Recently Published Reviews

Late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century art in northern Europe is often noted for its similarities to Classical art, as evidenced most famously in Nicholas of Verdun’s altar at Klosterneuberg, of 1181; the sculpture of Laon and Chartres; and the Ingeborg Psalter, of ca. 1195. The idea of a “Year 1200 Style,” however, as Konrad Hoffman dubbed it in his catalogue for the The Year 1200 exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970, has been considered problematic from the earliest days, with Willibald Sauerländer calling it overly “vague and formalistic” (review of “‘The Year 1200,’ a Centennial Exhibition… Full Review

Depending on the context of its usage, the Spanish term género is definable as either “gender” or “genre.” Katherine Clay Bassard takes up this dichotomy in line with questions of literacy when she opines that “[i]n speaking of gender and genre, then, [she works] from the assumption that form is not merely a matter of free choice or appropriate models but a function of how a writer perceives her/himself in the social order.”1 This conflation suggests that whenever deployed, the context is never not haunted by the subtext as well as by the social location in which the usage… Full Review

Volume 8 in Boydell’s Medievalism series, Peter N. Lindfield’s Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 explores the nuances of and developments in the early Gothic Revival. Lindfield couches his study within the growing appreciation of the Gothic, discussing how leading Gothic Revival architects (Kent, Essex, Wyatt), antiquarians (Carter, Rickman), and Gothic proponents (Gray, Warton, Walpole) crucially impacted the history of design. Working in an interdisciplinary context, he shows how the picturesque, the Gothic novel, antiquarian prints, and topographical studies influenced the arbiters of taste and led to gradual changes in the use of Gothic motifs in furniture… Full Review

The exhibition The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, on view just a few steps from the White House in Washington, DC, was the first major exhibition of Qur’an manuscripts in the United States, and timely in countering the fast-growing anti-Muslim rhetoric even though it was not envisioned with such an aim. Along with its publication, under review here, the exhibition offered a nuanced understanding of the Qur’an’s role in Islamic societies and revealed the artistry involved in its making. Edited by the show’s curators, Massumeh Farhad and Simon Rettig, the book… Full Review

Although much researched, the Justinian church of Hagia Sophia (532–37 and 562) proves to be a still unfathomable well of architectural revelations that bear on the building’s significance as a monument of Byzantine spirituality. This book is a welcome contribution that offers conceptual vistas through which to understand the metaphysical effects of the building’s material and artistic fabric. Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium centers on the claim that during the liturgy in the church all participants—congregation, officiating clergy, and choirs—enjoyed a multisensory, transcendent experience. Both the visual qualities of the material fabric of the church and the… Full Review

Rice University’s 300-acre campus is a bucolic enclave situated between the Museum District and the Texas Medical Center, all to the south of downtown Houston. The bulk of its academic buildings are clustered at its axial and planned core. Its north edge and east edge along Main Street are tree lined, well groomed and park-like. Its south and west edges are less tidy, however, and are lined with more functional structures—sports fields and surface parking lots. The Moody Center for the Arts, designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture in Los Angeles and opened in February 2017, is not part of the… Full Review

Angela Ho’s Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention is a groundbreaking book that explores the phenomena of repetition and invention as they pertain to the work of the most outstanding genre painters active in the Dutch Republic during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. Ho focuses on three of the leading masters during this period: Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris, who collectively helped to raise this art to an extraordinary level of technical refinement imbued with matchless splendor and consummate illusionism. In order to delve more fully into the achievements of these… Full Review

Published to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the US entry into World War I in 1917, David Lubin’s Grand Illusions: American Art and World War I offers its reader much more than the book’s straightforward title suggests. Lubin’s foreign, filmic, postwar touchstone, Jean Renoir’s 1937 film La grande illusion, signals an unconventional history of American art of the period regarding media, chronological scope, and well-worn definitions of “American” art. In fact, the subtitle’s narrow national emphasis quite dramatically belies Lubin’s cross-media and international concerns, encompassing painting and photography in addition to film and popular visual culture. The book’s Anglo-American… Full Review

1986, Sarajevo. Zvono rushes the field during a soccer match. For this performance, entitled Sport and Art, the band of artists sets up easels and begins to paint. They wear the colors of the opposing team. Once the paintings are complete, they run across the field and showcase them. 1986, Turgovishte. In northern Bulgaria, three groups of artists perform parallel actions called The Road. Members of Dobrudzha, Turgovishte, and Ma paint their bodies and engage in enigmatic rituals as they move through remote hillsides. 1986, Dresden. The Auto-Perforation Artists stage a series of rambunctious theatrics involving animal parts… Full Review

Ralph Ubl takes Max Ernst very seriously in unforeseen ways, not as a pasticheur of fashionable lines of thought—the fire bringer of Freud to Paris—and not as a great painter. This Ernst is more a dark mechanic dismantling the parts of painting (perspective, ground, picture plane, rectangle, contour), which then persist as a “repressed power” (7) in his painting, enigmatically but powerfully generating “effects of the unavailable” (6). What is at stake in the “unavailable” is Ernst’s figuring of the conditions of Surrealist revolution. Ubl asks: What fueled Ernst’s “unconscious” production, and prompted it to take the form of artistic… Full Review

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This quote from John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) illustrates the blurred line between fact and fiction in the American story of nation building. The exhibition Once Upon a Time . . . The Western: A New Frontier in Art and Film, cocurated by Mary-Dailey Desmarais of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and Thomas Brent Smith of the Denver Art Museum (DAM), where it was titled The Western: An Epic in Art and Film, carefully… Full Review

Darby English’s book 1971: A Year in the Life of Color hinges on two pairs of jarring pictures. One of the images is well known: a black-and-white photograph showing members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) protesting in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in January 1971. The sandwich boards atop their overcoats brand an upcoming survey of contemporary art by black American artists—which they had instigated and then disowned because of the museum’s failure to hire a black curator—a “racist show.” This image has come to signify the sustained pressure that… Full Review

In his latest engagement with print culture, Michael Gaudio demonstrates just how productive print culture’s modes of analysis continue to be. Given its rather predictable art-historical title, it may not be immediately evident that this is virtually the first full-length art-historical study of the Bible concordances produced at Little Gidding in England, unusual for deploying a process of collage in which fragments of printed images were reassembled into unconventional and puzzling compositions. As concordances, which usually have the goal of establishing agreement between different parts of the Bible, these volumes, especially in their use of printed images, seem to complicate… Full Review

Eyal Peretz’s premise is that framed artworks, which include paintings, photographs, cinema, and theater, imply an out-of-frame or off-screen space. This is not the literal exterior surrounding the enframed work—the gallery wall on which a painting hangs, the rafters above the stage, the space beyond the bounds of the movie screen—but the world the artwork creates but does not happen to include within its frame. This off-screen or out-of-frame space is part of the artwork inasmuch as the artwork suggests a complete world of which it chooses to show only part. But this space is also “not” part of the… Full Review

The essays in No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity interrogate humor as a transcultural device used to address the thorny issue of racial, social, and political difference. Each of the book’s contributors carefully considers human representation and classification and how stereotypes are constructed through visual culture. One of the book’s coeditors, the late Angela Rosenthal, argues that visual humor must be rigorously examined because comedy attracts our attention to issues of human worth and variance. For Rosenthal, interpreting visual satire is one key to understanding the fluidity of socially fixed categories such as race… Full Review