Recently Published Reviews

At the most superficial level, Edward Hopper’s paintings represent modern American life as a series of moments oscillating along a continuum between solitude and desolation via loneliness, isolation, and alienation and back again. As the drawings, paintings, prints, and ephemera included in Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) attest, those oscillations can generate a curious sense of longing that endures well after one departs the gallery spaces. The exhibition, a version of which opened at the Whitney Museum of Art in May 2013, features a small portion of the 2,500 drawings included in the… Full Review

Twenty-first-century media is marked by the rise of social networks and the concomitant tools to analyze and manipulate the data produced and transmitted through those networks. The work of R. Luke DuBois has emerged within this milieu, and his explorations of mass media and popular culture amid a world of unprecedented shared cultural production and exponentially proliferating data have provided a rich body of work over a relatively short period of time. In a span of just over a decade, DuBois has produced an abundant and varied oeuvre, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art has gathered that… Full Review

In The Echo of Things, Christopher Wright analyzes photographs of an island off New Georgia in the western Solomon Islands that were taken by European visitors at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. He also examines contemporary Solomon Islander attitudes toward old photographs and photography in general. This is an exciting approach, informed by Wright’s concern with history, ethnography, photography, and responses of the people of Roviana Island, a small but central site in the colonial histories of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. A historian, anthropologist, archivist, and historian of photography, Wright visited Roviana… Full Review

This edited volume—a companion to the exhibition of the same name, co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), in association with the Sicilian Region and the Assessorato for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity—showcases the art, archaeology, history, and culture of the Greek cities on Sicily from the victory over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera in 480 BCE to the defeat of Syracuse in 212 BCE by the Roman general Marcellus. The book’s objective, explained in the forewords by Italian officials, the editors, and museum personnel, and in the introduction by Claire… Full Review

In the section of Lives of the Artists dedicated to Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari tells a bewildering story surrounding the Doni Tondo (ca. 1506). Agnolo Doni, a friend of Michelangelo and lover of all things beautiful, had commissioned the painting and had negotiated with the artist on a price of seventy scudi. We do not know whether this price included the frame, or the gold and blue and other raw materials as would have been normal at the time, but when Agnolo received the finished work, he decided to pay only forty scudi. Again Vasari omits the reasons why… Full Review

In Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life, André Dombrowski presents an unfamiliar Paul Cézanne: the seemingly awkward, overwrought romantic who produced such works as The Murder (ca. 1868–70) and The Strangled Woman (ca. 1870–72). When this “expressionistic” Cézanne has been attended to at all, he has been characterized as an artist subject to his own immature psychic turbulence—a radically different creature from the modernist master whose influential “constructivist stroke” emerged in the mid-to-late 1870s. Dombrowski sets out to correct this dismissive periodization, making a case for the relevance of Cézanne’s early career. Devoting each of his five chapters to sustained… Full Review

Ambitious and far-reaching, History of Design offers an introductory global history of decorative arts, material culture, and design over the course of six centuries and is the fruit of nearly a decade’s worth of coordination on the part of editors Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber, with contributions from twenty-six listed authors. Envisioned as a textbook, its six chapters are clearly arranged in four chronological sections and six geo-cultural areas (currently omitting Australia/Oceania, which the editors note is planned for future editions). Color codes allow readers to pursue the story of individual cultures, skipping others, but the aim of producing an… Full Review

In Cultural Exchange: Jews, Christians, and Art in the Medieval Marketplace, Joseph Shatzmiller investigates the impact of Christian pictorial and aesthetic traditions on Jewish art in the Middle Ages. Jewish visual responses to styles, images, religious beliefs, cultural values, materials, and texts found in Christian art have previously been examined by Bianca Kühnel, Malachi Beit-Arié, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Bezalel Narkiss, Vivian Mann, and Eva Frojmovic, among others.[1] In addition, a recent exhibition, Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting Place of Cultures, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue edited by Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt, explored these themes (… Full Review

As Maxwell K. Hearn explains in his introduction to this important book, which serves as the catalogue of an exhibition he curated, for over two millennia ink made from lampblack or pine soot has been the principal medium of the allied arts of painting and calligraphy in China. Ground with water to form a liquid and applied with a brush to paper or silk, ink is an infinitely flexible medium: ranging in tone from jet black to pale, silvery gray, it records every inflection of the artist's arm, hands, and fingers transmitted to the tip of the brush. Ink was… Full Review

In No Innocent Bystanders, Frazer Ward addresses issues of community and the public through the lens of canonical performance artists—and work—from the 1970s. Ward is acutely aware of the importance of how an event or action is framed as art, noting that the “importance of art as a context here is that it at once invokes and relies upon (even as it may capture) an audience” (2–3). Ward chooses to focus on seminal pieces—many of which were so controversial that they received coverage in the mainstream press—in order to tease out the implications of audience, publics, and counterpublics in… Full Review

Though its title coyly pretends to be small, Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha is actually a large, substantial book. Edited and compiled by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton, and Hermann Zschiegner, Various Small Books provides an illustrated and annotated catalog of artists’ books inspired by Ed Ruscha’s books. It also includes an essay by Mark Rawlinson and descriptive texts by Phil Taylor. Ruscha created a number of books in the 1960s and 1970s that helped to create the field of contemporary artists’ books. Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, published in 1962, contains photographs of exactly twenty-six… Full Review

In 1943, the English architect, landscape architect, and town planner Geoffrey Jellicoe designed an exhibition for the British Road Federation (BRF) called Motorways for Britain. Jellicoe included photographs of motorways superimposed on different types of English landscape, showing thousands of miles of roadways “designed to harmonise with typical British scenery,” as described by Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minnis, authors of the lavishly illustrated and thoroughly researched Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England. They go on to say that a year later the BRF published New Roads for Britain: A Plan for the Immediate Future… Full Review

Conceived as an “integral counterpart” to the eponymous exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and which also appeared at the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City, Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World features an impressive roster of international scholars, an interdisciplinary approach, and over two hundred full-color illustrations. The publication is not, strictly speaking, an exhibition catalogue (there are no individual entries); rather, it is a collection of related essays capable of standing independently of the exhibition it was meant to accompany. In this sense, Contested Visions (the book) is an important example… Full Review

Agnes Martin: Before the Grid offered a rare opportunity to examine a selection of Martin’s artwork made before the iconic grid paintings she began around 1960. Martin destroyed much of her early work; for her, only the grids successfully embodied the authorial detachment and holistic union of painterly elements she sought in her practice. Despite the obvious curatorial challenges caused by Martin’s acts of destruction, the exhibition’s organizers, Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman, presented a visually rich selection of approximately two dozen paintings and works on paper depicting standard modernist genres—a still life, landscapes, portraits, and Surrealist abstractions—as well as… Full Review

Beauty Revealed is the first exhibition dedicated to Chinese paintings of meiren (beautiful women), a subject that is as complex and fraught as the English translation. Consisting of twenty-eight paintings drawn from eleven private and institutional collections in the United States, Canada, and Europe, it explores a genre of painting that appeared during the late Ming and continued in the Qing dynasty (seventeenth-to-late eighteenth century). Organized by Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White, in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley, Professor Emeritus James Cahill, the exhibition occupies the larger galleries in the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum… Full Review