Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910, Paul B. Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield have collected twelve essays that explore the variations and limits of the stylistic-cultural term “neoclassicism” and how the social-aesthetic concept of good taste intertwined with and inflected upon it. To a certain extent, this book treads a lengthy investigative path walked by earlier generations of art historians, such as Josef Strzygowski, Alois Riegl, or George Kubler, scholars who analyzed the transformation of stylistic forms across time and borders. The difference is that Niell and Widdifield are less interested in… Full Review

In The Melancholy Art, Michael Ann Holly has provided a strikingly poignant articulation of some of the more trenchant conundrums of what in modernity has come to be fabricated as the discipline of art history—an academic field whose distinctiveness, in her words, “generated by the physical nearness of its objects . . . can quicken certain reflections on the psychic undercurrents of the historical temperament” (xii). But how might melancholy help art historians to come to terms with the nature of its disciplinary transactions with the past? That is, literally, their mournful interactions and reckonings with what is staged… Full Review

The affective turn in the humanities and social sciences has only very recently started to have an impact on writing about photography. To date, the main books published on the topic are: Barbie Zelizer’s About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Suzie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010) (click here for review); Sharon Sliwinski’s Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) (click here for review); and Margaret Olin’s Touching Photographs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012) (click here for review… Full Review

Their Way of Writing is the material record of “Scripts, Signs, and Notational Systems in Pre-Columbian America,” a symposium held at Dumbarton Oaks in October 2008. Framing contributions by symposiarchs Gary Urton (chapter 1) and Elizabeth Hill Boone (chapter 15) contain thirteen case studies from both Mesoamerica (chapters 2–9) and the Andes (chapters 10–14). Accompanied by black-and-white and color illustrations—including several never-before-published images from the Andes—these contributions vary widely in their level of legibility to non-experts. The Mesoamerican chapters begin in the twentieth century, with Michael D. Coe’s consideration of why Soviet linguist Yuri Knorosov, and not British… Full Review

Marcia Pointon’s scholarship over the past three decades on eighteenth-century British portraiture has shaped art-historical understanding of the genre in that period. Her most recent publication, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, compiles five essays that return to the topic while also examining materials across a wide chronological and geographic span. Defining portraiture as “a tool that makes possible the registering of identity in relation to the social” (11), Pointon’s essays strongly move to sever the implicit connection between the portrait image and its subject, a connection that too often structures interpretations of works in the genre. Her case… Full Review

Esra Akcan’s new book on architecture, housing, and the exchange of ideas between Germany and Turkey after the foundation in 1923 of the Turkish Republic is an important addition to the growing body of literature on modern architecture in the late Ottoman and early Turkish states. With the groundbreaking work of Zeynep Çelik followed by significant newer studies by Sibel Bozdoğan, among others, the analysis of Turkish architecture has taken a more prominent role in the literature on the modern Mediterranean cultural world. Scholars have shown how the built environment reveals the tensions between varied colonial or postcolonial interests and… Full Review

In 1751, New Spain’s most famous painter, Miguel Cabrera, was given unusual access to the enormously popular Virgin of Guadalupe icon. By this point, devotees near and far had little doubt that the image in the Tepeyac sanctuary was divinely made, miraculously imprinted on the cloak (tilma) of a humble Indian in the first decade after the conquest. After meticulous examination, scientific analysis, and devotional considerations, Cabrera acknowledged the holy tilma’s incorruptible brilliance—the image’s divine origin was confirmed and its perfection as a work of art was touted in a remarkable treatise entitled Maravilla Americana (1756). Standing… Full Review

Kusakabe Kimbei was a purveyor of early Japanese souvenir photography, a genre often called Yokohama photography due to the key role that city played as a destination for Western travelers. There have been a number of articles and books on the subject published in the last decade, primarily addressing the Western photographers who dominated this market in the 1860s and 1870s, such as Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried. However, by the late 1880s, Japanese photographers became the principal producers of souvenir photography, with Kimbei one of the most successful. Mio Wakita’s Staging Desires: Japanese Femininity in Kusakabe Kimbei’s… Full Review

Jennifer A. Greenhill’s Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age offers most everything one could wish from a scholarly monograph: discerning judgment, telling anecdotes, historical insights grounded in close visual and intertextual analysis. In describing ways in which late nineteenth-century artists as different as Winslow Homer, Enoch Wood Perry, William Holbrook Beard, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Haberle managed to produce serious art while catering to a “growing public appetite for humor” (2), Greenhill herself strikes an equivalent balance. Consistently erudite, frequently entertaining, benefitting from the wisdom of her choice to focus at length on a relatively few… Full Review

Scholarly literature on the architectural monuments and urban infrastructure of early modern Rome abounds. What distinguishes this collection of essays is its focus on overlooked sites, e.g., the fish market rather than the Trevi Fountain, the ill-formed piazza in front of the Palazzo Zuccari rather than the Piazza del Popolo. The objective, as editor David R. Marshall puts it simply, is to study the sites and sights of Rome, its places (as distinct from its monuments) and, more importantly, the appearance of those places. After looking long and hard at the city of Rome, the essayists make fresh inroads in… Full Review