Recently Published Reviews

The Restless Earth, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and organized by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, was an ambitious exhibition that brought together more than sixty artists from over forty countries. It presented an exceptional ensemble of personal and collective works, which describe some of the most critical and debated issues of our society—migration, the current refugee crisis, and the phenomenon of globalization. The exhibition was on display at the Triennale di Milano Foundation, a center that explores the experimental languages of contemporary art, architecture, and design. The Restless Earth was displayed in a series of rooms, galleries, and corridors, which occupied… Full Review

Olivier Barlet’s 2016 English translation of Les Cinémas d’Afrique des années 2000 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012) offers scholars and students an impressive and comprehensive study of African film made and produced specifically from 1996 to the early 2000s. The four-hundred-plus-page work focuses on the questions and polemics in filmmakers’ work as well as the criticism that dictates the theoretical framework through which scholars understand African cinema. Barlet seeks to couch his study in the transnational contexts of the current trials and turmoil of our time to which African filmmakers are responding. “Africa today,” he writes, does not exist “in isolation… Full Review

The discipline of art history has, of late, experienced a surge of interest in the adjacent field of conservation studies. Exactly a decade ago, the research and conservation institutes at the Getty cohosted the symposium “The Object in Transition,” convened to bring artists, art historians, curators, and conservators together to discuss case studies that spanned from modernist painting to Postminimalist latex-based sculpture. The symposium—which one can watch in its entirety online—addressed, in the words of its organizers, “the interpretative problems that have arisen in relation to durability and ephemerality in modern and contemporary art,” which “have been exacerbated by an… Full Review

Amanda Wunder’s impressive study discusses how sacred artworks were created collaboratively as powerful interventions to mitigate Seville’s severe financial, political, and social crises in late seventeenth-century Spain. She examines works in multiple media, including architecture, painting, sculpture, alhajas (luxury objects prized for both their spiritual or monetary value), printed materials, and ephemera. Many of these were part of urban renewal campaigns responding to the natural and human-made disasters that profoundly affected Seville’s topography and distribution of resources, which eventually contributed to the city’s decline. Wunder explains in careful detail the context of the dire economic, political, and social turmoil that… Full Review

“No animal but man ever laughs.” Aristotle’s declaration launches this book on technologically facilitated representations, insisting on a historically broad and human framework for machine pictures. Though not unmindful of photography’s material functions, Kaplan’s engagingly written survey explores the medium’s rootedness in human experience and use, elucidating both its productive and destructive uses in the amplification of Self. What might initially appeal as a light-hearted study of levity in photographic practice swiftly transforms into a deeper reflection on the psychological motivations behind comedy, which also includes vilification, mockery, and the fear of mortality. Kaplan’s volume, in other words, is not… Full Review

Joan A. Holladay and Susan L. Ward, along with thirty-three additional contributors, have completed the third installment of the mammoth Gothic Sculpture in America series. This volume includes 446 entries on close to 500 objects, bringing the total of works published in the series close to 1200. At least two more volumes are anticipated. While some of the sculptures included, such as an Angel from the Frick Collection (cat. #43), have received scholarly attention, many more are published for the first time in this volume. Holladay and Ward’s introduction acknowledges the challenges inherent in both the terms “Gothic” and “sculpture.”… Full Review

The third and last iteration of Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950 on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2017, is just one of the several exhibitions over the last five years that has sought to examine and complicate the story about the development of avant-garde movements in Mexico and their impact on the cultural and social life of the country. This latest surge of interest in modern Mexican art started with Vanguardia en México 1915–1930, organized by the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City in 2013, and continued with the exhibition Modern Mexico Avant-Garde… Full Review

The vast area of the Andes was home to extraordinary cultures that produced ritual imagery for millennia before the arrival of the Spanish and continued with new subjects and significance under the dictates of the Catholic Church. Easel paintings by indigenous artists from Cuzco, once the capital of the Inca empire, have received considerable attention along with other Precolumbian and colonial ceramics, metallurgy, architecture, and textiles from the city and its environs, Changes in artistic production follow the course of cultural, social, political, and religious action through numerous administrative systems, culminating with the Spanish in the sixteenth century. However, there… Full Review

What distinguishes the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Calder: Hypermobility exhibition from other recent Calder exhibitions is its presentation of sculpture as performance art. Jay Sanders, the Whitney Museum’s curator of performance art, and his colleagues Greta Hartenstein and Melinda Lang advance the claim that, in order to be adequately apprehended, Calder’s sculptures ought to be seen and heard in motion or, as they would have it, in a state of activation. From the position of art historical argument, this seems so logical as to sound self-evident and therefore unworthy of serious consideration. However, in the museum setting, the implementation… Full Review

Seldom is an artist offered the opportunity of creating a complete space. Seldom is an artist offered complete control of the architecture, lighting, and contents of a venue, or given complete control of the experience of the spectator. More seldom still does a public museum afford such an occasion to an artist, allowing for the creation of a truly permanent installation. With the realization of Austin, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin accomplishes this rare feat, enabling Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) to join an elite list of artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries… Full Review

In describing Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini wedding portrait, signed and dated by the artist in 1434, Ernst Gombrich wrote: “For the first time in history the artist became the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense of the term.” But is this actually the first instance? In the late sixth century BCE an Athenian vase painter signed his name “Smikros egrapsen” (Smikros painted it) on a red-figure stamnos now in Brussels that depicts an otherwise typical Athenian symposium, namely, young men lounging on couches, wine cups in hand while being entertained by female courtesans. The central of the three symposiasts… Full Review

Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895–1925 boldly rethinks the established histories of fine art photography’s development in America, a topic foundational to the history of photography’s origins as a discipline. Clarence H. White (1871–1925) was one of the leading photographers of the American Pictorialist movement, which advocated the practice of photography as a fine art medium. His life and work were conducted in surroundings as varied as the parlors and backyards of Newark, Ohio, a gracious urban townhouse in Harlem, shore cabins in Maine, and the modest farm buildings and open vistas of… Full Review

Catherine Walworth’s Soviet Salvage: Imperial Debris, Revolutionary Reuse, and Russian Constructivism is an unusual entry in the literature on early Soviet art, which is sure to puzzle many readers and (in all likelihood) infuriate at least a few. Readers of academic books are familiar enough with such responses, immersed as we are in the unceasing drive for self-criticism and revision that dulls the polemical sting to a tickle. Walworth’s book is no argument for argument’s sake, however; it neither delights in overturning accepted interpretations nor revels in hyperbole. Instead, it explores the possibility of discarding key distinctions honed by generations… Full Review

Jane Taylor, friend and longtime collaborator of William Kentridge, examines the artistic process behind Kentridge’s 2010 production of the Russian opera The Nose, which was based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 short story of the same name and composed by Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich in 1928. As Taylor tells us, the book is less about the production of the opera and more about the making of it. In other words, she is interested in examining how the artist deals with making as a problem-solving operation as well as the operations that happen between head and hand in the course of Kentridge’s… Full Review

When SmartHistory.org, the online scholarly resource for art history students and instructors, debuted in 2007, it was a radical proposition. Instead of purchasing expensive textbooks, students could access videos modeling in-depth visual analysis of well-known works of art and architecture, robustly researched essays on single works and overarching themes, and images that articulate a global art history survey, free through their web browser. Both the website interface and the YouTube–style videos contained within were, in many senses, more germane to students’ consumption patterns and learning habits than a ten-pound textbook. SmartHistory cofounders Beth Harris and Steve Zucker, both graduates… Full Review