Recently Published Reviews

Emblazoned on the cover of the Louvre's new Chardin exhibition catalogue is the image of a girl child holding a racquet and shuttlecock but curiously made-up and dressed like an adult woman. Her cheeks are rouged, her hair is powdered and she wears a circlet of ribbon tied enticingly around a slim white neck. In contrast to the solemn abstract beauty of Basket of Wild Strawberries splashed on the Louvre's 1979 Chardin exhibition catalogue, this detail, taken from Girl with Shuttlecock, cuts a different sort of figure, one speaking directly to the sensibilities of the 1990s. Chardin's representation of… Full Review

Chinese art scholarship is undergoing invigorating change, in tandem with the larger field of art history but with special characteristics of its own. The book under review illuminates the political and cultural significance of painting during the first two dynasties of China's early modern period: the Sung (960-1279) and the Yuan (1279-1368). The original occasion for this volume's seven papers was a symposium held in conjunction with the 1996 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taiwan. A welcome openness to a variety of approaches is nicely reflected in… Full Review

In 1940 John I. H. Baur organized an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum devoted to the work of Eastman Johnson (1824-1906). For the next three decades, the publication accompanying that show was the standard source on the painter's life and achievement--for the few who chose to disturb Johnson's posthumous obscurity. In 1972, in tandem with her dissertation research, Patricia Hills assembled a retrospective of the artist's work for the Whitney Museum of American Art; her text became the foremost reference related to the painter and American nineteenth-century genre painting. The publications of both Baur and Hills revealed much about both… Full Review

Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) marched to a different drum than his fellow American painters in the second half of the nineteenth century. When confreres explored mountain ranges, he discovered marshlands; when they settled in New York City to establish reputations, he continued a peripatetic existence; when others were repeating tired variations on a single theme, he struck out in new directions. His marsh scenes, storm paintings, orchid and hummingbird pictures, and late reclining floral still lifes: These are American originals. Heade can lay claim to a more diverse and creative body of work than almost any of his colleagues, as… Full Review

For some years now, a lingering sense of inadequacy has plagued U.S. historians of ancient art and text, a sense of having somehow got behind in the great "race for theory" (Barbara Christian's phrase). Everyone elsewhere and in other fields always seemed to have read more broadly and to have thought more originally about theoretical frameworks for scholarship. But The Art of Ancient Spectacle, an elegantly produced and intellectually sophisticated collection of nineteen essays on Hellenistic, Etruscan and Roman culture, demonstrates the pointlessness of continuing the lament; the majority of papers reveal a… Full Review

Bernadette Fort has performed an important service by editing this new edition of the reviews of the biennial Salons or officially sponsored art exhibitions originally published in that remarkable 18th-century French periodical, the Memoires secrets. The eleven Salon reviews included in the volume, spanning the last two decades of the old regime, are one of the most important sources we have to document contemporary reactions to the painting and sculpture of this period, that saw the shift from Rococo to neoclassical and the emergence of such talents as Jacques-Louis David and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun. These reviews also represent an important… Full Review

Pamela M. Lee presents a compelling theory of Gordon Matta-Clark's art in her monographic study. Her book is well-written and intelligent, and offers a thought-provoking discussion that positions his art in the historical, political, social, and aesthetic context of his period. In her introduction, Lee lays out her principle argument, that Matta-Clark's practice of disassembly and cutting of derelict buildings slated for demolition represents a process of "unbuilding" that leaves nothing but fragments of documentary photographs and films. Lee believes that Matta-Clark "ultimately denied the [art] work's condition of possibility," and that he deconstructed architecture through "shifts in scale and… Full Review

Recent studies of China's remarkable tradition of scholar's rocks have begun to reveal that these, together with the better-known outdoor garden rocks, form a unique Chinese sculptural tradition as aesthetically sophisticated and as deep in meaning as other world traditions in sculpture. As John Hay observed (Hay, "The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?" in Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power in China, Chicago, 1994), "The classical image of the Western tradition is the Apollo or the Venus. The classical image of the Chinese tradition is the rock" (68). The aesthetic interest of this tradition… Full Review

Following Video/Architecture/Television: Writings on Video and Video Works 1970-1978, edited by Benjamin H. Buchloh (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1979), now out of print, and MIT's own Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects 1965-1990, edited by Brian Wallis, with its upbeat design and wide range of supporting illustrations, this is the third major compilation of writings by New York artist Dan Graham. As the textual architecture and thematic arrangement of the volume, its relation to these predecessors, and Graham's writing styles and occasions are… Full Review

A host of contemporary scholarly contributions to the literature on John Singer Sargent has enlarged and refined considerably our knowledge and understanding of the painter's work and life. Molly Crawford Volk, Trevor Fairbrother, Jane Dini, Miriam Stewart, Kerry Schauber, Erika Hirschler, and Sally M. Promey have of late facilitated a symbiotic discourse, through publications and exhibitions, that makes for a thick stew of accounts staking claims that often read as an ongoing dialogue committed to arguing out the many and complicated issues that subtend Sargent's art from the standpoint of context, intention, reception, and biography. Sargent's current popularity… Full Review

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour, was one of the most persistently pictured women of her time. During her career as official mistress of Louis XV of France (1745-64), artists such as François Boucher, François-Hubert Drouais, and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour represented her in a variety of contexts, from elegantly decorated interiors to lush garden bowers, and accompanied by a variety of objects, including books, prints, and musical instruments. In this book, Elise Goodman argues that a significant number of these portraits--five of a corpus of fifteen--were designed to portray Pompadour as a "femme savante," or "a woman of learning and… Full Review

This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue bring together for the first time in the United States a dazzling variety of Chinese rare books, rubbings and maps from the extensive holdings of the National Library of China, Beijing. This joint enterprise was organized by the National Library of China and the Queens Borough Public Library as part of an on-going effort to increase international professional cooperation and information exchange between these two institutions. While the quality and importance of the objects would easily argue for a major museum venue for this exhibition, the decision to use major public libraries was made… Full Review

James Meyer's Minimalism is a large, weighty book, filled with pictures, in between which are crammed immense amounts of information, ranging from snippets of commentary to exhaustive philosophical analyses. The middle section of this tripartite tome contains most of the illustrations, each of which is captioned with a Cliff's-Notes-like summary. Many are very insightful and precise, providing information on materials, size, scale, and proportions along with abbreviated, sometimes amusing, interpretations. The caption writer, identified as Catherine Caesar in the author's acknowledgements, relates an anecdote about a shipment, identified as "paper," of Robert Ryman's Classico paintings to Germany. When customs officials… Full Review

Ann Bermingham's eagerly awaited new book, Learning to Draw, is about much more than the development of drawing practices. As the subtitle, Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art, suggests, this is a wider history of the formation of the individual as a subject in (visual) culture. It analyzes the way drawing "resulted in an aestheticization of the self and the things of everyday life," a phenomenon that Bermingham sees as an important characteristic of the modern period (ix). This excellent book is difficult to fairly summarize and characterize for it is such an… Full Review

Writing on the Salon of 1755, the abbé de la Porte concluded his enthusiastic review of Jean-Baptiste Greuze with the phrase, "One would like to know him." (quoted in Munhall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 11). This comment is ambiguous, since, despite his longing to know Greuze, it was apparently clear to the abbé that the work and the man were not transparent reflections of each other. For modern audiences, such longing is puzzling: we think we know Greuze all too well. Even some of the most scholarly accounts have stressed his eccentricity and vanity, his penchant for painting pathetic adolescents and domestic… Full Review