Browse Recent Book Reviews

The role of modernity in influencing vision has produced such a wealth of insightful scholarship that it can be surprising when a new study contributes substantially to the field. Jason Weems’s Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest provides an engaging and thoughtful analysis of how the elevated vantage point helped to create the modern Midwestern landscape and, in turn, informed the region’s identity. Weems explores how the aerial, synoptic view of the prairie fostered changes in the perception of that landscape through a series of case studies beginning with the piecemeal pioneer settlement of individual farms that… Full Review

Rachel Cohen’s clear, concise, and gracefully written retelling of the life of Bernard Berenson is far more manageable than Ernest Samuels’s long, magisterial biography published in 1979 (Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). It would be unfair to think a much shorter account would cover any part of Berenson’s life in equal depth to Samuels’s study, but a reader might reasonably form that expectation about at least one aspect of it, for Cohen’s book is part of a Yale series of biographies entitled Jewish Lives. Whether these are life stories… Full Review

In his iconic 1964 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Leo Marx surveyed early American literature and painting to uncover a uniquely American understanding of the collective landscape. Elizabeth Milroy—framing her lens on early Philadelphia—has produced an equally authoritative and compelling portrait of how a city’s actual landscape fabric has been fashioned through a process of negotiating and representing a dominant idea about landscape’s place in American culture. It is as if these two works, separated by a half century, were meant to be read together: one laying out a… Full Review

The architecture of shrines has been neglected in Islamic architecture scholarship until recently. Among others, Kishwar Rizvi and John Curry have demonstrated how architectural patronage and the writing of hagiographies are intricate political acts and deserve a common analysis (Kishwar Rizvi, The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: Architecture, Religion and Power in Early Modern Iran, London: I.B. Tauris, 2011; and John J. Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350–1650, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Zeynep Yürekli successfully utilizes and furthers this methodology in Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman… Full Review

Robert DeCaroli’s book bears the title Image Problems. But I read the text as Image Answers, for DeCaroli provides some remarkable insights into the conception and production of images by mining textual sources, both Buddhist and Brahmanical, in enormously impressive ways. For almost as long as the history of South Asian art has been studied, the question of when and where the Buddha image was first created—invented, some even might say—has been central. Given the long history of image worship, if that is the right way of phrasing it, in the West, the assumption has been that this innovation… Full Review

The titles of these two books aptly indicate the ambiguity that has always plagued any attempt to classify the work of Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941). Is he the modernist architect who advocated concrete construction, the machine, and eschewed ornamented surfaces, or is he the artisan architect who upheld the teachings of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and John Ruskin, followed Gothic principles, and produced scores of ornamental designs for furniture, wallpaper, and textiles? Nikolaus Pevsner attempted to synthesize these currents in Voysey’s work by including him in his landmark Pioneers of the Modern Movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). There… Full Review

Patricia Blessing’s Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 seeks to place the monuments within their immediate social and political landscape. Departing from previous approaches to the subject that have stressed continuities with architectural traditions of the prior Seljuk and later Ottoman period, Blessing instead emphasizes the local circumstances in which the monuments were produced. She considers how building forms and decoration were shaped by the particular circumstances of each patron, as well as by the rich and diverse architecture of prior Seljuk Anatolia, Ilkhanid Iran, and the medieval South Caucasus. Fundamentally, Blessing… Full Review

Exhibitions of architecture have recently moved from the margins to the center of architectural history and theory. This shift reflects a greater tendency in scholarship to focus less on individual buildings and more on issues such as the institutional structures that underpin architectural practice, theoretical discourse and its dissemination, as well as architecture’s relationship to its publics and to mass media. These three themes provide the structure for the edited volume Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, which collects fifteen essays grouped in three sections entitled “Discourse,” “Institutions,” and “Circulation.” The volume contains the contributions to a 2013… Full Review

Anyone who cares about the representation of night in the modern era will want to have this beautiful book for the images alone, and anyone who can read French will profit from the strong analysis of nocturnal art and politics. Hélène Valance has written a much-needed history of how image makers reacted to the ways in which the American night was lit, exploited, and commercialized from the turn of the twentieth century until the U.S. entry into World War I—between the “closing” of the frontier and the new American presence on an international stage. The prewar night was a battleground… Full Review

Author’s note: When writing this review last summer, I could not foresee that it would be published just as depictions of anti-black violence in the Whitney Biennial were provoking international debate. These urgent conversations evoke the politics of race, representation, and privilege that animate Susan E. Cahan’s Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power and underscore the value of recovering this underexamined history. This month, July 2016, police officers shot Alton B. Sperling and Philando Castile, both African American, at point-blank range on successive days. Then a sniper used a peaceful #BlackLivesMatter protest in… Full Review