Recently Published Reviews

Engraving has long been part and parcel of the European enterprise of ethnographic knowledge. Indeed, the discovery of the Americas occurred within decades of the development of copper-plate engraving. By the late sixteenth-century, engraving was one of several technologies that Europeans saw as distinguishing themselves from New World “savages,” precisely because these technologies enabled Europeans to acquire a grasp on the world that Native peoples seemingly could not achieve. In turn, these technologies, especially those associated with exploration, fostered the creation of new forms of knowledge, most notably accounts of the lives and customs of Native North Americans, a discipline… Full Review

With the International Polar Year (March 2007–March 2008) and centennial celebrations of the Robert E. Peary and Robert R. Scott expeditions, we are experiencing a new age of polar exploration. The Arctic and Antarctica are now at the center of global concerns about energy and the environment, with visual images—photographs of submersible vessels planting a Russian flag on the North Pole seabed and polar bears floating on ever decreasing ice floes—serving as powerful icons. Contemporary environmental and Native artists have also turned to this region, as documented in two recent exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Portland Museum… Full Review

The Chartreuse de Champmol is known to students of the fifteenth century as the burial mausoleum of the Valois Burgundian dukes and the location of such famous works as Claus Sluter’s Well of Moses, naturalistic portal sculptures of Margaret of Flanders and Philip the Bold, and Philip the Bold’s tomb with its pleurants. There has been renewed interest in both these individual works and the monument as a whole in the past decade, spurred by the recent Paris-Cleveland show Art from the Court of Burgundy (2004–5) and publications by Renate Prochno, Susie Nash, and Sherry Lindquist among others… Full Review

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions brought to New York City about forty paintings by Nicolas Poussin, along with a group of drawings by the artist and some of his contemporaries, for a superb exhibition devoted to an aspect of his work better known to specialists than the general public.[1] Beautifully paced and hung, the exhibition was large enough to do justice to the subject without being overwhelming. A group of mainly small paintings from Poussin’s early years in Rome filled the first two rooms, and introduced the theme with his first experiments and successes in landscape painting. The visitor could… Full Review

Virtually unknown before 2004, the Macclesfield Psalter has since emerged as a key work for the study of East Anglian book painting of the first half of the fourteenth century. Named for the Earls of Macclesfield in whose library at Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire, it had been housed, the manuscript was auctioned as lot 587 at Sotheby’s on June 22 of that year and was initially purchased for the department of manuscripts at the Getty Museum. It was subsequently prevented from exportation by the Minister of Culture and was purchased by the Fitzwilliam Museum in February of 2005, where it is… Full Review

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