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Refracted Visions is a substantial and well-researched study of contemporary popular photography in Indonesia, a result of anthropologist Karen Strassler’s extensive fieldwork in Java since the mid-1990s, which covers a period when analog photography was still dominant. While the book provides adequate historical background into the consolidation of popular photography since the colonial era, its focus is on six genres, each given a separate chapter treatment: amateur photography (chapter 1), studio portraiture (chapter 2), identity photographs (chapter 3), family ritual photography (chapter 4), student photographs of demonstrations (chapter 5), and photographs of charismatic political leaders (chapter 6). Strassler draws from… Full Review

If the observation that modern conceptions of homosexuality were deeply interwoven with the forms and experiences of the modern city is now a commonplace, queer London has emerged as a privileged site of analysis. Cultural and social historians have mapped its contours in impressive detail, drawing on the extensive police documentation of sodomy arrests from the late nineteenth century onward, the numerous high-profile court cases inaugurated by the notorious trial of Oscar Wilde, and the popular press’s apparently unlimited appetite for sexual scandal. The latest contribution to this textured historiography is The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar… Full Review

Clive Getty's scholarship has long held a central place within the secondary literature on the French caricaturist and illustrator Grandville (Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard, 1803–1847). Alongside important studies in French by Annie Renonciat and Philippe Kaenel, Getty's work has served as a necessary corrective to the ahistorical, Surrealistic, and Freudian interpretations of Grandville's art that dominated study of the artist for much of the twentieth century. While the art historian and painter Laure Garcin together with the artist Max Ernst revived interest in Grandville, whose reputation was neglected for nearly a century after his death, they also perpetuated the myth… Full Review

Jan Gossart has long been overdue a thorough modern reassessment. A decisive figure in the transformation of South Netherlandish art in the 1510s and 1520s, famous since his day for bringing knowledge of Antiquity and the rendering of mythological nudes from Italy to the Netherlands, Gossart—the spelling of his name here rightly restored to the way he signed it—is far less well-known today than his position and achievement deserve. The last comprehensive exhibition of his work was held forty-six years ago in Rotterdam and Bruges, and he has never been the subject of a U.S. exhibition. For this… Full Review

In The Temperamental Nude: Class, Medicine and Representation in Eighteenth-Century France, the late Tony Halliday studies a neglected facet of visual representation in Enlightenment culture, namely, the revival and significance of the theory of the temperaments and its impact on the depiction of the human figure, specifically the male figure, in painting, sculpture, and prints. His study focuses principally on mid- to late eighteenth-century France, with particular emphasis on the Revolutionary period. The contested idea of the new citizen (who was male according to French convention and law) and his fluctuating image in the visual arts during the Revolution… Full Review

A compendium of twelve essays written over the last three decades, Charles Harrison’s Since 1950: Art and Its Criticism offers a punchy yet partial picture of the critic and historian’s take on visual art at the end of the twentieth century. Sadly, this volume must also serve as the coda to the author’s career as curator, researcher, teacher, and longtime collaborator with Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden in the collective art practice of Art & Language. After a long struggle with cancer, Charles Harrison died on 6 August 2009 at the age of 67. Presenting much more than an… Full Review

David Whitehouse is the executive director of the Corning Museum of Glass and has embarked on the ambitious task to publish comprehensive catalogues of ancient and Islamic glass in his institution. The Roman, Sasanian, and Post-Sasanian publications are on the shelves (Roman Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass, vols. 1–3, 1997, 2001, 2003; Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass, 2005), while the present review deals with the first of three volumes dedicated to the glass holdings from the Islamic world. This book is entirely devoted to cut and engraved objects; the two… Full Review

The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore is a revisionist study of the leading artist of the early twentieth-century Bengal Art School. Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) was the vice principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta from 1905–1915. Tagore’s art and writings helped spawn a nationalist art movement known as New Indian Art (Nabya Bharat Shilpa) tied to the larger cultural nationalism of the Bengali Renaissance, in which he and several family members, including his uncle, the famous poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), played a leading role. The book argues that overemphasis on Tagore’s involvement in the nationalist art movement has… Full Review

There are few things as challenging as creating large-scale cultural events for cities. Numerous stakeholders, funding bodies, and public agencies must be counseled, appeased, and included in the process, if not directly in the artistic program. Local audiences and interests should form an integral part of the event’s offering, while media and tourist markets yearn for the high-end, world-exclusive tier of cultural engagement. Add to these factors the mystical quest to create a “something for everyone” program to please all of the above, and one begins to understand the complications at hand. It is therefore admirable that someone should step… Full Review

In an effort to counteract the negative reputation Iran has earned in parts of the West during the past few decades, many Iranians and Westerners alike point to the country’s “glorious past”—the Achaemenid Empire, for example, where the so-called first charter of human rights was fabricated. Iranians point with pride to poets and other literary greats their country has produced. The verses of the national epic—Shahnameh (Book of Kings), written by Ferdowsi in the eleventh century—are frequently recited, and Hafez-reading (fal-e Hafez) is part of many Iranians’ everyday life. Sa’di’s medieval prose and poetry—recognized for their quality… Full Review