Recently Published Reviews

Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. The contributors insist that “things,” the objects that surround us, are endowed with agency that goes unnoticed because of our compulsion to fill the world with meaning. In our concern to make sense of our surroundings we fail to notice that we are not the only ones responsible for shaping the order we impose on the world. Things cry out for our attention and decisively… Full Review

Enthusiasts of early twentieth-century American art have long recognized George Bellows’s facility for powerful draftsmanship, yet his energetic, even boisterous, paintings and lithographs remain appreciably better known than his drawings. The artist made hundreds of original works on paper, largely black and white, now hidden in museums and private collections across the country. Their broad dispersal may account, in part, for the limited scholarly attention paid this fascinating aspect of the artist’s work. The exhibition The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library begins to redress this lacuna by showcasing works from one of the key… Full Review

First, a disclaimer. Throughout my art-history education, which began in the 1960s and was probably typical, pre-twentieth-century sculpture was evaluated much as it had been since the Renaissance, which is to say in formal terms, the purity of its planes and contours competing with painting’s reliance on surface and color. I came to know, at least intellectually, that perceptions and judgments are indelibly affected by the conventions and values of our time, and assumed that, in the objective spirit in which art historians are taught to approach works of art, I would adjust gracefully to new evidence requiring shifts in… Full Review

These two publications represent opposite ends of the spectrum of approaches to art history today and are clearly intended for different audiences. While Maria Loh approaches Padovanino’s “remaking” of Titian’s compositions in the early seventeenth century with the stated goal of “wrenching the writing of art history from a discourse that secures privileged seating for its ‘great masters’” (14), Peter Humphrey’s volume is the first in a series projected by Ludion called the “Classical Art Series,” with forthcoming volumes on Bruegel, Vermeer, Velasquez, and Van Eyck. Loh’s focus is on copies or repetitions (of compositions by Titian and his contemporaries)… Full Review

The curators of Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730–2008 have gathered an impressive collection of well-known objects from Europe and the United States to showcase the curving beauty of the eighteenth-century Rococo and of later designs with similarly sinuous lines. The show was mounted by members of the Cooper-Hewitt curatorial staff, including Sarah Coffin, Gail Davidson, and Ellen Lupton, with Penelope Hunter-Stiebel as a guest curator. The focus is on the formal elements of the Rococo, demonstrating the historical persistence of sculptural curves across media and through space and time. The exhibition consists of a roughly chronological display of… Full Review

When describing The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1855) in a letter to a friend, Gustave Courbet notoriously quipped, “It’s pretty mysterious. Good luck to anyone who can make it out!” Art historians have long grappled with the ambiguities of Courbet’s oeuvre, and recent books by Linda Nochlin and Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, as well as an online publication by the Getty Museum, demonstrate the ever-present allure of works that in spite of many fine formal, socio-historical, and psychoanalytical analyses continue to exude an aura of mystery. Both Nochlin and Chu… Full Review

Only seven years after their resplendent pioneering exhibition and catalogue on the seventeenth-century Japanese artist Hon'ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), Felice Fischer, Kyoko Kinoshita, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art produced an even more magnificent catalogue and exhibition on the artists Ike (also known as Ikeno and Ike no) Taiga (1723–76) and Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727/28–1784). Like Kōetsu, who was himself a calligrapher, potter, and lacquer-ware artist, Gyokuran and her husband Taiga were stylistic and social pioneers who worked in several arts, in their case painting, calligraphy, poetry, and even seal-carving and lacquer, in the style called Nanga. One of several… Full Review

What happens when a discerning historian of urban public art is asked to join the administrative body responsible for regulating the very art that she has so shrewdly critiqued in the past? She writes a book that turns her gimlet eye upon her own endeavor, placing it in historical context while using the past to help explain the present. The Politics of Urban Beauty is the product of Michele Bogart’s service as the “lay” member of the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) from 1999 (the year of her appointment by the Giuliani administration) to the end… Full Review

Perhaps most famous in art history as Antonio Moro, a name he assumed while portraitist for the Spanish court of King Philip II, Anthonis Mor enjoyed a long career in the Netherlands, chiefly around his native Utrecht. In this extensive analytical study, Joanna Woodall restores to the painter his full career, including a serious output of religious subjects. Indeed, Woodall’s perceptive characterizations sometimes seem colored by a portentous wish to convey the ultimate seriousness and salvific purpose of his vocation. If Christian content enjoys extensive attention here, it arose with Mor’s origins, for he was a “disciple” (Woodall’s word,… Full Review

Collectors, it sometimes seems, are a necessary evil. Artists create, and we art writers explain the significance of what they make. But collectors, who usually are privileged people, mostly only pick up the check. Too often they treat art as a form of speculation, and so are ready to resell when its value increases. And many of them are not shy about hustling for tips. As a dealer explained to me over dinner, after the newly rich purchase their houses and yacht, they come to his gallery to get their art. Well, they have to do something with their money… Full Review

El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts brings to light a period in Spanish art which, despite the quality of artistic production and the rich history of the period, has been overshadowed by the art produced during the reigns of Philip III’s father, Philip II, and son, Philip IV. Philip III reigned from 1598 to 1621; notably, neither El Greco nor Velázquez, the protagonists of this exhibition to judge by its title, lived at Philip’s court. El Greco had long been settled in Toledo (he died there… Full Review

Reviewing the Van Abbemuseum’s recent exhibition Forms of Resistance (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, September 22, 2007–January 6, 2008), art historian and critic Hal Foster poses the questions, “What is the ‘social’ that ‘desires’ to be ‘changed,’ and how might ‘forms of resistance’ bear on this change? Do radical art and politics converge only at moments of crisis?” (Artforum XLVI, no. 4 [January 2008]: 273). How can we describe the relationship between political activism and the production of contemporary art? While of course there are no simple answers to these questions, editors Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette propose that the concept… Full Review

A curtain of clear plastic sleeves hangs in the shop window that serves as the façade to Ooga Booga’s main space. Inside each transparent pocket rests a simple, photocopied, and staple-bound book available for visitors to touch and flip through. In this modest exhibition of zines and artists’ books, the manner of installation complements the temperament of the work on view. Everything is straightforward and accessible. Ooga Booga, an alternative space in Los Angeles’s Chinatown District, presents for the first time in the United States the complete range of publications issued by the Zurich-based publisher Nieves. Nestled within… Full Review

Curated by Silvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Sciré, the exhibition of late paintings by Titian initiated at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and continued with variations at the Accademia was rich in materials from which to learn more about the great Venetian artist. While the Venetian venue showed only twenty-eight paintings, these offered much upon which to meditate. Occupying a space that was once the church of the Carità, and typically used at the Accademia for temporary shows, the paintings were displayed with artificial lighting. At first one wished for daylight, but with time one found that this arrangement worked. The… Full Review

Though a distinctive genre, scholarly treatment of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits has been infrequent following Alois Riegl’s 1902 Das Holländische Gruppenporträt. Twentieth-century engagement with group portraits has largely focused either on the example of Rembrandt, as in the contributions by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann (Rembrandt: The Nightwatch, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Margaret Carroll (“Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and the Iconological Traditions of Military Company Portraiture in Amsterdam,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1976), or else considered the paintings as straightforward historical documents of the groups represented, as in the catalogue to the 1988 exhibition Schutters in Holland at the Frans… Full Review