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“What is nihonga, where did it come from, and why is it still around?” (12). These questions comprise the final sentence of the introduction to Chelsea Foxwell’s impressive book and serve as our point of departure into the emergence and evolution of nihonga or “modern Japanese painting” in late nineteenth-century Japan. As Foxwell compellingly argues, the emergence of nihonga was not simply the result of Japan’s shedding its feudal past at the precise moment of the Restoration (1868) but rather a process that began in the diverse, hybrid artistic milieu of the late Edo period (1615–1868). By focusing on… Full Review

Dansaekhwa is a style of abstract painting in which Korean artists explore monotones using various materials. There has been little agreement among Korean theorists on the term, which demonstrates the difficulties of defining it. Although Joan Kee transliterates it as Tansaekhwa in her book Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, ever since the 2012 exhibition Dansaekhwa at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea, Dansaekhwa has been widely used. Dansaekhwa emerged in the mid-1970s, continues to influence contemporary Korean artists, and recently has been recognized abroad. Though scholarship and criticism about Dansaekhwa is plentiful in… Full Review

In the last few years, nineteenth-century Japanese souvenir photography from the port city of Yokohama has witnessed increasing public interest after decades of neglect in institutional archives. In the current decade alone, there have been more than five special exhibitions across Europe dedicated to these photographic works. This unexpected emergence of so-called “Yokohama photography” was pioneered by new critical scholarship. Building upon the persistent research efforts on the visual souvenir industry of a small group of historians and photo historians since the 1980s (e.g., Saitō Takio, Terry Bennett, and Sebastian Dobson, to name a few), the scholarship has seen a… Full Review

Tara Zanardi’s Framing Majismo examines the cultural phenomenon of majismo, the eighteenth-century movement that defined Spanish types drawn from the urban lower classes. She emphasizes that majismo was a product of the Enlightenment as well as a xenophobic reaction to foreign influences, and argues that majismo imagery provides a view into the tensions between gender and class, as well as between tradition and modernity, in eighteenth-century Bourbon Spain. Zanardi brings together an impressive collection of sources in her interdisciplinary research, and this book will be of interest to scholars and students of many disciplines beyond art history. Visual representation… Full Review

Seventeenth-century Naples was the largest city in Italy, and the second largest in Europe after London. It was also home to a thriving school of painting, with homegrown artists such as Massimo Stanzione, Bernardo Cavallino, and Luca Giordano, as well as foreigners such as Caravaggio, Jusepe de Ribera, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Yet Neapolitan painting has been overshadowed by that of Bologna, Rome, or other schools of Italian painting. Although there has been no shortage of interest in particular artists or monuments, there exists no broader scholarly framework for understanding the development, production, and patronage of painting in Naples. This gap… Full Review

The topic of ‘Alid shrines in medieval Syria has an established scholarly framework of sectarian arguments. These include, on the one hand, a debate concerning the role of Shi’i doctrine in the proliferation of shrines from the tenth century onward, and on the other, bold statements concerning the culturally transformative impact of the so-called Sunni Revival from the eleventh century. In her introduction to The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi‘is and the Architecture of Coexistence, Stephennie Mulder is very careful not to entirely dismiss any particular arguments within this framework, but refreshingly suggests an alternative… Full Review

To produce the photographs in his Theaters series (1975–2001), Hiroshi Sugimoto brought his still camera into darkened movie palaces and opened the shutter for the full duration of the feature. What appears in the image is something that was never quite there—a glowing rectangle of pure white light caused by the superimposition of every frame of the film during the hours-long exposure. The extended time of capture reveals something else, something that was always there but hidden or resolutely ignored during the screening: the theater itself and its impressive, opulent architecture (231). It was cloaked in an intentional and studied… Full Review

Medieval works of art were made to fit into their specific ecclesiastical or secular contexts. Since the eighteenth century, such objects have been removed from their original intended locations and subsequently destroyed or placed into private or public collections. Detached from original context and use, the perception and presentation of medieval art has brought about an inherent tension: on the one hand this process has led to an understanding of medieval objects as standalone artistic creations, while on the other hand such a process is accompanied by a growing discomfort among curators with attempts to recontextualize objects back into their… Full Review

Research on the relation between theater and art in the late Middle Ages relies on a rich history, first highlighted in the work of Emile Mâle and Gustave Cohen at the beginning of the twentieth century. The two prominent scholars started a long tradition of looking at exchanges between art and theater, as well as at the perceived “realism” of these media. In her latest book, Laura Weigert proposes a different understanding of theater and art that concentrates on the realms of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French kings and Burgundian dukes. Weigert disrupts accepted thinking that separates these media and… Full Review

The Hudson River School painter Asher B. Durand makes a bold declaration at the end of Susan Rather’s The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era. Admiring European pictures during a tour abroad, Durand nonetheless hungers for “a sight of the signboards in the streets of New York” (242). He would have relished the stunning cover of Rather’s book, which reproduces five jaunty top hats from a nineteenth-century hatters’ signboard. This detail is an apt metaphor for The American School, which follows the careers of five painters (and a cast… Full Review