Recently Published Reviews

Visual Shock is Michael Kammen's eighteenth book and like so many of the author's earlier forays into American cultural history, it strives for encyclopedic breadth. Kammen relates a host of well-known historical episodes, beginning with the jeering reception accorded Horatio Greenough's Zeus-like George Washington when it was installed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1841, and ending with the culture wars—Mapplethorpe! The West as America! Sensation!—of the last two decades. He also describes many obscure incidents, such as the carping criticism that greeted Kenneth Evett's murals for the Nebraska state capitol rotunda in 1954. Visual… Full Review

Alexander Roslin (1718–1793) is an artist whose better-known paintings are familiar to modern Anglo-American audiences; many will recognize the oft-reproduced portrait he made of his wife, the painter Marie-Suzanne Giroust, known colloquially as The Veiled Lady (1768; Stockholm, Nationalmuseum). But overall, Roslin is a marginalized figure whose lack of critical prominence has led to the perception that he is a minor painter. The facts suggest otherwise. Roslin was massively prolific, academically successful, internationally in demand, and recognized by contemporaries as one of his era’s premier portraitists. He died one of the wealthiest artists in all of Europe, abundantly praised, and… Full Review

The four essays in this book began as lectures delivered in 2002, and it is fortunate indeed that they have been published here in so elegant and timely a form. Each develops a theme from Vasari’s Vite that has been in plain view, but overlooked, and presents it gracefully. This volume stands as a fitting tribute to its author (1949–2007), whose consistent interest in verbal description of artists and their art leads to strategies offering illuminating interpretations. The starting point for chapter 1, “The Sorcerer’s ‘O’ (and the Painter Who Wasn’t There),” is the anecdote of Giotto’s “O,”… Full Review

In Looking Close and Seeing Far, Kenneth Haltman turns our attention to neglected areas of American cultural production with rich results. The book focuses on the art of the Long Expedition (1819–20), the first U.S. exploratory expedition to include professional artists. When Major Stephen Long’s party set off from Pittsburgh for the Rocky Mountains in April 1819 aboard a specially designed steamboat, the scientific team included two artists: Titian Ramsay Peale and Samuel Seymour. Peale, though only nineteen years old, was already an accomplished draftsman and a veteran of an earlier scientific expedition. Seymour, still such an elusive figure… Full Review

Francois Cusset’s French Theory (FT) is more inclusive than Stanley Fish’s April 2008 reduction of FT to the “farce” of deconstruction (Stanley Fish, “French Theory in America,” “Think Again” New York Times blog, April 6, 2008: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-in-america/). This book straddles theory; intellectual history; cultural exchange; American university dominance and academic trench warfare; relations between FT, aesthetics, and the art world(s); global FT; and more. Its historiographic scope is conceptually useful, more genealogy than narrative history. Cusset affirms FT‘s work-up of the “undecidability of meaning” for new audiences and readers. There is a persistent tone to this… Full Review

This edited volume is the initial product of a joint research project undertaken by scholars at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The “Epistemic History of Architecture” aims to promote a series of conferences on the theme of architecture as a historical form of “knowledge.” The group’s primary object of study is not the building itself but rather the process of construction, which is understood to incorporate implicit and explicit “systems” of knowledge, ranging from practitioners’ rules-of-thumb to codified theory in all its… Full Review

The beautifully produced catalogue of the exhibition that opened at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and will have its second venue at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is devoted to the re-evaluation of the art of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, making known to a wider public the work of artists that preceded the great flowering of Spanish painting in its Golden Age, specifically during the period between the death of Philip III’s father, at the end of the sixteenth century, and the accession to the throne of his son, Philip IV, in 1621… Full Review

This is an excellent book. Its virtues are that it offers an overview of the painting, sculpture, architecture, and luxury arts of Iberia; furthermore, it is highly reliable. Between the footnotes and the bibliography, it contains a trustworthy list of existing publications on Spanish and Portuguese art, a list that registers the history of Iberia with depth and balanced judgment. For example, Trusted does not carelessly assert that in the sixteenth century Muslims fled Spain for the Americas, where they created Islamic-derived ceilings, tiles, leather hangings, and carpets. Instead she wisely notes that the artists who created these items may… Full Review

Federico Zuccaro documented the troubled early life, apprenticeships, and rise to fame of his older brother, Taddeo, in a series of twenty drawings acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1999 from Christie’s New York. An exhibition of these drawings, created in the 1590s, coincided with the publication of this book in which the drawings and accompanying poems are illustrated and placed in the historical and artistic context of sixteenth-century Rome. Two major themes recur throughout the volume. One is the prominence of not only Taddeo (1529–1566) as a central player among Raphael, Michelangelo, and Polidoro da Caravaggio in… Full Review

There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (a) those who look deeply at the artifacts' formal qualities (design, shape, iconic references . . .), and (b) those who look at how the artifacts are used (circulated, displayed, collected, narrated . . .). Let's try again. There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (i) those who focus on relatively autonomous material objects (on the analogy of painting and sculpture), and (ii) those who focus on understanding aesthetics, cosmologies, and sensibilities, which generally works against imagining objects as autonomous. Hmmm. There are two further camps: (1) those who believe the… Full Review

There are far too few general books available on topics in Japanese art, and those who are intrepid enough to write them are insufficiently applauded for the difficult task. Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005 is an excellent example of an overview of Japanese Buddhist art done exceedingly well. It does a laudable job of surveying Japanese Buddhist arts from the early modern period continuing into the present, discussing an important body of visual materials that until now has been largely overlooked. The intention of the book, Patricia Graham states, is to “suggest new directions for research and… Full Review

Scholarly texts, from David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990) to Carl Schorske’s Fin-De-Siecle Vienna (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), have played a pivotal role in theorizing culture, and specifically art, as a means by which to withstand and overcome the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernity in the West. In the past decade, the field of East Asian Studies has found itself undergoing a much-needed methodological shift whereby the intersection between culture, the economy, and nationalist politics is carefully analyzed. Through works that weave historical narratives with critical theory, such as Harry Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity… Full Review

Although most of his works normally reside in Florentine museums and his role as a proponent of the maniera in sculpture is well-known, Vincenzo Danti (1530–76) is finally being feted with an exhibition of his own. On view at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence through September 7, I grandi bronzi del Battistero: L’arte di Vincenzo Danti, discepolo di Michelangelo is the schizophrenic title for what is essentially a monographic show on the career of the artist. Its occasion is the restoration of a three-figure bronze group from the southern door of the Florentine Baptistery, but the show and… Full Review

The current, straightforwardly titled Frida Kahlo retrospective, organized by the Walker Art Center and traveling to Philadelphia and San Francisco, follows two unrelated but identically titled surveys of the same artist—one organized by the Tate Modern (2005) and another, more hastily put together, at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (2007), each with unique, well-illustrated catalogues. While the shows in Mexico and the United States were explicitly tied to the centennial of Kahlo’s 1907 birth, the Tate version seems to have been conceptualized as the best way to get British audiences excited about Latin American art… Full Review

This edited anthology is the result of a symposium held in Chicago in 2005. It includes seven essays that “explore how and why people bought, sold, donated, and received works of art in the Edo period (1600–1868)” (i). The book is a much-needed addition to the growing literature on collecting and material culture in early modern Japan. The essays deal mainly with the acquisition of prints and paintings, but omit other collecting practices entirely. For example, the volume’s lack of attention to one of Japan’s most important cultural practices—the ritual culture of tea (chanoyu)—is astonishing, as tea was… Full Review