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Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture by Sonya S. Lee is the first book-length study of the nirvana image in Chinese art, examining carefully chosen works from the sixth to twelfth centuries. In her exploration of this motif, which represents the final extinction of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni, Lee’s methodological approach mediates the interactions between the monastic community, lay patrons, and artisans in articulating the particular resonance that this motif had in China, where it materialized in a broader range of architectural, material, and visual forms than had been the case in South and Central Asia… Full Review

In texts and poetry of ancient China, the Yellow Springs refers to the subterranean realm of the dead and was thus “the imagined location of innumerable graves” (7). Wu Hung’s Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs presents a long-awaited synthesis of developments in tomb art in China from the Neolithic period through the Song Dynasty, or the third millennium BCE though the fourteenth century (and in some instances, even into the succeeding Ming and Qing dynasties). Such broad, sweeping studies are rarely attempted, but the core of this book is in fact a compilation of some three decades… Full Review

In Writing Art History, Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville have produced a timely book. It is neatly paradoxical. It worries about the “professionalization” of art history in research universities. Its principal readership, however, will be professional art historians in research universities. It protests pedagogical methodologism in art history—the reduction of theory to teachable methods, or “methodology.” But its own method of deconstructive close reading and rhetorical analysis is conspicuous. It has been widely legitimated as one way—maybe the best—to read good writing in the history and criticism of art, “theory” or not. These tensions are not fatal, however. They… Full Review

Contemporary Korean art has garnered a place in the narrative of Western contemporary art with Nam June Paik and Ufan Lee, who had retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 and 2011, respectively. Although both were born in Korea, they left at a young age. Along with these two stars, the recent story of contemporary Korean art has focused on Lee Bul, Do Ho Suh, and Kimsooja, among others, who have likewise attracted attention at international art institutions and fairs in recent years. Generally excluded in the Western narrative are the talented young or established artists who live and… Full Review

Ingrid Vermeulen undertakes an important self-reflexive task in Picturing Art History: the examination of the transition from unillustrated to illustrated texts about art. Surprisingly, that transformation had little to do with technological changes. Using three specific publications as examples, she argues that eighteenth-century scholars increasingly came to conceive of the artistic past not as a series of biographies of artists, but rather as a seamless “chain” of artworks in which historical progress can, and indeed must, be seen to be fully understood. Vermeulen tracks her topic through four related questions: What types of images were considered appropriate to the… Full Review

Based on Michael Dorsch’s doctoral dissertation (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2001), French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–80 explores the aftermath of what Victor Hugo called France’s “Terrible Year” as reflected in the field of sculpture. Memorialized in many cases by artists who had themselves endured the long standoff (from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871), the commemoration of the siege of Paris forced French artists to confront difficult and unfamiliar themes. Both privately and in public, painters and sculptors struggled to devise personifications appropriate to the representation of Resistance, Defense, and Defeat. Among the maquettes… Full Review

Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations focuses on the artists associated with the major figures of what the Anglo-Saxon world has called “French Theory,” conceived in a broad way, and corresponding mainly to the 1970s. The various chapters are confrontations between Jean-Paul Sartre and Robert Lapoujade or Leonardo Cremonini, Pierre Bourdieu and Bernard Rancillac, Louis Althusser and Lucio Fanti, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Gérard Fromanger, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Monory, Jacques Derrida and Valerio Adami. The goal is to draw attention to these artists, far less known than the thinkers. The relationship then appears… Full Review

The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, published in Cambridge University Press’s Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance series, follows those on Rome, edited by Marcia B. Hall (2005), and Venice and the Veneto, edited by Peter Humphrey (2008), while two forthcoming volumes will address Naples and Florence. The series is conceived as a broadly contextual account of art of all kinds in Italy, 1300–1600. The key to this approach is patronage. Each of the authors of Court Cities of Northern Italy looks at patrons as… Full Review

There comes a moment in every architectural history class when an undergraduate asks how exactly did architects work out the science or mathematics of some major monument. It is not a moment I eagerly anticipate, and I suspect I am not alone. Especially in the large introductory classes I teach each year, my emphasis is on the broad cultural issues of architecture, the ways in which buildings shape human experience and respond to historical pressures. I am trying to engage students who are not necessarily art history or architecture majors and those who are in the class to satisfy some… Full Review

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many writers, such as the economist Stanley Jevons, viewed museums as agents of social reform, but today many scholars have focused on reforming museums and their collecting practices. Specifically, museums’ acquisitions of ancient objects have sparked contentious disputes about these institutions’ responsibilities. These debates are presented in Robin F. Rhodes’s The Acquisition and Exhibition of Classical Antiquities, an edited book of essays from a symposium held at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame on 24 February 2007. This work addresses the collection and display of licit… Full Review