nature and reality of the divine? At stake was the very essence of Christianity, and the debates were accordingly fierce. In the battle over the… Full Review

The exhibition The Dragon’s Gift: Sacred Arts of Bhutan features emerging curatorial trends with regard to premodern Asian art, and displays a wealth of treasures from a little-known Himalayan kingdom on the northeastern border of India. Bronze Buddhas, thangkas of wrathful deities, footage of live performance, monks busy at their prayers, Buddhist lineage portraits, and gigantic textiles are just some of the multi-media experiences the show presents. From the only independent Vajrayana Buddhist kingdom in the world—a place where the GHP (Gross Happiness Product) officially replaces the GNP (Gross National Product)—an impressive array of objects from Bhutan are journeying throughout… Full Review

This fall, the battleground states of New Hampshire and Ohio each enlisted an Andy Warhol that was more man than machine and more substance than image to grapple with life and politics at the end of the Bush era. The Warhols on display in Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at the Currier Museum and in Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Wexner Center combine the nuances of mass media with the traditions of graphic arts and painting to delve into personal and public life in the second half of the twentieth century. The Currier exhibition, curated by Sharon Matt… Full Review

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body was an attractive and smart show. The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, its second venue of three, offered a stunning introduction to the galleries from its entrance balcony where Allison Saar’s 2006 Cache—a life-sized, tin-clad nude figure in a fetal position held in place by a giant ball of wire—was draped across the floor beneath Baby Back, Renée Cox’s oversized blackout C-print self-portrait as a dominatrix odalisque from 2001. The two works engaged in a shrill dialogue that teetered between tongue-in-cheek humor and slap-in-the-face confrontation… Full Review

How should we identify our period style? Twenty years ago, that question would have been easy to answer: we are postmodernists. But these days postmodernism is finished—whether because too many competing commentators killed the concept, or because it was too closely linked to modernism, or because we in the early twenty-first century require our own period style. And so the goal of the sequence of essays given at a University of Pittsburgh-sponsored conference during the 2004 Carnegie International and collected in Antinomies of Art and Culture is to offer a way of identifying the characteristic features of art made today… Full Review

“I do like to hit the nerves,” painter Peter Saul confesses. Yes, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it when he does. In the past, whenever I encountered Saul’s paintings—unmistakable with their garish, artificially hot colors and repellant imagery—I quickly withdrew from this frontal assault on my sensibilities. As it turns out, I was shortchanging myself. I rescinded my snap judgments after seeing the first major U.S. survey of Saul’s paintings and drawings from the early 1960s to the present, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and guest curator Dan Cameron. I caught up… Full Review

Most historians of Japanese art are likely familiar with the generous exhibition and publication grants given by the Blakemore Foundation. Older print scholars and collectors may have shopped in the 1960s and 1970s at the Franell Gallery in Tokyo, or used the book Who’s Who in Modern Japanese Prints, published by Weatherhill in 1975. Some may have heard that the person behind these diverse enterprises was a woman named Frances Blakemore. Before the publication of Michiyo Morioka’s biography, however, it is unlikely that anyone knew much about the fascinating life and artistic career of Frances Wismer Baker Blakemore (1906–1997)… Full Review