Recently Published Reviews

Well-written, magisterially conceived, and impeccably documented, this volume is both a superb introduction to Franz Radziwill, an intriguing figure almost unknown outside Germany, and an authoritative social history of art that thoroughly revises understandings of the world of modernism during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. As he considers the ambiguities and contradictions of Radziwill’s art, politics, and self-presentation, James A. Van Dyke confronts issues of how to write about and exhibit the works of artists who were sympathetic toward or lived under National Socialism. Radically historicized accounts of “Weimar culture” and the Third Reich, Van Dyke argues,… Full Review

In 2009, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, acquired an important tea storage jar at auction. The deep brown stoneware jar has an asymmetric glaze and stands 41.6 centimeters tall. Named “Chigusa,” the jar is believed to have been made in China during the thirteenth or fourteenth century before it was imported to Japan, where it became a prized object for practitioners of the Japanese tea culture (chanoyu). At purchase, the jar was accompanied by extensive documentary material, including inscribed storage boxes and letters. To celebrate the acquisition of this object, the museum organized an online… Full Review

Plagued by migraines and seemingly allergic to the sun-dappled environs in which she spent so many of her years, Joan Didion nonetheless wrote into being a host of characters that participated in a dissolute Golden State fantasy. Her stories from the 1960s evoke the siren cupidity of a nostalgic, decidedly prelapsarian California, even as they admit an illusion fraying at the seams. That her essays from the other side of the long decade comprise such topics as Malibu fires, Jerry Brown, and Sharon Tate might not surprise. Still, her 2003 memoir, Where I Was From (New York: Vintage), tenders a… Full Review

At the outset, the recent exhibition Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna was presented as both a close look at sixteenth-century Venetian painting and as a chapter in the history of collecting. The collection of Europe’s dominant imperial family, the Habsburgs, is now housed in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum; because that museum’s Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) is undergoing renovations, fifty paintings from the permanent collection were made available for exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Some of the works on display were acquired by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria… Full Review

It is not farfetched to assume that theoretical reflections on photography will pay close attention to historical perspectives and that histories of photography will take into account theoretical issues. However, Jae Emerling has discovered that hardly any publications on photography have interwoven history and theory in a sustained fashion. Emerling’s Photography: History and Theory demonstrates how insightful this integrated approach can be. This same quality also characterizes Kathrin Yacavone’s Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, also released in 2012. Almost every volume dealing with photography theory discusses the views of both Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes—often combined with… Full Review

Dichotomies have provided a convenient way to categorize practices and for affiliated architectural groups to contest positions. Prominent dichotomies range from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian to echoes in Kenzo Tange’s Yayoi and Jomon categories relating historic positions to post-World War II modern Japanese architecture, and from continued tensions between notions of modern and traditional as well as global and local. Related contestations shaping architectural production are evident in the Museum of Modern Art’s “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” 1948 debate between modernists, Lewis Mumford, and Bay Area regionalists and more recent postmodern debates between the Whites and Grays… Full Review

Even during the midst of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s meteoric Roman career, questions were raised concerning the singularity and originality of his manner and its impact upon young artists of his own generation. In fact, it was Caravaggio himself, Carlo Cesare Malvasia reports, who was the first to ask why artists adopted his manner, pressing to know to what end Guido Reni had transformed himself into the Lombard painter after seeking out Caravaggio’s paintings for purchase (would that we knew which ones). The flagrant theft of his manner and his coloring, Caravaggio made abundantly clear, could cost the Bolognese painter… Full Review

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art floats between several different visions of itself. Like any museum, how the institution envisions its mission and future will affect the way it builds its collections, installs its exhibitions, and otherwise engages with its publics. The purpose here is not to suggest preferred goals and objectives for Crystal Bridges, but to evaluate its success in achieving the goals it seems to claim in the museum’s inaugural exhibition from its permanent collection, Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. This sprawling exhibition fills five expansive galleries (including… Full Review

So much controversy has surrounded the creation of the Crystal Bridges Museum that it almost inevitably colors the perception of its remarkable new building in Bentonville, Arkansas. One of the causes, of course, is the origin of most of the museum’s enormous endowment: the Walmart fortune. Even a cursory Google search quickly reveals the fault lines of the debate: detractors point out the hypocrisy of financing a philanthropic high-culture celebration of American art from the profits of a corporation known for its poor labor practices, cheap disposable goods, and outsourcing of production to China. Apologists argue that the real reason… Full Review

Few today would dispute the fact that the Japanese collective Gutai Art Association (1954–1972) is the most renowned postwar avant-garde movement coming out of East Asia. If, on the one hand, Gutai’s assertively internationalist attitude ultimately paid off, on the other, its members often paid a high price for embracing internationalism when what was expected from a Japanese avant-garde collective was mainly the particular and exotic. Ming Tiampo’s excellent Gutai: Decentering Modernism, the first English-language monograph on Gutai, explores Gutai’s internationalism as a structuring element in the group’s long and diverse creative trajectory. In doing so, the book contributes… Full Review

Among the many pleasures involved in viewing Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, California, is the fact that this exhibition has come hard on the heels of State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, a brainy, spirited exhibition that covered roughly the same time period and featured photographs, films and videos, performance documentation, and installation works representing the Conceptual art movement as it appeared in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. Galleries that had been filled with verbally oriented and often witty works that discarded… Full Review

Jacqueline Francis dedicates her book, Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America, to Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber, the three interwar-era artists who serve as her principle case studies. This gesture is not only touching (who among us doesn’t feel indebted to “our” artists?); it also indicates something about Francis’s stakes. Like so many studies of minority American artists before this one, Making Race is fundamentally a restorative project. But unlike earlier scholarship, which sought to admit more artists to the art-historical canon, Making Race pursues something different—and more exciting. Deploying the lessons of critical… Full Review

Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, edited by Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg, is devoted to the representation of Jews and Judaism in Christian art, with an emphasis on contemporaneous ecclesiastical anxieties on issues concerned with both Christianity and Judaism. The exceptions are one essay on a Jewish subject created by a Christian and another on the architecture of the Venetian ghetto. The essays are framed by Nirenberg’s introduction and final chapter, “The Judaism of Christian Art,” in which he discusses a major theme of the book: that Christians regard art made for… Full Review

David Clarke’s Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World is composed of six essays in three sections: “Trajectories: Chinese Artists and the West,” “Imported Genres,” and “Returning Home: Cities between China and the World.” Earlier versions of five of the essays have appeared before, as has some of the information in the first. It is a good idea for a scholar to bring together individual essays and chronologically discontinuous views in a single volume since these then become more easily available for reference and present a kind of informational penumbra for the topics they discuss. The usefulness of this… Full Review

The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art, during its stop at the Crocker Art Museum, presented a panoramic display of drawing as an art form from the sixteenth to eighteenth century in Italy. It also included a fine selection of intaglio and woodcut prints. Drawn from the collection of Giuliano Ceseri—who has loaned his collection to the Georgia Museum of Art—and from the collection of the Georgia Museum, the exhibition, curated by Robert Randolf Coleman and Babette Bohn, presented a wide-ranging approach to works on paper from the period, and did so… Full Review