Recently Published Reviews

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

David O’Brien’s book is a timely addition to Delacroix literature at a significant moment when the great Romantic painter is once again in the limelight. A major retrospective exhibition—the first since 1963—of 180 of his works just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its only American venue, following the show’s display at the Louvre museum. A more intimate exhibition around Delacroix and the theme of “struggle” as exemplified in his Saint-Sulpice murals—their antecedents and their afterlife in modernist painting—ran parallel with the Louvre retrospective at the Musée National Eugène Delacroix in the painter’s atelier on the picturesque Place Fürstenberg… Full Review

Several years ago, an Egyptian fly who died in 1870 was belatedly elegized in the pages of a prominent cultural studies journal. This poor airborne creature had lost its way, navigating into the camera of Antonio Beato and careening into the sticky collodion that coated the photographer’s glass plate negative. The fly’s treacly end would secure its immortality, for when the image was printed, the carcass loomed monstrously large over the citadel that was Beato’s putative subject. Occupying the flat surface of the plate and of the print, the mummified fly makes a travesty of the perspectival construction of the… Full Review

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, the latest exhibition from the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explored the influence of Catholicism on fashion. As curator Andrew Bolton writes in the exhibition catalogue, it examined “how the Catholic imagination has shaped the creativity of designers and how it is conveyed through their fashions” (96). The exhibition design, by architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, capitalized on light and height to endow each space with its own environment, and a distinctive soundtrack used the emotive power of song to envelop visitors as they entered. Credit is due… Full Review

Peggy McCracken’s new book is about power. Although the burgeoning field of human-animal studies has been dominated by literary historians like herself, McCracken’s approach is refreshingly interdisciplinary and opens the door to new ways in which scholars in other disciplines might enter this increasingly important discourse. In her introduction, McCracken’s thesis is crystal clear: “literary texts use human-animal encounters to explore the legitimacy of authority and dominion over others” (1). Her sources are wide ranging and include fables, bestiaries, romances, and the Bible. As the title suggests, actual animal skins function on multiple levels by forming (or concealing) identity and… Full Review

Shari Tishman’s Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation is a book that covers the whole field of education, beginning with children in primary school to adults visiting museums. Though I intend to discuss the entire scope of the book here, my primary concern is how its thesis applies to people, of any age, when they look at art in museums. My first thought when asked to review the book was that the concept of “slow looking” is appealing, but is it realistic? Our tendency for multitasking, fast looking, and immediate information saturates our lives today. Can… Full Review

In 2017, the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, United Kingdom) and the Musée d’Orsay (Paris) marked the centenary of Edgar Degas’s death with exhibitions that explored different aspects of the painter’s legacy. Each exhibition drew attention to myths that developed about Degas and his art in the years after his death, highlighting approaches that dealers and collectors took to the marketing and acquisition of his works. The subtitle of the Fitzwilliam exhibition—“a passion for perfection”—is taken from a comment that the celebrated dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard made in the 1924 book he published about Degas. As noted by the curator, Jane… Full Review

What does it mean to say that an artwork is “global” or “contemporary”? Such claims, which are often both implicit and based on unreflective judgments, are nothing less than a condition of possibility for virtually any kind of discourse or practice related to contemporary art. Yet despite the ubiquity or even the necessity of “the global” and “the contemporary,” it is by no means clear how these terms function rhetorically; it isn’t even clear that they refer to determinate concepts or that they can be distinguished analytically. This intense ambiguity presents severe hazards for those who wish to operate critically… Full Review

The mutual imbrications of race, space, and visuality that are a shared preoccupation of art history, cultural studies, critical theory, media studies, and anthropology come into disturbingly vivid relief in the story of the colonial-era cemetery whose long-buried past and recent transformation into the first national monument to memorialize US slavery form the subjects of Andrea Frohne’s fascinating book, The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space. Over the course of the eighteenth century, over 15,000 deceased African Americans, slave and free—perhaps as many as 20,000, according to some estimates—were interred throughout roughly 6.7 acres… Full Review

In Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture: Representations from France, c. 1100–1500, Marian Bleeke’s goal is to explore what medieval sculptures “have to say about medieval women’s experiences of motherhood” (1). She asserts that “these sculptures become sites where medieval women could consider their own maternal experiences and the meanings those experiences held for them” (3). In this study, the author makes a powerful case for exploring the potential experiences and perspectives of those people who have limited presence in the medieval textual record—a rather large, but decidedly understudied portion of the medieval population. It remains a shortcoming… Full Review

Diana Bullen Presciutti’s Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy is a sharply focused look at the figurative imagery deployed by hospitals caring for orphaned and abandoned children. Hospitals in Renaissance Italy have long been a subject of research: John Henderson’s The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (2006) is a recent example of broad treatment, and Il mercante, l’ospedale, i fanciulli: La donazione di Francesco Datini, Santa Maria Nuova e la Fondazione degli Innocenti (eds. Stefano Filipponi, et al., 2010) is an example of specialized institutional studies. Historians have sought to chart the emergence of… Full Review

The chiaroscuro woodcut has always occupied an awkward and somewhat uncertain place in the history of prints. The technique employs multiple superimposed woodblock impressions in different colors to create printed images with tonal variation. Although the technique was developed by Lucas Cranach, Hans Burgkmair, and Hans Baldung Grien in Germany in the early years of the sixteenth century, most chiaroscuro woodcuts were produced in Italy. Between ca. 1516 and 1610, it is estimated that approximately two hundred such woodcuts were produced in Venice, Rome, and elsewhere on the Italian peninsula. Even allowing that there may be a number of lost… Full Review

In her innovative and elegant book, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, Sonal Khullar reconstitutes the history of modernism in India as nimble artistic negotiations between present and past, East and West, crafts and fine arts, and individual and nation. Through Edward Said’s notion of “affiliation,” she pushes the history of art worlds beyond the bounds of the nation-state, education, or media to revive “the worldly conditions, or social and political horizons, of cultural production” (14). By attending to artists’ mediations, she models a new theory of writing art history. Khullar examines four canonical artists—Amrita… Full Review