Recently Published Reviews

The American Culture Association’s presentation of its 2006 Cawelti Book Award to Martin Berger’s Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture is an early indication of its deserved recognition and acclaim. This terse volume is doubly ambitious: as a groundbreaking investigation of a category of analysis mostly uncharted by the field of US art history, and as the delineation and defense of a provocative interpretive methodology that reads “artworks against the grain of their visual evidence” (24). First and foremost, Berger’s text represents the discipline’s overdue contribution to the relatively new but rapidly expanding field of whiteness studies. At the… Full Review

If it is historically true that “clothing makes the man,” this collection of essays determines how that dictum was enacted in the Middle Ages. Désirée Koslin and Janet Snyder have assembled a variety of articles exploring medieval fashion and dress with a truly interdisciplinary approach. The scope of the collection is broad in several ways. The essays discuss textiles and dress diachronically from the Merovingian period of the seventh century to the sixteenth century. They combine the perspectives of archaeology, art history, economics, religion, costume history, material culture, and literary criticism, and explore fabrics from England, Ireland, France, the Low… Full Review

The title of Peter Stewart’s Statues in Roman Society subtly delineates the major premise of his innovative study: that the modern notion of sculpture hinders our ability to understand the quotidian functions of statues within Roman society. As explained in his introduction, “classical art history has generally been concerned with Roman sculpture as a kind of art, not Roman statuary as a remarkable accumulation of objects working in society” (10). Using a variety of approaches, Stewart attempts to reintegrate Roman statues into their physical and social contexts, and at the same time, to provide a thought-provoking criticism of some of… Full Review

As Cécile Whiting acknowledges in the introduction to her recent analysis of the relationship between Los Angeles and the art produced there, a copious literature already exists addressing both the city and its art world. That said, Whiting offers a fresh approach to the subject that illuminates how diverse artists helped redefine Los Angeles in the public imagination during the 1960s. Perhaps even more important is Whiting’s methodology, which promises a broad applicability well beyond its obvious relevance for those interested in West Coast Pop and the expanding field of the 1960s Whiting foregrounds the city of Los Angeles itself,… Full Review

For many scholars, the historiography of their own fields is a late-career feat, arrived at after decades of slow rumination—George Kubler’s Aesthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) comes immediately to mind. This slim volume, by contrast, is the reworking of a dissertation (Yale, 1998). Its five chapters are written with vigor and freshness, and while they lack the intellectual heft of Kubler’s work (though this could be said of most works in the field), they offer an easily accessible introduction to some key nineteenth-century writers who tried to make sense of the ancient history… Full Review

The “Divanyolu” in Maurice Cerasi’s title refers to the main thoroughfare of Ottoman Istanbul. Cerasi uses the Divanyolu to provide a novel lens on the city. According to the author, the Divanyolu escaped the attention it deserves in existing literature because it was not perfectly axial or unitary as a throughway. It was not built for the display of monumentality or as a hub of commerce. Yet, it was central to urban culture because of its spatial character. Hence, the Divanyolu helps reimagine urban morphology in a city that has changed dramatically In the Ottoman period, the “Divan” denoted the… Full Review

The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures is a master narrative of the political life of art objects in China, from early Shang-dynasty bronze vessels to the “remnant collections” of the last Qing emperor now belonging to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan and the Palace Museum in Beijing. While much of what Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott and David Shambaugh have to say about the relationship between art and authority is familiar, the study is the first to present an extended account in English of the travails of creating, compiling, and protecting a national patrimony in tumultuous twentieth-century China. … Full Review

This volume makes a welcome contribution to the study of Classical Athenian white lekythoi. These oil vessels, painted in polychrome on a white background, are known from more than two thousand examples produced from about 470 to 400 BCE. Used mainly as grave offerings in Athens and its territory, their function and funerary imagery link white lekythoi closely with Classical Athenian burial practice. In Picturing Death in Classical Athens, John Oakley’s concentration on the vases’ rich figural depictions fills a gap in the scholarship. Since white lekythoi first began to receive significant attention in the second half of the… Full Review

The record-breaking attendance at the recent Hokusai exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC (March 4–May 14, 2006) proves that at least one Japanese artist draws crowds as well as Monet. The focus of an exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London in 1890 and countless exhibitions thereafter, more has been published on Hokusai in Western languages than on any other Japanese artist. In the postwar period, Richard Lane, Jack Hillier, and Matthi Forrer contributed the standard volumes on Hokusai in English. Then, beginning in 1990, Gian Carlo Calza, head of the International Hokusai Research Centre, spearheaded three… Full Review

My work for the last few years has gone beyond defining modernity in Asian art to looking at the circuits for the recognition and distribution of contemporary art in Asia. In particular these involve two simultaneous phenomena.[1] The first is the arrival of contemporary Asian artists on the international stage, chiefly at major cross-national exhibitions, including the Venice and São Paolo Biennales. This occurrence may be conveniently dated to Japanese participation at Venice in the 1950s,[2] followed by the inclusion of three contemporary Chinese artists in the Magiciens de la terre exhibition in Paris in 1989. The trend continued with… Full Review

A much-needed book in Japanese art history, Ikumi Kaminishi’s Explaining Pictures: Buddhist Propaganda and Etoki Storytelling in Japan, an analysis of the performative art of “picture deciphering,” or etoki, is also essential to anyone studying the uses of images in society. Covering the gamut of disciplines from art history to ethnography to religion, Kaminishi’s book is a good attempt at interdisciplinary practice and how that practice can be used to uncover the overlays of human imagination in the use of visual images. Kaminishi explains that once etoki is understood as serving as propaganda, it will… Full Review

In the last two decades, scholars in art history, cultural history, and American studies have produced a host of important texts examining the once aesthetically maligned decade of the 1930s, according it a dignified place in the history of American visual production. In expanding this historiography, scholars have developed new historical and cultural explanations for images, including their content, settings, and audiences. Armed with contextual methods, with postmodern identity theory, and highly sensitive to period culture, politics, economics, and institutional constraints, writers have interpreted murals, prints, easel paintings, photography, and design. In these studies we learn of the workings of… Full Review

Writing a catalogue raisonné has become one of the most thankless tasks in art history. The inseparable association of this type of scholarly publication with the traditional valorizing of the individual master (even when not labeled a “genius”) makes many readers look askance at such catalogues. Moreover, the results of one individual’s evaluative process of connoisseurship are often seen as overly subjective, not that the results of group connoisseurship, as with the Rembrandt Research Project, have fared much better. Yet the catalogue raisonné still thrives as a scholarly genre, and many—academics, curators, dealers, collectors, and amateurs—depend on its contributions These… Full Review

In this elegant publication, Victor Schmidt surveys small Tuscan panel paintings from the duecento and trecento in order to search for the answer to a single question: How did such works function when they were originally created? While a wide variety of such works survives from this period, they are largely without context; information on patronage and provenance for small panels is sparse, as is documentary evidence on usage. Schmidt’s most basic body of evidence is the panels themselves, which demonstrate a wide variety of type and of iconography Especially problematic is the lack of information on the patrons and/or… Full Review

As an exhibition, A House of Art: Rubens as Collector provided the unique experience of showing a substantial portion of Rubens’s personal art collection within his own house. When I visited the exhibition for the first time, a pail and mop lay inadvertently forgotten in a corner, further adding to the domestic atmosphere. Rarely is an exhibition as perfectly suited to its setting, and for this apt pairing the curators Kristin Belkin and Fiona Healy deserve to be congratulated. The catalogue cannot duplicate the in situ experience, but it provides the important alternative perspective of tracking the transformation of the… Full Review