Browse Recent Book Reviews

Scholarly interest in the enigmatically alluring art of Sargent, galvanized by the 1998–9 retrospective and numerous exhibitions since, is still thriving. In the most recent monograph on the artist, John Singer Sargent and the Art of Allusion, Bruce Redford contends that “no portrait painter in the Anglo-American tradition is more consistently and inventively allusive than Sargent” (15). Redford suggests that Sargent’s sustained childhood exposure to the old masters, his desires to create an elite portrait practice and to craft his own artistic genealogy, and reticence about his sexuality inclined the painter to the adoption of a complex pictorial code… Full Review

Historians of eighteenth-century art, architecture, science, and engineering will undoubtedly have typed out the name “Jombert” many times in their footnotes, for this family was the publisher of nearly a thousand titles between the late 1680s and early 1810s. In a remarkable gift not only to the history of the book, but also to the story of how a pan-European public sphere was formed in which artistic and architectural information was debated, Greta Kaucher has produced a comprehensive study of the Jombert publishing dynasty. Her expansive text is comprised of a rich biography of the family that outlines their professional… Full Review

The first English-language book on this mid-nineteenth-century French painter, The Deaths of Henri Regnault will become an important reference with its many leads for art historians to pursue. Its first four chapters examine Regnault’s decade-long career, which took off when he won the Prix de Rome in 1866 and ended with his death in 1871; the final three examine his posthumous reputation until World War I, when it precipitously declined. Marc Gotlieb’s attempt to revive Regnault’s critical fortunes is laudable but hampered by a tendency to accept and extend Third Republic propaganda that lionized the artist. Regnault’s untimely death coincided… Full Review

It is hard to imagine that a painter as provocative and awe-inspiring as Rembrandt created his oeuvre without having a theory of art. His works are outspoken, offering robust statements (as Hubert Damisch and Mieke Bal would say) about the nature and status of pictorial representation. To have such pictorial statements further articulated and contextualized would have made a great book. However, in Rembrandt: The Painter Thinking, Ernst van de Wetering approaches with great caution the idea that Rembrandt possessed a theory of art, revealing from the outset an ambivalent view of art theory as such. In his preface… Full Review

The illuminating exhibition Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Cycle of Life recently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), explored the deep connections between what seems at first glance to be the work of two starkly different artists. Both the exhibition and meticulously researched catalogue essay examine the common threads that bind Munch, the Norwegian Symbolist known for his dramatic, intensely personal depictions of the fleeting pleasures and enduring anxieties associated with life, death, and sexuality; and Johns, the post-1945 American artist known for rejecting precisely the notion of art as personal expression… Full Review

Women, Geography, Borders in the Age of (Anti)Globalization— The constituency of women is the primary subject of two books co-edited by art historian Marsha Meskimmon; and as represented in the above-listed volumes, the 2013 title was coedited with Dorothy C. Rowe while the 2016 compendium was with first editor Marion Arnold. The two collections of essays contribute to the resurgence of the name of woman in the aftermath of the disavowal of the term following the 1990s gender deconstructions that challenged the heteronormative signifier. As articulated by Arnold and Meskimmon, the name of woman “does not presuppose a singular… Full Review

In his introduction to Renaissance Art in Venice: From Tradition to Individualism, Tom Nichols takes careful aim at some overused concepts in the discussion of Venetian art, namely the characterization of it as distinguished by colore as opposed to disegno, and qualities of venezianità and mediocritas. He cautions his readers that these narratives do “little to explain the more dynamic dimensions of art and architecture in this period, and fail to account for the radical changes in their appearance” (8). This is a judicious beginning. Without rejecting past insights, Nichols offers a history of Venetian art that… Full Review

With breaking news coming out of the White House daily, if given the chance, what would you “wish to say” to President Trump? What might you ask him? What would be your most pressing issue to discuss? Would you be able to fit it on a postcard? Sheryl Oring has been asking the public these and related questions for over a decade in her project, “I Wish to Say.” Donning 1960s-era dress suits, she travels across the country with her portable public office, a vintage manual typewriter in tow, and an ear to lend. What amassed is a diverse archive… Full Review

This excellent book by the feminist scholar, critic, and curator Jenni Sorkin exemplifies the value of incorporating craft and other forms of applied art more fully into the history of the avant-garde. Sorkin reveals the important role played by women ceramic artists of the 1950s and 1960s in shaping collective and performative experiences of art. Women ceramicists built alternative communities of practitioners while exploring issues of form and process, and Sorkin argues that their work anticipated avant-garde collectives and participatory art forms of the late twentieth century. Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community participates in a growing effort to… Full Review

A legendary artist with an extraordinary life story and a larger-than-life persona, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is a difficult subject for study, which leaves little room for diverse interpretation. Her account of mental illness and the fact that she has been living in a psychiatric hospital since the mid-1970s—upon returning to Tokyo after struggling in New York for recognition and success in the 1960s—have shaped not only public perception but also scholarly analysis of her artwork. When she reappeared on the international art scene in the early 1990s after two decades of relative obscurity, scholarship and criticism of her practice… Full Review