Recently Published Reviews

The historic exhibition Hokusai contains almost 500 works (about 310 woodblock prints, 130 paintings, 40 published books, and 20 drawings) by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), arguably the best-known Japanese artist outside Japan and the creator of the Great Wave (ca. 1831). According to the Tokyo National Museum press materials, there had been one other Hokusai exhibition of this scale, which was in Vienna in 1901. However, the exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum reflected a century of subsequent international scholarship. The exhibition follows a more focused Hokusai: Prints and Drawings (1991) at the Royal Academy of Art, London, with 133 prints… Full Review

Qusayr ‘Amra is perhaps the most enigmatic of the so-called Umayyad “desert castles” that inhabit the landscape of the Syro-Jordanian steppe and the more arid regions to the east of it. These “castles,” or qusur as they are commonly referred to in Arabic, are in fact residences, bathhouses, hunting lodges, and farms built by the elites of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750 CE). Built sometime in the first half of the eighth-century CE, Qusayr ‘Amra consists of a bath complex (a large hall and three small bathing rooms), a deep stone well, a cistern, and a hydraulic installation with a waterwheel… Full Review

Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre was the first major exhibition of the artist’s work since the 1991–92 retrospective in London and Paris. It was also the first large-scale show of both his paintings and prints in the United States in more than twenty-five years. In contrast to its predecessors this show focused on a single theme—the relationship of Lautrec’s art to Montmartre, the bohemian and lower-class Parisian district where he worked and where he found his characteristic subjects. The accompanying volume provides substantial documentation and analysis in support of the exhibition’s mission of setting the artist’s work in its socio-historical… Full Review

Juergen Schulz’s varied and rich career has been capped by a book that can only be termed revolutionary. Venetian scholarship has clung to the idea that the Venetian palace is a Byzantine import. Venice was closely tied to Byzantium politically for much of its early history, and it has seemed logical to assume that the East provided the city with its architectural models. That Byzantine or Byzantine-style embellishments—what Schulz terms, in a marvelous phrase, “borrowed finery of pseudo-antique grandeur”—were the decoration of choice for early Venetian palaces seemed to clinch the matter. The issue has been compounded by the early… Full Review

A large number of beautifully illustrated catalogues of Spanish drawings have been published in the last ten years, many to accompany exhibitions, as the more fragile treasures of Spanish art are being studied and brought to a wider audience. The Catálogo de la Collección de Dibujos del Instituto Jovellanos de Gijón stands apart from this group, as it is a reprint and enhancement of a catalogue first published in 1969 by a pioneer in the study of Spanish drawings, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez. Before its demise, the Jovellanos collection of drawings had been catalogued by Jesús Menéndez Acebal in the… Full Review

This past summer, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, inspired by the history and legacies of their collections and even the buildings that house them, focused on abstraction—each with a major exhibition and accompanying publication: The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art, 1950–2005 at the AGO and Extreme Abstraction at the Albright-Knox. Responding to a bemused critic in a statement to the New York Times on June 13, 1943, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, assisted by Barnett Newman, declared: “To us art is an adventure… Full Review

The recent exhibition, Depth of Field: The Place of Relief in the Time of Donatello, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, focused on early fifteenth-century Italian relief sculptures from the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Organized by Peta Motture, Glyn Davies, and Stuart Frost at the museum and by Penelope Curtis, Martina Droth, and Stephen Feeke of the Henry Moore Institute, it was the first exhibition to focus on Italian early fifteenth-century relief sculpture, and it presented the subject in a provocative and innovative way. Its specific purposes were to explore how the sculptures might be… Full Review

The received history of the fifteenth-century Florentine villa begins with Careggi, Trebbio, and Cafaggiolo, the brooding strongholds built for Cosimo de’ Medici by Michelozzo, then proceeds to the serene, cubic Villa Medici at Fiesole, and concludes with the all’antica forms of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano. In Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, Amanda Lillie suggests this standard sequence is both generalizing and reductive, and notes that an assumed familiarity with this architectural type is in fact based upon the evidence drawn from the five principal Medici villas. In her book—a self-described “quest for a more representative… Full Review

Lianne McTavish’s book, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France, is part of an Ashgate series entitled Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, a group of collected essays and single-authored volumes that investigate subjects as diverse as identity politics, widowhood, and the book trade. Ashgate is, indeed, one of the few publishing houses still willing to produce these sorts of studies, especially in the form of collected essays, and we are indebted to them for their efforts to bring new studies of women and gender into the scholarly realm. Like the other books in… Full Review

Although many of Jacques-Louis David’s best-known paintings are in French public collections, over the past century U.S. institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Clark Art Institute have managed to snap up significant works by the artist. The presence in the United States of these images, which date mainly from the Napoleonic Empire and David’s period of post-Napoleonic exile in Brussels, was the stimulus for an exhibition of David’s late work at both the Getty and the Clark last year. The exhibition was accompanied by… Full Review

It’s unfortunate that Jacques de Gheyn II is not widely known beyond Dutch specialists. He exemplifies the richness of his immediate cultural context and, more broadly, of the period surrounding 1600, when so many paradigms of European art began to change dramatically. New literature on his work is most welcome. The primary book on the de Gheyn family, I. Q. Van Regteren Altena’s Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983), was based on the author’s dissertation research in the 1930s. Although full of valuable insights and providing a useful catalogue of works by the de Gheyn family… Full Review

Wu Hung, Chinese born, has become a well-known U.S. art historian. Author of a number of distinguished books discussing the art of his native country, in Remaking Beijing he tells the history of Tiananmen Square, the gate to the Imperial Palace. Every tourist who goes to Beijing visits this central site. Coming from the east, you go north to buy a ticket and enter the Forbidden City. But if you walk south just before entering the Square, you reach the Museum of Chinese History, which now contains displays of art and a waxworks exhibition showing the communist rulers, various emperors… Full Review

Over a century of scholarship in Islamic art has produced numerous monographs, catalogues, and surveys; yet until recently, only a few studies have been published on the aesthetics of Islamic art. The last three decades, however, have seen several books and exhibitions that claim to deal with the “common principles,” “aesthetics,” and “philosophy” of Islamic art. Oliver Leaman’s book is both a contribution to and a critique of this particular tradition Although according to Leaman his book is intended to “establish a solid foundation for the aesthetics of Islamic art” (vii), the book is in fact not solely focused on… Full Review

Despite its modest format, this is a monumental book. The author has fitted into comparatively few pages one of the most carefully considered methodological assessments, historical analysis, and art historical interpretations of eighteenth-century Central European culture to have appeared in the last half-century. This is no unremarkable accomplishment, as it can only have been written in the maturity of a scholarly career engaged with the history, culture, and art of Europe in its full geographical and intellectual breadth, from the Renaissance through the Baroque into Neo-Classicism. But as striking as is the erudition informing the book’s multiple theses, equally impressive… Full Review

The title of this collection, Chinese-Language Film, proposes a linguistically based category through which to consider a block of films, directors, and styles. This grouping obviously works against the notion of national cinema, but it also works against a transnational ethnic identification that would include, for example, films about Chinese life in the United States, Europe, South America, or other locales if those films’ predominant language is English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or any language that is not Chinese. Given that language specificity and its implications are often ignored in many fields—under the utopian desire, perhaps, for transparency and easy… Full Review