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Mitchell Merback’s latest book, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, precisely does not reveal what the enigma of the master engraving is “about.” Rather, it reveals mystery itself as a sixteenth-century therapeutic practice. In so doing, the book provides insight into the endurance and pervasiveness of a lingering stereotype: that transformative wisdom lies concealed in old books, old paintings, and old diagrams from old Europe. This stereotype brings with it rich fantasies about coded riddles that mask transhistorical conspiracies. As Merback is aware, for he uses a fitting epigraph from Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol to kick… Full Review

The cover of the coffee table book Albino shows a Tanzanian girl with albinism photographed mid-twirl, the blue, white, and yellow stripes of her skirt spun out into a full bell around her. The picture, by Spanish photojournalist Ana Palacios, is called Kelen’s Dance, and Kelen spins in the center of a grayish-brown interior, a phalanx of concrete walls receding behind her, green sandals a blur of movement on a lumpy dirt floor, the ceiling a sturdy brown grid. Her face is turned, slightly smiling, her whole body caught in the joy of movement. Upon opening the book, readers… Full Review

One cannot complain that Jackson Pollock is an understudied visual artist of mid-twentieth-century American abstraction. Some of the leading art historians working in the modern and contemporary period have scrutinized and contextualized and theorized this artist’s practice, including Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, T. J. Clark, and Michael Leja, to name but a few. One might have felt hard pressed to imagine a need for more scholarly attention, especially when not occasioned by the introduction of substantial new source documents or a focus on lesser-known works in the oeuvre (1). This puts Pollock’s Modernism, Michael Schreyach’s recent monograph on the… Full Review

The first illustration included in Tirza True Latimer’s most recent book is the oft-reproduced cover to the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art formulated by Alfred H. Barr Jr. Latimer makes the point that the manner in which Barr’s timeline has been taken up since its inception has decontexualized it and forced the diagram into a realm of certainty its supposed simplicity could not sustain. Eschewing the linear altogether and drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s writing on queer theory and time, Latimer focuses on what she describes as the “elliptical.” To quote the author in laying out her intentions for the… Full Review

John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night, curated by Diana Nawi, then associate curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and assisted by the Jamaican independent curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson, introduced to US audiences the significant and expansive oeuvre of John Dunkley, a seminal figure in Jamaican art history. A self-taught artist, Dunkley worked in Central America and Cuba, returning to establish himself as a barber in downtown Kingston in the 1930s and 1940s while producing a remarkable body of work. This landmark exhibition was the most comprehensive presentation of his painting and sculpture outside of Jamaica and in museum space… Full Review

Phoebe Wolfskill’s Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention: The Old Negro in New Negro Art offers a compelling account of the artistic difficulties inherent in the task of creating innovative models of racialized representation within a culture saturated with racist stereotypes. She approaches this topic through the work of one of the New Negro era’s most celebrated yet highly elusive artists, Archibald Motley Jr. As a Creole Catholic whose family moved from New Orleans to Chicago prior to the Great Migration, Motley’s personal history registers ever so subtle differences from the more dominant narratives of African American history in the… Full Review

Since its acquisition by the Freer Gallery of Art in 2009, the tea leaf storage jar known as “Chigusa” (Thousand Grasses) has generated much discussion and scholarship, including two exhibitions (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2014, and Princeton University Art Museum, 2014­­–15), a symposium, two workshops, and two books. The present volume results from the symposium and workshops. While the earlier book, Chigusa and the Art of Tea (2014), also edited by Louise Allison Cort and Andrew M. Watsky, is made up of short essays that focus primarily on the object itself, Around Chigusa takes a different approach. The essays create… Full Review

Presented in Paris in 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson’s fabricated duck, one of the most renowned examples of an automaton, could not only flap its wings and move its beak but also eat and excrete. Later discovered to have been pre-stuffed with fake waste, it indulged the Enlightenment desire for engineered imitations that modeled the inner workings of living forms. Voltaire declared that the shitting bird was the only reminder of the glory of France. The history of automata in the early modern period often accentuates the writings of René Descartes and sets forth how anatomists, theologians, and social theorists sought… Full Review

Italy, a relatively recently unified country, is often described as a patchwork of idiosyncratic regions. Even to this day, the food, customs, dialects, architecture, and terrain shift dramatically between neighboring villages, cities, and regions, Italians themselves proclaiming “campanilismo,” a competitive pride in their birthplace. By focusing on one particular region, Linda Safran gains a valuable insight into how one such distinctive identity emerged and developed in the Middle Ages. Some background to the region is essential for fully appreciating Safran’s study. The area known as Salento forms part of the present-day administrative region of Apulia: essentially the heel of the… Full Review

Ezra Shales’s The Shape of Craft derives its name as a pointed homage to George Kubler’s influential treatise, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962). Though he was an eminent Mesoamericanist, Kubler’s book had unusual reach and scope and was widely admired by modernists and practicing artists alike, including his former students at Yale, Sheila Hicks and Richard Serra. Clearly the work of an adroit and poetic storyteller, Shales’s book seeks to extend the lineage and framework for Kubler’s rejection of the art historical masterwork, thereby reordering the cultural hierarchy in favor of humanity’s humble origins… Full Review