Recently Published Reviews

Most of the essays contained in Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage, edited by Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman, were presented as lectures during a conference at Villa I Tatti in 2009 marking the fiftieth anniversary of Berenson’s death. As Connors both perceptively and tactfully observes in the introduction’s opening paragraph, the timing was propitious: by 2009 the “cult of personality” that had surrounded Berenson during his life had “dissipated for the most part,” and the approach to the study of art that he had espoused in such spirited fashion throughout his long career no longer stood “at the… Full Review

This compact 2012 paperback edition of Escultura monumental mexica (Monumental Mexica Sculpture) is considerably smaller than the hefty—over 11 inches square, 1 5/8 inches thick—hardback first edition of 2009, yet its importance is equally “monumental.” This stems in no small part from the expertise of its coauthors, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Leonardo López Luján, two Mexican archaeologists who, over the course of over three-and-a-half decades, have helped lead the effort to recover, reconstruct, and analyze the material culture of the indigenous Mexica (Aztec) peoples of Central Mexico. When the Spaniards led by Hernán Cortés arrived at the Mexica capital in… Full Review

Promoted in the press release as “the first museum-wide exhibition in New York City to feature contemporary art from and about the Arab world,” Here and Elsewhere brought together over forty-five artists from more than fifteen countries. The ambitious exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni with Natalie Bell, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Helga Christoffersen, and Margot Norton, included many artists who had not previously exhibited their work in New York. Despite its expansiveness and regional arrangement (and the fact that many reviewers referred to it as such), the curators were insistent that the exhibition was not a survey. Rather, Here and Elsewhere sought… Full Review

In regards to documentary photography, the issue of responsibility—be it ethical, social, political, or a combination thereof—has been a central concern throughout its polemicized history. One could stretch that argument, along the line of memory, from the last photograph uploaded or tweeted onto the World Wide Web at precisely 00:00 tonight, to the first instances when human presence was registered on a photographic plate, as in the famous view of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, where a passerby stopped to have his shoes polished, seen from Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s window in 1838. Yet the fundamental difference between such instances and… Full Review

Expo Chicago boasts local pride as another annual art fair to emerge in the United States. Now in its third year, the event took place from September 18–21, 2014, at Navy Pier, a city landmark and hub for tourists, where summer crowds line up to board boat tours and take rides on the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel to view the famed Chicago skyline. Expo Chicago is young within the U.S. art-fair circuit; it emerged in 2012, newly reenvisioned after the former venue for Chicago’s fair, Merchandise Mart, dropped their art event after thirty-two years. The 2014 post-event report showed that… Full Review

In the 1992 postscript to her essay “Patrilineage,” published in Art Journal the year prior, Mira Schor argued for the necessary interruption of male-dominated art history through the production of histories of and by women. “The method is really very simple,” she explained. “It will always be a man’s world unless one seeks out and values the women in it” (Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 117). Despite the changes of nearly two and a half decades, this lesson remains relevant (sadly, so do many in Schor’s essay): unless… Full Review

In this absorbing yet brief book, Stephen Houston, a noted Maya epigrapher and archaeologist, seeks to map out one of the core issues of the anthropology of art—materiality—within the ancient Maya context. The volume highlights in particular native attitudes toward the spirits or energies that reside within certain materials with which the Maya fashioned their visual culture. Over three main chapters, The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence outlines varied dimensions of ancient Maya materiality, employing close visual analysis of artworks, interpretations of hieroglyphic texts, and ethnographic comparisons. The scope of visual culture addressed largely pertains to… Full Review

Recent scholarship has eschewed the fashion for broad, thematic exhibitions in favor of probing specific makers and more local examinations; the exhibition and publication Cincinnati Silver, 1788–1940 was an example of this trend. Cincinnati produced a treasure trove of decorative arts during the nineteenth century, and the silversmithing trade, established by 1795, was evidence of the city’s prowess. Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Amy Miller Dehan acutely situated Cincinnati’s role in the rising American silver industry of the nineteenth century. Dehan’s exhibition followed ten years of research, which prompted previously unknown makers, production methods… Full Review

Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections caa.reviews With “Reflections on Digital Art History,” caa.reviews inaugurates a new field of coverage, since our future is now. In fact, immediately prior to drafting these remarks, I noticed a headline on Hyperallergic.com asking, “Can an algorithm determine art history’s most creative paintings?” I was only curious enough to skim a paragraph or two, yet surely many of us sympathize with the convergence it represents. On the one hand, popular imagination and political rhetoric have increasingly figured the humanities as superfluous to the needs of civilization. On the other, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and… Full Review

Art history would seem to be a discipline that could and should generate digital visualization projects—if only for the simple reason that the objects of study are already and easily found in digitized form. As evidenced by the number of workshops and conferences and the general buzz on the subject, the attention given to this type of project has intensified in the past few years; but there are still very few operational sites in the field. A close consideration of one such site, “What Jane Saw” (visited May 2015), raises important questions facing project developers and users of digital art-history… Full Review

What did Wassily Kandinsky mean by “the spiritual in art”? In his long-canonical treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Melerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), the artist does not quite say, though he clearly conceives it in some opposition to the creeping materialism that he assails as the defining feature of the modern world. Scholars, seeking a tighter definition, have often seized on a short, early passage in the text that explicitly evokes Theosophy, even as they have also linked the painter to Eastern mysticism and diverse… Full Review

“Photography is not an Art. Neither is painting nor sculpture, literature nor music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings; the tools he uses in his creative art.” So Alfred Stieglitz provocatively proclaimed in his article “Is Photography a Failure?” printed in New York’s The Sun on March 14, 1922. For Stieglitz, a photographic image was a “picture” (rather than a mere “photograph,” which was the generic term he used to describe anything “drawn by the rays of light”) when it had succeeded as a work of art. Interestingly, almost half a century later… Full Review

As one walks down Oxford Road, the central artery of the University of Manchester’s campus, the imposing Gothic revival structure of the Manchester Museum creates a powerful impression of the ambitions of Victorian science. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti’s Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum goes inside Alfred Waterhouse’s building to interrogate the history of the institution as seen through the display of its specimens. In so doing, Alberti’s stated aim is to overlay a traditional approach to museology—that of focusing on a single institution—with an examination of the political and cultural forces at work. For Alberti… Full Review

This important collection of essays originated in a symposium entitled “The Muse in the Marble: Plastic Arts and Aesthetic Theories in the Seventeenth Century” held at the American Academy in Rome in 2004. Anthony Colantuono, one of the two organizers, had the original idea to publish the papers. In 2008, he enlisted the help of Steven F. Ostrow, and the project gradually expanded, with several new essays commissioned from leading scholars. As the editors state in their preface, they aimed to create a volume that “would engage issues concerning the theory and production, reception, and interpretation of early modern Roman… Full Review

A museum exhibition on nineteenth-century chromolithography and the landscape of the American West must negotiate its way through key challenges. When the discipline of art history routinely emphasizes the innovation and novelty of artistic developments, imagery of mountains and natural wonders can strike scholars and museumgoers as familiar territory and therefore unworthy of attention. Moreover, in an era that celebrates globalization, the western landscape might bear a whiff of provincialism, complicated by questions about how the United States, under the spell of Manifest Destiny, invested the terrain with now unfashionable cultural meanings. In these circumstances, prints risk becoming mere images… Full Review