Browse Recent Book Reviews

Chika Okeke-Agulu’s thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria significantly advances an understanding of modern African art. He considers a key time period in Nigerian art history, from the late 1950s eve of independence (Nigeria gained its independence in 1960) to roughly 1968 at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). The term “postcolonial modernism,” Okeke-Agulu rightly insists, means that the artistic developments of this time cannot be disentangled from prevailing nationalist ideologies. He sees postcolonial modernism as an “international phenomenon,” and throughout the book highlights the connections of Nigerian ideas and… Full Review

In 1960, Dominique and John de Menil instituted a project to study images of persons of African descent in Western art. As Adrienne Childs and Susan Libby note in the introduction to their edited volume, Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, that project, which began as a photographic archive, was initiated in response to segregation and racial discrimination in the United States. The Menil’s undertaking eventually culminated in a series of five books, republished by Harvard University Press, along with three new volumes, the last appearing in 2014 (click here for review)… Full Review

In Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art, Mechtild Widrich examines the relationship of embodiment, memory making, and especially documentation to the meaning of monumental, performative, and audience-oriented art in post-World War II Europe. Ranging from former Yugoslavia to Austria and a split Germany during the Cold War, Widrich expertly discusses artists from each region, including VALIE EXPORT in Vienna, Marina Abramović in the former Yugoslavia, and Joseph Beuys in Germany. Widrich’s art-historical exegesis of these artists’ works and the history of their reception leads to a sophisticated and deft unfolding of historical events alongside analyses of documents, photographs… Full Review

Time and again it is declared that photojournalism is in crisis—that neither its truth claims nor its purported humanitarianism carry much currency in today’s hyper-mediatized, post-indexical world. Critics commonly hold that our era’s wholesale mistrust in photography’s veracity and its ability to straightforwardly incite “empathy and compassion” has rendered photojournalism “fatally compromised or exhausted” (2). Indeed, in a climate where claims such as, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” (Karl Rove), become prescriptive, and what passes for news is driven by political and market forces, conventional photojournalistic images have little purchase in terms… Full Review

Maarten Delbeke’s The Art of Religion examines the relationship between the art theory of seventeenth-century Rome, particularly as it might apply to the work of Gianlorenzo Bernini and the writings of the Jesuit Sforza Pallavicino (1607–1667), confidant of popes Urban VIII, Innocent X, and especially Alexander VII, who made him cardinal in 1659. Pallavicino’s direct involvement with art and architecture was limited, and his writings refer only occasionally to the visual arts or artists (including Bernini), but Delbeke makes a compelling case for the relevance of Pallavicino’s work and more generally for a broader conception of art theory that acknowledges… Full Review

David Cateforis’s Rethinking Andrew Wyeth—an anthology of new and republished essays by well-known scholars of American and modern art—will prove invaluable to anyone studying the work or life of this controversial artist. Sturdily constructed and beautifully presented by the University of California Press, its 107 high-quality images (91 in color, 16 in black and white) illustrate nine individual texts, which are prefaced by an editor’s introduction and followed by a compilation of survey data from two major exhibitions of Wyeth’s works (one from 1973, the other from 2006). Two of these nine essays have previously appeared elsewhere and… Full Review

Meredith Gill’s Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy sets ambitious goals. She states that “in studying angels we are . . . always studying the big questions, whether these may be about the nature of existence; about humankind’s relation to the supernal; about the identity of language, or the definitions of ‘place,’ ‘hierarchy,’ ‘metaphor,’ or ‘love.’ Studying angels . . . makes available to us the imaginations of artists as they grapple with the marvelous problem of representing the invisible” (14). As Gill explains in her introduction, in their theological essence angels were incorporeal and… Full Review

Basquiat and the Bayou is a catalogue accompanying the exhibition of ten works by Jean-Michel Basquiat held at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Its contributors attempt to expand an understanding of Basquiat’s art by locating it within an African diasporic identity via interpretations of a selection of his Southern-themed works. Curator Franklin Sirmans’s essay, also titled “Basquiat and the Bayou,” is essentially an exhibition review. It describes works that reference the Mississippi River, religion, jazz, and zydeco, implying a thematic relationship among them that he does not fully detail. Sirmans visualizes Basquiat “meditating on the… Full Review

The ten essays in this edited collection focus on the role of photography in the implementation of colonial policy in early twentieth-century Indonesia and the responses of the local Indies people whose lives were affected and shaped by this policy. Susie Protschky, the book’s editor, explains that in the very early years of the twentieth century, local resistance to Dutch rule had become so resounding that the government was forced to moderate its policies. The new suite of liberal developmentalist reforms introduced in 1904 was known collectively as the “Ethical Policy.” Photography is the frame through which this policy is… Full Review

Embodiments: Masterworks of African Figurative Sculpture is an ambitious exhibition project accompanied by an equally substantial catalogue. Highlighting 120 selections that constitute almost half of the private collection of Dr. Richard H. Scheller, the exhibition is composed of an eloquent mixture of “classical” or “canonical” works, to use the catalogue’s terminology, punctuated with a jaw-dropping array of rare and unusual sculptural forms that “challenge commonly held assumptions about African art,” to quote the exhibition’s online description, and underscore the sheer diversity of sculptural traditions that exist across the broad swathe of West and Central Africa. Yet the objects in this… Full Review