Recently Published Reviews

It is difficult to sustain a discussion of Canterbury Cathedral, the sprawling monument at the heart of this incisive monograph, without falling into a surfeit of art-historical superlatives. The present church, which served as the seat of the chief primate of England throughout the Middle Ages (and, from 1170, as the site of the cult of the internationally renowned martyr St. Thomas Becket), ranks among the longest, largest, and most lavish medieval churches in Britain. Scholars of the Romanesque period have long celebrated the architecture and sculpture of the extension begun under Archbishop Anselm of Bec (r. 1093–1109). Scholars of… Full Review

Distinct yet intersecting debates concerning the possibilities of a global art history and a decolonial or decolonized art history have reoriented the mainstream of the discipline’s focus in the last decade. Among the art historical strategies stemming from this inquiry, an incorporative mode, seeking to bring underrepresented artists and makers into the fold of global history as moderns, emerges prominently alongside a deconstructive mode, which eschews the universality of the global in favor of a plurality of local differences and counter-institutional proposals. Both approaches have been variously formalized in recent years, reverberating through recent shifts in curatorial practice, curricular designs… Full Review

Did genre painting exist in the early twentieth century? This question forms the premise of John Fagg’s Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1905–1945. Known primarily to historians of United States art as an antebellum practice and, secondarily, as a later nineteenth-century movement that recalled its predecessor, genre painting is rarely thought of as an avenue of early twentieth-century artistic expression. Yet, one of its defining features, the depiction of everyday life, appears prominently in the art of numerous practitioners of that time—even when such depictions differ politically and stylistically from earlier examples. As Fagg notes, recent scholarship by… Full Review

What to make of this book? This is a question posed several times by Stanley Abe throughout his innovatively formatted recent work, Imagining Sculpture: A Short Conjectural History. On the surface, Abe’s book is the culmination of the author’s inquiry into the birth of “sculpture” as an aesthetic category in China during the modern era. Here, and in research preceding this publication, Abe has offered a rich historical and historiographical account of the cross-cultural encounters that led to the birth of modern artistic and art historical inquiry into the category of sculpture—specifically Buddhist sculpture—in East Asia. Perhaps more importantly… Full Review

Broadly speaking, both the sciences and archaeological fieldwork are often fueled by the search for discoveries that provide new, inescapable points of reference. By contrast, the canonical narrative of art history isn’t designed to be reshaped periodically by fresh discoveries. Instead, classic major monuments continue to delineate the canonical narrative, originally chosen to best represent the standard model for the development of medieval art and architecture. Over the past several decades a variety of thematic studies have been incorporated to reframe such narratives, adding topics such as patronage, labor, use, materiality, and sensory studies. These new contexts have largely nuanced… Full Review

In Nakahira Takuma’s photobook For a Language to Come [Kitarubeki botoba no tame ni] (1970), a haunting diptych of photographs conveys flat, endless tire-track-covered sand that stretches out to a dark horizon under a blotted sky, as if capturing a terrain in the midst of battle. Art historian Bert Winther-Tamaki sensitively unpacks this image taken in 1965 on a human-made island in Tokyo Bay, to reveal the layers of horror and modernity that undergird its spectral form. The island was created from developmental desires both to dredge the bay of Tokyo to allow for the transit of larger vessels… Full Review

Curator and academic James Voorhies’s book Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial asks how contemporary art exhibitions produce new knowledge when the modes of production surrounding these events have developed in complexity. Exhibitions now extend far beyond the gallery to include their broadcast on social media, publications of varying forms, and public programs (both in-person and virtual) surrounding these events. For Voorhies, this means that audiences now combine—and, crucially, expect—both sensual and cognitive experiences with art in order to learn and digest its content. Yet, traditional aesthetics still prioritizes the value of the viewer’s sensual experience with the… Full Review

Keith Haring’s journals (Penguin Books, 2010) open with the nineteen-year-old burgeoning artist hitchhiking across the Midwest. Before he moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, the kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania followed the Grateful Dead, selling t-shirts, getting high, and seeing the country. In Minnesota he found a tree by the St. Croix River that he was “gonna come back to, someday” (2). After the Dead show in Minneapolis, he and his companion hitched a ride and ate in a bar on the North Dakota border surrounded by farmers who commented on Haring’s hair when he… Full Review

For Indigenous Pacific Islanders, the ocean is not a metaphor. Land and water are genealogically related to people, providing the physical and ancestral links that connect, rather than divide. This “Oceanitude” is a central framework for The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists, in which author Anaïs Maurer investigates what she calls  (post)apocalyptic stories—both literary and visual—that offer strategies for mourning, healing, survival, and regeneration in the face of nuclear imperialism. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the French, US-American, and British militaries conducted nuclear bomb tests in Tahiti, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati, among… Full Review

The New Public Art: Collectivity and Activism in Mexico since the 1980s edited by Maria Polgovsky Ezcurra examines a range of artistic-activist projects carried out in Mexico between 1985 and 2017. These were years of political and economic transformation and growing drug-related violence, bracketed by two major earthquakes in Mexico City. Especially since President Felipe Calderón’s initiation of a war on drugs in 2006, fear and violence have shut down public dialogue, historical memory, and possibilities for mourning. This volume explores practices that resist disenfranchisement and aim to strengthen social bonds, and ultimately, the public sphere.  Some of the artists… Full Review

Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts by editors Joseph Salvatore Ackley and Shannon L. Wearing is the fourth volume in De Gruyter’s series Sense, Matter, and Medium. The book complements recent exhibitions and publications on the materials of medieval manuscript illumination, such as the Fitzwilliam Museum’s landmark Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (2016). Projects such as these have drawn on the expertise of scientists and conservators, guided, as the introduction here states, “by the conviction that a sustained incorporation of technical data deeply enriches the art historical project.” Ornamenting a manuscript with precious metals… Full Review

In the introduction to Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy, Timothy McCall states that it is his intention to " . . . explore and interpret how [fifteenth-century Italian princes] . . . used art, spectacle, and especially clothing and adornment to reinforce and advertise power, and to seduce those who beheld them." McCall’s focus on aristocratic masculine dress is a significant addition to the growing literature on Renaissance male fashion. Central and unique to McCall’s argument is the assertion that quattrocento rulers such as Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Borso d’Este, and Alfonso d’Aragona purposefully attracted the… Full Review

What constitutes Korean photography? How do photographs of and in Korea shape national identity? Or perhaps more accurately, how are photography and the nation mutually constituted? And how might Korean photography intervene in the history of photography itself? The historiography of Korean photography brings forth a set of methodological issues that continue to shape the field of Korean art history at large. Demanding the construction of “Koreanness” in which a photograph must demonstrate its unique national and cultural authenticity, Korean photography is compartmentalized and perceived as a peripheral modernity that serves or catches up to Euro-American modernity. Two recent works… Full Review

In September 1934, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), announced that it was staging The Making of a Museum Publication, an exhibition that displayed the entire production process of its own publications, step by step. From manuscript through to multiply-reproduced object, typeset and laid-out, printed and bound, the MoMA show not only reinforced the critical role of printed matter as a medium for display in a modern art museum but also ushered in a heightened sense of self-reflexivity in relation to the catalog as an object of art-historiographical attention. In the subsequent ninety years, the question… Full Review

Southeast Asia is a region of ambiguity and complexity. Existing countries in the region went through different historical transformations before coming into being with diverse linguistic heritages. There is no unified lingua franca. Although—on the surface—there is geopolitical unity (such as through ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), art practitioners often struggle to establish cross-cultural understanding because of a lack of resources and knowledge about their neighboring countries. The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader is an attempt to establish such common ground. With the support of National Gallery Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University, Centre of… Full Review