Recently Published Reviews

If ambiguity was something that could be seen or touched, it might have a tangible yet enigmatic effect. Perhaps it would be like a fragile lantern lit from within, neither solid nor translucent, with angles of light taking shape through sudden rips of fabric. Or perhaps it would be a metallic cube hovering over the ground like an imbalanced weight, yet with a surface as seemingly delicate as crumpled paper. Or perhaps it would be a cold glass entrance with ice rock chandeliers, where luscious, decorative folds in white walls peek through. Maybe, in short, ambiguity would take the shape… Full Review

Euro-American modernity arrived in Japan during a precarious time. World War II had just ended, atomic bombs had devastated two major cities, land was barren following destruction by fire-storms, famine was widespread, and, for the first time in the country’s history, foreign soldiers occupied its land. Suddenly modern America, with its Coca-Cola, playing cards, and t-shirts, was everywhere, awkwardly overlying prewar Japanese aesthetics. Shomei Tomatsu, born in 1930, came of age during the occupation era and was keenly aware of the tension surrounding the transition from prewar aesthetics to American-style modernism. The photographs and essays collected for his first U.S… Full Review

This collection of essays is the record of a symposium held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome in July 2000. Organized by Giancarla Periti, the subject of that event was broad, covering both ecclesiastical and secular patronage in northern Italy (principally Emilia-Romagna, but also parts of current-day Lombardy) and Inventio—artistic invention—as it was conceived and practiced there. That many of the participants have long been interlocutors—either as students at Johns Hopkins University, working with Charles Dempsey, who wrote the book’s introduction, or as colleagues from other projects—provides another unifying component to the selection. Ashgate is to be commended for… Full Review

One year before Vassar College first offered courses in 1865, the institution already had an art gallery and a collection. Purchases, beginning with that of the Reverend Elias Magoon’s American and English landscape paintings, and continuing into the present with acquisitions in various media from diverse cultures, have made the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (which occupies an elegant building by Cesar Pelli) into an important museum possessing 12,500 objects, and also—fulfilling the original intention—into an effective complement to the teaching of art and art history A good example of that synergy was the 1970 exhibition “Dutch Mannerism: Apogee and… Full Review

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of Marcia Brennan’s new book—and it is typical of revisionist accounts of modernist art and criticism on the 1950s and 1960s from the past two decades—is the assumed transparency of her own interpretations vis-à-vis the ideologically mediated nature of critical accounts from the period. Historical distance from an object of study does not permit an unadulterated account of that object, and neither does an enlightened methodology, especially when the theoretical perspective given voice is a very late and idiosyncratic response to the headway made in the discipline of art history by gender and cultural studies… Full Review

The National Treasure system, instituted in Japan in the late nineteenth century, has had a strong influence in the establishment of the canon of Japanese art history. A work or a monument may be designated as a National Treasure or Important Cultural Property after a team of specialists presents a detailed study evaluating its historical and artistic importance. In most cases, the conclusions of these specialists formed the basis for the standard account in Japanese art history. The subject of Sherry Fowler’ book Murōji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple is a famous Buddhist temple established in… Full Review

In Stephen Bann’s account of the complex professional nexus that produced images and reputations in nineteenth-century France, prints finally get their due. The important role of reproductive engraving in the rich visual culture before 1900 has been marginalized for years, but as Bann asserts, printmaking—in the sense of fine engravings made after contemporary paintings—was “an integral part of the academic system of nineteenth-century French visual art” (vi). He looks at the use that painters made of traditional engraving, the newer process of lithography, and, ultimately, photography, within the larger context of contemporary artistic practice. In laying out an overarching theme… Full Review

This fascinating book explores Charles Longfellow’s travels in Japan from 1871–73 and his return, laden with curios, photos, and tattoos, to the Boston home of his illustrious father, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It also marks a milestone in author Christine Guth’s own impressive journey from the kind of “traditional connoisseurial concerns” emphasized during her graduate training to the complex and compelling world of “visual cultural studies” (xii). Over the last decade or so the experience of Americans in Meiji-era Japan has been much examined in popular books like Christopher Benfey’s lively The Great Wave (New York: Random House, 2003)… Full Review

Did modern architecture ever die? Accounts of its demise appear much exaggerated, especially to a new generation, for whom postmodern historicism seems the exclusive domain of strip malls and willful eccentrics with enough money to pay for correct Corinthian detailing, whatever that is. Most of this younger generation of star architects, and there are plenty of them, owe their fame in no small part to deliberate distance they have put between themselves and any but the most casual recall of history. Abstract form and technological imagery are very much back in vogue Meredith Clausen’s The Pan Am Building and the… Full Review

The title of this stimulating collection of essays points to one of its important contributions. The very structure of Saints, Sinners, and Sisters rejects the bipolar evaluation of women that has been so pervasive in Western culture. While two sections of the book are devoted to consideration of women as either “Saints” or “Sinners,” the third section is concerned with “Sisters, Wives, Poets.” The whole collection reminds us of the multiplicity of roles that women played in medieval and early modern Europe, even as they do today. The editors, Jane Carroll and Alison Stewart, have selected essays that demonstrate how… Full Review

It is a testimony to the esteem in which Peter Sutton and Marjorie Wieseman are held in the art world that they were able to find enough oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens for an exhibition in the United States in 2004—the most competitive “Rubens” year in recent memory. Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens is the first exhibition dedicated solely to Rubens’s oil sketches since the one Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann organized in Rotterdam in 1953–54. Although originally planned to include loans solely from U.S. and Canadian collections, the exhibition was expanded with a few choice pieces… Full Review

Some things never go out of style. One of those is Parthenon scholarship; a year does not pass without the appearance of books and articles devoted to this most venerable of Greek monuments. One would think that there are no more questions to be asked, no more answers to be proposed, but this is decidedly not the case. The Acropolis restoration project alone, active since the 1970s and spearheaded by Manolis Korres, constantly brings new information to light, to say nothing of new methodologies and technologies that inspire one to look at the familiar in new ways. … Full Review

France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870, closely followed by an agonizing civil insurrection, led to the christening of that period as the country’s année terrible. While 1870–71 marks a crisp line for historians between the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the events of the Prussian siege of Paris from September 1870 to January 1871 have not been interrogated for their art-historical significance. Hollis Clayson’s groundbreaking work, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–1871), provides just such an interrogation. Clayson seeks to complicate social art histories that read artists only as “exemplars of a collectivity… Full Review

It would appear that Jack Burnham’s 1968 claim that “a ‘systems esthetic’ will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present” was accurately visionary. In Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970, curator Donna De Salvo has put this concept of a “system” to work as an organizing principle around which to understand anew significant trends in art produced during the years bracketing 1970. The choice was a good one on two counts. First, there has been much recent interest in the art of the period, as high-profile retrospectives of Robert Smithson, Dan… Full Review

One thought-provoking passage from the introductory wall panel at the entrance to Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent exhibition, Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, read as follows: “Music offered a model to which art might aspire: an art based on a language of abstract form that evokes limitless space and evolving time, in short, ‘visual music.’” This brief passage makes some challenging and complex claims for the broad category of visual art as it relates to the equally broad category of music. One clear precedent for these claims can be found in the writing… Full Review