Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Vernon James Knight Jr.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 214 pp.; 45 b/w ills. Cloth $110.00 (9781107022638)
Ancient images produced in contexts from which no written records survive present a formidable challenge to iconographers. Vernon James Knight Jr. argues that studies of such imagery are particularly vulnerable to specious claims based on intuition and superficial analysis, a problem he addresses in Iconographic Method in New World Prehistory. In response to what he describes as a lack of methodological rigor in “a field of study that is still in search of academic respectability” (xiv), Knight proposes a method for iconographic analysis consisting of seven ordered and discrete phases that is a synthesis of what he deems to… Full Review
April 13, 2017
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Barbara Miller Lane
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 320 pp.; 224 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780691167619)
James A. Jacobs
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. 272 pp. Cloth $45.00 (9780813937618)
My dad remembers being lifted up by my grandfather into the bay window of a large, white bi-level ranch house in the suburbs of New Jersey. It was the spring of 1968, and this house was one of three standing in the new development surrounded by farmland, only a twenty-minute drive outside of Newark. His slim, nine-year old body fit through the window, and he walked down into the foyer to unlock the front door from inside. My grandfather entered to inspect the house he had purchased that fall for only $25,000. His father was with him—three generations of urban… Full Review
April 12, 2017
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Vered Maimon
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 269 pp.; 43 b/w ills. Paper $30.00 (9780816694723)
In Singular Images, Failed Copies, Vered Maimon investigates William Henry Fox Talbot and his connection with early photography. After H. J. P. Arnold’s, Gail Buckland’s, and Larry Schaaf’s monographic works and studies on Talbot—first published in the 1970s and making essential original sources accessible—a renewed interest in Talbot and early photography has occurred. On the one hand, this could be linked to Schaaf’s online research project on Talbot’s correspondence (http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk) or more recently his work on a catalogue raisonné. Also, there are newly acquired Talbot records such as photographs, notebooks, and ephemera purchased in 2006 by the British Library… Full Review
April 6, 2017
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Marian Wardle and Sarah E. Boehme, eds.
Exh. cat. Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West, Vol. 23. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. 240 pp.; 128 color ills.; 27 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780806152912)
Exhibition schedule: Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, February 19–August 13, 2016; Stark Museum of Art, Orange, TX, March 11–September 09, 2017
Branding the American West: Paintings and Films, 1900–1950 is a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue containing seven essays by art historians, literary scholars, and poets, as well as an introduction by the exhibition’s co-curators. With its wide range of stimulating perspectives and insights, the catalogue offers a substantive conversation among the authors who consider the works and the legends of the Taos Society of Artists (TSA). The group’s paintings, and those of Maynard Dixon, are the focus of the book. The spirit of scholarly collaboration and cross-pollination is perhaps its greatest strength. The relationship between the museums began, according… Full Review
April 5, 2017
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Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Corpus of Illuminated Manuscripts 21. Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 2014. 77 pp.; 39 color ills. Cloth $32.00 (9789042930353)
For many years, Jeffrey Hamburger has been interested in the artwork of the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and with Script as Image he has published a deeply engaging book, or rather a lengthy essay, on the “double page” in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. In it Hamburger approaches illuminated manuscripts from the apparent “classical” theme of the relationship between text and image. In certain ways, one could say that Hamburger’s Script as Image continues a line of thought developed several decades ago by Meyer Schapiro on the same subject, but here seen from all artistic media, including… Full Review
March 31, 2017
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Stephanie Porras
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. 216 pp.; 34 color ills.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $79.95 (9780271070896)
Stephanie Porras has written a smart, important book on Pieter Bruegel the Elder. She offers a carefully considered take on his notion of the Netherlandish past as it manifests in the peasants who cavort and carouse their way through his oeuvre. While this is familiar terrain, Porras’s study redirects focus from the once-heated debate about Bruegel’s peasants as either moralizing signifiers of excess or amusements for urbane viewers. Instead, by citing Netherlandish humanism’s interest in reconciling classical antiquity with the local Batavian past, Porras builds on Bruegel’s unassailable status as the most gifted interpreter of Hieronymus Bosch’s pictorial idiom to… Full Review
March 30, 2017
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Pamela McClusky and Erika Dalya Massaquoi
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. 104 pp.; 80 color ills. Cloth $40.00 (9780300208740)
Exhibition schedule: Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, June 18–September 7, 2015; Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, October 18, 2015–March 13, 2016; Brooklyn Museum, New York, April 29–September 18, 2016
How do African cultural traditions circulate and influence global contemporary art? Many artists and scholars have argued for the importance of African art (or what they have understood as African art, regardless of authenticity or provenance) in the development of European and American modernism, typically without much consideration for African artists themselves. Pamela McClusky and Erika Dalya Massaquoi, curators of Disguise: Masks and Global African Art and authors of the catalogue of the same title, argue that the artists of “global Africa” have begun to address this issue, changing how we understand African art. McClusky writes that “global African art”… Full Review
March 30, 2017
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Hannelore Magnus and Katlijne Van der Stighelen, eds.
Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. 228 pp.; 75 b/w ills. Cloth $123.00 (9782503554860)
The history of emotions, their cultural expression, and their representation in the arts of early modern Europe are currently a subject of much interest. In recent years, exhibitions and collaborative research projects from the Netherlands to Australia have been devoted to this theme. The fourteen essays gathered in Facts and Feelings: Retracing Emotions of Artists, 1600–1800, edited by Hannelore Magnus and Katlijne Van der Stighelen, are the product of a symposium held at the University of Leuven in December 2012. The goal of the book is not to gauge the expression of emotion in art, but instead to plumb… Full Review
March 29, 2017
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Gary Monroe
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. 192 pp.; Many color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780813049694)
Mary Ann Carroll: First Lady of the Highwaymen is the fourth Highwaymen book by Gary Monroe, Daytona State College professor of fine arts and photography. Virginia Lynn Moylan’s unexpectedly moving foreword outlines the context of Monroe’s study: the omission of black visual artists and black female artists from discussions of “cultural expression” in the United States. In 1995, Jim Fitch, then-director of the Museum of Florida Art and Culture, wrote “‘The Highwaymen’ is a name I’ve given to a group of black artists working on the East coast of Florida from approximately 1955 to the present. So called because their… Full Review
March 22, 2017
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Ara Osterweil
Rethinking Art's Histories. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014. 304 pp.; 45 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (9780719091919)
Ara Osterweil argues in Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film that the medium operates on the spectator’s sensorium in a uniquely direct and intense way. Films can emphasize this link by depicting bodies in extreme circumstances; for instance, bodies immobilized by drugs, dead and being autopsied, or epileptic and seizing are just some of the precarious versions of corporeality that experimental filmmakers documented in the 1960s and 1970s. But within the array of films considered in Osterweil’s book, representations of the body engaged in sexual activity are the most central. Postwar avant-garde film, like the hard-core pornography… Full Review
March 17, 2017
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