Recently Published Reviews

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 details Venice’s role as a commercial, political, and diplomatic hub, strategically situated at the center of Mediterranean trade, and examines how the city absorbed artistic and cultural ideas from the Islamic world. With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase of the resources compiled by its editor, Stefano Carboni, who also served as the exhibition’s curator. Carboni eloquently guides… Full Review

In his Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (ca. 1633), the artist Anthony Van Dyck turns to gaze out at the viewer. With one hand he points to himself while holding up for display the gold chain recently presented to him by his patron, the English monarch Charles I; with the other he gestures toward a large sunflower that seems to mirror the artist’s pose. Both the man and plant appear animated, as his tousled hair and the flower’s thick petals appear to respond to the shifting light and billowing atmosphere surrounding them. The picture’s intertwined themes have long been recognized: Van… Full Review

This impressive and dense book examines a subject that on the surface seems to have been fully explored: early American modernism and the Stieglitz circle.[1] Alfred Stieglitz’s renowned wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, remains a central figure among these various publications. It is not surprising, then, that Kathleen Pyne also weaves her text around the importance of this artist who, according to Pyne’s account, fulfilled Stieglitz’s search for a “woman-child,” a sexually active adult who could retain her childhood innocence to capture in her art a pure, essential feminine vision, and who could assist him in creating his own identity as a… Full Review

A New World is a beautifully illustrated, wide-ranging catalogue of the British Museum’s rarely exhibited collection of John White’s watercolors. White’s pictures record the people and nature he encountered while accompanying a group of English colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to Roanoke Island in 1585. Some of these images, particularly his studies of the native inhabitants of what is now coastal North Carolina, are iconic, while others—fireflies, Puerto Rico, Turks—are considerably less well-known. The catalogue’s six essays, by Kim Sloan, curator of British drawings and watercolors at the British Museum, and Joyce Chaplin, Christian Feest, and Ute Kuhlemann, successfully… Full Review

Jewish art poses a perennial problem of definition, just like Jewish identity. Inevitably the question arises about whether an artist has to be considered Jewish, and even what that might mean: is it a matter of ethnicity or of religion? Additionally, many early Jewish contributions to visual culture lie entirely outside any identification of an artistic hand; rather, they are defined chiefly through their location and function, usually as decorations within a ritual context of religious practice, be it in a synagogue or home. Yet even in those cases, the makers of the objects need not have been Jewish themselves… Full Review

Claiming Space is a small, carefully curated exhibition with a big heart and ambitious agenda. It makes a compelling argument that feminist artists working in the late sixties into the early eighties had an enormous role in defining and expanding what constitutes feminist culture, and that any history of the period—social, political, cultural, or art historical—is woefully incomplete if these artists are not fully integrated into these stories. The history of this period and the art of the nineties simply does not make sense otherwise. There are nineteen artists represented in the exhibition, including major works by Judith Bernstein, Judy… Full Review

In Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw contextualizes the production and interpretation of Kara Walker’s fantastical depictions of slavery as produced in installation silhouettes, prints, and drawings between the years 1995 and 1998. Through five well-paced chapters, Shaw investigates the personal and art-historical origins of Walker’s art, analyzes three of Walker’s most dense and widely-circulated silhouettes, and addresses the passionate and complex reception to Walker’s challenging images. At the beginning of her text, Shaw reveals her own stunned reaction to seeing Walker’s artwork for the first time in 1997. Following her encounter,… Full Review

Guest-curator Jeffrey Spier’s Picturing the Bible at the Kimbell Art Museum is the first major exhibition of early Christian art in the United States since the Metropolitan Museum’s The Age of Spirituality in 1977. Where that was a vast installation, responding to the panoramic sweep of what had then only barely begun to be called Late Antiquity, Picturing the Bible is compact and select, focused specifically upon the modes of Christian visual expression and asking much of each object displayed. It is an exhibition of exceptional visual and intellectual elegance. Its governing insight, conveyed in its title, is most fully… Full Review

Crafting a useful and compelling textbook from the diverse, contested, and ever-mutating material and methodologies of any scholarly field constitutes no small task. The authors of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity are to be congratulated for the boldness and originality with which they approached such an endeavor, and their survey of the art and visual culture of the geographic region now known as the United States does indeed constitute, as the back-cover copy states, a “tremendous accomplishment.” The text presents a persuasive and rich portrait of the history of the arts in America on two levels.… Full Review

Heidegger’s Hut offers a full architectural analysis of a very simple structure, the philosopher’s retreat in Todtnauberg. As Simon Sadler says in his foreword, “This is the most thorough architectural ‘crit’ of a hut ever set down” (ix). Of course the hut would never have attracted such attention were it not Heidegger’s. The oral tradition that accompanied Heidegger’s reception in the Anglophone world (and perhaps elsewhere) involved rumors of the philosopher working at a remote mountain hut. Well before the 1980s, when the question of Heidegger’s Nazism became unavoidable for scholars, the legend that accompanied him was that of the… Full Review

A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, though occupying only four rooms at the Menil Collection in Houston, is an intense, richly complex and subtly disturbing exhibition. The curator in Houston, Franklin Sirmans, has helped create a fluid, dynamic exhibition space that highlights the extraordinary diversity of Nauman’s production from 1964–69 and establishes key themes and paths of development, while leaving many connections open-ended and available for viewers to pursue for themselves. Drawings, sculptures, photographs, video/film, and sound installations are all placed within the same spaces, and highly visceral, body pieces mix with the intellectual play… Full Review

Even for the Metropolitan Museum of Art it was impossible to duplicate the revelatory experience and concomitant visitor record of Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, the 2002 precursor of the present show and the first major U.S. exhibition on the topic in twenty-five years. Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor comes just five years later and simply could not be marketed as the same kind of novelty. Yet the faithful, returning museumgoer is rewarded with experiences of rare beauty, historical insight, and displays of astonishing technical virtuosity that are at least equal to those in the… Full Review

This book is part of a promising new wave of scholarship. From the 1960s onward, writing on perspective was divided between what might roughly be called humanist interpretations and technical accounts. Humanist writing made use of structuralist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic interpretations, and it has produced a line of texts from Hubert Damisch to Hanneke Grootenboer. Technical writing, such as Martin Kemp’s, has accumulated an equally impressive range of information. Recently there have been signs that the two strains are merging, for example in Lyle Massey’s Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania… Full Review

As interventions within contemporary art’s ongoing male and Western hegemonies, two recent, groundbreaking shows of global women artists, Global Feminisms and Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture, were timely. After seeing Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum last spring, I was equally thrilled to see it remixed at the Davis Museum in the fall—thrilled because the show is needed, because it is exciting to discover new artistic responses to age-old problems, and because it is still regrettably rare to see feminist concerns addressed overtly in art. The Davis version of the show was truncated, which… Full Review

As “the first anthology to deal with the painting, sculpture, graphic arts, and photography of the 1930s in a hemispheric context” (xiii), this ambitious collection of fourteen essays makes a significant contribution to the vigorous literature of this seminal decade. While more than half of the volume is focused on the United States, articles take a Pan-American approach in considering work from Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, and Canada. The inclusion of Latin America and the Caribbean with North America reveals remarkable cross-cultural commonalities that remind the reader that the borders demarcating the countries where these artists worked were more political than… Full Review