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Zhou Mi’s Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes: An Annotated Translation offers a stimulating and well-documented discussion of art collecting in late-thirteenth-century China. Revised from her dissertation, completed in 1994 at the University of Kansas, Ankeney Weitz’s book is centered on her copiously footnoted translation of Yunyan guoyan lu, an important catalogue by Zhou Mi (1232–1298).[1] The title of Zhou’s work, translated as Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes, is Zhou’s ironic twist on a well-known comment by the poet Su Shi (1037–1101), who compared painting and calligraphy to evanescent clouds… Full Review

In November of 2003, the Society for Visual Anthropology awarded Corinne Kratz its first Collier Prize for work that exemplifies the use of still photography for research and communication of anthropological knowledge. Presented at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Chicago, this award makes clear that her work in visual anthropology is of great significance. Kratz’s commitment to the field also led her to study the process of exhibiting photographs. This book reports the results of that introspection and scholarship. Kratz’s ethnographic fieldwork among the Okiek people of Kenya extends from 1974 to the present. She has taken thousands of… Full Review

This book was written in part to document the collection of gold objects from Africa, Asia, and America donated in 1997 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, by Alfred C. Glassell, Jr., a collector and philanthropist from Houston. The book also serves as the catalogue for the touring exhibition of the Akan part of the collection. Numbering more than nine hundred objects, it is the largest collection of Akan chiefly regalia in the world. The principal author of the book, Doran Ross, has studied and worked among the Ghanaian Akan for the past thirty years. Widely published on the… Full Review

The recent publication of two surveys of Sienese painting is another indication of a noticeable boom in this field. Such historians as William Bowsky, Samuel Cohn, and Daniel Waley have fueled this resurgence, and their investigations of the political, religious, and social institutions of the Commune of Siena identified a unique and influential culture with well-preserved archival records. Building upon their work, art historians have added the study of historical and documentary context to the traditional analysis of style that in the late nineteenth century first articulated a separate “Sienese School.” Hayden Maginnis’s historiographical study, Painting in the Age of… Full Review

Kathleen Kamerick’s study of late medieval art and piety in England is partly a history of strong reactions to images. The book begins with the 1429 heresy trial of a Lollard, an adherent of a heretical reform movement led by John Wyclif and others. The accused, Margery Baxter, had suggested to a friend that the images in the local church were not only the base material creations of “lewd” craftsmen but were also idols inhabited by demons (13–14). This Lollard contempt for religious images was often accompanied by acts of destruction. In the 1380s, for example, two men in need… Full Review

Vincent Scully, Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University, is probably the best-known architectural historian in the United States. During a teaching career that stretched from 1947 to 1991, Scully established a reputation as one of Yale’s most inspiring lecturers. How many other architectural historians have been profiled in the New Yorker, had their retirement covered on the front page of the New York Times, or lectured at the White House? A new collection of twenty Scully essays spanning from 1954 to 1998, edited by Harvard professor and former Scully student Neil Levine, allows us to reconsider this acclaimed… Full Review

See "Amy Golahny's review":http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/643 of this catalogue. Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher is the outcome of Clifford Ackley’s own Rembrandt odyssey. His long and intensive study of the artist’s work has resulted in three landmark exhibitions and catalogues, and through these publications the course of Rembrandt print scholarship can be charted over nearly thirty-five years. (Although this exhibition and catalogue include the artist’s work in a variety of media, etchings far outnumber paintings and drawings.) Ackley’s earliest Rembrandt endeavor, Rembrandt: Experimental Etcher (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1969), written jointly with Felice Stampfle, Eleanor Sayre, and Sue Reed,… Full Review

Cultural theory fiddles while the world burns. It is this perversion that Terry Eagleton hopes to remedy with his newest jeremiad, After Theory. Here is the problem, which September 11 and the resulting War on Terror made crystal clear: cultural theorists—and by this label he lumps together all those wrong-minded poststructuralists, neopragmatists, and postmodernists, from Jacques Derrida to Stanley Fish to Fredric Jameson—strip majorities of the norms and stable identities that are necessary to oppose real power. And by power he means the coarse kind that decides who eats and who goes hungry. “Only an intellectual who has overdosed… Full Review

More than a century has elapsed since the inauguration of Classical Javanese archaeological studies by the perspicacious and prolific scholars working under the auspices of the Dutch East Indies Archaeological Service. Despite this fact scholarly explorations of the religious edifices of the Eastern Javanese Period (ca. 970 to 1500) still continue to be overshadowed by the extraordinary artistic legacy of the preceding Central Javanese era (ca. 750 to 930), particularly by the remarkable monuments that have become synonymous with this epoch: Candi Borobudur and the Loro Jonggrang Temple Complex. This earlier phase was perhaps more appealing, with forms echoing those… Full Review

The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China is a well-illustrated and handsomely produced volume that presents itself as a survey of the development and transformation of the Chinese calligraphic tradition in the modern era (defined here as the roughly fifty-year period from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the century). Despite its grand ambitions, however, the book turns out, upon closer inspection, to be something far more limited: namely, a catalogue published to accompany an exhibition entitled Brushes with Surprise: The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, held at the British Museum in… Full Review