Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Gwyneth Shanks and Allie Tepper, eds.
Living Collections Catalogue, vol. 3. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2020. Online (9781935963219)
(Click here to view the online multimedia publication.) “What if museums narrated their history, our histories, not as a chronology of single artists or ‘masterpieces,’ but rather as a story of group work?” Thomas Lax, curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), asks this question in his preface to the third volume of the Walker Art Center’s Living Collections Catalogue. Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980s, coedited by scholar Gwyneth Shanks and curator Allie Tepper, is a dynamic investigation of how artists have negotiated the politics… Full Review
June 30, 2021
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Julius von Schlosser
Ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann; trans. Jonathan Blower. Texts & Documents. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021. 232 pp.; 7 color ills.; 103 b/w ills. Paper $65.00 (9781606066652)
Although the German phrase Kunst- und Wunderkammer has become a standard expression in anglophone scholarship on early modern collecting, it has taken more than a hundred years for a full English translation of the pioneering Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance by Julius von Schlosser to appear. First published in German in 1908 and republished in a modified version in 1978, von Schlosser’s book was translated into French, Italian, and Spanish before its English edition finally appeared in the Getty Research Institute’s series Texts & Documents in 2021. It was due to this book that the term Kunst- und Wunderkammer… Full Review
June 25, 2021
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Marko Ilić
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 384 pp.; 55 color ills.; 75 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780262044844)
“New Art Practice” is a name that draws together a group of artists, collectives, exhibitions, publications, and public and private projects appearing from the 1960s through the 1980s in cities across Yugoslavia. More a localized genre category (with a somewhat generic title) than a movement per se, the New Art Practice included artists who engaged random passersby as art, wrote short texts and slogans as art, and produced body art, video art, posters, installations, and manifestations. They forged a complicated relationship with the state-funded art world and socialist system of their country: critiquing, mocking, and appropriating as well as respecting… Full Review
June 23, 2021
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Rebecca VanDiver
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020. 256 pp.; 51 color ills.; 37 b/w ills. Cloth $59.95 (9780271086040)
Rebecca VanDiver’s intersectional monograph on the iconic artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998) is a remarkable step forward in the expanding art historical canon. She situates Jones’s stylistically eclectic work (impressionistic landscapes, realistic portraits, cubistic still lifes, and political allegories) in the aesthetic and cultural concerns of the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, Négritude, abstraction, feminism, and Pan-Africanism. Her central thesis is that Jones, by producing innovative African and Afrodiasporic-themed paintings, collages, and illustrations throughout her career, designed a new composite tradition that both reflects her medial position in multiple worlds and expresses the “increasingly fragmented nature of black identity and diasporic experiences”… Full Review
June 22, 2021
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Steven J. Cody
Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 314/47. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2020. 312 pp.; 74 color ills. Cloth $155.00 (9789004430150)
The luminous color, palpable atmosphere, and graceful Madonnas of Andrea del Sarto’s paintings have entranced viewers for centuries. In Steven J. Cody’s aptly titled Andrea del Sarto: Splendor and Renewal in the Renaissance Altarpiece, a series of case studies offers an explanation for this aesthetic attraction and the deep spirituality of the artist’s paintings. Six chapters, each devoted to a single altarpiece, analyze Andrea’s pictures from various angles: the commissioning of the projects; the impact of religious doctrine on the iconography and style of the altarpieces; and the art theory underpinning his practice. A comprehensive introduction sets forth the… Full Review
June 18, 2021
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K. L. H. Wells
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. 280 pp.; 59 color ills.; 45 b/w ills. Cloth $59.00 (9780300232592)
With Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York, author K. L. H. Wells, associate professor of American art and architecture at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, proposes a reassessment of modernism’s relationship to decoration through an examination of modernist tapestries produced after World War II. Wells asserts that the indeterminate positioning of tapestry as a French luxury craft with “masculine prestige” gave it a “privileged position within postwar modernism,” a position attributable to its being “both elite and marginal” (6–7). Over four chapters, Wells considers the prevalence of postwar tapestries and the way in which tapestry expanded the… Full Review
June 16, 2021
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Janis A. Tomlinson
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 448 pp.; 35 color ills.; 46 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780691192048)
Retratos, or portraits, come in different varieties in Spanish culture. There are, of course, portraits and self-portraits like the ones Francisco de Goya y Lucientes produced in abundance: visual representations of the subject—usually though not always human—created to commemorate individuals, to preserve likenesses for posterity, and to serve as models for emulation. These might be meticulous renderings of physical features and dress, idealized portrayals that flattered their subject, or perceptive reflections of the sitter’s mind and heart through a steely gaze, a furrowed brow, or an impish grin. Early modern portraits identified as verdaderos retratos, or true portraits… Full Review
June 9, 2021
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Arthur J. DiFuria
Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2019. 548 pp.; 380 color ills. Cloth $165.00 (9789004380462)
Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) is best known as the author of the earliest and largest corpus of Netherlandish drawings of Rome and its ruins, made during the years he spent in the Eternal City after the 1527 sack. These drawings are the primary subject of Arthur J. DiFuria’s book, which concludes with a catalog. DiFuria’s commendable task throughout the book is to place these drawings in the context of Heemskerck’s training and overall artistic vision, and of the cult of ruins and memory in sixteenth-century Rome and the Netherlands. Part 1 focuses on the pre-Roman Heemskerck, in an era of… Full Review
June 7, 2021
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Go Hirasawa, Ann Adachi-Tasch, and Julian Ross, eds.
Trans. Yuzo Sakuramoto and Colin Smith. Berlin: Archive Books, 2020. 222 pp. Paper €15.00 (9783948212292)
In 2016 the Tate Modern and International Film Festival Rotterdam presented Throwing Shadows: Japanese Expanded Cinema in the Time of Pop, a series of screenings and events accompanied by a symposium. The program included restagings of live cinema performances by Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver, Rikuro Miyai, and Jun’ichi Okuyama decades after their original inception and, for the first time, for audiences in the UK. Unlike extant single-screen works of experimental film, expanded cinema and intermedia often involves multiple projection sources and multiple surfaces upon which images are projected, and typically includes live, performative elements that respond in real time to… Full Review
June 4, 2021
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BuYun Chen
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. 272 pp.; 96 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (9780295745305)
Mariachiara Gasparini
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. 278 pp.; 20 color ills.; 27 b/w ills. Cloth $74.00 (9780824877989)
Eiren L. Shea
Routledge Research in Art History. New York: Routledge, 2020. 206 pp.; 30 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $124.00 (9780367356187)
The three books reviewed here represent recent monographs on dress and textiles and their movements along the Silk Roads in the medieval and early modern periods. The study of dress and textiles has often been marginalized in art history, and the materials dismissed as minor or decorative arts—a marginality that is compounded by the limited survival of textiles and garments from earlier historical periods, which sometimes remain only as reused scraps. Textiles have been recognized as evidence for the exchange of ideas and technologies across Eurasia, as markers of trade, cultural contact, and interaction, but far less frequently as visual-culture… Full Review
May 28, 2021
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