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In this important, sensitive, stimulating, but also occasionally irritating book, Peter Chametzky has provided a series of finely argued and well-documented case studies involving twentieth-century German works of art, using individual objects or larger spans of an artist’s career as catalysts for exploring the knotty problem of art’s relationship to history. Chametzky’s chosen examples—objects or artists firmly established in the discussion of German art in the context of modern society and its catastrophic manifestations—include Max Beckmann’s 1913 painting The Sinking of the Titanic and 1930s triptych Departure; Hannah Höch’s large-format Dada collage Cut with the Kitchen-Knife Dada through Germany’s… Full Review

Born in 1389, Antoninus Pierozzi entered into the Dominican Order in 1405 at the new house of the Order in Fiesole, near Florence. Soon, in spite of his youth, he was called to administer various convents in Cortona, Rome, Naples, as well as Florence, and he actively worked to make them part of the Dominican Congregation of Tuscany, which had been recently established by Giovanni Dominici in order to promote a stricter form of life among the Friars Preachers. Consecrated Archbishop of Florence on March 13, 1446, he died on May 2, 1459, and was lauded among Florentines for his… Full Review

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western readerships closely identified the ancient Maya with dance and bodily performance. The theme of dance is implicit in the sinuous orientalism of Frédéric de Waldeck’s renderings of Palenque relief sculpture published in 1866 (e.g., “The Beau Relief”: see Frédéric de Waldeck and Brasseur de Bourbourg, Palenqué et autres ruines de l’ancienne civilisation du Mexique, Paris: Bertrand, 1866, plate 42). The animated pose of a maize god statue from Copán Temple 22 prompted English colonial administrator and explorer A. P. Maudslay to call the figure “the singing girl” in his documentary volume of 1889 (Alfred P… Full Review

Sarah Betzer’s Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History opens with a detail of the head of the Valpinçon Bather (1808). Turning the page, the reader is confronted with the steady gaze of Madame de Moitessier, the subject of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s striking 1856 portrait. This pairing visualizes the central problem Betzer seeks to engage: how did Ingres, a history painter who decisively turned attention to the eroticized female form, conceive of portraits of women? And what did the women who sat for these portraits desire to see in them? Betzer’s book is a detailed and sophisticated examination of… Full Review

The eerie title of Rachel Poliquin’s beautifully illustrated and designed book, The Breathless Zoo, first in the exciting new “Animalibus” series edited by Nigel Rothfels and Gary Marvin, immediately calls attention to the contradictions at the heart of its subject. Taxidermy, which can be traced at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a process whereby animals are killed in order to be preserved and displayed, and in which their deaths—deliberate and celebrated in some instances, accidental or mourned in others—linger in the background of that display. The result is an irresolvable tension between the live animal taxidermy… Full Review

In their introduction to The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, Patrizia Di Bello and Shamoon Zamir make a refreshingly straightforward proposition about the historical relationship between the photograph and the printed page: “Ever since the publication of Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844–46) . . . the home of the photograph has been the book as much as the gallery wall. It could even be argued that the book is the first and proper home of the photographic image from which it moved out to take up residence in the fine art gallery and the modern… Full Review

The market that readers of The Rise of the Art Market in London, 1850–1939 encounter is not one driven by an invisible hand. In lieu of focusing on quantitative analyses of the “fiscal exchange value of the work of art” (15), the volume’s editors and contributors trace the tacit, coordinated, and often failed activities of myriad actors—dealers, auctioneers, collectors, painters, museum trustees, the art presses—that underpinned the development of London’s art market within a legible geographical terrain from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar years. The collection thus privileges the theoretical parameters of “cultural geography” and the methods of art… Full Review

"What is alive anyhow?" This is one of the simple, troubling, and eternal questions posed by Casey Gardner's artists' book, Body of Inquiry. Her response is anything but simple. Partly inspired by the Musée des arts et meétiers, a labyrinth of scientific instruments and investigations in Paris, Gardner creates a complex multi-layered work combining the museum, her elementary science classes, technical facts, and an anatomical model called Torso Woman with her speculations on life, science, and death. The result is truly surprising. In the colophon Gardner states that "this book has been on my mind for quite some… Full Review

Today, J. M. W. Turner is arguably the most widely recognized artist of nineteenth-century Britain. He has been much on display during the past few years, thanks to several major exhibitions and their accompanying publications: J. M. W. Turner (Ian Warrell, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2007), Turner and the Masters (David Solkin, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2009), and Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude (Ian Warrell, ed., London: National Gallery, 2012). The first of these exhibitions brought Turner’s works before U.S. audiences and provided a fresh evaluation of his career; the latter two focused on the artist’s intense engagement… Full Review

Taking Time: Chardin’s “Boy Building a House of Cards” and Other Paintings is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition mounted at Waddesdon Manor, the country house in Buckinghamshire, England, built in the nineteenth century for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Today the manor is run jointly by the National Trust and a charitable Rothschild Family Trust headed by Jacob Rothschild, 4th Lord Rothschild. In 2007, the trust purchased Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards (1735). Taking Time celebrates the arrival of Chardin’s painting to Waddesdon Manor, where it joins another famous genre painting by Chardin, Girl with a Shuttlecock (1737)… Full Review