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France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870, closely followed by an agonizing civil insurrection, led to the christening of that period as the country’s année terrible. While 1870–71 marks a crisp line for historians between the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the events of the Prussian siege of Paris from September 1870 to January 1871 have not been interrogated for their art-historical significance. Hollis Clayson’s groundbreaking work, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–1871), provides just such an interrogation. Clayson seeks to complicate social art histories that read artists only as “exemplars of a collectivity… Full Review

The intersection of space and place occurs on shifting sands at the borders of philosophy and aesthetics. This is not to suggest a lack of clarity about either way of knowing, but to make a claim about the fuzziness of the epistemological boundaries that the debate about space and place must necessarily engage. Edward Casey’s book Representing Place situates itself within the din of geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, architects, and philosophers rallying under the postmodern banner of place over space. For some time now his work has entered the fray. This, the third in a trilogy of books that includes Getting… Full Review

The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name, which was on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal from October 2004 to September 2005. The catalogue presents a new study of a significant period of change in a major North American city. Like other CCA catalogues, it is a carefully produced book with high-quality illustrations. It includes a fascinating collection of visual material, and the essays are valuable contributions to the literature on architecture and urban planning in the 1960s, as well as to scholarship on Montreal. The project focuses… Full Review

This deluxe two-volume boxed set is a catalogue raisonné documenting Ilya Kabakov’s important and influential work as an installation artist. Yet in keeping with the current practice of institutional critique, which turns every corner of the institution of art into an exhibition space in order to make those corners visible in a new way, it is much more. Included are descriptions of 155 installations executed between 1983 and 2000, along with preparatory drawings, installation photographs, and information about the exhibitions in which they appeared and the museums that own them. The bulk of the book consists of extensive commentaries by… Full Review

Author Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–c. 1430) is no longer the obscure figure she was three decades ago when Susan Groag Bell began her research for The Lost Tapestries of the ‘City of Ladies’: Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy. Indeed, although Christine’s texts were widely commissioned for court libraries in fifteenth-century Europe, by the middle of the sixteenth century they had already fallen out of favor. Not until feminist scholars of the early 1980s began to uncover and mine a larger body of evidence for medieval women as writers, readers, patrons, and interpreters of literature was Christine propelled back… Full Review

Tryna Lyons’s The Artists of Nathadwara vividly renders a community of traditional painters. It brings to life a profession that the field of South Asian art studies has tended to sidestep in its focus on objects. Early in the last century, Ananda Coomaraswamy created a vision of the artist as an anonymous yogin, meditating on internalized canons to make his imagery. It was a romantic ideal that still makes itself felt, even though a number of scholars of South Asian art have since turned their attention to individual artists, using inscriptions and archival data to discover information on real… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea seeks simultaneously to remedy faulty perceptions of the modern art of Latin America and to revolutionize the writing of its history. Focusing on two periods of heightened aesthetic inquiry—the 1920s and 1930s, and the decades immediately following the Second World War—it is required reading for anyone concerned with the art produced in this vast region or with twentieth-century art in general The title of the award-winning exhibition invokes the famous drawing published in 1936 by Joaquín Torres-García in which he inverted the map… Full Review

“Encounter”—the operative word, to my mind, of the title under review—has transformed, in a relatively brief period of time, from a strikingly innovative and promising concept to a somewhat enigmatic, if not altogether elusive, scholarly term of choice, which is increasingly, perhaps even blandly, invoked to describe the meeting between Europe and the wider world in the early modern period. Which is to say, the relatively fresh field of “encounter studies” is already—don’t blink!—ripe for revision. A bit of backstory: The study of Europe’s engagement with the non-European world—particularly during the pivotal moment of global expansion… Full Review

At the outset of her study on Soyer and Jewish identity, Samantha Baskind acknowledges the knotty complications of her venture: “Raphael Soyer did not want to be known as a Jewish artist…. So why am I … writing a book on Soyer and Jewish art” (1–2)? Despite the urban realist’s persistent denial that his religious and cultural heritage influenced his art, this book makes a compelling case for its primacy. While the artist preferred and promoted the labels “American” and “New York” in association with himself and his art, Baskind digs deeper to show how Soyer’s works were informed by… Full Review

Peter Paul Rubens acted on an international stage of grand proportions. His journeys, together with his massive output and universal interests, reflect a life of exceptional scope. Born in Germany and raised in the Southern Netherlands, Rubens traveled throughout the continent and England as both artist and diplomat. A life so rich in variety and achievement is not easily encompassed in a monograph. A catalogue raisonnée of Rubens’s works has required twenty-seven volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, categorized by series, subjects, and commissions and written by a small army of scholars. Rubens’s life and work have also been… Full Review