Recently Published Reviews

What might dance achieve in a museum is the guiding question of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s exhibition Work/Travail/Arbeid at the Centre Pompidou. Embedded within that broad question are several, more specific, strands: How might dance change perceptions of time and space? What defines dance as a medium? What remains after the exhibition? Such issues are endemic to a long-standing, sophisticated conversation about the possibilities of contemporary dance in museums (see, for instance, “Dance in the Museum,” special issue of Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 [December 2014]). As a medievalist who has extensively explored an archive of… Full Review

The volume Chavín: Peru’s Enigmatic Temple in the Andes is a thoroughly researched scholarly complement to the blockbuster exhibition of the same name, held at the Museum Rietberg, Zürich, between November 23, 2012, and March 10, 2013. Edited by Peter Fux, the catalogue presents the work of a group of scholars who seek to reanalyze, reevaluate, and reconstruct the role of Chavín de Huántar in Andean scholarship. Rather than merely summarizing previous research, the articles present new archaeological excavations and new interpretations of material objects, monumental decorations, and plans of excavated sites. The book is noteworthy in that all of… Full Review

In its opening wall text, the exhibition This Place claims to grapple with “the complexity of Israel and the West Bank, as place and metaphor,” and includes a dozen internationally acclaimed photographers in an effort to accomplish this feat. Nevertheless, in my view, a sense of apprehension regarding the loose mobilization of “place and metaphor” pervades. Certainly, multiple voices seem appropriate for engaging the discursive potential of this immensely fractured and intensely debated region. Yet the exhibition does not bring the viewer any closer to understanding the realities of this highly charged terrain or the people who reside there. This… Full Review

The Getty Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) Art Institute of Chicago Monet Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago https://publications.artic.edu/monet/reader/paintingsanddrawings/section/135470 Art Institute of Chicago Renoir Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago https://publications.artic.edu/renoir/reader/paintingsanddrawings/section/138973 Freer/Sackler Galleries The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book: The Gerhard Pulverer Collection http://pulverer.si.edu/ Los Angeles County Museum of Art Southeast Asian Art: An Online Scholarly Catalogue at LACMA http://seasian.catalog.lacma.org/ National Gallery of Art Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, by Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/research/online-editions/17th-century-dutch-paintings.html/ San… Full Review

Six chapters of this conveniently quarto-sized catalogue examine the history of metalpoint’s use by artists in Italy, the Low Countries, Germany and Switzerland, nineteenth-century Britain, and more recently by U.S. artists as well as Otto Dix, Avigdor Arikha, and Shirazeh Houshiary, whose Shroud (2000; unillustrated) is mistakenly placed in Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery rather than the Tate (237). For those of us who have asserted glibly that metalpoint went out with tempera painting, the sections dealing with the later history of the medium will be of particular interest—not least the detail, revealed in a letter by Edward Burne-Jones… Full Review

The exhibition Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978 is a significant contribution to the study of modernisms and their relationship to processes of modernization. It focuses on domestic design in countries undergoing rapid change due to investments in infrastructure and economic growth, driven by the developmentalist policies of their governments. The home features as an important laboratory for design, where modernist ideologies with broad social implications were first tested in material form. Much attention is devoted to the simultaneous absorption of international design trends and creation of nationalist aesthetics, and to tensions between these seemingly contrasting… Full Review

What is bling, if not more tightly focused shine? The Oxford English Dictionary defines bling (sometimes reduplicated as bling-bling) as both a material referent and multivalent signified: “A. n. (A piece of) ostentatious jewelry. Hence: wealth; conspicuous consumption. B. adj. Ostentatious, flashy; designating flamboyant jewelry or dress. Also: that glorifies conspicuous consumption; materialistic.” According to the rapper B.G., one of the coiners of term at the end of the last century, bling is also the imaginary sound light makes when it hits a diamond. Bling is key to Krista A. Thompson’s Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic… Full Review

Lienzos are large painted cloths produced after the Spanish invasion of Mexico that relate the territory, historical deeds, and protagonists of local cacicazgos (city-states) throughout central and southern Mexico. Following the style and conventions of Mesoamerican pictography, such as the more famous Mixtec screenfolds, they greatly outnumber their surviving pre-Hispanic counterparts and offer an indigenous view of the changes that occurred in Mesoamerica in the wake of the conquest. The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec is one such document hailing from the Coixtlahuaca valley in northern Oaxaca and now housed at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto. The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec:… Full Review

In 1998, French museums celebrated the bicentennial of the birth of Eugène Delacroix by staging a diverse, exciting series of exhibitions of his work. One of the smallest shows centered on a single painting, the monumental Battle of Taillebourg, made for the Galeries historique de Versailles in 1837 and now housed in the museum at the Château de Versailles, which hosted the exhibition. Accompanied by a modest but excellent catalogue, the show examined the painting and its preparatory drawings, along with a handful of lithographs, sculptures, and several other battle paintings. Other museums have since followed suit, adopting this… Full Review

The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 was a defining moment in modern Japan’s history. The tremors and aftershocks caused significant damage, but even more destructive were the out-of-control fires that raged across the cityscape in the aftermath. Over forty-five percent of Tokyo and ninety percent of Yokohama were razed, with over ninety-one thousand people killed, thirteen thousand missing, and fifty-two thousand injured. While there were heartening episodes of self-sacrifice, other stories suggest that tragedy fed tragedy, as the disorder that sometimes follows in disaster’s wake brought privation and disease, theft and violence. The opportunistic murders of prominent leftist activists and… Full Review

Historian Benjamin Schmidt’s Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World picks up, chronologically speaking, where his prior book, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), left off—in 1670. In Innocence Abroad Schmidt trained his scholarly gaze on Dutch encounters with and conceptions of the New World in the first century of the Dutch Republic. In Inventing Exoticism he casts a wider net, to describe how around the turn of the eighteenth century “a new conception of the exotic world and a new conceit of Europe came to be, and… Full Review

Ian Verstegen’s new book, Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation, examines the interior decoration of the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, specifically the altarpieces of the chapels, in light of the order and their beliefs. His focus is on Barocci and how his style corresponded so well to the tenets of the Oratorians that they repeatedly sought his paintings, despite the fact that other artists were available and Barocci was expensive, slow, always in demand by numerous patrons, and did not even live in Rome. Verstegen asks some key questions that successfully frame his… Full Review

There are two questions that must be considered before a review of these two books is presented: What is a Latino and what is Latino art? The term Latino, as used by the authors of these very interesting and different perspectives on the subject of Latino art in particular, refers to the descendants of people of Latin America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula who were either born in or moved to the United States. Today, the Latino community's numbers are growing rapidly. Latinos already outnumber non-Hispanic whites in New Mexico and California, and by 2050 the U.S. Census… Full Review

Stefanie Solum opens this stimulating book by discussing a question fundamental for those interested in artistic patronage in Renaissance Florence: whether or not laywomen commissioned significant paintings, sculptures, or buildings in the city during the fifteenth century. Archival sources, the lifeblood of patronage studies, suggest that they did not; essentially nothing in the existing documentary record ties any woman, as patron, to any major fifteenth-century project (6). Arguing that archival silence should not stymie investigation of this issue, Solum contends that one can address the topic by employing a methodology that considers the work of art as, essentially, a document—a… Full Review

Doing justice to the importance of Megan R. Luke’s compelling study of the German artist Kurt Schwitters’s late work of the 1930s and 1940s requires taking stock of how Schwitters’s richly contradictory art has previously been understood. The story as usually told—following John Elderfield’s foundational monograph (Kurt Schwitters, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985)—goes something like this: soon after the end of the First World War, Schwitters began making what he called Merzbilder, works joining the recent innovations of abstraction and collage to one another in an unprecedented manner. In 1919, in his first statement about these… Full Review