Recently Published Reviews

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

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