Recently Published Reviews

What is it about antiquities that so compels us to collect them? This is the central question Lawrence Berman asks in The Priest, the Prince, and the Pasha: The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Egyptian Sculpture. To answer this question, Berman focuses on a single object, the so-called Boston Green Head. Approximately four inches in height, broken off from a standing or kneeling statue, the Green Head is a centerpiece in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Indisputably a masterpiece, the sensitivity and skill with which the sculptor modeled the features produced a seemingly… Full Review

More than any other media, architecture has played a fundamental role in the organization of physical reality according to various social, cultural, and ideological templates. As both a product and producer of identity, architectural forms have inscribed the texture of human life onto the natural environment. Thus, Mark Hinchman’s Portrait of an Island: The Architecture and Material Culture of Gorée, Sénégal, 1758–1837 is a welcome addition to contemporary studies of the history of the built environment. Expanding the borders of what might be considered “traditional” architectural scholarship, Hinchman incorporates the material and object-based realm by examining structures in concert with… Full Review

Think of a professor and the clichés tumble out: houndstooth blazer, tortoiseshell glasses, air of aloof superiority. The professor, insulated from worldly concerns by tenure, is an icon of the traditional university, a selling point for students willing to take on debt in exchange for wisdom, and a target of right-wing reformers who scorn the leisurely pace of scholarship. While the professor can’t be described as wealthy in this age of hedge funds, she is at least free from anything resembling a money problem. The professor won’t descend, for example, into a crippling days-long panic at the prospect of having… Full Review

On August 18, 1939, the French abstract painter Jean Hélion wrote to Raymond Queneau from his studio in Rockbridge Baths, Virginia, to say that he was ready to return to France and throw himself back into what he called the “torment of Europe” (Lettres d’Amérique: Correspondance avec Raymond Queneau 1934–1967, Paris: IMEC, 1996, 146). In leaving Paris for New York in 1936 in the aftermath of the collapse of the Popular Front, Hélion had left behind the aesthetic and political convictions of the previous period. From the late 1920s through the mid-1930s, he had been a central part… Full Review

The Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art set out to elucidate how the orders of this world and the next were conceptualized and represented in the Seljuq Empire and its successor states. To a certain extent, Met curators Sheila R. Canby, Deniz Beyazit, and Martina Rugiadi delivered. With over 270 objects, Court and Cosmos is the first major exhibition on the Seljuqs in the United States, and according to Met Director Thomas P. Campbell’s preface to the exhibition catalogue, it is one of the first exhibitions in the world to… Full Review

In Ugliness: A Cultural History, Gretchen E. Henderson ventures on a critical journey through the history of ugliness, viewing the concept through the lens of culture and corporeality. Henderson packs an abundance of fascinating case studies and thought-provoking insights into a stimulating conceptual framework, all in the service of her argument about past and contemporary relationships with ugliness. Her aim is not to redefine ugliness but to trace the use and perceptions of it from antiquity to the modern day. Ugliness is not held here strictly within theoretical or aesthetic perspectives; rather, Henderson unpacks the concept with the use… Full Review

Scholarship on the art of the American West has greatly expanded in the last decade, with the northern New Mexico art colonies of Taos and Santa Fe receiving particular attention.[1] A Place in the Sun, a multi-authored volume that accompanied a traveling exhibition, considers two of the leading artists of Taos, Walter Ufer (1876–1936) and E. Martin Hennings (1886–1956). Their many parallels make it logical to consider their careers together. As German-Americans, they shared a significant cultural background that led them to pursue art study in Munich in the second decade of the twentieth century, in contrast… Full Review

On January 13, 2013, the contemporary artist Wade Guyton visited a blog on Tumblr, the less-is-more, image-driven social-media platform that resembles an online corkboard. He downloaded thirty days’ worth of the blog’s contents and transposed them into that good old thing, the book, calling it One Month Ago. The title refers to the way in which Tumblr automatically tells website visitors how far away they are, temporally speaking, from the post they are currently looking at (from, say, one hour ago, to one week ago, to one month ago, and so on). The Tumblr in question is not your… Full Review

The title of Erin Griffey’s meticulously researched book is well suited to its principal argument: that early modern sovereigns, especially powerful women such as Queen Henrietta Maria of England, projected their authority through the specific and calculated allure of their material luxuries. All aspects of dress, appurtenances, architecture, and furnishings (including paintings and other fine arts) contributed to an overall “magnificence” which did not burnish the image of the monarch so much as it constituted the very essence of how she was publicly known. Only through attentive study of this complicated material culture, Griffey argues, is it possible to interpret… Full Review

Junko Aono’s Confronting the Golden Age: Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting, 1680–1750 focuses on the generation of Dutch genre painters that succeeded the “great masters” of the seventeenth-century such as Gerard Dou and Frans van Mieris I. The book’s main objective is to investigate how artists working in the waning light of the Golden Age dealt with the illustrious artistic past, and particularly how they emulated the inventions of their predecessors in order to create a niche market for themselves. This subject is in line with renewed interest in Dutch art from the later decades of… Full Review

Lawren Harris is among the most famous Canadian painters. The general public in Canada know him as one of the members of the Group of Seven, artists who exhibited together in the 1920s, popularizing a new, colorful, modernist style of painting that celebrated the Canadian landscape. But Harris’s celebrity status stops at the border. The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, attempts to bring this star of Canadian art to the attention of a U.S. audience. While the exhibition was shown first at… Full Review

Matisse in the Barnes Foundation continues a laudable program to publish the holdings of this renowned collection of modern European, African, and American art in systematic, scholarly catalogues. Yve-Alain Bois, long one of the most compelling writers on Henri Matisse, is the project director, editor, and lead author, joined by Karen K. Butler and Claudine Grammont. Conservation and condition issues, now a welcome concern in many major museum publications, are treated by Barbara A. Buckley and Jennifer Mass (for paintings) and Thomas Primeau (for works on paper). Every one of the Barnes Foundation’s fifty-nine artworks by Matisse is reproduced… Full Review

The role of modernity in influencing vision has produced such a wealth of insightful scholarship that it can be surprising when a new study contributes substantially to the field. Jason Weems’s Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest provides an engaging and thoughtful analysis of how the elevated vantage point helped to create the modern Midwestern landscape and, in turn, informed the region’s identity. Weems explores how the aerial, synoptic view of the prairie fostered changes in the perception of that landscape through a series of case studies beginning with the piecemeal pioneer settlement of individual farms that… Full Review

Rachel Cohen’s clear, concise, and gracefully written retelling of the life of Bernard Berenson is far more manageable than Ernest Samuels’s long, magisterial biography published in 1979 (Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). It would be unfair to think a much shorter account would cover any part of Berenson’s life in equal depth to Samuels’s study, but a reader might reasonably form that expectation about at least one aspect of it, for Cohen’s book is part of a Yale series of biographies entitled Jewish Lives. Whether these are life stories… Full Review

In his iconic 1964 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Leo Marx surveyed early American literature and painting to uncover a uniquely American understanding of the collective landscape. Elizabeth Milroy—framing her lens on early Philadelphia—has produced an equally authoritative and compelling portrait of how a city’s actual landscape fabric has been fashioned through a process of negotiating and representing a dominant idea about landscape’s place in American culture. It is as if these two works, separated by a half century, were meant to be read together: one laying out a… Full Review