Browse Recent Book Reviews

Medieval reliquaries—metalwork and bejeweled objects housing the relics of saints—often inspire analyses predicated on theories of signs, meaning, and the relationship of text to visual matter. Reliquaries demand such modes of inquiry. They layer their signifying strategies, which range from enamel images to patterned jewel inlay to poetic inscription to crystal windows mediating the display of the enshrined relic. Because they participate in so many sign systems, relics and reliquaries attract interdisciplinary approaches, such as mine (2008) and Robyn Malo’s (2013), which lend the perspective of literary and textual studies to the signifying strategies of reliquaries, relics, and their attendant… Full Review

Suzanne Hudson’s contribution to the One Work series by Afterall (a research center of the University of the Arts London, located at Central Saint Martins) is focused on Night Sea, a painting by Agnes Martin (1912–2004) that Martin completed in 1963. The series is unique in its focus on the critical elaboration, by notable authors in the field, of individual works of art. Suzanne Hudson, associate professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, has also written critical texts on painting, including Painting Now (2015) as well as Robert Ryman: Used Paint (2009). Additionally… Full Review

Between 1935 and 1944 the US Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) commissioned a collection of 170,000 photographs. Ostensibly a public relations project to promote Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s resettlement programs for poor farmers during the Great Depression, they are a record of rural life and economic anxieties that were mediated by an intervention of industrialized public services. Now these images, along with some later additions, are a digitized collection of photographs and metadata that have been archived by the Library of Congress (LoC). This collection is also the primary object of inquiry… Full Review

Late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century art in northern Europe is often noted for its similarities to Classical art, as evidenced most famously in Nicholas of Verdun’s altar at Klosterneuberg, of 1181; the sculpture of Laon and Chartres; and the Ingeborg Psalter, of ca. 1195. The idea of a “Year 1200 Style,” however, as Konrad Hoffman dubbed it in his catalogue for the The Year 1200 exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970, has been considered problematic from the earliest days, with Willibald Sauerländer calling it overly “vague and formalistic” (review of “‘The Year 1200,’ a Centennial Exhibition… Full Review

Depending on the context of its usage, the Spanish term género is definable as either “gender” or “genre.” Katherine Clay Bassard takes up this dichotomy in line with questions of literacy when she opines that “[i]n speaking of gender and genre, then, [she works] from the assumption that form is not merely a matter of free choice or appropriate models but a function of how a writer perceives her/himself in the social order.”1 This conflation suggests that whenever deployed, the context is never not haunted by the subtext as well as by the social location in which the usage… Full Review

Volume 8 in Boydell’s Medievalism series, Peter N. Lindfield’s Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 explores the nuances of and developments in the early Gothic Revival. Lindfield couches his study within the growing appreciation of the Gothic, discussing how leading Gothic Revival architects (Kent, Essex, Wyatt), antiquarians (Carter, Rickman), and Gothic proponents (Gray, Warton, Walpole) crucially impacted the history of design. Working in an interdisciplinary context, he shows how the picturesque, the Gothic novel, antiquarian prints, and topographical studies influenced the arbiters of taste and led to gradual changes in the use of Gothic motifs in furniture… Full Review

The exhibition The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, on view just a few steps from the White House in Washington, DC, was the first major exhibition of Qur’an manuscripts in the United States, and timely in countering the fast-growing anti-Muslim rhetoric even though it was not envisioned with such an aim. Along with its publication, under review here, the exhibition offered a nuanced understanding of the Qur’an’s role in Islamic societies and revealed the artistry involved in its making. Edited by the show’s curators, Massumeh Farhad and Simon Rettig, the book… Full Review

Although much researched, the Justinian church of Hagia Sophia (532–37 and 562) proves to be a still unfathomable well of architectural revelations that bear on the building’s significance as a monument of Byzantine spirituality. This book is a welcome contribution that offers conceptual vistas through which to understand the metaphysical effects of the building’s material and artistic fabric. Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium centers on the claim that during the liturgy in the church all participants—congregation, officiating clergy, and choirs—enjoyed a multisensory, transcendent experience. Both the visual qualities of the material fabric of the church and the… Full Review

Angela Ho’s Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention is a groundbreaking book that explores the phenomena of repetition and invention as they pertain to the work of the most outstanding genre painters active in the Dutch Republic during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. Ho focuses on three of the leading masters during this period: Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris, who collectively helped to raise this art to an extraordinary level of technical refinement imbued with matchless splendor and consummate illusionism. In order to delve more fully into the achievements of these… Full Review

Published to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the US entry into World War I in 1917, David Lubin’s Grand Illusions: American Art and World War I offers its reader much more than the book’s straightforward title suggests. Lubin’s foreign, filmic, postwar touchstone, Jean Renoir’s 1937 film La grande illusion, signals an unconventional history of American art of the period regarding media, chronological scope, and well-worn definitions of “American” art. In fact, the subtitle’s narrow national emphasis quite dramatically belies Lubin’s cross-media and international concerns, encompassing painting and photography in addition to film and popular visual culture. The book’s Anglo-American… Full Review