Recently Published Reviews

The French eighteenth century, an era often derided and dismissed as frivolous and libertine, has been experiencing a revival by scholars in the last three decades, with the prolific artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) occupying a singular position in the period’s rehabilitation. Fragonard has been the subject of at least four major monographic shows in the last three years—including the recent Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures (2017) at the National Gallery of Art and Fragonard Amoureux: Galant et Libertin (2015–16) at the Musée du Luxembourg. While his dazzling paint handling and prominent commissions—one thinks of The Progress of Love at the Frick… Full Review

“Where’s the poet?” Cy Twombly posed this question in a drawing he made in August 1960 while on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples. Yet, as Mary Jacobus tells us in her new book, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, this is not merely the painter’s question but a quotation from an unfinished poem John Keats wrote in 1818. Furthermore, the borrowed Keats line is not alone in Twombly’s drawing. These words are accompanied by more text (the heading “Sonnet” and the phrase “mists of idleness”) as well as a grid of twelve numbered sections (with… Full Review

In Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba, Abigail McEwen, associate professor of Latin American Art at the University of Maryland, offers an original and meticulously researched account of an understudied episode in the history of Latin American modernism: the rise of abstract art in Cuba during the 1950s. The book’s main protagonists are not so much artists or works of art as the complex field of discursive and ideological formations that structured Cuban cultural politics during the tumultuous decade leading up to the 1959 revolution. In the absence of a single figure or group that might naturally… Full Review

Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing is the work of the author duo Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon, whose multiple areas of expertise cross theory and practices of scholarly writing, contemporary drawing, and curatorship. Through this manifold competence, Drawing Difference attends to and appreciates drawing as a material, embodied process and therefore engages, in detail, with how the works discussed were executed and installed. The lens of gender, which has been for over two decades the focus of Meskimmon’s pioneering body of books on “women making art,” is evident throughout. From the first sentence, it is apparent that the… Full Review

Ancient American rock art studies and mainstream art history have long maintained an awkward, often uneasy scholarly relationship. Ancient American rock art typically receives only occasional passing mention in mainstream art-historical publications. In The White Shaman Mural, Carolyn E. Boyd, associate professor of anthropology at Texas State University and founder of the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center in Comstock, Texas, endeavors to narrow this scholarly gap through a highly detailed analysis and interpretation of the White Shaman mural, an ancient polychrome rock art panel situated along the Rio Grande in west Texas. The mural is associated with the… Full Review

Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past is both a fascinating and frustrating compendium of art made since the sixteenth century that either depicts, reflects, or comments upon British colonialism. Written by a team of Tate curators, with contributions by Gus Casely-Hayford, Annie E. Coombes, Paul Gilroy, Nicholas Thomas, and Sean Willcock, this exhibition catalogue seeks to address the legacies of the British Empire: to reconsider how empire was recorded and perceived by those artists actively involved in, or affected by, Britain’s colonial enterprise; to equitably present and reconsider artworks by indigenous or colonized people; to identify and celebrate artistic… Full Review

Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) is either a Victorian eccentric remote from our understanding or a man for our time. Or both. Dedicated to the intersection of imaging, technology, and the cutting-edge science of his day, Muybridge was a flamboyant self-promoter, ambitious immigrant, and reinventor of self. He was also the larger-than-life assassin of his young wife’s lover and the sometime friend of plutocrat and former California governor Leland Stanford, as well as a participant in not one but two extremely important phases of nineteenth-century photographic practice, exploratory landscape photography and stop-action motion study. He was both the man behind… Full Review

Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser is the first mid-career survey of the work of California-born New York–based Conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968). The exhibition explores ten major bodies of her work that include video, photography, sculpture, and sound art, addressing themes such as language, translation and interpretation, mapping and classificatory systems, sound and silence, awkwardness and the absurd, with a serious playfulness that has become the artist’s trademark. Organized by Veronica Roberts, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, the exhibition is both intellectually stimulating and aesthetically powerful, displaying… Full Review

Tate Modern’s wide-ranging, twelve-room retrospective The EY Exhibition examined the complex and politically aesthetic body of work produced by the internationally renowned Cuban Surrealist painter and ceramicist Wifredo Lam (1902–82). Lam achieved fame at an early stage in his career, and his artistic legacy positions him as one of the most influential artists of color to have globalized and pluralized the modernist movement. The texts and illustrations in the comprehensive exhibition catalogue are presented in five sections: 1) introductions from the exhibition’s sponsor and institutional partners (the Musée National d’Art Modern (MNAM)/Centre Pompidou, Paris, working in collaboration with… Full Review

In 1935 Otto von Falke and Erich Meyer published the first volume of Bronzegeräte des Mittelalters (Bronze Utensils of the Middle Ages), the long-running series of corpus-wide surveys of bronze objects (door knockers, cross bases, lavabos, etc.), whose seventh installment, Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen’s corpus of censers from ca. 800–1500, appeared in 2014. Each volume consists of a catalogue, rigorously formalist in method, prefaced by an introduction to the history, form, function, and material of the objects of study. The medium- and Gerät-specific mandates of these pioneering reference works helped to ensconce such otherwise marginalized objects within the discipline of medieval… Full Review

In Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art, Benjamin Anderson studies three cultures—Frankish, Umayyad, and Byzantine—to examine how each used cosmological imagery to express social and political relationships between the ruler and the people. That zodiac imagery has remained stable from antiquity to the present allows for this type of study. For those unfamiliar with the history of zodiac and cosmos studies, Anderson provides a logical and helpful introduction, deftly framing the two approaches to the study of cosmos iconography in art and architecture: the Warburgian school, which focused primarily on the survival and revival of cosmic images, and the… Full Review

Annie Bourneuf’s monograph Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible is a brilliantly written and meticulously researched contribution to the reinterpretation of classical modernism. Each of the three main chapters attends to a group of works and concepts that are central to the canonical artist Paul Klee. The study analyzes pictures and texts from the period between 1916 and 1923, from the small-format graphics, which were produced during World War I, and early Schriftbilder (pictographs and images containing letters or poems), to the Quadratbilder (square images) from the Weimar Bauhaus period; it covers the part of Klee’s life that begins… Full Review

In the classic art-historical telling, performance art was birthed around 1910 in Italy by a group of men who incited audience riots with ideological and aesthetic provocations at their Futurist serata, or evenings. Fast-forward to the 1950s, and body-based art emerges as one of several tactics to dematerialize the art object and resist easy commodification of one’s artistic endeavors—a concern primarily for those testing the boundaries of, rather than fighting for access to, the art world and its market. Only with this traditional narrative in mind can one fully appreciate the audacity of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist… Full Review

In Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000–2015, Jennifer Liese brings together seventy-five texts by contemporary artists working in diverse media, including such well-known practitioners as Mira Schor, Xu Bing, Coco Fusco, Ryan Trecartin, Adrian Piper, and Mike Kelley. As becomes clear in the introduction, Liese—the director of the Writing Center at Rhode Island School of Design—aims to show that artists in the twenty-first century are not only writing more but also expanding the category known as “artists’ writing.” On this count, I would say Liese has succeeded. With an emphasis on the activity of writing rather than on the final… Full Review

Despite the growth of museum-history scholarship in recent decades, there is still much to learn about museums’ origins and development. Kathleen Curran’s skillfully researched and richly illustrated book is a stimulating contribution to this field, especially regarding collections and display practices among the first generation of major American art museums as they matured. These include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (both founded in 1870), what became the Philadelphia Museum of Art (whose origins date to 1876), and, to a lesser extent, museums further west, including the Art Institute of… Full Review