Browse Recent Book Reviews

If one were pressed to position a single artistic project at the center of the relationship between sculpture and photography, Brassaï’s Sculptures involontaires seems a good choice. Indeed, both volumes reviewed here—one a catalogue for an exhibition originating at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the other a collection of essays in Ashgate’s “Studies in Surrealism” series—pivot around Brassaï’s photographs, which were collaborations with Salvador Dalí, who supplied their captions and published them in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in December 1933. As Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly write in their introduction to Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to… Full Review

Stephanie C. Leone’s The Pamphilj and the Arts brings together sixteen essays examining the biography of Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj (1653–1730), as well as his and his family’s patronage of the visual arts and music. The papers were first assembled for a conference on the Pamphilj and the arts held at Boston College in 2010. The combined expertise of the interdisciplinary scholars assembled by Leone (art historians, musicologists, historians, philologists, linguists, and archivists) reveals a vivid portrait of Pamphilj, whose biography and patronage have been neglected since Lina Montalto’s Un mecenate in Roma barocca: il cardinale Benedetto Pamphilj (Florence: Sansoni, 1955)… Full Review

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), home to a sizeable part of the Paul Mellon Collection of Sporting Art and the largest permanent display of British sporting art in the world, provides an ideal venue for a show dedicated to the presentation of sporting prints. While there have been recent exhibitions on sporting painting and sculpture, including Country Pursuits at VMFA in 2007, this is the first large-scale exhibition on prints outside of galleries and auction houses. Accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue, the exhibition endeavors to locate this genre within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artistic… Full Review

When the French daily Libération published its November 14, 2013, print edition “sans photo,” marking photography’s absence with empty white fields, did its public, as it read that day’s “paper,” take note? Or did it encounter this smart protest against the decline of the photojournalist’s profession as a meme, liking and sharing it on smartphone screens? Did Libération strip its website and app edition of photographs too? Such questions are not easy to answer in retrospect, as homepages do not appear to be archived, and who, if anyone, loaded a screenshot onto a blog? The state of photojournalism in the… Full Review

In his latest publication, Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors: An Insight into the Artist’s Last Decade, Hugh Belsey highlights the spirited independence and skillful professional maneuvering of the artist he has researched for most of his career. More specifically, Belsey points out how Thomas Gainsborough’s attitudes and decisions, especially in relation to his rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as the Royal Academy, clarify the creation of the celebrated Cottage Door (ca. 1780) painting in the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and two subsequent similar versions. Indeed, the book coincides with the exhibition of all three canvases together for… Full Review

With the publication in 1778 of A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, antiquarian, writer, and ordained Jesuit priest Thomas West (1720?–1779) contributed to and capitalized on the growing interest in exploring the aesthetic significance of British landscape. The first edition was a success, but West died before seeing the book go into a second, which was expanded and made “decently perspicuous and correct” by the writer William Cockin (1736–1801) (reprinted in 4th ed., London: W. Richardson, 1789, 90). Despite the Guide’s initial success, Cockin included in the preface a curiously belittling description of the… Full Review

Within modern East Asian art and visual culture the politics of beauty have revolved around two notable archetypes: the “Modern Woman” and the “Traditional Woman.” The Modern Woman—also known as the “modern girl” or “new woman”—was identifiable by her bobbed haircut and flapper dress and embodied the flamboyant lifestyle of the self-motivated working girl. The Modern Woman challenged social mores by publicly asserting her sexuality, intelligence, and individualism. In contrast, the Traditional Woman, or “good wife, wise mother,” was based on a Confucian model of womanhood in which moral education and homemaking skills, rather than wage employment, cultural and intellectual… Full Review

By rights, a book about temporary Georgian festival architecture should be the very definition of scholarly navel-gazing. But in our modern era of tablescapes, wall treatments, chalk art, digital holograms, and laser light shows, this illuminating survey of eighteenth-century event planning feels perversely contemporary—as relevant as it is revelatory. In Georgian England, extravagant decorative and architectural effects were employed for large-scale public displays and elite private entertainments alike. Frequently, these one-off installations celebrated momentous events such as military victories and royal birthdays. “All these decorations were in their time an integral part of a culture rich in visual… Full Review

In 2013, the names of Malian portrait photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé may be familiar to the art-viewing public in Europe and the United States, but this was not always the case. In fact, it was a little over twenty years ago that Keita’s studio portraits were first shown in the United States in the Museum for African Art’s exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (1991). The timing of that appearance coincided with significant intellectual shifts taking place in the study of African art, and subsequently the field of African photography grew as an area of scholarly pursuit… Full Review

Social media networks like Facebook make us anticipate the moment we turn into objects under another person’s gaze. Yet this experience of becoming a spectacle, and organizing our lives accordingly, is hardly new. Nor is the very small size that our portraits will usually take in these types of media: as Hanneke Grootenboer points out in Treasuring the Gaze, the format of a photo on a smartphone screen is remarkably similar to that of the pre-photographic portrait miniature. In her new book, Grootenboer focuses on a short-lived subgenre of the portrait miniature, the so-called eye miniature or eye portrait… Full Review