- Chronology
- Before 1500 BCE
- 1500 BCE to 500 BCE
- 500 BCE to 500 CE
- Sixth to Tenth Century
- Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
- Fifteenth Century
- Sixteenth Century
- Seventeenth Century
- Eighteenth Century
- Nineteenth Century
- Twentieth Century
- Twenty-first Century
- Geographic Area
- Africa
- Caribbean
- Central America
- Central and North Asia
- East Asia
- North America
- Northern Europe
- Oceania/Australia
- South America
- South Asia/South East Asia
- Southern Europe and Mediterranean
- West Asia
- Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice
- Aesthetics
- African American/African Diaspora
- Ancient Egyptian/Near Eastern Art
- Ancient Greek/Roman Art
- Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation
- Art Education/Pedagogy/Art Therapy
- Art of the Ancient Americas
- Artistic Practice/Creativity
- Asian American/Asian Diaspora
- Ceramics/Metals/Fiber Arts/Glass
- Colonial and Modern Latin America
- Comparative
- Conceptual Art
- Decorative Arts
- Design History
- Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media
- Digital Scholarship/History
- Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice
- Fiber Arts and Textiles
- Film/Video/Animation
- Folk Art/Vernacular Art
- Genders/Sexualities/Feminisms
- Graphic/Industrial/Object Design
- Indigenous Peoples
- Installation/Environmental Art
- Islamic Art
- Latinx
- Material Culture
- Multimedia/Intermedia
- Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration
- Native American/First Nations
- Painting
- Patronage, Art Collecting
- Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice
- Photography
- Politics/Economics
- Queer/Gay Art
- Race/Ethnicity
- Religion/Cosmology/Spirituality
- Sculpture
- Sound Art
- Survey
- Theory/Historiography/Methodology
- Visual Studies
Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.
Recently Published Reviews
Crafting a useful and compelling textbook from the diverse, contested, and ever-mutating material and methodologies of any scholarly field constitutes no small task. The authors of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity are to be congratulated for the boldness and originality with which they approached such an endeavor, and their survey of the art and visual culture of the geographic region now known as the United States does indeed constitute, as the back-cover copy states, a “tremendous accomplishment.”
The text presents a persuasive and rich portrait of the history of the arts in America on two levels.…
Full Review
March 11, 2008
Heidegger’s Hut offers a full architectural analysis of a very simple structure, the philosopher’s retreat in Todtnauberg. As Simon Sadler says in his foreword, “This is the most thorough architectural ‘crit’ of a hut ever set down” (ix). Of course the hut would never have attracted such attention were it not Heidegger’s. The oral tradition that accompanied Heidegger’s reception in the Anglophone world (and perhaps elsewhere) involved rumors of the philosopher working at a remote mountain hut. Well before the 1980s, when the question of Heidegger’s Nazism became unavoidable for scholars, the legend that accompanied him was that of the…
Full Review
March 5, 2008
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, though occupying only four rooms at the Menil Collection in Houston, is an intense, richly complex and subtly disturbing exhibition. The curator in Houston, Franklin Sirmans, has helped create a fluid, dynamic exhibition space that highlights the extraordinary diversity of Nauman’s production from 1964–69 and establishes key themes and paths of development, while leaving many connections open-ended and available for viewers to pursue for themselves. Drawings, sculptures, photographs, video/film, and sound installations are all placed within the same spaces, and highly visceral, body pieces mix with the intellectual play…
Full Review
March 4, 2008
Even for the Metropolitan Museum of Art it was impossible to duplicate the revelatory experience and concomitant visitor record of Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, the 2002 precursor of the present show and the first major U.S. exhibition on the topic in twenty-five years. Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor comes just five years later and simply could not be marketed as the same kind of novelty. Yet the faithful, returning museumgoer is rewarded with experiences of rare beauty, historical insight, and displays of astonishing technical virtuosity that are at least equal to those in the…
Full Review
February 27, 2008
This book is part of a promising new wave of scholarship. From the 1960s onward, writing on perspective was divided between what might roughly be called humanist interpretations and technical accounts. Humanist writing made use of structuralist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic interpretations, and it has produced a line of texts from Hubert Damisch to Hanneke Grootenboer. Technical writing, such as Martin Kemp’s, has accumulated an equally impressive range of information. Recently there have been signs that the two strains are merging, for example in Lyle Massey’s Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania…
Full Review
February 27, 2008
As interventions within contemporary art’s ongoing male and Western hegemonies, two recent, groundbreaking shows of global women artists, Global Feminisms and Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture, were timely. After seeing Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum last spring, I was equally thrilled to see it remixed at the Davis Museum in the fall—thrilled because the show is needed, because it is exciting to discover new artistic responses to age-old problems, and because it is still regrettably rare to see feminist concerns addressed overtly in art. The Davis version of the show was truncated, which…
Full Review
February 26, 2008
As “the first anthology to deal with the painting, sculpture, graphic arts, and photography of the 1930s in a hemispheric context” (xiii), this ambitious collection of fourteen essays makes a significant contribution to the vigorous literature of this seminal decade. While more than half of the volume is focused on the United States, articles take a Pan-American approach in considering work from Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, and Canada. The inclusion of Latin America and the Caribbean with North America reveals remarkable cross-cultural commonalities that remind the reader that the borders demarcating the countries where these artists worked were more political than…
Full Review
February 22, 2008
Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych is the scholarly catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by its authors for the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, in association with the Harvard University Art Museums. Complementing the volume is a second book, Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (John Oliver Hand and Ron Spronk, eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), which collects writings by thirteen specialists from the field of Netherlandish art history. The catalogue focuses primarily on material, technical, and qualitative issues contextualized by format and use, while its…
Full Review
February 13, 2008
A certain swath of the collective museum-going, architecture-loving audience must be endlessly fascinated by the success of David Adjaye. Just forty-one years old, his rise to the top echelon of his profession has happened quickly, and has just as suddenly put his name into the minds of a larger group interested in celebrity homes, industrial design, and the perversely compelling cult of genius prodigies. That Adjaye is arguably the most prominent contemporary (if not twentieth-century) architect of African descent might also be deserving of some scrutiny, and yet Adjaye takes pains to suppress that aspect of his work, perhaps as…
Full Review
February 12, 2008
In judging a photograph, one distinguishes between the quality of the image and that of the object shown, and so it is with a literary anthology. American Architectural History, edited by Keith Eggener, is a compilation of essays published between 1981 and 2002 that presents a vivid and faithful image of the discipline today. What it reveals about that discipline is, of course, a different question altogether.
American Architectural History was designed to free the instructor from the burdensome task of making a reading packet to supplement a survey text. One can do this with a set of…
Full Review
February 6, 2008
Near the end of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, he describes the effect of seeing a scene from Fellini’s film Casanova, in which the protagonist dances with an automaton. Barthes is overwhelmed by the beautiful simulacrum of a young woman, discussing how the combination of “desperate” inertness and apparent affection touched him in the same way as the “punctum” in photography. Mulvey recalls this scene in her book Death 24x a Second, as she engages in a dialogue with Barthes, for whom cinema was normally free from the elegiac effects that he described in photography. The project of…
Full Review
February 6, 2008
While many scholars celebrate Aaron Douglas as the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, there remains a widespread unfamiliarity with the diversity of his artistic production and his manifold contributions to the New Negro Movement. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, the first nationally touring retrospective of his work, attends to this disparity. Organized by Susan Earle and coordinated by Stephanie Fox Nappe for the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, the exhibition showcases Douglas’s output in a variety of media, displaying oil paintings, woodcuts, pen-and-ink drawings, book and record jackets, magazine covers, illustrations, and murals…
Full Review
February 5, 2008
At the outset of Reinventing the Wheel, Stephen Teiser recounts an episode from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim that sets into motion the primary theme of his study. In this episode, the British curator of the Lahore Museum and a Tibetan lama exchange views in which the former presents Buddhism as a sweeping phenomenon framed by the panorama of book knowledge, while the latter intimates that the true fruits of the religion are found more locally in one’s own awareness and experience. Likewise, the modern scholar must negotiate similar tensions in the study of Buddhist art. While the undeniable similarities of…
Full Review
January 31, 2008
Georgia Inside and Out: Architecture, Landscape, and Decorative Arts follows the publication in 2003 of the First Henry D. Green Symposium—The Savannah River Valley to 1865: Fine Arts, Architecture, and Decorative Arts, also edited by Ashley Callahan. The symposium series is named in honor of Henry D. Green (1909–2003), who beginning in the 1930s established himself as a pioneer in the appreciation and study of Southern heritage, particularly Southern decorative arts. Under Callahan’s direction, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens brings a welcome focus on its home state. For decades the study…
Full Review
January 29, 2008
Ella Shohat’s Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices is a collection of essays written largely over a two-decade period spanning the 1980s and 1990s. Shohat contributed prolifically to discussions in the emerging knowledge domains of multiculturalism, postcolonial studies, and transnational feminisms; moreover, she did so in a rigorous and self-conscious manner, always probing the new paradigms in a critical way. The essays here record this engagement with transformations in the North American academy over the past couple of decades, and they demonstrate the work of an author who has vigilantly critiqued the post-Enlightenment legacies of an enduring Eurocentricism. Indeed, the collection functions…
Full Review
January 24, 2008
Load More