Browse Recent Book Reviews

Charles Colbert sets Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art against the backdrop of industrialization. His book addresses a range of artists and critics who worked between the 1840s and 1910s—a period of time that saw the rise of the transcontinental railroad, the factory system, and the modern city. Colbert asserts that within the explosive consumer culture these developments engendered, visual art threatened to become just another object or commodity. But, it did not; rather, he observes over the course of the long nineteenth century a “growing willingness on the part of many Americans to hold the fine arts in high… Full Review

On a trip to Los Angeles during graduate school, I made my way to the Mondrian hotel on the Sunset Strip to see James Turrell’s Hi Test (1996). On every floor, light emanated from a hole in the wall shaped like a television screen (pre-flat screen). The sources of light were out of sight, televisions hidden, each tuned to a different channel, each producing diverse, ever-modulating tones. As I read Nancy Troy’s book, even before I reached her discussion of the hotel in question, I found myself working hard to recall the details of that visit, which I hadn’t thought… Full Review

While the core argument of Michael W. Cole’s Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure owes something to his brilliant article “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body” (Art History 24, no. 4 [September 2001]: 520–51), his subsequent work on later sixteenth-century Florentine art has facilitated a book of broader significance. The opening lines signal Cole’s critical self-positioning: Historians of Italian Renaissance art like origin stories. When we write or talk about our period, we pause at those moments when art began to employ new or newly recovered visual idioms: perspective, for example, or… Full Review

Hypercities is an unruly book that does not want to behave. With its attendant website, it is neither fish nor fowl, for it is simultaneously a scholarly book, an introduction to a digital mapping platform, an extension of web-based projects that use the platform, and an activist text. Yet, rather than a lack of organization or rigor on the part of the authors, their intent is clearly to present the reader with a mash-up of genres and points of entry that strive for multiple users along a spectrum ranging from coders, to academics just getting their feet wet in… Full Review

Craig Clunas’s Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China is a new landmark in the study of the history of the visual and material culture of China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644), succeeding his five earlier and equally important monographs on the arts and culture of this period, including Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) (click here for review) and Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003) (click here for review). Screen of Kings provides a revisionist view of the role of… Full Review

Jacques Derrida loved the word “observe.” He paid special attention to its root word, “serve” (in French: server), which tied observation to respect, service, and deference. To observe something, he thought, was an act of humility. You gave yourself over to the details, gathering data and storing it in reserve for the future (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 23). Stan Douglas uses lens-based media to facilitate this kind of servitude to details. I mention Derrida not to overemphasize the theoretical… Full Review

Lindsay J. Twa’s Visualizing Haiti in U.S. Culture, 1910–1950 offers the most thorough examination yet written of Haiti’s representation in visual media that circulated in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Twa’s monograph dexterously spans many disciplines to survey cultural production as diverse as Aaron Douglas’s illustration and painting, Katherine Dunham’s choreography and dance, Alexander King’s photojournalism and illustration, Paul Robeson’s acting, Maya Deren’s filmmaking, and William Edouard Scott’s painting (to name only a few of the central subjects here). Indeed Visualizing Haiti blends approaches inspired by work in the field of Postcolonial Cultural Studies… Full Review

Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England consists of papers first delivered at a conference at the University of York in 2008. It is presented as a “companion volume” to Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836, David H. Solkin’s exhibition and edited book (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Courtauld Institute Gallery, 2001), which so memorably reconstructed the Royal Academy’s exhibitions at Somerset House between 1780 and 1836. More generally, the present volume builds on a now substantial… Full Review

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum in New York City, Chris Ofili: Night and Day was the title of the first retrospective of the contemporary British artist’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures to be shown in the United States. The accompanying exhibition catalogue’s visual and textual narratives provide a loosely chronological survey of Ofili’s most celebrated artworks, with each contributor highlighting particular influences and experiences in the artist’s life that have served as catalysts for his creative expression. These include: “Lush Life,” Gioni’s scene-setting introduction and curatorial contextualization; “Inspired by Ovid,” National Gallery of London curator Minna Moore Ede’s… Full Review

Originally conceived in 1960 by French U.S.-based philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil, The Image of the Black in Western Art was “prompted” by what one of the project's patrons, Dominique de Menil, described as “an intolerable situation: segregation as it still existed in spite of having been outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954” (Dominique de Menil, “Acknowledgements and Perspectives,” The Image of the Black in Western Art. Volume 1: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire, Fribourg, Switzerland: Office Du Livre, 1976, ix). Within the volatile social and racial politics of the 1960s and… Full Review