Recently Published Reviews

As the subject of a monograph, the American genre painter Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855) presents some clear challenges. His life was regrettably short (he died of a morphine overdose at age thirty), his few years of work were not overly prolific (we know of perhaps seven major paintings), his decision to live in Europe for his entire career placed him culturally and physically outside the ranks of his fellow antebellum artists, and, as if to frustrate the historian’s attempt to compensate for these limitations, he left behind almost no personal papers. Moreover, Woodville’s art does not fit into the accustomed… Full Review

Debra Schafter’s book contributes to a small but growing literature committed to identifying intersections of, rather than differences between, ornament and modernism. The stakes of this endeavor should not be underestimated. One needs only to remember Adolf Loos’s proclamation that “the evolution of humanity would cause ornament to disappear from functional objects,” in his polemic from 1908, aptly titled “Ornament and Crime,” to grasp the significance of this turnaround in aesthetic categorization and judgment. Hal Foster, who plays on Loos’s title for his own recent book, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), summarizes the traditional understanding… Full Review

See Mikiko Hirayama’s review of this book From its beginnings, photography has been the agent of an international dialogue of its own making. It has enacted and exemplified tensions between local cultures and wider historical energies: those of colonialist assimilation and resistance, of commercial engagement, of transcultural communication. Study of the medium leads quickly and irresistibly to international issues. Therefore few approaches to it have proven as prone to schematic rigidity as surveys of what might be called—to adopt the wishful old Stalinist phrase for realizing “socialism” within national borders—Photography in One Country. Whether extrapolated to fill out… Full Review

Art history has now and then been structured around psychoanalytic theory and method of inquiry. Clinical method and therapy have often been relied upon to interpret paintings as well. Nevertheless, the two modes of inquiry, historical and therapeutic, have been wary of each other’s conclusions, and therefore a relationship that varies from outright antagonism to interdisciplinary merger has characterized their past. That history is usually thought to begin with Sigmund Freud’s studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and brief references to other artists. As a matter of fact, the psychological interpretation of painting goes much further back, to Pliny the… Full Review

The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance is an ambitious book, a prolonged meditation on the reflexive nature of portraiture. It constitutes a novel contribution to the history of Renaissance portraiture in that Jodi Cranston seeks to bring modern literary criticism and concepts to bear in her discussion of sixteenth-century Venetian and northern Italian likenesses. Stating that “thinking of pictures in terms of analogous structures characterized the general approach” (7) of Renaissance artists and patrons, she suggests parallels between the structural relationship of sitter and viewer and the rhetorical structures—as distinct from the content—of certain Renaissance literary forms. The… Full Review

In Japan, little formal distinction existed between the fine and decorative arts until about a century ago, when the Japanese began to adopt Western art-historical language and structures. Before then, all works of art—painting, ceramics, sculpture, and textiles—were seen as playing an equally vital role in the embellishment of interior and exterior spaces and as setting the aesthetic tone of a specific locale. The careful choice of the painting to be displayed in the tokonoma, the floral arrangement in a particular vase, or the design on a kimono could work together to create a mood of austerity or luxury,… Full Review

The large retrospective devoted to the work of Marsden Hartley, organized by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, is a delight, a sadness, and a puzzle in nearly equal measure. The delight is easy to relate. It was thrilling to walk into the Hartford exhibition’s first gallery and face a wall of Hartley’s brightly colored, nonrepresentational paintings made in Paris and Berlin in 1912 and 1913 (cat. nos. 8–11). Their recognizable motifs—numbers, seated Buddhas, musical staves, mudras, Chinese cloud forms, uniformed horsemen—float across the canvases, divided by dark blue lines that alternatively undulate among or… Full Review

In Image and Relic: Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome, Erik Thunø thoroughly explores three objects that could be justly deemed among the most important works of art created in the Carolingian period. (One of these is pictured here.) Commissioned as part of what was apparently a coherent papal project of art production in support of the cult of saints and relics, the objects were made for the most prestigious location in all of Western Christendom, the Lateran altar of the Holy of Holies. Nevertheless, these works are now less familiar than they ought to be, not… Full Review

Robert Smithson can be a trap for the critic. So much of what is interesting in his work can only be accessed through his writing, and his ideas are so captivatingly threaded through both that quotation often stands in for interpretation. Most studies of Smithson are just extended glosses and therefore do not tell us anything that we could not find out ourselves by going to the same source. Art history offers two correctives to this state of affairs: close study of the works themselves, and close study of the context within which they were made. These two approaches are… Full Review

See Margaret Olin’s review of this book. The Anglophone public owes a great debt to Christopher Wood and his colleagues for their various translations of classic German art-historical texts. This latest volume is centered on the work of the so-called Second School of Vienna Art Historians, active in the 1920s and 1930s. Writings by its key members, Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt, are prefaced by two pieces from Alois Riegl, supplemented by texts from Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg and Fritz Novotny, and concluded by reviews from Walter Benjamin and Meyer Schapiro. The volume gathers material relevant… Full Review

Sacred Traces: British Explorations of Buddhism in South Asia examines steps in the process by which our understanding of Buddhist sculpture—particularly those from eastern India, the region where Buddhism originated—has been shaped by British colonial interest in the region. In addressing this issue, Janice Leoshko draws upon images as diverse as the Bharhut rail pillars from the first century B.C.E., medieval clay votives and models of the Bodh Gaya temple, late-nineteenth-century Tibetan tangka paintings of the Wheel of Life, and the illustrations accompanying the original 1901 edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. This innovative juxtaposition of… Full Review

Why have psychoanalytic approaches to interpreting medieval art long been resisted? For decades many art historians have explored how Sigmund Freud’s ideas can enhance the readings of objects, yet medievalists have considered psychoanalytic theories too remote in time and philosophy from their subject. Psychoanalysis seems too concerned with individual agency to be adapted for use in studying artists and patrons whose identities have largely been lost over time. Madeline H. Caviness claims to be “the first to attempt an articulation of current [psychoanalytic] theories in play with feminist analyses of medieval works of art” (229). The medieval field would benefit… Full Review

Competition is something we are all familiar with, both inside and outside of our professions. We compete with our parents, mentors, siblings, friends, and lovers. We compete with our enemies. We compete with the living and, even, with the dead—occasionally, in order to transcend death. We need to prove our worth, both to ourselves and to the world at large, as we attempt to give meaning to our lives. Competition sustains us. It can be productive and can lead to breakthroughs (i.e., progress). It forces us to surpass ourselves in order to triumph over others. Thus, competition has a dual… Full Review

Miyagawa (or Makuzu) Kōzan (1842–1916) is enjoying a revival among collectors today—and with good reason. A remarkably prolific artist whose activities spanned the entire Meiji era (1868–1912), he produced ceramics of dazzling technical bravura, of subtle tonalities, and of painterly effects. His name is associated with wares in the Satsuma style; giant vases intricately decorated in high relief; stonewares in the manner of Ninsei and Kenzan; celadons; and, above all, with elegant porcelains featuring softly blurred underglaze landscapes, floral, and animal décor. Although Kōzan’s protean talents made him an international celebrity during his lifetime and his work has been highlighted… Full Review

No group of Athenian vase painters has received more scholarly attention than the so-called Pioneers, the early painters in the red-figure technique working from its invention ca. 530 B.C. to about 490/480 B.C., the height of the late archaic period in Greek art. Among the Pioneers the best known by far is Euphronios, one of the few ancient Greek artists to be given a solo exhibition and still the holder of the record price for a Greek vase. The Pioneers and their vases are also the focus of Richard Neer’s book, chosen because he sees in certain exceptional peculiarities of… Full Review