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

John J. Herrmann
Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2003. 215 pp.; 207 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (0878466819)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., July 21–November 28, 2004
A strong interest in the ancient Olympics on the part of both scholars and the general public has led several museums abroad to mount exhibitions exploring the artistic and archaeological evidence for Greek sports. The return of the Olympics to Greece in summer 2004 provided the impetus for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), to present Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit, the first exhibition in the United States to rival shows such as Mind and Body: Athletic Contests in Ancient Greece at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, in 1989 or… Full Review
June 21, 2005
Thumbnail
Philip Jacks
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. 440 pp.; 12 color ills.; 145 b/w ills. Cloth $98.95 (0271019247)
In the middle years of the fifteenth century, the Florentine-born Tommaso Spinelli (1398–1472) became a prominent banker in Rome and sponsored numerous building projects and other artistic enterprises, especially in Florence. This book gives an overview of the Spinelli family, concentrating on Tommaso and discussing in detail his business activities and his donations to the church of Santa Croce, the cloister and infirmary that he built there, the palace nearby, and his villa in the hills east of the city. Some of these matters had already been touched upon by Filippo Moisè (Santa Croce di Firenze: Illustrazione storico-artistica [Florence… Full Review
June 14, 2005
Thumbnail
Susan Foister
London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 320 pp.; 40 color ills.; 180 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300102801)
No one would mistake an artist with a name like Hans Holbein for an Englishman. Yet, as Susan Foister’s new book sets out to demonstrate, Holbein the Younger not only flourished during his tenure in England but also produced works integrally connected to the artistic context of the Tudor period. In Holbein and England, Foister hopes to revise common assumptions by reframing the artist geographically, arguing that Holbein’s experiences in Germany informed his English work and that early-sixteenth-century England was no backwater for the visual arts Misconceptions and unfamiliarity have assured a dearth of literature about English art of… Full Review
June 14, 2005
Thumbnail
David Roxburgh, ed.
Royal Academy of Arts, 2005. 496 pp.; many color ills.; 375 ills. Cloth (1903973562)
Royal Academy of Arts, London, January 22–April 12, 2005
Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600 is an ambitious and highly informative exhibition. With 376 items on display from 53 lending institutions—such is the wealth of material that it is hard to believe it took barely fifteen months to assemble—the show constitutes an important part of a program of all things Turkish in London. The aim is to unravel the cultural origins of the Ottomans (or the Turks, as Ottomans were commonly known in the West), but soon it becomes clear that this is no easy task. Thus Turks skillfully unfolds before our eyes as the widest possible… Full Review
May 27, 2005
Thumbnail
Andrea Longhi, ed.
Milan: Skira, 2004. 264 pp.; 176 b/w ills. Cloth €32.00 (8884912571)
The sacrament of baptism is the most fundamental initiation rite of Christianity. In the earliest centuries of Christian worship, it was a lustration that welcomed new converts into the church. During the Middle Ages baptism was typically performed only on Easter and Pentecost; rules that the rite should be performed during these two feasts held sway until the twelfth century. Baptism, like most rituals, evolved gradually over time, and eventually it assumed a new significance linked to the notion of salvation rather than conversion. By the eleventh century, the ritual was performed not only on Easter or Pentecost, but also… Full Review
May 25, 2005
Thumbnail
Anthony Alofsin
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. 320 pp.; 20 color ills.; 250 b/w ills.; 270 ills. Cloth $60.00 (0393730484)
Much history penned by the American generation that came of age during (and since) the 1960s deploys the narrative mode of a struggle between two binaries. Anthony Alofsin’s new history of design education at Harvard University goes so far as to include the word in its title. For Alofsin, the study of what is one of America’s leading institutions for architecture, landscape, and planning education revolves around a struggle for modernism. Importantly, the ultimate outcome of that skirmish was not the various attitudes that followed modernism, sundry posts, and their ilk, but instead an essential hijacking of America’s inevitable professional… Full Review
May 25, 2005
Thumbnail
Hal Foster
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 473 pp.; 15 color ills.; 121 b/w ills. Cloth $38.00 (0262062429)
Hal Foster’s Prosthetic Gods is a Lacanian-driven contribution to art history and theory. The book does not address problems in the writing of art history, for example, why such writing is prone to monumentalizing artifacts or is crucial in canon formation. Instead, it uses theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to quarantine modern art and art history by taking the special interpretive codes of Freud, and then Lacan, and transferring them to a general code of interpretation. Prosthetic Gods historicizes art history through Lacanian theory. This strategy produces a circularity in which an object, an interpretation thereof, and institutional… Full Review
May 10, 2005
Thumbnail
Zachary Ross
Exh. cat. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2003. 86 pp.; 19 color ills.; 27 b/w ills. $24.95 (0937031259)
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., October 20, 2004–February 6, 2005
A mysterious illness spread throughout the United States following the end of the Civil War. Symptoms varied from person to person but generally included diminished powers of concentration, decreased appetite, and overall decline in the level of physical energy. The Boston medical doctor George Beard identified the disease as neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, in 1869 and attributed its sudden appearance to rapid urbanization and industrialization. In the decades following Beard’s diagnosis, the American medical establishment refined the list of symptoms associated with neurasthenia and established a variety of treatments for it, from patent medicines to bedrest to vigorous exercise. Although… Full Review
May 9, 2005
Thumbnail
Leslie Carlyle
London: Archetype Publications, 2001. 592 pp.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $140.00 (1873132166)
Manuals and instructional handbooks for artists have been in existence at least since Pliny the Elder’s discussion, in Book 35 of his Natural History, of the history of painting and its materials. Their numbers increased in the twentieth century, as shown by the volumes now in print and by the large number of instructional articles in “popular” artists’ magazines—as opposed to the academic or “serious” artists’ press, where there is either no instruction or, if I may say so, disdain for such a thing. As Leslie Carlyle points out in The Artist’s Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction… Full Review
May 4, 2005
Thumbnail
Anne-Marie Logan
Exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 344 pp.; 145 color ills.; 151 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300104944)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 15–April 3, 2005
The medallions on the monumental facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art contain the names of, among other great artists, Rembrandt and Diego Velázquez. But if one looks for the name of the greatest master of the Flemish Baroque, Peter Paul Rubens, one will have searched in vain. Although Ruben’s paintings, oil sketches, and drawings lay within reach of the most important American collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they apparently avoided buying them. For example, Rubens is the only major seventeenth-century painter whose work is not represented in the Frick Collection in New York. This seems… Full Review
April 29, 2005
Thumbnail
Edward Dimendberg
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 352 pp.; 61 b/w ills. Paper $29.50 (0674013468)
Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity analyzes the logic and history of the modern metropolis through the eyes of its most faithful disciple and staunchest critic, the postwar noir film, especially its B variation, where “[t]he loss of public space, the homogenization of everyday life, the intensification of surveillance, and the eradication of older neighborhoods by urban renewal and redevelopment projects are seldom absent” (7). In the tradition of Siegfried Kracauer, Dimendberg is interested in the common, the everyday, and the epiphenomenal, expressions of mass culture that lend us insight into the unconscious logic of late-capitalist reason… Full Review
April 27, 2005
Thumbnail
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Calif., November 12, 2004–March 13, 2005
The cadences of an auctioneer greet the visitor to an exhibition of Rachel Harrison’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but this is not Sotheby’s. It’s a low-rent auction. The bids come in one- and two-dollar increments, and there are no British accents. Intrigued by the galloping voice, you discover its source: a towering, amorphous, silvery blue, concrete mass entitled Hail to Reason. Although vaguely resembling Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac in its tall, oblong shape, Hail to Reason does not represent anything in particular. Instead, it offers a lumpy surface punctuated by alcoves ideal for… Full Review
April 26, 2005
Nicola Courtright
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 344 pp.; 10 color ills.; 244 b/w ills. Cloth $113.00 (0521624371)
This book is a richly illustrated surrogate for actually visiting a monument that, since 1585, has occupied the heart of Vatican City yet has been off-limits for ordinary citizens, then and now. Who knew that the square tower rising at the terminus of the northern flank of the Belvedere Courtyard contained a well-thought-out program of frescoes covering the walls of the seven rooms of this triple-story papal retreat? With this handsome publication, we can take a virtual tour and file through the rooms to admire a sequence of epic narratives and monumental landscapes that celebrate the signal achievement of its… Full Review
April 26, 2005
Thumbnail
Yuko Kikuchi
New York: Routledge, 2004. 328 pp.; 102 b/w ills. Cloth $195.00 (0415297907)
Western readers will have come to know about mingei (folkcraft) theory through The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1972), the English potter Bernard Leach’s adaptation of a number of essays by his friend, the philosopher and crafts theorist Yanagi Soetsu, who is the principal subject of Yuko Kikuchi’s book. Or, if such readers happen to be potters themselves, they might have learned the basics of Japanese folkcraft theory from Leach’s own A Potter’s Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1940). What they will not have discovered is that Yanagi’s work is itself based on a hybridization… Full Review
April 25, 2005
Thumbnail
Chiyo Ishikawa, ed.
Exh. cat. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum in association with University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 300 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (0803225059)
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Wash., October 16, 2004–January 2, 2005; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fla., February 2, 2005–May 1, 2005
It has been a long time since a major American museum has undertaken an exhibition of Spanish art, and none has tackled as ambitious a subject as Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492–1819. Organized by the Seattle Art Museum and Spain’s Patrimonio Nacional, the exhibition has a strong thematic content that is presented thoughtfully in a handsome catalogue and in the display of some one hundred rare objects. Most of the works are drawn from the Spanish royal collection, and many have never been seen outside of Spain. Prominent art museums in the United States… Full Review
April 25, 2005
Thumbnail