Recently Published Reviews

Although the Iron Age (circa 1200 to 600 BCE) Levant (a zone covering territory in present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan) is not familiar ground for most art historians, Marian H. Feldman’s masterful book Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant will draw diverse readers into its dynamic world aswirl with social networks and enchanting objects. Feldman focuses on the ninth to seventh centuries BCE in the Levant, but her study casts back to the second millennium BCE and projects geographically east of the Tigris River in what is now Iraq… Full Review

In her recently published Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, artist Renée Green describes her 1999 exhibition Partially Buried in Three Parts as an exploration “of genealogical traces,” where overlapping investigations examine the ways people reinterpret their past to their “contemporary relations to a natal patria” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, 275–276). The exhibition, for Green, was also a meditation on what site-specificity might mean when the concept of location is increasingly “affected for many by circuit relations, meaning that a sense of place and time can depend largely on where one’s computer screen is and when memory is… Full Review

Katherine Roeder’s new monograph on Winsor McCay nicely bridges the divide between the sometimes insular scholarship on comic art and the broader field of what I have taken to calling visual modernities. Expanding beyond the fine arts, visual modernities includes animation, comics, early film, poster art, photography, and everyday design, all of which emerged as the vernacular face of twentieth-century visual and media modernization. In Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay, Roeder situates her subject’s prolific career within the context of rising consumerism, urban middle-class anxieties, and modernist self-reflexivity. McCay… Full Review

The exhibition In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art featured thirty-four artists, most of whom live in Haiti, and, according to the accompanying exhibition catalogue, over “70 of their paintings, prints, sculptures, installations and mixed-media pieces drawn mainly from loans as well as the museum’s holdings” (8) representing a richer and complex set of cultural and spiritual histories. The well-illustrated catalogue, edited by Donald J. Cosentino (professor emeritus of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA), presents a rich analysis of the power of the visual and the complex relationships among regeneration, spirituality, and the livability of death. … Full Review

Fred Tomaselli’s solo exhibition The Times at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is the New York-based artist’s first West Coast show. The exhibition is also a homecoming for the artist, who grew up in the neighboring city of Santa Ana. Before traveling to Orange County, The Times spent four months at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The idea for these two exhibitions came from James Cohan Gallery’s debut spring 2014 show, entitled Fred Tomaselli: Current Events. As the artist’s gallery representation, James Cohan dedicated Current Events to exploratory artworks that Tomaselli colloquially calls capriccetti… Full Review

Allora and Calzadilla: Intervals brings together new and recent work by the Puerto Rico-based artists whose interdisciplinary practice addresses the ethical and affective dimensions of political resistance. Working collaboratively since meeting as art students in 1995, the Philadelphia-born Jennifer Allora and Havana-born Guillermo Calzadilla are perhaps most widely known for their exhibition Gloria at the American Pavilion during the 2011 Venice Biennale. That exhibition’s memorably monumental pieces—an ATM machine built into a pipe organ or a treadmill on top of an inverted army tank—packed a spectacular visual punch, mordantly satirizing capitalism, religion, the military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism without necessarily… Full Review

Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, executed during the last twenty years of the artist’s life, have been taken to exemplify the concept of “late style”—the culmination of a career achieved through intensified abstraction, luminosity, and spiritual expression. Yet, as the recent exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) reveals, the series might be better understood as a continuation of the artist’s lifelong interest in the emotional appeal of color; simplified, synthetic line; and the interplay of decorative surfaces, borders, and frames. Despite repeated references to Matisse’s illness and old age in the exhibition catalogue, documentary photographs, and… Full Review

Douglas N. Dow’s Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform is a welcome contribution to scholarly literature on the under-researched topic of the relationships between Florentine art, devotion, and religious reform in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. As Dow observes on the first page of his introduction, the works, authors, and patrons that he examines have not simply been largely overlooked; they seem actively to have been avoided by scholars more preoccupied by earlier trends and later developments (1). Dow’s strategic response to this lacuna is a series of tightly focused case… Full Review

Sophie Calle’s thirty-minute video Unfinished (2005), on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), narrates the artist’s troubled fifteen-year investigation of money. The video moves chronologically from Calle’s receipt, in 1988, of seven stills from the security cameras of an American bank, to her acquisition of three full tapes of ATM security footage in 1990, through another thirteen years of her frustrated attempts to use this footage to make sense or art out of money. Taken alone, Unfinished is concerned primarily with its paired investigations of artistic process and the function of money as a mediator between individual… Full Review

Science fiction and space travel are only one facet of this unusual and ambitious exhibition, which brings together an array of disparate artworks addressing multiple intertwined subjects ranging from the cosmic and geologic to the technological, social, political, and environmental. Curator Sarah Montross proposes four broad themes for organizing the multiplicity of works: the “new man” of the technological future; space travel and its depiction through visual technologies; American landscapes and time travel; and utopian/dystopian futures. The layout of the exhibition largely corresponds to these topics, and simultaneously creates marked divisions between work by artists from the United States and… Full Review

Sarah Patricia Hill and Giuliana Minghelli’s edited volume, Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography, and the Meanings of Modernity, is the latest contribution to a growing body of English-language scholarship on photography in Italy. As Hill and Minghelli state in their introduction to the volume, their goal is to reveal something of “the current global culture of the image” (4) within the triangulation of Italian identity, photography, and modernity. Although not intended as a national history, the book nonetheless makes a claim for the particularity of the Italian case, arguing that Italy’s relationship to both photography and modernity has historically… Full Review

Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not A Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a collaborative project between Robert Gober; Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture; and Paulina Pobocha, assistant curator. The exhibition, at its heart, reflects Gober’s curatorial practice. This role is not a new one for the artist. In 2009, Gober organized Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, with Cynthia Burlingham, at the Hammer Museum of Art; and for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, he curated a selection of Forrest Bess’s work. Indeed, as MoMA Director Glenn Lowry notes in… Full Review

Francesco Vanni (1563/64–1610), the leading Sienese painter at the turn of the seventeenth century, was an innovative religious iconographer, a gifted draftsman, and an occasional printmaker. Despite his considerable accomplishments, he has never been the sole subject of a full monograph or exhibition—until now. Inspired by Yale University Art Gallery’s acquisition in 2003 of Vanni’s Madonna della Pappa painting (ca. 1599), the exhibition appeared only in New Haven. The accompanying catalogue provides an extensive examination of the artist’s works, focusing on his preparatory drawings for altarpieces, his three autograph etchings, and the many prints by other artists based on his… Full Review

Francisco de Hollanda (1517–84) begins Da Pintura Antigua (1548) by closely paraphrasing Vitruvius’s introduction to book 6 of De Architectura, in which the Roman author notes that the best preparation for the whims of Fortuna is knowledge—both education and the mastery of one’s profession. Hollanda’s knowledge of the theory and practice of art, however, seems to have offered him little protection from a poor critical fortune. After his work was finally published in the nineteenth century, many historians of art dismissed it as that of a pretentious and parochial artist. This reception, which is usefully outlined by Ángel González… Full Review

The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World is the rather ominous title of a sprawling exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The title alone almost seems to threaten the very existence of any and all future endeavors in painting. Seventeen artists from just three countries (nine women and eight men), all born after 1954, make up the group selected by Laura Hoptman, curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, to carry the banner of painting into the future and, perhaps, back into the past. The term “atemporality” was coined by science fiction writer… Full Review