Browse Recent Book Reviews

It used to be simpler. When Beaumont Newhall published his first English-language surveys of the history of photography in the 1930s and 1940s, most of the art-historical establishment did not consider photography a legitimate art, and when a modernist did think about the relation of the camera to art, it was often under a cloud of worry that some established painter would be revealed to have used a photograph as his source. Newhall thus began his project from a position of deficit: photography, as he understood it, could be expressive but was fundamentally different from painting and the graphic arts… Full Review

Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome, edited by Jill Burke, consists of twelve essays that emerged from a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. They take the art of Rome in the first decades of the sixteenth century as their subject, and collectively foment reconsideration of the notion of “High Renaissance” style. In accord with current scholarship and survey texts, the term “High Renaissance” is understood as a product of historiography only loosely related to the historical period in question and is therefore placed in quotations throughout the… Full Review

The Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, annually inspires millions of people to congregate at a single place in a manner that is unique among world religions. The British Museum’s 2012 exhibition on the subject was accompanied by two publications that bring together the religious, political, economic, and visual histories of the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from the seventh century through present times. For the main catalogue, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, exhibition curator and editor Venetia Porter invited scholars of religious studies, comparative religion, history, cultural criticism, and… Full Review

In her provocative new book, Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin presents an innovative approach to visual and photographic studies. Her essays form interrelated and often fascinatingly oblique case studies pertaining to the use of photography and its metaphorical affect as tactility and touch. Olin offers deep embraces of photographic discourse in James Agee and Walker Evans’s New Deal-era text and photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; James VanDerZee's Harlem photographs produced during the 1920s and 1930s; photographic references in the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and W. G. Sebald; "empowerment" projects such… Full Review

In 1953 German art historian Otto von Simson, writing in the pages of The Art Bulletin, heralded Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition (ca. 1435) in the Prado as "the birth of tragedy in Christian art" (Otto G. von Simson, “Compassio and Co-Redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent From the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 [March 1953]: 9–16). Well-timed to coincide with post-war philosophy's Nietzsche revival, the claim was grounded in a conventional scholarly alignment of visual fact (the famous rhyme of Christ and Mary's bodies) and prevailing currents of religious culture (in particular the… Full Review

“How did images produce religious truth in the later Middle Ages?” Adam Kumler’s Translating Truth is an ambitious book that tries to answer this question through an examination of visual responses to the search for religious knowledge among the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Kumler analyzes a series of exceptional manuscripts containing vernacular texts and images made for a lay clientele in France and England within the new “horizon of expectations” regarding education of the laity that emerged from the Fourth Lateran Council’s reform. Through the mediation of archbishops and bishops who supervised parochial clergy, the reformers sought… Full Review

In 1931, seeking to distinguish between a radically modern art and the flood of belle peinture that was submerging the French capital, the expatriate critic Carl Einstein unleashed an unsparing diagnosis in an essay entitled “The Little Picture Factory.” “In Paris,” he wrote, “the fabrication of pictures without worldview or risk is baser than the traffic in young women, for the facile dauber is rewarded by no punishment, only comfortable income” (Carl Einstein, “Kleine Bildefabrik,” Weltkunst 5 [April 1931]: 2–3). As Keith Holz sums up in “After Locarno: German Artists in the Parisian Picture Factory,” included in Academics, Pompiers, Official… Full Review

Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1865, James Henry Breasted (d. 1935) became the most famous American Egyptologist of his generation. He was known not only for his historical scholarship, embodied in A History of Egypt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), a massive book published in 1905, and the five volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), published in 1906–07—achievements that led to his appointment to the first professorship in Egyptology in the United States, which he assumed at the University of Chicago in 1905. He was also widely known for many semi-popular and popular articles, guides… Full Review

Nigel Hiscock has devoted a substantial portion of his career to an exceedingly difficult study: the symbolism of medieval ecclesiastical architecture. As a result, he must wrestle with a frustrating historiography whose pendulum swings between the assumption and denial of meaning in medieval architectural form; a spotty documentary record whose contributors, little concerned with questions of interest to modern scholars, rarely reference subjects like architectural training or the symbolic intent of plans; and data collection and analysis that, until the arrival of digitization, meant painstaking manual measurement and calculation. The Symbol at Your Door, intended to complement Hiscock’s The… Full Review

Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography encourages readers to imagine a new discourse for the study and treatment of photography. Expanding upon ideas found in her book The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) (click here for review), Azoulay proposes to consider photography as an ongoing public event that began with the emergence of photographic consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Ever since, she asserts, the existence of photography and the awareness of its omnipresence have normalized and conditioned the physical and psychic behaviour of human beings to comply with the moral… Full Review