Browse Recent Book Reviews

Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the Young Rembrandt considers the early career of one of the Dutch Republic’s most beguiling artists, a painter-printmaker who worked for courts in The Hague, London, and Berlin but also practiced his craft for eight years in Antwerp and participated in Amsterdam’s grandest decorative program in the seventeenth century, the new Town Hall. Part gentleman painter à la Peter Paul Rubens, part hustler on a competitive market for art, Jan Lievens (1607–74) continues to intrigue scholars because of his constantly evolving style. The artist spent his first years as an independent master in Leiden… Full Review

We art historians have gained some familiarity with the independence-era history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from Raoul Peck’s acclaimed film Lumumba (2000) and from several published studies on the life and death of Patrice Lumumba, its first prime minister. A key publication is A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art, a catalogue for the exhibition of the same title presented at the Museum for African Art in New York, April 23–August 15, 1999. Evaluations of Lumumba inevitably incorporate the vicious, CIA-inspired conspiracy that led to Lumumba’s murder, pointing to his executioner… Full Review

The French eighteenth century, an era often derided and dismissed as frivolous and libertine, has been experiencing a revival by scholars in the last three decades, with the prolific artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) occupying a singular position in the period’s rehabilitation. Fragonard has been the subject of at least four major monographic shows in the last three years—including the recent Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures (2017) at the National Gallery of Art and Fragonard Amoureux: Galant et Libertin (2015–16) at the Musée du Luxembourg. While his dazzling paint handling and prominent commissions—one thinks of The Progress of Love at the Frick… Full Review

“Where’s the poet?” Cy Twombly posed this question in a drawing he made in August 1960 while on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples. Yet, as Mary Jacobus tells us in her new book, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, this is not merely the painter’s question but a quotation from an unfinished poem John Keats wrote in 1818. Furthermore, the borrowed Keats line is not alone in Twombly’s drawing. These words are accompanied by more text (the heading “Sonnet” and the phrase “mists of idleness”) as well as a grid of twelve numbered sections (with… Full Review

In Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba, Abigail McEwen, associate professor of Latin American Art at the University of Maryland, offers an original and meticulously researched account of an understudied episode in the history of Latin American modernism: the rise of abstract art in Cuba during the 1950s. The book’s main protagonists are not so much artists or works of art as the complex field of discursive and ideological formations that structured Cuban cultural politics during the tumultuous decade leading up to the 1959 revolution. In the absence of a single figure or group that might naturally… Full Review

Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing is the work of the author duo Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon, whose multiple areas of expertise cross theory and practices of scholarly writing, contemporary drawing, and curatorship. Through this manifold competence, Drawing Difference attends to and appreciates drawing as a material, embodied process and therefore engages, in detail, with how the works discussed were executed and installed. The lens of gender, which has been for over two decades the focus of Meskimmon’s pioneering body of books on “women making art,” is evident throughout. From the first sentence, it is apparent that the… Full Review

Ancient American rock art studies and mainstream art history have long maintained an awkward, often uneasy scholarly relationship. Ancient American rock art typically receives only occasional passing mention in mainstream art-historical publications. In The White Shaman Mural, Carolyn E. Boyd, associate professor of anthropology at Texas State University and founder of the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center in Comstock, Texas, endeavors to narrow this scholarly gap through a highly detailed analysis and interpretation of the White Shaman mural, an ancient polychrome rock art panel situated along the Rio Grande in west Texas. The mural is associated with the… Full Review

Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past is both a fascinating and frustrating compendium of art made since the sixteenth century that either depicts, reflects, or comments upon British colonialism. Written by a team of Tate curators, with contributions by Gus Casely-Hayford, Annie E. Coombes, Paul Gilroy, Nicholas Thomas, and Sean Willcock, this exhibition catalogue seeks to address the legacies of the British Empire: to reconsider how empire was recorded and perceived by those artists actively involved in, or affected by, Britain’s colonial enterprise; to equitably present and reconsider artworks by indigenous or colonized people; to identify and celebrate artistic… Full Review

Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) is either a Victorian eccentric remote from our understanding or a man for our time. Or both. Dedicated to the intersection of imaging, technology, and the cutting-edge science of his day, Muybridge was a flamboyant self-promoter, ambitious immigrant, and reinventor of self. He was also the larger-than-life assassin of his young wife’s lover and the sometime friend of plutocrat and former California governor Leland Stanford, as well as a participant in not one but two extremely important phases of nineteenth-century photographic practice, exploratory landscape photography and stop-action motion study. He was both the man behind… Full Review

Tate Modern’s wide-ranging, twelve-room retrospective The EY Exhibition examined the complex and politically aesthetic body of work produced by the internationally renowned Cuban Surrealist painter and ceramicist Wifredo Lam (1902–82). Lam achieved fame at an early stage in his career, and his artistic legacy positions him as one of the most influential artists of color to have globalized and pluralized the modernist movement. The texts and illustrations in the comprehensive exhibition catalogue are presented in five sections: 1) introductions from the exhibition’s sponsor and institutional partners (the Musée National d’Art Modern (MNAM)/Centre Pompidou, Paris, working in collaboration with… Full Review