Recently Published Reviews

The Alhambra has long been an accessible entryway into a powerful kind of Orientalist romanticism, capturing the minds and words of writers, rulers, artists, and art historians alike. Constructed at the end of the ninth century, expanded as a palace in the twelfth and thirteenth under the Nasrid dynasty (1230–1492), before falling into disrepair from the Reconquista until the nineteenth century, the Alhambra inspired Europeans with its arabesque ornamental scheme and poetic Arabic epigraphy. But as Olga Bush points out in Reframing the Alhambra, the records and descriptions from such sources often tell us more about the authors themselves… Full Review

There are times when divergent academic and ideological interests come together unexpectedly; these events can yield new scholarly insights even as they lay bare disciplinary antagonisms. A 2009 symposium at the Clark Art Institute was just such an occasion. Its interrogatory title Is Paris Still the Capital of the 19th Century? signaled the conveners’ interest in the legacies of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and T. J. Clark for the writing of nineteenth-century art history. Less clear was whether the title was meant ironically or in earnest. Were the conveners purposely begging the question? The publication of a related collection of… Full Review

The catalogue Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots (1886) accompanied its namesake exhibition in Istanbul curated by Bahattin Öztuncay, Ahmet Ersoy, and Deniz Türker. The exhibition displayed the Bismarck Gift Albums, three photographic albums prepared by the court of Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) as an official gift for Otto von Bismarck (d. 1890), Germany’s long-term legendary chancellor. These albums (acquired by the Omer M. Koç Collection in May 2017) document the Söğüt Photographic Expedition, which was a trip ordered in 1886 by Abdülhamid II’s imperial decree to the then newly established Ertuğrul Sancak… Full Review

The Dutch painter, printmaker, and draftsman Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) died three hundred fifty years ago (the anniversary this year is being marked by exhibitions and events worldwide) and for much of that time, his art has been the object of avid consumption, artistic emulation, and scholarly scrutiny. Responses have ranged from adulation to disgust, but apathy has seldom been one of them. Thus, it is a daunting challenge to say something new about this endlessly fascinating and infuriatingly cagey old master, whose own literary record can be summed up in a handful of financially motivated letters and pithy (possibly… Full Review

To mark the centenary of the death of Auguste Rodin, the Musée Rodin organized a range of events and acted as communication hub for celebratory happenings around the world, which included this weighty (in every sense) and lavishly illustrated book. Its appendices alone comprise an invaluable, clear record of the exhibition, with a detailed catalogue of works exhibited (332 entries), an extensive bibliography, and a list of works alphabetically by sculptor. But the bulk of the book celebrates Rodin in a broad sense, drawing out aspects of his work that have ongoing relevance for modern and contemporary sculptural practice. It… Full Review

The release of Sharon Farmer’s most recent book, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience, was eagerly awaited. With this study, the author tackles an exciting and ambitious project: to reconsider the history of silk industries in medieval Paris and question its origins. Exploiting with ease all sources available, Farmer demonstrates that from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the late fourteenth, Paris had, in effect, a silk cloth industry whose production went far beyond the manufacture of haberdashery to which it has often been limited. In the introduction, Farmer addresses and… Full Review

The Sainte-Chapelle de Paris is renowned as a monumental reliquary, designed for King Louis IX (r. 1214–70, canonized 1297), to guard the Crown of Thorns and other Passion relics. Its fame is matched only by praise (then and now) for its dazzling Gothic beauty. Despite its importance, few historians have attempted to understand its design. Meredith Cohen’s book fills this void by offering new insight into its architectural significance. The text is organized into five chapters that analyze the creation, dissemination, and crystallization of an aesthetic associated with Capetian rulership in Paris. She retraces the royal patronage of architecture from… Full Review

Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World of Greece and Rome was the first in a series of exhibitions organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum that put the art and history of ancient Greece and Rome in context by elucidating their relationships with neighboring civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. This approach of viewing pre-modern civilizations as part of a global network, in this case interconnected via trade, diplomacy, warfare, and religion, is part of a larger and welcome trend in museum exhibitions worldwide. The Mediterranean Sea has always functioned as both boundary and link between the… Full Review

Rencontres à Venise was visually sumptuous and intellectually stimulating while manageable in size, graced by the superb quality of the loans and accompanied by an excellent catalogue, coedited by the curators Stefania Mason and Linda Borean, two distinguished Italian scholars of Venetian art. Whereas Mason’s catalogue essay provides a fresh analysis of the renewal of Venetian painting in the seventeenth century, weaving together its many threads, Borean’s contribution traces the changes in artistic practices and patterns of patronage and collecting that nourished that renewal. Andrea Bacchi, who directed the sculpture section, presents a useful overview of the medium in the… Full Review

Sculpture Vertical, Horizontal, Closed, Open is based on the five lectures, collectively titled “Sculpture on the Threshold—An Enquiry into the Underlying Forms of Sculpture,” that Penelope Curtis delivered as the 2015 Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in London. The framework of the lecture series, given biennially since 1994 by selected leading scholars of British art, accounts for the specific national focus of the book, though at times it seems incongruous for a project concerned with identifying something akin to a universal vocabulary of sculpture. Curtis justifies this exact issue in the preface, writing that beyond the… Full Review

As the migration of people across national borders becomes an increasingly contentious issue, Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 offers a history of the impact of one specific geographic migration of people and ideas back and forth across the Mexico-California border. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition that took place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from September 17, 2017, to April 1, 2018. The exhibition and catalogue were created to explore and complicate the history of design and architectural influence across the border and show the ways in which design and architecture in Mexico and… Full Review

From the Page to the Street: Latin American Conceptualism, curated by Julia Detchon, the 2017–2018 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum, draws from its collection of prints and drawings to reconsider the role of paper in translating the concerns of artists into political protest in Latin America during the 1960s and early 1980s. Whether designed to evade the censorship of regional dictators or to bind the concerns of art to the conditions of daily life, postcards, lithographs, newsprint, and butcher paper, hanging cold and quiet within the museum’s Paper Vault, represent an archive… Full Review

Architectural historians have reason to welcome The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem and An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South. Brian D. Goldstein, an architecture, urban, and planning historian, and Angel David Nieves, an architecture and urban historian with expertise in the digital humanities, tell important stories that enrich our understanding of architecture and planning in relationship to race, racism, gender, and grassroots social movements in the United States. The focus on the built environment in each case study, one of postwar Harlem and the other of the Jim Crow South… Full Review

In November 2017, the Louvre Abu Dhabi opened its magnificent buildings and dome, which reflect contemplatively on the conventional white-cube gallery and local architectural traditions. To this reviewer the building is eclipsed by the collection. The Louvre Abu Dhabi has acquired objects from 3000 BCE to 2016 with the accession of Ai Weiwei’s Fountain of Light. In addition, the Agence France-Muséums provides them, as part of a thirty-year agreement, management advice, object loans, and the use of the brand “Louvre” for $1.27 billion. They will host four temporary exhibitions a year from the thirteen partner museums in France. The… Full Review

“I have made something graceful,” Gustave Courbet once said of his Young Ladies of the Village (127). When his painting of three elegantly dressed women charitably offering a piece of bread to a raggedy peasant girl appeared at the Salon of 1852, however, critics saw anything but grace. On the contrary, for Gustave Planche it manifested the artist’s “disdain for anything resembling beauty or formal elegance” (Revue des deux mondes, 670). Today, it is perhaps the work’s placid treatment of light, its constraint, and spatial distancing that strike us in the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it now… Full Review