Recently Published Reviews

Camera Constructs is a brimful compendium packed with a rich variety of relational investigations into photography, architecture, and urban space. The book enters a field that has grown considerably since the mid-1980s, when architectural historians heeded Marshall McLuhan’s (and other media theorists’) dictums and began to study architecture and its media, and architecture as medium, with a new seriousness. From early groundbreaking studies to more recent focused treatments, the media content of architecture has been laid bare in written text; Alison and Peter Smithson, neo-avant-garde groups like Archigram and Superstudio, and a range of postmodern architects laid similar cards on… Full Review

Artists whose work engages in critical social commentary have never found a particularly warm reception in Japan, and most of them remain underrepresented. Even today, politically oriented artists find support and exhibition venues more easily overseas. Such has been the case with Tomiyama Taeko (b. 1921), an artist who has devoted her life to art and political activism concerning such issues as Japan’s wartime crimes and its victims in the former colonies. Because of such biting content, her art has been better appreciated outside Japan, primarily in North America and East Asia. Turning ninety-two this year, Tomiyama is far from… Full Review

Polis Chrysochous, the modern town in a fertile river valley on the northwest coast of Cyprus mentioned in the scholarly catalogue’s title (but not in the exhibition’s), was, from 1983–2007, the location of excavations by Princeton University’s Cyprus Expedition directed by one of this show’s curators, William A. P. Childs, professor emeritus of art and archaeology. Called “city flowing with gold (chrysos)” since the nineteenth century, the titular City of Gold overlays two rich ancient forebears, which might themselves be considered cities of gold: Marion, a city-kingdom, settled by the eighth century BCE and destroyed in 312 BCE… Full Review

In Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis, Rubén Gallo details the story of his voyage of discovery to trace the thin lines that connect the great Viennese thinker and founder of psychoanalysis to Mexico, itself represented by artifacts, paintings, publications, and a range of intellectuals affected by a psychoanalysis they variously translated (imaginatively rather than literally) into ways of thinking about modern Mexico. The book is also a substantial work of cultural analysis that both defies the regionalization of culture and area studies by criss-crossing the Atlantic, and it brings into a new perspective aspects of the particularity… Full Review

Hard and unyielding, marble is a rock that must be wrestled with by sheer force, exquisite care, and grunt of labor. Human hands require the intermediary hammer and chisel, and touch is distanced in the service of the eye. To give this rock the spark of life is a formidable task, one that few are able to accomplish. Red clay is mud. Dirty, cheap, and plentiful, it is underfoot, low, and common. By dint of water it is plastic and alive, the fingers imprinting an instant record of presence, time, and motion. A mound is grasped—three, four moves,… Full Review

One cannot wade too deeply into Asian American studies without encountering the generative, foundational, and divisive concept of the model minority, or the representation of Asian Americans as exceptionally successful minorities (particularly in contrast to other ethnic groups). As described in Thy Phu’s Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, the figure of the model minority both influenced the late sixties blossoming of a pan-ethnic Asian American social movement, and has propelled contemporary scholarship extending from (and expanding beyond) that formative moment (8–11). To even begin summarizing the body of work devoted to defining, contesting, and revising… Full Review

In this important, sensitive, stimulating, but also occasionally irritating book, Peter Chametzky has provided a series of finely argued and well-documented case studies involving twentieth-century German works of art, using individual objects or larger spans of an artist’s career as catalysts for exploring the knotty problem of art’s relationship to history. Chametzky’s chosen examples—objects or artists firmly established in the discussion of German art in the context of modern society and its catastrophic manifestations—include Max Beckmann’s 1913 painting The Sinking of the Titanic and 1930s triptych Departure; Hannah Höch’s large-format Dada collage Cut with the Kitchen-Knife Dada through Germany’s… Full Review

Born in 1389, Antoninus Pierozzi entered into the Dominican Order in 1405 at the new house of the Order in Fiesole, near Florence. Soon, in spite of his youth, he was called to administer various convents in Cortona, Rome, Naples, as well as Florence, and he actively worked to make them part of the Dominican Congregation of Tuscany, which had been recently established by Giovanni Dominici in order to promote a stricter form of life among the Friars Preachers. Consecrated Archbishop of Florence on March 13, 1446, he died on May 2, 1459, and was lauded among Florentines for his… Full Review

More than a formal practice of using earth as material, Land art has from the beginning been concerned with social, political, and cultural issues that cannot be separated from the land we inhabit. We know that “landscape” is an ideologically invested term, and artists dealing with their relationship to the land are by no means unique to contemporary art. However, Nancy Holt: Sightlines demonstrates that in the 1960s and 1970s the expansion of media in art played a central role in how Nancy Holt (b. 1938) interpreted the landscape. This exhibition comes at an opportune moment, building on current interest… Full Review

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western readerships closely identified the ancient Maya with dance and bodily performance. The theme of dance is implicit in the sinuous orientalism of Frédéric de Waldeck’s renderings of Palenque relief sculpture published in 1866 (e.g., “The Beau Relief”: see Frédéric de Waldeck and Brasseur de Bourbourg, Palenqué et autres ruines de l’ancienne civilisation du Mexique, Paris: Bertrand, 1866, plate 42). The animated pose of a maize god statue from Copán Temple 22 prompted English colonial administrator and explorer A. P. Maudslay to call the figure “the singing girl” in his documentary volume of 1889 (Alfred P… Full Review

Sarah Betzer’s Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History opens with a detail of the head of the Valpinçon Bather (1808). Turning the page, the reader is confronted with the steady gaze of Madame de Moitessier, the subject of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s striking 1856 portrait. This pairing visualizes the central problem Betzer seeks to engage: how did Ingres, a history painter who decisively turned attention to the eroticized female form, conceive of portraits of women? And what did the women who sat for these portraits desire to see in them? Betzer’s book is a detailed and sophisticated examination of… Full Review

Prior to the opening of the Musée du Louvre’s spectacular new galleries for Islamic art in September 2012, this renowned collection largely had been in storage for the last thirty-five years, with brief reinstallations in 1987 and again in 1993. After such a long and much anticipated wait, the galleries did not disappoint this reviewer; rather, they absolutely dazzled. Five lengthy, successive visits were just enough to get a sense of the sheer depth of this remarkable assemblage, which encompasses the breadth of Islamic art, traditionally defined as extending from Spain to India between the seventh and nineteenth centuries.… Full Review

“See the largest selection of Rembrandt paintings assembled in the United States. . . . Ever.” Such ads helped make Rembrandt in America one of the most successful exhibitions in the history of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In its last days, demand was so high that an aggressive scalper tried to sell his extra ticket to a senior administrator as she returned from lunch. The show’s success was all the more remarkable given its genesis: curatorial conversations about the links between collecting and connoisseurship. With those links as its defining concept, Rembrandt in America, curated by George S… Full Review

The eerie title of Rachel Poliquin’s beautifully illustrated and designed book, The Breathless Zoo, first in the exciting new “Animalibus” series edited by Nigel Rothfels and Gary Marvin, immediately calls attention to the contradictions at the heart of its subject. Taxidermy, which can be traced at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a process whereby animals are killed in order to be preserved and displayed, and in which their deaths—deliberate and celebrated in some instances, accidental or mourned in others—linger in the background of that display. The result is an irresolvable tension between the live animal taxidermy… Full Review

Once in a while an exhibition comes along that achieves many things. It illuminates past and present, and does so by creating a viewing experience both beautiful and instructive. All the better when such an exhibition also brightens up a blind spot in the history of art. The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens achieved this. Curated by Wolfram Koeppe, Maria Kellen French Curator of European Decorative Arts, the show was a monographic investigation of father-and-son furniture makers Abraham (1711–1793) and David Roentgen (1743–1807), whose workshop in the German town… Full Review