Recently Published Reviews

The surfaces of John Zurier’s spare, abstract paintings are breathtaking—thin washes of icy blue, brushy layers of deep aubergine, swathes of opaque electric orange—but the edges are where the action is. Sometimes color runs over the side of the picture plane and is folded around the back of the stretcher bars; other times it stops just short, leaving a sliver of raw jute exposed. In Votilækur (2014), for example, a few strong vertical lines lie beneath a cool aqua pigment washed over a tall canvas. The veil of color seems to cover the entire surface, but it is not a… Full Review

The “Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” the Vienna School of Art History, hardly needs an introduction today, as anyone interested in the history of academic art-history writing will have come across at least some of the recent literature in several languages, mostly devoted to one or other of the school’s chief protagonists, be it Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, Hans Sedlmayr, or Ernst Gombrich. Julius von Schlosser’s account, still the most useful brief introduction, is now available in English (Julius von Schlosser, “The Vienna School of the History of Art” (1934), translated by Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography 1 [December 2009])… Full Review

This Is War! Graphic Arts from the Great War, 1914–1918 joins a number of exhibitions taking advantage of the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I to explore this conflict and its representations. The Portland Art Museum focuses its contribution on the graphic arts, as the museum’s rich collection of prints, posters, and works on paper, along with a number of recent acquisitions, has enabled it to stage a comprehensive exhibition that demonstrates the great variety of graphic representations of the war. While marquee artists are represented by very good, even excellent examples, their works hang alongside… Full Review

Scholarship across the disciplines on death and commemoration in the early modern era is rich. A significant new contribution is Minou Schraven’s Festive Funerals in Early Modern Italy: The Art and Culture of Conspicuous Commemoration. The volume focuses on the development of funeral apparati—ephemeral decorations for the celebration of requiem masses on behalf of ecclesiastical princes and heads of state—in sixteenth-century Rome, which evolved into increasingly spectacular displays. These formal changes paralleled new attitudes regarding commemoration and devotion as well as shifts in ideological and institutional claims of the papacy. Funeral apparati encompassed a wide range… Full Review

At least since Plato’s claim that it is the foundation of true knowledge, light has been identified by the Western philosophical canon as the source of universal wisdom. It is this implied connection between physical light and rationality that prompts Dag Petersson to assert in The Art of Reconciliation that photography is the visual counterpart of dialectical logic, because dialectics and photography both are forms of light-writing. In order to substantiate his view of photography as the “self portrait” of dialectics (xv), Petersson’s first move is to explain that dialectics is a rigorously symmetrical mode of reasoning that… Full Review

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby’s The Cult of St Clare of Assisi in Early Modern Italy is a broad survey and analysis of materials documenting the extraordinary life and robust cult of St. Clare of Assisi (1193–1253) in Italian visual culture. Drawing on diverse representations of St. Clare, ranging from medieval reliquary cabinets, seals, tapestries, and frescoes to monumental baroque sculpture and altarpieces, Debby maps shifts and transformations in the iconography of St. Clare in the service of religious and political initiatives across early modern Italy. She focuses particularly on the diffusion of images of St. Clare as a model for Catholic… Full Review

In a world where vast collections of digital image libraries like Artstor allow works of art from any place or time to be accessed and saved on hard drives, we need not consider the weight, scale, and fragility of objects, nor how they travel from the nebulous space of “the cloud” to our screens. In Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America, Jennifer Roberts argues that we should not ignore the materiality of images or the often fraught processes of transporting them in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. In three chapters she demonstrates that John Singleton Copley… Full Review

Is there a post-postmodern approach to the art of Thomas Hart Benton, the opinionated, controversial polymath? One that expands an understanding of this larger-than-life artist in humanistic terms while laying bare his manifold contradictions: the short man who drew elongated bodies; the Parisian-trained painter who disavowed the avant-garde and its “cubes”; the man of ideas who read John Dewey while lambasting urban intelligentsia; and, last but not least, the scion of politicians who eschewed public service to travel around the country to reach out to the everyman? In the 1970s and 1980s, art historians strove to unfix Benton’s status as… Full Review

Before even reaching the five main galleries dedicated to Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), visitors encounter the tangled mass of neon-green and sea-blue crocheted strands of Sheila Pepe’s “site-responsive” sculpture, Put Me Down Gently (2014), cascading down the atrium walls. The work extends to the elevator shaft, where more parachute cords, laces, and yarn become visible through the glass of the car as it ascends the length of the building. Though not covering every surface, the fiber envelopes the space, its inherent materiality challenging the hard, clean architecture of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed… Full Review

Although popular culture and its incidental pleasures are constantly consumed, such things are not usually assessed with the same meticulous and critical lenses trained upon other forms of culture. Indeed, despite the victories of cultural studies, there is still less ink spilt (or keys tapped) on close academic analyses of pop culture than objects classed as “art.” Carol Magee’s Africa in the American Imagination is a welcome—and exemplary—exception to the rule (though certainly scholars such as Sidney Kasfir have addressed similar pop-cultural topics [Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity, Bloomington: Indiana University… Full Review

On Sunday, November 16, 2014, ambitious Boston museumgoers could have treated themselves to first-viewings of two remarkable achievements: Mark Rothko’s newly restored Harvard Murals, currently installed in the Harvard Art Museums’ impeccable Renzo Piano-designed galleries, and Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour behind-the-scenes chronicle of the London museum presented by the filmmaker himself at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The coincidence would have delighted Wiseman, whose wry observation of institutions, in both their operational perversities and decorous self-presentation, seems tailor made for the museum’s grand performance before its many audiences. But where National Gallery is rich in quotidian… Full Review

Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky examines the connections between the avant-garde art worlds in France and Germany in the years between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War II, considering the influence of artists like Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse on German artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Franz Marc. To that end, the network of cultural exchange—exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues, visits by German artists to France and vice versa, dealers and critics who served to link the two art worlds—is a… Full Review

Soundings: A Contemporary Score was the first major exhibition of “sound” at the Museum of Modern art (MoMA), which Christopher Phillips once famously characterized as “the seat of judgment.” But it encompassed far more than the exhibited sixteen artists from ten countries. It was a large and integrated program of exhibition, films, sound performances, workshops, and lectures overseen by Barbara London, associate curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art, and curatorial assistant Leora Morinis. This review can merely outline some of these concerns by reducing the vast array of diverse impulses brought together into a few basic categories… Full Review

Deco Japan is a rambunctious assemblage of objects from the late 1920s and 1930s that evokes the excitement and instability of an era in which urbanization, international communication, global travel, mass-market consumerism, and the expansion of imperial ambitions were transforming the everyday lives and imaginations of millions, while spurring artists and designers in particular to rethink their art in relation to the new world that was taking shape around them. Curated and with an accompanying catalogue edited by Kendall H. Brown, the traveling exhibition had its longest run in Seattle, invited by the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s new curator of… Full Review

In the closing pages of his fine book Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art, Andrew V. Uroskie delivers a vivid explication of Ken Dewey’s multimedia project Selma Last Year (1966). With this work, Dewey proposes to redefine the social character of media through sophisticated interrelations of technology and live performance contingent to a viewer’s presence: “the act of spectatorship itself [was] staged” (226). The stakes of this staging are evidenced in the work’s radical reconfiguration from its first to its second iteration. The work was initially conceived as an exhibition of photographs… Full Review