Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture, Carolyn E. Tate eschews the well-trodden path of the iconography of rulership to reveal the central role of the unborn, women, gestation, birth, and regeneration in the art and ideation of the Formative-period peoples of Mesoamerica. Based on this imagery, specifically its fidelity to embryo and fetus representations, she argues that empirical observation played a prominent role in Formative-period epistemologies of gender and creation. While regeneration and renewal have long been recognized, other major themes in Mesoamerican art such as women, children, and related issues have often been overlooked or minimized. Tate addresses these… Full Review

Frances Gage’s Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art investigates the medical rationales for collecting art that are scattered throughout a well-known treatise by Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), Pope Urban VIII’s physician. Mancini’s medical thought was retardataire in the era of the Lincei, but his artistic connoisseurship was innovative. Thanks to Gage’s book, Mancini can now be appreciated for adding painters to Sandra Cavallo’s categories of “artisans of the body.” Following an introduction, biographical notes, and a chapter indicating the confluence of medicine and art in seicento Rome’s visual culture, three chapters… Full Review

Meant to serve as a pedagogical tool to “stimulate comparative contemplation about broad and basic issues in the history of art” (1), A Companion to Chinese Art, edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, is a collection of twenty-five essays by some of the leading scholars of Chinese art history, history, and literature. It adopts a thematic structure, devoting five essays to each of five general topics commonly taught within art-historical surveys—production and distribution, representation and reality, theories and terms, objects and persons, and word and image. The volume brings a much-needed interdisciplinary update to older scholarship… Full Review

The eight essays in Early Medieval Stone Monuments: Materiality, Biography, Landscape, along with a substantial introduction by editors Howard Williams, Joanne Kirton, and Meggen Gondek, offer original insights on the objectness of early medieval sculpture: they describe physical encounters with monuments, mnemonic qualities of stone, and multiple reuses of artworks, medieval and post-medieval. A main strength of the volume is its thematic, rather than geographic or chronological, orientation. Three chapters concern sculpture in Scotland, one England, two Scandinavia, and two Ireland, and the introduction foregrounds two Welsh examples. This allows for comparison of commemorative strategies and social memory practices… Full Review

I never met Adrian Howells. I never let him wash my feet, hold me, or invite me to launder my clothes with him. Touching, and being touched, by a stranger within the context of a performance has evoked both empathy and apprehension in me, and often raises the question of who is meant to benefit from such an awkward, constructed form of engagement. When confronted with a one-to-one performance, the fear of harm, physical or emotional discomfort, and embarrassment wrestles with my curiosity, potential for titillation, and general interest in the complexities of human interactions. In intimate performances… Full Review

Kobena Mercer’s Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s gathers eighteen essays written in the span of twenty years, from 1992 to 2012, which offer an extraordinarily rich journey into the intellectual process of one of the most significant critics to emerge from the British cultural studies tradition in the 1980s. This is a journey of discovery and exploration of the work of artists of the black diaspora working under the sign of the “postcolonial modern,” as indexed by the collection’s very title, i.e., Travel and See, which is an inscription Mercer found on a sea… Full Review

Sabine Kriebel’s book Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield is a study characterized by its exceptional rigor and intellectual intensity. Although written in a meticulously sculpted language, precise and full of imagery, this work does not claim to be a definitive, closed, or unequivocal object. Focusing on the monteur John Heartfield, a major artist who curiously has received little scholarly attention until now, Revolutionary Beauty does not belong to the monographic genre, nor is it yet another formalist study. Rather, it explores a medium—photomontage—laden with a substantial critical and interpretive past. Even though the volume focuses on the… Full Review

“Look at the Christs of Gauguin,” Émile Bernard once complained in an 1891 letter to Émile Schuffenecker, “they are human, they are of this world. Christ absolutely did not cry silly tears on beautiful, veiny hands. All that is Gauguin, which is to say self-worship, pure secularism, Renan.” For Bernard, an artist who had already returned to a devout Catholicism, a humanized image of Christ derived from the liberal theology of the day—Ernest Renan’s unmiraculous Vie de Jésus (1863) looms large—lacked both religious and artistic weight. And the one problem folded into the other. Paul Gauguin’s modernism was as much… Full Review

The political efficacy of architecture and urban planning is brought to the fore in Timothy Hyde’s cogent analysis of architecture and constitutionalism in Republican-era Cuba (1933–59). Focused primarily on Havana, Hyde brilliantly accounts for the relationship between legal discourse and architectural production. Divided into three parts, the book claims a tripartite of trajectories: the textual, the graphic, and the physical. The first part of the book explores the creation of the 1940 Constitution of Cuba, a key political document in the founding of the modern Cuban state. Cuba’s 1933 revolution led to the immediate dissolution of the 1901 Platt Amendment… Full Review

Mexican plazas are the “public living rooms” of urban centers large and small, and they have been shaped by social intercourse for over four thousand years, sometimes rhythmically and slowly, sometimes violently and suddenly. These communal spaces still resonate with Pre-Columbian symbolism, as Logan Wagner, Hal Box, and Susan Kline Morehead demonstrate in Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza: From Primordial Sea to Public Space. Whereas the pioneering studies of colonial Spanish architecture in the past century brought attention to architectural forms, Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza instead attends to the open volumes shaped by architecture, arguing that… Full Review