Recently Published Reviews

In January 1902, the German art dealer Paul Cassirer, a major proponent of Berlin Secession artists, as well as the conduit through which French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism gained currency in Germany, presented a show at his Berlin gallery (Galerie Paul Cassirer) in which he juxtaposed two highly original yet antithetical artists. Both artists were rather unknown at the time, but one-half of this visionary curatorial diptych would become a household name, instantly recognizable for his bold colors, thick brushwork, and troubled life. The other artist would gain little recognition and appreciation outside of the German-speaking world for much of his… Full Review

Among contemporary art ceramists and potters in various countries, there are few who are unfamiliar with the ceramics technique known as “raku.” This method of custom-firing pieces at low temperatures gained popularity in Europe and the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century, and today raku kilns are a common fixture at university and art-school ceramics programs around the world. While most makers of raku ceramics are aware that “raku” is a term that originated in Japan, they use the firing technique in ways that owe little to Asian traditions. As a result, Western raku bears faint… Full Review

Multi-authored volumes seem to be rather difficult to publish these days, and yet they can be among the most important resources for scholars and students alike. The Artist as Professional in Japan is one such volume. The series of essays in this book consists of individual case studies, ranging in time from the seventh century to the twentieth, and covering the fields of sculpture, painting, pottery, printmaking, and architecture. The authors tackle a variety of questions pertinent to the idea of artist as professional: How did producers of art conduct their business? How did they learn their art and/or become… Full Review

In her recent career survey organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, Tara Donovan creates ethereal, environmental sculptures out of such banal, everyday objects as toothpicks, Scotch tape, Mylar, and plastic cups. Working with one material at a time, and testing the range of its physical properties, Donovan subverts the utilitarian function of an object through a process of accumulation. In the seventeen works on view from the past decade, she stacks, piles, or otherwise masses her material to explore its latent sculptural capabilities, all the while turning mundane matter into the stuff of high art. When I… Full Review

In almost every sense, the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy and the accompanying catalogue are retrospective. First, they include many objects that were acquired by collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century, during an earlier period of interest in the history of private life. Second, they draw upon and summarize four recent decades of historical and art-historical scholarship focused on the family life of Renaissance Italians and the material objects that accompanied them through its various stages. Finally, they look back at those Renaissance Italians themselves and try to explain how they understood love (both sacred and… Full Review

Vézelay, with its astonishing triple portal, luminous interior, and exquisitely carved, inventive capitals is a monument that all historians of medieval art must address at some point in their careers, whether as students, teachers, or researchers. It is a challenging and difficult subject. In The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay, Kirk Ambrose offers a reconsideration of the 135 nave capitals, less studied than the portal sculpture in part because of the problems they pose. The capitals vividly represent subjects from the Old Testament, saints’ lives, and classical poetry, but many subjects cannot be firmly identified. Furthermore, for all the care… Full Review

Elizabeth Saxon’s The Eucharist in Romanesque France is strikingly ambitious. A study of eucharistic theology and devotion in eleventh- and twelfth-century “France” (up to approximately 1160), it simultaneously aspires to be a survey, in the spirit of Emile Mâle’s great overviews, of relevant contemporary iconography—drawn primarily from monumental sculpture, in Saxon’s case, but also on occasion from frescoes and manuscript illumination. As Saxon states in her introduction, her aim is “to juxtapose aspects of the multi-faceted penitential-eucharistic devotion, as revealed in theological writings and Mass commentaries, in Gregorian reform, in heretical circles both clerical and popular and in works of… Full Review

The exhibition Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan and its accompanying catalogue constitute a landmark in the study of Japanese art. The paintings displayed at the Japan Society Gallery were of both high quality and significance, and the catalogue essays are all of permanent importance and will be required reading for those interested in Japanese art history. The catalogue begins with an essay entitled "Patriarchs Heading West: An Introduction," written by the exhibition’s curators, Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit. In it, they offer historiographical observations and delineate some of the interpretative methodologies that will be developed in the… Full Review

Many art historians are familiar with the work produced in India during the period of Mughal rule (1526–1857). All surveys of world art illustrate the Taj Mahal, the stunning tomb commissioned by the emperor Shah Jahan for his wife on the bank of the Yamuna River at Agra. Most surveys also include pages from the magnificent albums compiled for the Mughals, whether intricate scenes of court receptions with splendid arrays of bejeweled courtiers or stunning studies of individual animals and birds. (Those interested can see some of these album pages in the exhibition currently traveling around the United States or… Full Review

Annabel Wharton’s Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks is the biography by proxy of a sacred site. It chronicles not the possession of Jerusalem via military conquest or pilgrimage, but rather the smaller-scale possession of proxies for it, the acquisition and construction of a series of surrogates for this most famously contested of holy sites. Following twists and turns of history from the early Christian period to the present, Wharton studies the ways in which proxies for the city have been sold. She also argues that these different iterations of Jerusalem have intersected with moments in what we might call… Full Review

Jonathan Bloom can rightfully be considered the foremost authority on Fatimid art and architecture, having produced a steady stream of articles on the subject over the past twenty-five years. He is thus in a perfect position to produce a synthesis, and this is indeed an excellent survey of the material. Time and again he is able to cut through conflicting bodies of opinion and produce authoritative interpretations or offer new insights into problematic material. The book discusses art and architecture, organizing it both chronologically and by material in a way that is appropriate and easy to follow. The writing… Full Review

Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth provides American audiences with a rare opportunity to intimately view twelve drawings (doubling the number in U.S. collections) and three documents by the hand of one of history’s most revered artists, all on loan from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence and never before exhibited in the United States. These original works are accompanied by six portraits of the artist (my favorite is the enigmatic bronze medal by Leone Leoni, 1561); six posthumous publications of his poetry, including one sonnet set to music by Benjamin Britten (1943); a twentieth-century bronze replica of Michelangelo’s marble Vatican… Full Review

When I received a copy of this research report in the mail, I was astonished by its heft: 140 pages of charts, graphs, and their explanations! These are preceded by an introduction by Dana Gioia, former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts, and brief summaries of ten key findings. This last section has provided good headlines for a few stories in the general press, like, “Nearly two million Americans are artists,” or, “Women remain underrepresented in several artist occupations.” Understanding these findings properly requires study. After all, this is a report of statistics, not an interpretation of… Full Review

Joseph Beuys famously proposed that, “every human being is an artist” (Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching for Field Character,” in Art into Society, Society into Art, trans. Caroline Tisdall, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1974, 48). How, then, do we understand the relationship between artists and audience? The Art of Participation, an extremely ambitious, multifaceted exhibition and catalogue by Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, provides numerous potential inroads to considering this question, among others. Desiring to determine whether there is an inherent conflict between the institutional goals of the… Full Review

Act/React, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s recent exhibition of interactive installation art, presented work by six contemporary artists: Janet Cardiff, Brian Knep, Liz Phillips, Daniel Rozin, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback. While all employ some combination of customized computer software, surveillance cameras, digital video and projection, electronic photocells and circuits, microcontrollers, synthesizers, and amplifiers, the resulting artworks nonetheless conceal their technological underpinnings. Focusing on “non-technical” interactivity, which guest curator George Fifield specifies in the accompanying catalogue as activities that are “performed with the entire body of the viewer” (31), the exhibition elicited kinetic play, as one body moved toward and… Full Review