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The questions David James asks in The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geographies of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles begin with a simple problem of space: what is the difference between Los Angeles and Hollywood? Hollywood was once lured to Los Angeles by terrain that could simulate everything from deserts to the Orient, but, as James argues, Los Angeles now tries to create itself in the image of Hollywood. One symptom of this suppression of local geography is that “LA film” has become completely synonymous with “Hollywood film” in the popular imagination. James’s project both continues and revises… Full Review

In the context of today’s increasingly global art world, Midori Yoshimoto’s excellent and timely study, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, fills a lacuna in the history of Japanese art in the West as well as in the history of the avant-garde more generally. Into Performance offers fascinating insight into the period between the Zen appropriations of Western artists in the 1950s and the identity art that reigned in the 1980s and 1990s, now so frequently subsumed under the more neutral (or, as some argue, neutralizing) rubric of globalism. The five Japanese women artists who are the… Full Review

In 1968, the Mono-ha artist Sekine Nobuo dug a perfectly cylindrical hole, 2.7 meters in depth and 2.2 meters in diameter, in a park in Kobe. Next to it, he placed an earthen column of identical dimensions, giving the impression of a simple transfer of matter, a sculpture plucked from the earth. Presenting earth as earth, this work was intended as a negation of the artist’s privileged role as creator, as a critique of the art market, and as a questioning of the modernist art object. This and other works of its generation constituted an attack on modernism that was… Full Review

Enthusiasts for the remarkable work of Joseph Michael Gandy—visionary, perspectivist to Sir John Soane, romantic evoker of the sublime—have been a small but indomitable band. This is the book for which we have been waiting many years. Since the 1970s, Brian Lukacher has been researching the work of Gandy—ferreting out unknown pictures, discovering the anatomy of a life and oeuvre. He knows more than anyone else is ever likely to know about his remarkable and scintillating subject. In short this publication could not be more welcome. Gandy (1771–1843) is in many ways a bit of a sad case. He… Full Review

The aesthetic appropriation of psychic states and disorders has a distinguished pedigree. André Breton adopted hysteria in the early days of the Surrealist movement, while his colleague Salvador Dalí preferred paranoia. Anton Ehrenzweig pressed Melanie Klein’s manic and depressive moments of an infant’s life into a theory of creative processes in his influential book, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Of course, Sigmund Freud himself set the modern trend for this sort of borrowing in his analysis of the psychic energy underlying Leonardo da Vinci’s peculiar genius, but the tradition reaches as far back as… Full Review

Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance offers a wide-ranging study of the elite visual culture of France under the Valois-Angoulême dynasty. In this book, based upon her dissertation at the University of Chicago, Zorach studies the many manifestations of the Fontainebleau style, from panel and wall paintings to sculpture, prints, ceramics, diplomatic gifts and royal entry decorations, costume, and the many copies after the antique that populated the galleries and gardens of the palace. The book’s plentiful, high-quality illustrations exemplify both the author’s arguments as well as the incredible fertility of artistic production… Full Review

Historians and art historians have a soft spot for Charles Sheeler, the American painter, filmmaker, and photographer who made a career out of his apparent love for industrial modernity during the interwar decades. It is customary for scholars of this period to bend their knees at his Machine Age altarpieces, because they so plainly depict the means and effects of the era’s mania for rational efficiency, and also because—let’s face it—the works are beautiful, all the more seducing in their tight-lipped, standoffish reserve. For Charles Sheeler: Across Media, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by the same name, curator… Full Review

One can hardly think of Rome without picturing the massive dome of St. Peter’s. Clearly symbolic of Catholicism and, more subtly, of the transition from late pagan antiquity to the ascendancy of Christianity, the basilica has a rich and varied history. As Lex Bosman states in the introduction to The Power of Tradition, “The church of St. Peter’s in the Vatican is not special only because of its size and its splendor. It is also, more than any other building in Western Europe, a testimony to part of the history of Christianity in different types of stone” (9). … Full Review

Palladio’s Rome offers an unusual recreation of the Renaissance city in the words of the celebrated architect from northern Italy. Palladio made several visits to Rome when he was still an aspiring architect, producing a pair of guidebooks that were published in 1554—one an introduction to the ancient city (The Antiquities of Rome), and the other a companion guide to the churches of contemporary Rome (Description of the Churches). In keeping with standard practice of the time, the texts are brief and unillustrated, but the contents are surprising given the identity of the author. Vaughan… Full Review

It is a sign of the times, I suppose, to begin a book review, itself published online, with a reference to a website. For in many ways, Jane Geddes’s The St. Albans Psalter is a book that was spawned by a website. In 2003, the University of Aberdeen undertook, under the direction of Geddes, to publish the St. Albans Psalter on the internet as a virtual facsimile (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml). As academic websites go, this is a truly impressive accomplishment, for it provides high-quality color images of every page of this twelfth-century psalter (including the blank pages). For the first time… Full Review