Recently Published Reviews

The intersection of space and place occurs on shifting sands at the borders of philosophy and aesthetics. This is not to suggest a lack of clarity about either way of knowing, but to make a claim about the fuzziness of the epistemological boundaries that the debate about space and place must necessarily engage. Edward Casey’s book Representing Place situates itself within the din of geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, architects, and philosophers rallying under the postmodern banner of place over space. For some time now his work has entered the fray. This, the third in a trilogy of books that includes Getting… Full Review

In the 1600s, a convert from Roman Catholicism to the new Protestant faith might have felt disconcertingly bereft of the supportive community of saints in whose company she or he was accustomed to encountering the divine. For women, one of the greatest challenges must have been the loss of the Virgin Mary as empathetic listener and spiritual guide. Yet Martin Luther sternly condemned belief in the intercession of saints as a reliance on works rather than faith to procure salvation, and John Calvin adamantly rejected the mediatory role of saints, along with the veneration of their relics and images, as… Full Review

The construction of historical memory has been a critical issue for photography since the medium’s emergence as a method of mass reproduction and dissemination. German photographer Thomas Demand’s work addresses the question of veracity that remains at the heart of photography’s role in shaping the representation and understanding of history. His work interrogates this concern through a two-stage process that transforms politically charged subject matter from appropriated mass-produced photographic image to sculptural installation to a final life-scaled photograph made by Demand. That he takes on photography’s contested relation to material reality now, at a moment when the cultural field is… Full Review

The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name, which was on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal from October 2004 to September 2005. The catalogue presents a new study of a significant period of change in a major North American city. Like other CCA catalogues, it is a carefully produced book with high-quality illustrations. It includes a fascinating collection of visual material, and the essays are valuable contributions to the literature on architecture and urban planning in the 1960s, as well as to scholarship on Montreal. The project focuses… Full Review

This deluxe two-volume boxed set is a catalogue raisonné documenting Ilya Kabakov’s important and influential work as an installation artist. Yet in keeping with the current practice of institutional critique, which turns every corner of the institution of art into an exhibition space in order to make those corners visible in a new way, it is much more. Included are descriptions of 155 installations executed between 1983 and 2000, along with preparatory drawings, installation photographs, and information about the exhibitions in which they appeared and the museums that own them. The bulk of the book consists of extensive commentaries by… Full Review

Author Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–c. 1430) is no longer the obscure figure she was three decades ago when Susan Groag Bell began her research for The Lost Tapestries of the ‘City of Ladies’: Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy. Indeed, although Christine’s texts were widely commissioned for court libraries in fifteenth-century Europe, by the middle of the sixteenth century they had already fallen out of favor. Not until feminist scholars of the early 1980s began to uncover and mine a larger body of evidence for medieval women as writers, readers, patrons, and interpreters of literature was Christine propelled back… Full Review

The centennial exhibition of the works of Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was a signal event for those interested in the past century of intimate relations between the visual arts and psychoanalysis. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (New York: Dial Press, 1942; 17–18), the painter reports that during their first meeting he and Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) were astonished at the congruence of their views on the primacy of paranoia as a form of active invention in contradistinction to the passive experience of the dream. Back-to-back articles in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1933 expressed… Full Review

Tryna Lyons’s The Artists of Nathadwara vividly renders a community of traditional painters. It brings to life a profession that the field of South Asian art studies has tended to sidestep in its focus on objects. Early in the last century, Ananda Coomaraswamy created a vision of the artist as an anonymous yogin, meditating on internalized canons to make his imagery. It was a romantic ideal that still makes itself felt, even though a number of scholars of South Asian art have since turned their attention to individual artists, using inscriptions and archival data to discover information on real… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea seeks simultaneously to remedy faulty perceptions of the modern art of Latin America and to revolutionize the writing of its history. Focusing on two periods of heightened aesthetic inquiry—the 1920s and 1930s, and the decades immediately following the Second World War—it is required reading for anyone concerned with the art produced in this vast region or with twentieth-century art in general The title of the award-winning exhibition invokes the famous drawing published in 1936 by Joaquín Torres-García in which he inverted the map… Full Review

The title Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a time of Plague, 1500–1800 does not adequately prepare the viewer for the beauty, substance, and intelligence of the exhibition. Visitors will, of course, be confronted with the grim reality of plague. They will also be dazzled by the depth of scholarship embodied in the well-chosen images, which suggest unmistakable parallels between an era dominated by fear of pestilence and our own twenty-first-century world. The exhibition’s curators, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas Worcester, organized the exhibition in partnership with Clark University and… Full Review

SubUrban: Tam Van Tran features the paintings and “sculptural drawings” of Tam Van Tran, a Vietnamese-born, Los Angeles–based artist who combines organic substances such as chlorophyll, spirulina algae, and beet juice with acrylic paint, canvas, paper, Wite-out liquid, foil, and metal staples. The exhibition is the latest in the Knoxville Museum of Art’s ongoing program, the SubUrban series, which serves as the first solo museum show and catalogue in the United States for emerging contemporary artists. Tran has participated in group and solo exhibitions since 1999, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and he was selected for participation in the series… Full Review

René Magritte’s art has attracted much attention in the past few years. Following 1999’s Magritte in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Humlebaek, Denmark, and the monumental exhibition in the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2003, a new series of Magritte exhibitions attempts to place the Belgian artist into the spotlight of public interest, responding to new developments in art theory and to new ways of thinking about Surrealism. René Magritte: Der Schlüssel der Träume (The Key of Dreams), the first-ever retrospective of Magritte’s art in Austria, presents more than seventy of his paintings and is staged concurrently with the… Full Review

“Encounter”—the operative word, to my mind, of the title under review—has transformed, in a relatively brief period of time, from a strikingly innovative and promising concept to a somewhat enigmatic, if not altogether elusive, scholarly term of choice, which is increasingly, perhaps even blandly, invoked to describe the meeting between Europe and the wider world in the early modern period. Which is to say, the relatively fresh field of “encounter studies” is already—don’t blink!—ripe for revision. A bit of backstory: The study of Europe’s engagement with the non-European world—particularly during the pivotal moment of global expansion… Full Review

At the outset of her study on Soyer and Jewish identity, Samantha Baskind acknowledges the knotty complications of her venture: “Raphael Soyer did not want to be known as a Jewish artist…. So why am I … writing a book on Soyer and Jewish art” (1–2)? Despite the urban realist’s persistent denial that his religious and cultural heritage influenced his art, this book makes a compelling case for its primacy. While the artist preferred and promoted the labels “American” and “New York” in association with himself and his art, Baskind digs deeper to show how Soyer’s works were informed by… Full Review

Peter Paul Rubens acted on an international stage of grand proportions. His journeys, together with his massive output and universal interests, reflect a life of exceptional scope. Born in Germany and raised in the Southern Netherlands, Rubens traveled throughout the continent and England as both artist and diplomat. A life so rich in variety and achievement is not easily encompassed in a monograph. A catalogue raisonnée of Rubens’s works has required twenty-seven volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, categorized by series, subjects, and commissions and written by a small army of scholars. Rubens’s life and work have also been… Full Review