Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Britain, contradictions characterized the decade and a half following the Second World War. The country, looking to rebuild itself, kept one eye on tradition and continuity, and even resorted to a nostalgia for the Victorian past. The other eye looked toward a clean start, to the innovative, to the modern. In order to convey this entangled “structure of feeling,” Lynda Nead—explicitly building on the gloss that Raymond Williams gave this phrase—makes the brilliant choice of organizing the book The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain around two visual poles that exemplify this tug between past… Full Review

Over the past few decades the arts and visual cultures of Latin America have become an exciting, rediscovered area of scholarly exploration, collecting, and marketing. The increased scholarly attention is evidenced by new academic and museum positions and events, from the creation of curatorial chairs dedicated to Latin American art to world-traveling exhibitions displaying the works of artists from diverse Latin American nations of the colonial through modern periods. These trends have paralleled a vibrant market of international collectors and auction houses that have focused their attention and catalogues on the arts from Central and South America, Mexico, and the… Full Review

In the collective memory of Mexicans, President Lázaro Cárdenas, who governed the country between 1934 and 1940, is considered an exemplar of nationalism: he is mythically associated with the steadfast defense of national assets such as oil, and with the struggles of peasants and indigenous people. As Verónica Vázquez Mantecón points out in a 2009 article, this mythology reveals Mexicans’ persistent desire for social justice. Having been an active participant in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20 and later governor of the state of Michoacán before becoming president, General Cárdenas has social and political capital that has remained stable and has… Full Review

There are numerous textbooks on Roman art, but certain features ensure that A History of Roman Art stands out. This book is organized chronologically from the Etruscans to the reign of Constantine, and all the chapters (except for chapter 1) begin with a timeline showing major events and a brief historical overview, which helps students to understand the eras’ background. Throughout the book, Steven L. Tuck demonstrates how Roman art developed and discusses its influence. By examining the styles and techniques employed and developed in Roman art, Tuck tries to show how “the changes that occur in the art of… Full Review

The translation of Sebastian Egenhofer’s Towards an Aesthetics of Production makes a work of great synthetic ambition available in English. It is at once a theory of modernism, an intervention into metaphysics, and an account of aesthetics under capital. In fact, the subject of Egenhofer’s book is synthesis itself: the means by which the semblance of a coherent world is produced from “pre-synthetic Becoming” (81) and art’s capacity for unconcealment. The book’s art historical horizon is European modernism and its consequences, with substantial case studies on Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Michael Asher, and Thomas Hirschhorn. Egenhofer’s wager is that only… Full Review

Elizabeth Angelicoussis’s new book is a work of extraordinary worth and of great interest for the field of ancient sculpture and the history of collections. Its focus is one of the most important eighteenth-century British collections, initiated in 1771 by William Petty-Fitzmaurice, the first Marquess of Lansdowne (1737–1805), and inspired by Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798), whose position as a brilliant art dealer and antiquities connoisseur is well-known. Angelicoussis’s detailed and fascinating reconstruction enables us to retrace the labyrinthine sequence of events that led to the creation of the Lansdowne collection, alongside the story of the construction and multiple transformations and adaptations… Full Review

Pocket Museum: Ancient Egypt by Campbell Price is the fourth book of Thames & Hudson’s series Pocket Museum, preceded by volumes devoted respectively to ancient Rome, ancient Greece, and the Vikings. The book brings together nearly two hundred ancient Egyptian artifacts, spanning more than five thousand years (ca. 5300 BCE–395 CE), scattered in museum collections all over the world. The volume attempts to outline and reconstruct the history, system of beliefs, and social practices of ancient Egyptian civilization through the analysis of its material culture. The great potential of this volume lies in its innovative approach, based on the examination… Full Review

Peter Fane-Saunders’s book is an indispensable guide to the reception of Pliny’s Naturalis historia within the architectural theory and practice of Renaissance Italy. As a systematic exploration of antiquarian literature and treatises as well as drawn and built architecture, this volume aims to compensate for a chronic lack of attention to Pliny’s treatise (77–79 CE) by architectural historians, largely due to the dominant position occupied by another ancient authority, Vitruvius’s De architectura. Fane-Saunders gathers a broad corpus of excerpts, reuses, interpretations, and citations from a wide range of textual and visual sources referring to the Naturalis historia: from… Full Review

In this meticulously researched and thoughtfully organized book, Moya Carey tells the story of the collection of art objects from Iran held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. Established in 1857 and known as the South Kensington Museum until 1899, the V&A has a particular institutional character—its founding mission was to improve the quality of industrial production by engaging worldwide visual cultures—that turns this museum into an ideal case study for scrutinizing collecting activities in Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century. The nature of the political relationship between Britain and Iran… Full Review

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name, the catalogue I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100 offers its general and scholarly readership a biographically rich and visually remarkable book. The Columbus Museum of Art approached the established biographer of African American life and culture Wil Haygood with the opportunity to consider the lives of Harlem Renaissance visual artists, politicians, and authors through the organization of the show and his substantial contribution to the publication’s text. Readers also find art historical vignettes written by staff members of the Columbus Museum of Art dispersed throughout the… Full Review