Browse Recent Book Reviews

The interactive website “Object:Photo, The Thomas Walther Collection” (visited March 2016) presents an archive of 241 photographs acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2001. The site is part of a multiplatform rollout, including a catalogue (Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014) and an exhibition (Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949). All three components showcase new research and scholarship on the collection, which was partially supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The “Object:Photo” website features traditional scholarly essays… Full Review

Increasing attention to the systemic violence endured by African Americans is raising fundamental questions about what it is like to inhabit that identity. What does it mean to be African American? How does the experience of the African American subject shape the identity of the nation itself? History, of course, informs both these questions and any attempt at answering them. Given that race is partly a visual construct, how African Americans see and are seen is an essential part of this narrative. Since its inception, photography has influenced “habits of looking” (42). Neither fully a photo history nor fully… Full Review

“By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial five hundred-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio . . . has bumped him from his perch.” Thus wrote Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times in 2010, referring to Philip Sohm’s analysis of “Caravaggiomania” (Michael Kimmelman, “Caravaggio in Ascendance: An Italian Antihero’s Time to Shine,” New York Times [March 10, 2010]). Five years later, Caravaggio remains among the best-known early modern artists, and along with this popular appeal there has come a flood of literature on the artist—so much, in fact, that scholars are… Full Review

Nicholas Eckstein’s Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence extricates this intensely studied monument from preoccupations characteristic of traditional art history: patronage, connoisseurship, style, conservation history, technique, and materials. This is notable because all these topics have prompted an extensive scholarship. Giorgio Vasari oriented the chapel to the future and drew a line from the Brancacci frescoes to those by Michelangelo at the Sistine chapel, marking a new tradition of excellence and modernity in Florentine art. Eckstein’s orientation is to the past, and his goal is to understand the chapel as an expression of the multifaceted identity of the… Full Review

The historical study of clothing has surged during the past two decades as scholarly disciplines including art history began to shift toward the cultural contextualization of objects and, consequently, accept the category of material culture as worthy of attention on its own merits. Simultaneously, the near obsession with fashion and celebrity designers has soared. Museum curators have frequently contributed to these developments by staging exhibitions—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s highly successful Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011) immediately leaps to mind—that both attract nontraditional audiences and reinforce the increasingly elevated status of fashion. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the… Full Review

Fashion, by nature of its universal presence, countless manifestations, ephemerality of material, and inclination toward rapid and constant change, presents a daunting subject of academic research. The study of fashion requires mobility between the fields of history, visual and material culture, and anthropology in their various methodologies and theories. African fashion demands this mobility and more. Coming from the discipline of art history with a specialization in West African textiles, Victoria L. Rovine is a scholar with the rare combination of expertise to give the subject of African fashion its due attention. The book benefits immensely from Rovine’s academic background… Full Review

In The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style, David Young Kim examines how the mobility of artists was understood in early modern Italy. Seeing the era as being one “on the move” and “in motion,” he presents a rich account of this mobility, particularly its meaning in relation to geography and style. Ultimately, his book’s true concern is early modern subjectivity and how mobility could be understood as an “artful, puzzling, and controversial” process, one that could, in certain cases, help construct a successful artistic persona or banish it to the margins of history. Reading… Full Review

In Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks, Katharine Capshaw writes about the ways in which images enlisted African American children in the Civil Rights Movement. Her subject is photographic books—fiction and nonfiction—by black authors from the 1940s to the 1970s. The books consider, at first implicitly and later explicitly, the possibility of political agency in children (xi). In Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Laura Wexler examines the “mammy image.” Capshaw addresses the lacuna that Wexler’s analysis produces in its “visual erasure” of black… Full Review

Aleksandra Lipińska has written an important book on Netherlandish sculpture that addresses many issues that are already of interest to historians of Netherlandish art and culture. Her topic is alabaster carving, a seemingly modest intervention until we realize that alabaster was the primary stone for all’antica sculpture in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. It was also the material that introduced this antique manner in three-dimensional form to the region. In a way, Lipińska’s title, Moving Sculptures: Southern Netherlandish Alabasters from the 16th to 17th Centuries in Central and Northern Europe, resembles that of Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood… Full Review

Cynthia Mills’s Beyond Grief: Sculpture and Wonder in the Gilded Age Cemetery is a highly readable, engaging, and authoritative book on American memorial sculpture in the late nineteenth century. She focuses her attention on four famous monuments: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Adams Memorial (1891), Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC; Daniel Chester French’s The Angel of Death and the Sculptor (1893), Forest Hills Cemetery, Roxbury, Massachusetts; Frank Duveneck’s (with Clement J. Barnhorn) Memorial to Elizabeth Boott Duveneck (1891), Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori (Evangelical Cemetery of the Laurels), Florence, Italy; and William Wetmore Story’s Angel of Grief (1894), Protestant Cemetery, Rome, Italy. However, the… Full Review