Recently Published Reviews

With this welcome volume, Janet Wolff, author of a number of studies bringing an expanded sociological perspective to the study of the visual arts, delivers a salutary reminder of a fact often sensed but rarely articulated: the uncertain, the indirect, and the oblique are especially at home in our contemporary context of artistic creation and interpretation, and we would do well to investigate them for what they are in and of themselves, rather than seeing them merely as obstacles to be gotten beyond in pursuit of something more perceptually stable and, we too easily think, epistemologically worthy. Wolff… Full Review

Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing well into the 1990s, a number of academics, critics, and curators turned to the question of California modernism asking, in short, if there was such a thing and, if so, to what did it owe its unique place in the annals of American art. Anne Bartlett Ayres, Bram Dijkstra, Susan Ehrlich, Paul Karlstrom, Susan Landauer, Peter Selz, and Richard Cándida Smith, among others, suggested, in a generous collection of books, essays, and exhibitions that not only did California modern art reveal a distinctive form and content but that it was far closer to… Full Review

Tamarind Techniques for Fine Art Lithography significantly updated the chemistry, technology, and aesthetics that The Tamarind Book of Lithography (1971) offered. I am fortunate to have had the chance to introduce both books.To me, then and now, Tamarind represents an “informed energy,” not a tradition built on rote and recipes. The core problem is still the same: how to differentiate what is merely novel from an aesthetic advance of long-term importance. (From the foreword.) —June Wayne Tamarind Techniques for Fine Art Lithography continues the legacy of “informed energy” that June Wayne (founder and director of the Tamarind Institute)… Full Review

Given the increasingly knotty exigencies of scheduling—much less securing and financing loans—it seems all but inevitable that more and more museums will be forced to feature shows culled from the oft-unseen resources of their permanent collections. Such proverbial icebox raiding was evident at the Hirshhorn of late—and to great consequence. Curated by Valerie Fletcher to fill an eleventh-hour programming gap, Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration featured nearly seventy works produced over almost as many years (from a 1917 sketch of workers’ houses to 1973’s comparatively monumental Variants), a number of which had never been exhibited previously. Augmented by select… Full Review

Labor and photography are inseparable. From the muddy newspaper photos of fallen Triangle fire sweatshop workers, to Lewis Hine’s “Icarus” sky boy building the Empire State Building, to Milton Rogovin’s portraits of deindustrialized steelworkers, labor history is partly learned through photographs. In this massive study of the interrelationship of images and farm labor in California, Richard Steven Street excavates a story of struggle, power, endurance, and harsh, dangerous, physical labor. It is a hybrid book—historical, biographical, scholarly, political, critical, technical, multi-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary. Street positions himself among the “three-eye people,” as photographer-historian-activist, both participant and observer. A photographic history of… Full Review

In 1998, Kirk Savage‘s first book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press), was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American Studies. His second book, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape, should have been a finalist for this year’s general non-fiction Pulitzer Prize, but perhaps it will receive another American Studies award or an art-history honor. Dell Upton, UCLA’s highly respected professor of architectural history, praises this book on its dust jacket as “at once an art history… Full Review

In Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State, Alick McLean presents the disclaimer that medieval Prato should be considered ordinary, at least when compared to its famous neighbors, Florence or Siena. However, by the end of this fascinating, finely researched book, the reader is left feeling that the architectural and urban design (and, ultimately, visual culture) of this Tuscan commune is, simply, extra-ordinary. McLean’s book is a diachronic exploration of the city and architecture of Prato in relation to social, political, and cultural developments, largely from its origin in the Carolingian era until its demise in… Full Review

In October 2009, the Toronto Photography Seminar and the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Study of the United States co-sponsored Feeling Photography, an international, interdisciplinary conference convened to investigate photography’s relationship to affect, emotion, and feeling. Conference presentations engaged and extended recent critical discussions of affect, which address aspects of human experience that have been largely under-theorized, ignored, or excluded from discourse. Put simply, affect foregrounds the body’s responses to stimuli at the moment when these responses meet cognition and enter into language as thinking-feeling states that move across historical distinctions separating mind and body. As such, discussions… Full Review

At first glance, the scale of Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, initially on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, belies its significance. The exhibition features photocollages, composed of cut-out albumen prints pasted into watercolored settings and assembled into albums by women (mostly) and men of the Victorian era. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibition contained works illustrating fifteen albums, some of which had been disassembled and not previously displayed together until this monumental undertaking. Individual pages from these disassembled albums lined the walls, while intact albums were displayed in cases. Wall decorations, composed of enlarged… Full Review

Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, provides an English-speaking audience an essential framework with which to place this scarcely known artist. The catalogue, written by Sarah Lees with contributions from Richard Kendall and Barbara Guidi, distinguishes itself from typical studies of Boldini (1842–1931) by examining and illustrating the full range of his work stylistically and thematically. Its format, organized largely by genre, is vividly supported by dozens of color plates, and illustrates Boldini’s explorations both in relation to his French environment after 1871 and his earlier Italian… Full Review

Even before Francisco Pizarro set foot in South America, the people, wealth, natural resources, and social organization of the prehispanic Andes were already being documented in text. The earliest known document of this kind, the Sámano account, was copied into the Spanish royal record by Juan de Sámano around 1528. By recounting the first European explorations in the region, the Sámano account established a tradition of recording and collating information about the Andes in written documents, a practice that continues today in projects like Joanne Pillsbury’s Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900. In the three volumes… Full Review

The exhibition (and accompanying catalogue) Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 sets out to convince viewers that it was a “singularly important year” in the artist’s career (9). In contrast, at a panel discussion on March 27, 2010, at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, curator Catherine Morris referred to 1950 as a “minor moment” in Hans Hofmann’s life. So which is it? After several visits and a thorough reading of the catalogue, it’s hard to say. While the year was clearly a momentous one for Hofmann (American, b. Germany, 1880–1966), it was only sometimes so for the reasons the curators suggest… Full Review

Pika Ghosh’s Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal breaks new ground in its exploration of Hindu temple architecture. This deeply researched, well-argued work considers a radically new form of temple design that was first consolidated in mid-seventeenth century Vishnupur, capital of the Malla dynasty of western Bengal. Ghosh weaves together histories of architecture, religion, culture, and sacred poetic literature to explore the genesis and early development of the temple form proclaimed by its patrons navaratna ratnam—in her translation, “new bejeweled temple”—in an inscription on the mid-seventeenth-century Shyam Ray Temple at Vishnupur. Ghosh concentrates on the formative… Full Review

In The Pygmalion Effect Victor Stoichita makes the astonishing claim that there is a libidinal component to mimetic production. Western art history—taken here to be a history of mimesis, of copies—has a dark, disavowed, erotic heart: the simulacrum. The simulacrum differs from the copy in that it is magical rather than mimetic, invites touch rather than merely looking, and is autonomous rather than merely derived from a model; Pygmalion’s statue is its founding myth. Arguing that “the simulacrum was not completely banished by Platonism” (3), Stoichita explores the “reverberations” (5) of the Pygmalion myth through Western art, paying close attention… Full Review

During the Tibetan Shrine exhibition at the Sackler gallery in Washington, DC, at the foot of the staircase leading into the museum’s subterranean atrium, a red gateway drew visitors toward a small opening on the opposite, neutral wall. Introductory wall text explained that what lay inside approximated a shrine that an elite family in Tibet might have had in their home. Comprised of objects collected over several decades by Alice Kandell, the single-room shrine installation was an adaptation of what one might encounter in her New York home. Upon visiting Sikkim as a young woman, Kandell became fascinated by Tibetan… Full Review