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

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Lynette M. F. Bosch
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. 292 pp.; 112 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0271019689)
For many American art historians, Spain’s fifteenth century is a murky period better known for its religious oppression and explosive colonialism than for its manuscripts. With Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo: The Mendoza and the Iglesia Primada, Lynette M. F. Bosch introduces Anglophone readers to the era through an assiduously detailed study of two-dozen illuminated liturgical manuscripts produced in fifteenth-century Toledo. Until now, these lavishly decorated books, commissioned between 1446 and 1495 by the prominent Toledan prelates Archbishop Alfonso Carillo y Acuña and Cardinal-Archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza, have been only scantily published and were available almost… Full Review
June 18, 2003
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Edgar Wind
Ed Elizabeth Sears New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 400 pp.; 193 b/w ills. Cloth $99.00 (0198174292)
“Unless our reading takes us far away from the pictures, it will not lead us properly back to them.” So Edgar Wind (1900–1971) reflected in an early and abandoned draft of his introduction to Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Wind aptly encapsulated his method, which, it is sometimes forgotten, derived much of its Olympian energy and original character from deep attention to the language of form. “Iconography,” he continued in his draft, “is nothing if not what Focillon regretfully called un détour. The divergences should be pursued, the convergences distrusted… Full Review
June 13, 2003
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Britta Erickson
Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in association with University of Washington Press, 2001. 112 pp.; 54 color ills.; 6 b/w ills. Paper $22.50 (0295981431)
Exhibition Schedule: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, October 21, 2001–May 12, 2002
Xu Bing is arguably the contemporary Chinese artist best known to audiences outside of China. Winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and the subject of several one-person shows at small museums around the country, he has received worldwide recognition and has been the subject of several critical essays. Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing brought together several periods of the artist’s work for the first time in a major American museum exhibition. Like many Chinese artists living and working in a postmodern, global art world, Xu has had to engage with the question of shifting and multiple audiences for… Full Review
June 12, 2003
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Renato González Mello
New York and Hanover, N.H.: W.W. Norton & Company and Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2002. 382 pp.; 320 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (039304176X)
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, March 9–May 19, 2002; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., June 8–December 15, 2002; Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, January 25–April 13, 2003
This book is the product of two interconnected developments. First, contemporary Mexican artists moving in the international art world are enjoying a lot of success, and while Mexican art is now no longer represented solely by the muralists, figures such as Santiago Sierra, Carlos Amorales, Minerva Cuevas, and Gabriel Kuri are reinventing the avant-garde of social intervention. This development has been paralleled in art history in Mexico by the emergence of a socially engaged, contextualizing approach. Some of this new work has been “social art history” based on thorough research of primary sources, but central to it all… Full Review
June 10, 2003
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Vivien Green Fryd
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 278 pp.; 14 color ills.; 127 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (0226266540)
Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe hold an exceptional status as two of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century American art. Notwithstanding the shared distinction of their canonical positions, their art could not be more different. While Hopper produced striking iconic images of the American scene, O’Keeffe’s paintings are associated with the modernist, abstracted aesthetics of the first American avant-garde. In their own day, the artists themselves moved in distinct professional circles that did not overlap. Yet when viewed comparatively, Hopper and O’Keeffe’s images exhibit some surprising thematic commonalities, particularly concerning issues of gender and embodiment, intimacy… Full Review
June 3, 2003
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Bruce Boucher, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 314 pp.; 80 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. $75.00 (0300090803)
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX, November 18, 2001–February 3, 2002; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 14, 2002–July 7, 2002
The exhibition catalogue Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name. Since this reviewer was unable to visit either venue, the following comments, perforce, concentrate on the only permanent record of the show, its catalogue. The catalogue is divided into two distinct parts: six essays with separate authors that treat different aspects of the exhibition’s content, and a series of eighty-five catalogue entries. The latter are not distinguished by author, but rather were the result of a “collaborative effort, reflecting the input of all those listed on the… Full Review
June 3, 2003
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Joseph M. Dye III
Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2001. 599 pp.; 307 color ills.; 175 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0917046609)
To write a book entitled The Arts of India must have been a labor even more daunting than to write a review of one. The Western reader might reflect on what it would be like to address “the Arts of Europe” between two covers. Admittedly this volume catalogues one museum’s collection, which might seem to require finite skills. In fact, that collection includes forms often entrusted to separate curatorial departments: stone sculpture (originally part of a building), bronze sculpture (created and set differently), paintings (originally viewed by readers and connoisseurs of diverse kinds), textiles (in a wide range of techniques,… Full Review
May 30, 2003
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Charles Barber
Princeton University Press, 2002. 208 pp.; 38 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (0691091773)
Charles Barber’s Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm sets out to explore Byzantine iconoclasm as primarily an art historian’s concern. The author writes: “In the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, the ideas in play around the icons and the emphases within these ideas were to change considerably. It is these changes that need to be addressed before iconoclasm can be shown to be either the cause or the effect of the shape of Byzantine political, social, cultural, or theological conditions of this period. This is work for an art… Full Review
May 29, 2003
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Marjorie Susan Venit
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 284 pp.; 10 color ills.; 160 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (0521806593)
Ancient Alexandria, in spite of its fame and importance in the Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, does not come into focus clearly. Even the most rewarding discussions of Alexandria leave us frustratingly aware of the gaps in the historical record (see the recent Getty symposium documented in Kenneth Hamma, ed., Alexandria and Alexandrianism [Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996]). For this reason, Marjorie Susan Venit’s new book on Alexandrian tombs is of great interest. Venit shares her fascination with this compelling city and justifiably credits her subject matter as bearing “eloquent witness to… Full Review
May 29, 2003
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Victor M. Schmidt, ed.
Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2002. 528 pp.; 24 color ills.; 369 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300094612)
In 1939, and in response to the massive Mostra Giottesca of 1938, Roberto Longhi wrote a sour, intentionally provocative piece that he curtly called his Guidizio sul Duecento, or judgment regarding the thirteenth century. In the essay, Longhi fretted that writers on medieval art had become so absorbed in establishing the authorship and origins of images that they had largely forgotten to act as responsible critics. They had thus also begun to forget that the majority of dugento works represented—in Longhi’s unshrinking opinion—tired and often-confused debasements of Byzantine imports. Using terminology that was all too common in Fascist Italy, Longhi… Full Review
May 29, 2003
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