Recently Published Reviews

In January of this year, I visited Longmen on a grey and chilly day. Amy McNair’s Donors of Longmen was deliberately my companion. As I walked through the site, up and down the ramps of stairs that give access to the cave temples, the fourteenth-century Muslim poet Sadula’s description of Longmen, which McNair quotes on page 160, resonated with sad truth in my mind: Along both river banks, men in the past bored into the rock to make large caves and small shrines no fewer than one thousand in number. They sculpted out of the rock sacred images… Full Review

Pompeo Batoni (Lucca 1708–Rome 1787) was one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most famous artists, lionized by popes, princes, and connoisseurs who saw his poetic and technically dazzling art as the acme of Italian painting and wore a path to his studio in one of Rome’s most fashionable districts. That simple fact bears stating, given how far Batoni’s star would sink among later generations; Sir Joshua Reynolds’s prediction that the artist would soon fall into near oblivion seems justified by the sale of a distinguished painting in 1928 for just £2. Few of his pictures were on view to the general public… Full Review

Thomas Campbell’s Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court is a must read for anyone interested in tapestry, patronage studies, and cultural history. It is the latest addition to an important group of books mapping the tapestry patronage and collections of early modern royalty and nobility: Clifford Brown and Guy Delmarcel examined the Gonzaga collection (Tapestries for the Courts of Federico Ii, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzaga, 1522–1563, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996); Lucia Meoni has already published two out of four volumes that focus on the Medici tapestries (Gli arazzi nei… Full Review

Two weeks after opening its Gates of Paradise exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a symposium to explore various issues surrounding the creation, reception, and conservation of Ghiberti’s masterpiece. An international panel of art historians, curators, and conservators offered a range of general and specialist talks to accompany the remarkable loan of three narrative reliefs and four framing elements from the final set of bronze doors created for the Florentine Baptistery. Ian Wardropper, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of the Metropolitan’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts (ESDA), welcomed conference attendees. Cristina Acidini, Superintendent of the… Full Review

bq. “. . . this slumber of forgetfulness will not last forever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past.” (Petrarch, Africa, IX, 453–7, quoted by Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Westview Press, 1960, 10) Petrarch’s concluding words to his epic poem Africa are equally applicable to Ghiberti studies. Long under the dark shadows of Richard Krautheimer and John Pope-Hennessy, Lorenzo Ghiberti and his magnificent Gates of Paradise from the Florentine Baptistery are finally being seen in a… Full Review

The Indian Temple Traceries by M. A. Dhaky, dean of Indian architectural historians, is a fascinating study of the variety to be found within a single element of the fabric of Indian temples—the jāla or jālaka (Sanskrit), jālī (Hindi), tracery, pierced screen, grill, or lattice. Dhaky’s starting point is the terminology of the Sanskrit architectural treatises, which provide names for the types of jāla but generally do not define them. Providing plausible identifications depends not only on comparing the terms in different texts but on an encyclopedic knowledge of the appearance of jāla through the ages. Dhaky’s analysis is accompanied… Full Review

In early 1927, Julien Levy informed his father that instead of finishing his last semester at Harvard University, he was sailing to Europe with the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to begin his career as an experimental filmmaker. Six months later he returned home to New York with a new passion, Surrealism, and a new calling, gallery director. Levy has long been considered one of the foremost champions in New York of Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, only episodic attention has been paid to an important aspect of his activities: photography. In 1976, David Travis, curator of photography at… Full Review

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 details Venice’s role as a commercial, political, and diplomatic hub, strategically situated at the center of Mediterranean trade, and examines how the city absorbed artistic and cultural ideas from the Islamic world. With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase of the resources compiled by its editor, Stefano Carboni, who also served as the exhibition’s curator. Carboni eloquently guides… Full Review

In his Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (ca. 1633), the artist Anthony Van Dyck turns to gaze out at the viewer. With one hand he points to himself while holding up for display the gold chain recently presented to him by his patron, the English monarch Charles I; with the other he gestures toward a large sunflower that seems to mirror the artist’s pose. Both the man and plant appear animated, as his tousled hair and the flower’s thick petals appear to respond to the shifting light and billowing atmosphere surrounding them. The picture’s intertwined themes have long been recognized: Van… Full Review

This impressive and dense book examines a subject that on the surface seems to have been fully explored: early American modernism and the Stieglitz circle.[1] Alfred Stieglitz’s renowned wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, remains a central figure among these various publications. It is not surprising, then, that Kathleen Pyne also weaves her text around the importance of this artist who, according to Pyne’s account, fulfilled Stieglitz’s search for a “woman-child,” a sexually active adult who could retain her childhood innocence to capture in her art a pure, essential feminine vision, and who could assist him in creating his own identity as a… Full Review

A New World is a beautifully illustrated, wide-ranging catalogue of the British Museum’s rarely exhibited collection of John White’s watercolors. White’s pictures record the people and nature he encountered while accompanying a group of English colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to Roanoke Island in 1585. Some of these images, particularly his studies of the native inhabitants of what is now coastal North Carolina, are iconic, while others—fireflies, Puerto Rico, Turks—are considerably less well-known. The catalogue’s six essays, by Kim Sloan, curator of British drawings and watercolors at the British Museum, and Joyce Chaplin, Christian Feest, and Ute Kuhlemann, successfully… Full Review

Jewish art poses a perennial problem of definition, just like Jewish identity. Inevitably the question arises about whether an artist has to be considered Jewish, and even what that might mean: is it a matter of ethnicity or of religion? Additionally, many early Jewish contributions to visual culture lie entirely outside any identification of an artistic hand; rather, they are defined chiefly through their location and function, usually as decorations within a ritual context of religious practice, be it in a synagogue or home. Yet even in those cases, the makers of the objects need not have been Jewish themselves… Full Review

Claiming Space is a small, carefully curated exhibition with a big heart and ambitious agenda. It makes a compelling argument that feminist artists working in the late sixties into the early eighties had an enormous role in defining and expanding what constitutes feminist culture, and that any history of the period—social, political, cultural, or art historical—is woefully incomplete if these artists are not fully integrated into these stories. The history of this period and the art of the nineties simply does not make sense otherwise. There are nineteen artists represented in the exhibition, including major works by Judith Bernstein, Judy… Full Review

In Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw contextualizes the production and interpretation of Kara Walker’s fantastical depictions of slavery as produced in installation silhouettes, prints, and drawings between the years 1995 and 1998. Through five well-paced chapters, Shaw investigates the personal and art-historical origins of Walker’s art, analyzes three of Walker’s most dense and widely-circulated silhouettes, and addresses the passionate and complex reception to Walker’s challenging images. At the beginning of her text, Shaw reveals her own stunned reaction to seeing Walker’s artwork for the first time in 1997. Following her encounter,… Full Review

Guest-curator Jeffrey Spier’s Picturing the Bible at the Kimbell Art Museum is the first major exhibition of early Christian art in the United States since the Metropolitan Museum’s The Age of Spirituality in 1977. Where that was a vast installation, responding to the panoramic sweep of what had then only barely begun to be called Late Antiquity, Picturing the Bible is compact and select, focused specifically upon the modes of Christian visual expression and asking much of each object displayed. It is an exhibition of exceptional visual and intellectual elegance. Its governing insight, conveyed in its title, is most fully… Full Review