Recently Published Reviews

How did Diego Velázquez’s formative period in Seville inform his later artistic accomplishments at the Spanish court? What was the role of Francisco Pacheco’s teachings and of his intellectual circle in the artist’s training? And how did Velázquez’s early works engage with Sevillian audiences and the concerns of their local culture? These questions are not new ones to students and historians of Spanish baroque painting. In Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville, Tanya J. Tiffany considers them once again, yet from a refreshing and original perspective. Seeking “to bring an investigation of the cultural and… Full Review

Considering Paul Gauguin’s notable impact on the development of modern art, it seems remarkable that Gauguin: Metamorphoses is his first monographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and only the second major presentation of his art in New York since 1959. Perhaps even more surprising, this show, organized by Starr Figura, the Phyllis Ann and Walter Borten Associate Curator, with Lotte Johnson, curatorial assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, foregoes the expected focus on Gauguin’s paintings. Instead, the paintings play a supporting role, along with wood carvings and ceramics, in an exploration of the theme of transformation in his… Full Review

What is an exhibition for? What can it produce? In its earliest forms in the middle of the eighteenth century—the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the exhibiting societies of London—the exhibition was a collective affair, organized among artists: a form of self-assessment and public presentation mediating between a guild of merchant craftsmen and the unstable fractions within the public that might provide a market for those artists’ work. In this anxious context the emergence of the “solo” exhibition, as curator João Ribas has argued in recent lectures, risked the appearance of careerism, conceit, and self-interest (João… Full Review

William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography attempts to resituate the early history of photography and one of its most important innovators, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), in the context of mid-Victorian science. Developed from a conference held in June 2010 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, this collection of essays, as described in the introduction, examines the relationship of the discovery of photography to the “new [scientific] methods of inscription, recording, classification, visual display, collection, and above all, reproduction” (9–10). Though art historians tend to think of Talbot first and foremost… Full Review

The recent passing of several major figures, including Michael Sullivan (1916–2013) and James Cahill (1926–2014), reminds us of the importance of individuals in advancing the field of Chinese art. As one of the pioneers of Chinese art studies in Europe and North America during the first half of the twentieth century, Finnish-Swedish art historian Osvald Sirén’s (1879–1966) numerous publications helped to propel the field at the time. In Enchanted by Lohans: Osvald Sirén’s Journey into Chinese Art, Minna Törmä reconstructs what she calls the “middle part” of his career, investigating his decision to migrate from studying Italian to Chinese… Full Review

Two benchmark publications from the 1990s—Thomas Lawton’s A Time of Transition: Two Collectors of Chinese Art (Lawrence: University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art, 1991) and Warren I. Cohen’s East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)—are important precursors in considering Lara Jaishree Netting’s A Perpetual Fire: John C. Ferguson and His Quest for Chinese Art and Culture. These volumes provided some of the starting points for thinking about the trajectories of new, multi-disciplinary research into areas such as art dealers, collectors and collecting, exhibitions, and provenance issues related to… Full Review

El Greco’s Italian years, on which Andrew W. Casper’s Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy centers, present scholars with a challenge. Next to no documentation survives for the ten years he spent there. He seems to have received no major commission, the number of works is small, and none are securely dated. Most of El Greco’s Italian paintings have religious subjects, and Casper utilizes this fact to bring order to the material. According to Casper, one of the central artistic problems of the late sixteenth century Counter Reformation was the anxiety that images might be confused… Full Review

Reading An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body by Hans Belting has been remarkably similar to my experiences recording a performance as an art event in western Africa. The handsome book itself, like the African festival, is relatively short. Yet both the book and the ceremony are packed with layers of complex discourse, and become meaningful only when examined within the context of a particular intellectual tradition. Both require interpreters and the occasional suspension of disbelief. As a scholar based in the United States, I have been invited to observe ceremonial displays in Côte d’Ivoire because the participants wished to… Full Review

The central portion of Horst Bredekamp's Theorie des Bildakts ("Theory of the Image-Act") closes with the verbal image of Aby Warburg as the figurehead of a ship, "gaze locked in apotropaic contact with the waves of destruction," alone in propounding the "irritating life" possessed by forms of all sorts (305–6). Warburg’s dictum, "Du lebst und thust mir nichts" (“You live and do nothing to me”), is the implicit epigram to Bredekamp's enterprise—given that Bredekamp frames Warburg’s declaration as more trepidatious adjuration than confident assertion (21–22).[1] Bredekamp maintains that Warburg's thinking about art, craft, vision, and culture "approached more… Full Review

Last year the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel co-organized the provocative exhibition Jordaens and the Antique and published the accompanying catalogue under review here. Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) has long been relegated to a distant third position in the pantheon of seventeenth-century Flemish painters, behind Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Nonetheless, Jordaens outlived both Rubens and Van Dyck by twenty-five years and, as a result, became perhaps the leading Flemish painter for a quarter of a century. Despite achieving considerable fame in his lifetime, Jordaens has remained a bit of a shadow… Full Review

“Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other, the spectator,” wrote Marcel Duchamp in 1957 (quoted in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959, 77). Unwearyingly, Duchamp stressed the contribution of the spectator to the “creative act.” Like him, Juliane Rebentisch argues in Aesthetics of Installation Art that works of art exist only in the aesthetic experience of artists and spectators, shared in art discourse. But while her book centers on the relationship between subject and object—and therewith aims to overcome… Full Review

Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, both by T. J. Demos, are books of exceptional merit and importance. Demos’s critical practice resonates with a line from Jacques Derrida that has always inspired and haunted me: “I believe in the political virtue of the contretemps” (1993; Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994, 88). In these two works, Demos has offered not merely a body of… Full Review

Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections caa.reviews What a long way caa.reviews has come in fifteen years. The journal has published nearly twenty-four hundred reviews since 1998, more than four hundred of them in the broad category known as Renaissance/Baroque Art, which includes the more specific designation Early Modern Southern European Art, among others. One great achievement of caa.reviews is that it records the changing ways in which scholars approach their fields. The second installment of “Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections” is “Reflections on Early Modern Southern European Art” by Pamela M. Jones (University of Massachusetts Boston), and it follows upon… Full Review

For many philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytical tradition, the philosophy of film stands to film just as the philosophy of language stands to language: a given range of familiar phenomena are embedded in our lives in ways that take for granted a certain understanding of their nature, and the philosopher interrogates that understanding with a view to disclosing and testing the legitimacy of its presuppositions, and thereby clarifying the true nature of those phenomena. Katherine Thomson-Jones’s short, accessible book, Aesthetics and Film, belongs to this genre: it introduces readers to the field by focusing on two clusters of… Full Review

Not too many years ago, the story of American art as characterized in survey courses and other summary narratives was told in an apologetic tone. How could one make a case for the importance or singularity of a nation’s output before there was a nation and in the face of a European model then characterized as a teleological progression of ever-increasing artistic greatness? John Singleton Copley’s (1738–1815) story was frequently presented as the pinnacle of colonial uncertainty and inferiority. His output was cast as British art but lesser; the epistolary reviews from Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West of A… Full Review