Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and 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

Janet Abramowicz
Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 288 pp.; 41 color ills.; 71 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300100361)
Recent history has witnessed renewed interest in the work and life of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), famous for the muted tones and graceful volumes that epitomize his intimate still-life and landscape paintings, unadorned compositions that defy association with a single artistic movement. Characterized as stubbornly solitary, Morandi filled his canvases with barren combinations of forlorn bottles, vases, and other miscellaneous containers, producing clusters of architectonic bodies that allude to cathedrals, sculptures, and even the human figure in images whose “ambiguity of figure and ground” arrest the viewer (103). The Bolognese painter’s subdued landscapes oscillate between meditative abstract floating… Full Review
August 7, 2006
Thumbnail
Jay Fisher
The Essence of Line: French Drawings From Ingres to Degas
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, The Walters Art Museum, and Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. 408 pp. Paper $39.95 (0271026928)
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, June 19–September 11, 2005; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, June 19–September 11, 2005; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, February 19–May 14, 2006;
Published in conjunction with the exhibition by the same title, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas is a study of the superb nineteenth-century French drawings collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, and the Peabody Institute Art Collection of the Maryland State Archives (on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art). The core holdings of drawings at each institution are private collections amassed by Baltimoreans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, quite remarkably, have remained intact, thereby providing scholars a window into period taste and connoisseurship.… Full Review
August 2, 2006
Thumbnail
Caroline Jones
Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 544 pp.; 23 color ills.; 127 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0226409511)
The last word on the history of the New York School is far from having been written. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses announces a new chapter in the study of mid-century art and criticism by attempting to conclude one. At the end of her preface, Caroline Jones reveals, “More than anything else I’ve written, this book exists to end its subject—to construe the Greenberg effect, in order to be done with it” (xxix). Her central claim is that Greenberg’s art criticism served to limit and reduce experience to the visual, which, in the process… Full Review
August 2, 2006
Thumbnail
Xavier F. Salomon
Veronese's Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice
The Frick Collection, 2006. 56 pp.; 32 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Paper (0912114312)
Frick Collection, New York City, April 11–July 16, 2006
Paolo Veronese is in the news these days, enjoying the spotlight in two recent monographic exhibitions. Last year’s Veronese: Gods, Heroes, and Allegories, the Museo Correr in Venice, treated a wide array of the artist’s mythological works. Now, Veronese’s Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice at the Frick Collection, a more focused exhibit curated by Xavier Salomon, gathers together all five of the large allegorical canvases by the artist that have come to rest on US soil. These shows mark something of a renaissance for Veronese, which complements the current profusion of exhibits on Venetian topics: from… Full Review
August 2, 2006
Thumbnail
Allen Hockley
The Prints of Isoda Koryūsai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 336 pp.; 8 color ills.; 51 b/w ills.; 59 ills. Cloth $60.00 (0295983019)
Allen Hockley’s long-awaited monograph on Isoda Koryūsai (1735–90) is a welcome addition to the literature on Japan’s eighteenth-century print culture. Not only does he focus on one of the too-long neglected masters of the period, he also presents a fine analysis of some of Koryūsai’s major themes as well as his best-known series of single prints, Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh Young Leaves. That this study is, indeed, long overdue can be inferred from the fact that Koryūsai has received little scholarly attention in spite of the sheer number of designs for which he was responsible. As… Full Review
August 1, 2006
Thumbnail
Mark Coatzee and Laura Edward Heon
Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection
Miami and North Adams: MASS MoCA, 2006. 143 pp.; 27 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Cloth (0971634149)
MASS MoCA, March 19, 2005–March 31, 2006; SITE Santa Fe, April 21–June 19, 2006; Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington DC, September 5–October 29, 2006; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, February 16–June 3, 2007; Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, June 23–September 30, 2007
Leipzig is the new Berlin—at least that is what I have been told. Rents are still what Berlin rents used to be, after reunification but before the government arrived. Many artists have already moved their Berlin or Cologne studios to Leipzig. It is like Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain circa 1995, a combination of advanced, though scenic, urban decay pierced through with startling additions like high-tech (West) German mass transit or gleaming new bakeries and department stores. There is a developed Leipzig scene—the spreading waves of (West German-style) gentrification that includes clubs, restaurants, and of course, art galleries Another sign of… Full Review
August 1, 2006
Thumbnail
9th International Istanbul Biennial
Exhibition schedule: Istanbul, Turkey, September 16–October 30, 2005
The 9th International Istanbul Biennial, distributed across seven sites (Deniz Palace Apartments, Garanti Building, Antrepo No. 5, Tobacco Warehouse, Bilsar Building, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and the Garibaldi Building) used the city of Istanbul as not only its host but its principal theme. Visitors walked to and from each site, guided by the Italian Gruppo A12’s fuchsia paint on the venues’ façades and windows, occasionally getting lost in the streets of the Beyoğlu district. Rather than finding such wanderings a burden, visitors enjoyed the treats and surprises wherein they were routinely rewarded with the discovery of buildings that would… Full Review
July 25, 2006
In Search of Perfect Harmony
Exhibition Schedule: Tate Britain, London, February 4–May 7, 2006
With In Search of Perfect Harmony, a recent exhibition in the Art Now cycle at Tate Britain, British artist Jamie Shovlin cements his recent work’s affinity to what Hal Foster has described as the “archival impulse” prevalent in contemporary artistic production. The three works that comprised Shovlin’s exhibition all take root in the kind of idiosyncratic probing into a history, philosophy, or experience that Foster sees as the foundation of the “archival impulse.” While Foster’s descriptive moniker for this kind of work reminds us that such gestures have already become common practice in contemporary art, Shovlin’s… Full Review
July 19, 2006
Andrew Schulz
Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 255 pp.; 80 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780521821056)
Francisco de Goya's Los Caprichos (1799), a series of eighty etchings and aquatints, are widely known as satiric criticisms of human ignorance and folly. The artist is democratic in his critical assessment of society and its customs, from the superstitious beliefs of the lower classes to the genealogical obsession of aristocrats. Although the series includes themes particular to Spain at the turn of the century, Goya often veils these fixed references with ambiguous meanings, settings, and figures. Thus, many of the critiques expressed pictorially by Goya have application for locations and times outside of late-eighteenth-century Spain, giving the series a… Full Review
July 13, 2006
Thumbnail
Christopher B. Donnan
Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 220 pp.; 258 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (0292716222)
Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru is a welcome addition to the literature on the art of ancient Peru. The Moche were a state-level society who prospered in the first seven or so centuries AD on the desert coast of what is now northern Peru. They were prolific and prodigious artists in many media, the most famous being metalwork, the most numerous being ceramics. The gold-filled graves at Sipán and other Moche sites have been discovered in the last twenty years, and much progress has been made in our knowledge of this important ancient American society and its art. Christopher… Full Review
July 5, 2006
Thumbnail
Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, ed.
Paintings for the Planet King: Philip IV and the Buen Retiro Palace
Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2005. 304 pp.; 140 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth (1903470439)
In an inspired act of programming, in the summer of 2005 the Prado Museum exhibited a selection of paintings associated with the legendary Palace of the Buen Retiro. Not only does the accompanying catalogue shed light on an unparalleled chapter in the artistic patronage of Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621–65), it also marks a resourceful initiative by the Prado to draw attention to the strengths of its own holdings. The museum, which borrowed just three of the roughly sixty works in the exhibition, used the occasion to commemorate an enterprise generally accorded fragmentary coverage in the literature on seventeenth-century… Full Review
July 5, 2006
Thumbnail
Ellen Perry
The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Visual Arts of Ancient Rome
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 224 pp.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0521831652)
Ellen Perry offers a clear and forthright, if sometimes oversimplified, account of the complex, highly sophisticated discourses that characterized the Roman "aesthetics of emulation." In so doing, she seeks to transform the debate on Roman copying, with a particular focus on Roman statues of gods and heroes, so-called ideal sculpture. This debate has important repercussions for Romanists, and indeed for the field of art history as a whole. After all, Roman ideal sculptures are familiar to most art historians—but not as Roman works of art. Instead, statues that appear stylistically Greek, such as the Apollo Belvedere… Full Review
June 29, 2006
Thumbnail
Jeremy Tanner
The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society and Artisitic Rationalisation
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 348 pp.; 54 b/w ills. Cloth $114.00 (0521846145)
In chapter 1, after a brief discussion of "Greek art, the idea of freedom, and the creation of modern high culture," which treads mostly familiar ground, Tanner takes on some twentieth-century accounts of ancient art and (unsurprisingly) finds them wanting—too literary, too anachronistic, and so on. His own (quasi-Parsonian and somewhat jargon-filled) solution is to characterize art as a form of expressive cultural symbolism, constructing "affective experience on the basis of cultural-level codifications of sensuous form generated in some degree of abstraction from immediate social relationships (21). He then mobilizes Karl Weber's concept of rationalization to account for art's different… Full Review
June 29, 2006
Thumbnail
Villa America: American Moderns, 1900–1950
Orange County Museum, June 4–October 2, 2005; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, December 4–February 26, 2006; Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, March 15–June 4, 2006
Comprised of one wonderful work after another, Villa America: American Modern, 1900–1950 makes a strong impression. Beyond presenting many excellent works, the exhibition illuminates the visual dialogue concerning style and theme undertaken between and among U.S. artists during the first half of the twentieth century, a particularly exciting period in U.S. art history. With its illuminating juxtapositions of works and its many self-portraits, Villa America brings to life the excitement and energy that percolated within the U.S. art world during this now rather distant era. The exhibition presents for the first time selections from the private collection of Myron Kunin… Full Review
June 28, 2006
Robert D. Aguirre
Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 296 pp.; 29 b/w ills. Paper $19.95 (0816645000)
Robert Aguirre should be commended for calling our attention to the less-studied area of the circulation between, and symbolic function of, collections and displays in nineteenth-century Britain and parts of Latin America. Largely centered on nationalist discourses, Aguirre's very useful and informative Informal Empire explains the ways that England, in the place of direct military colonization of post-independence Mexico and Central America, and in the face of increasing interventions by the United States, nonetheless managed to play a vital, if not controlling, economic role in those regions. England did so, Aguirre argues, through the appropriation, trans-Atlantic exchange, and display of… Full Review
June 28, 2006
Thumbnail