Recently Published Reviews

Tryna Lyons’s The Artists of Nathadwara vividly renders a community of traditional painters. It brings to life a profession that the field of South Asian art studies has tended to sidestep in its focus on objects. Early in the last century, Ananda Coomaraswamy created a vision of the artist as an anonymous yogin, meditating on internalized canons to make his imagery. It was a romantic ideal that still makes itself felt, even though a number of scholars of South Asian art have since turned their attention to individual artists, using inscriptions and archival data to discover information on real… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea seeks simultaneously to remedy faulty perceptions of the modern art of Latin America and to revolutionize the writing of its history. Focusing on two periods of heightened aesthetic inquiry—the 1920s and 1930s, and the decades immediately following the Second World War—it is required reading for anyone concerned with the art produced in this vast region or with twentieth-century art in general The title of the award-winning exhibition invokes the famous drawing published in 1936 by Joaquín Torres-García in which he inverted the map… Full Review

The title Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a time of Plague, 1500–1800 does not adequately prepare the viewer for the beauty, substance, and intelligence of the exhibition. Visitors will, of course, be confronted with the grim reality of plague. They will also be dazzled by the depth of scholarship embodied in the well-chosen images, which suggest unmistakable parallels between an era dominated by fear of pestilence and our own twenty-first-century world. The exhibition’s curators, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas Worcester, organized the exhibition in partnership with Clark University and… Full Review

SubUrban: Tam Van Tran features the paintings and “sculptural drawings” of Tam Van Tran, a Vietnamese-born, Los Angeles–based artist who combines organic substances such as chlorophyll, spirulina algae, and beet juice with acrylic paint, canvas, paper, Wite-out liquid, foil, and metal staples. The exhibition is the latest in the Knoxville Museum of Art’s ongoing program, the SubUrban series, which serves as the first solo museum show and catalogue in the United States for emerging contemporary artists. Tran has participated in group and solo exhibitions since 1999, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and he was selected for participation in the series… Full Review

René Magritte’s art has attracted much attention in the past few years. Following 1999’s Magritte in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Humlebaek, Denmark, and the monumental exhibition in the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2003, a new series of Magritte exhibitions attempts to place the Belgian artist into the spotlight of public interest, responding to new developments in art theory and to new ways of thinking about Surrealism. René Magritte: Der Schlüssel der Träume (The Key of Dreams), the first-ever retrospective of Magritte’s art in Austria, presents more than seventy of his paintings and is staged concurrently with the… Full Review

“Encounter”—the operative word, to my mind, of the title under review—has transformed, in a relatively brief period of time, from a strikingly innovative and promising concept to a somewhat enigmatic, if not altogether elusive, scholarly term of choice, which is increasingly, perhaps even blandly, invoked to describe the meeting between Europe and the wider world in the early modern period. Which is to say, the relatively fresh field of “encounter studies” is already—don’t blink!—ripe for revision. A bit of backstory: The study of Europe’s engagement with the non-European world—particularly during the pivotal moment of global expansion… Full Review

At the outset of her study on Soyer and Jewish identity, Samantha Baskind acknowledges the knotty complications of her venture: “Raphael Soyer did not want to be known as a Jewish artist…. So why am I … writing a book on Soyer and Jewish art” (1–2)? Despite the urban realist’s persistent denial that his religious and cultural heritage influenced his art, this book makes a compelling case for its primacy. While the artist preferred and promoted the labels “American” and “New York” in association with himself and his art, Baskind digs deeper to show how Soyer’s works were informed by… Full Review

Peter Paul Rubens acted on an international stage of grand proportions. His journeys, together with his massive output and universal interests, reflect a life of exceptional scope. Born in Germany and raised in the Southern Netherlands, Rubens traveled throughout the continent and England as both artist and diplomat. A life so rich in variety and achievement is not easily encompassed in a monograph. A catalogue raisonnée of Rubens’s works has required twenty-seven volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, categorized by series, subjects, and commissions and written by a small army of scholars. Rubens’s life and work have also been… Full Review

A strong interest in the ancient Olympics on the part of both scholars and the general public has led several museums abroad to mount exhibitions exploring the artistic and archaeological evidence for Greek sports. The return of the Olympics to Greece in summer 2004 provided the impetus for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), to present Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit, the first exhibition in the United States to rival shows such as Mind and Body: Athletic Contests in Ancient Greece at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, in 1989 or… Full Review

In the middle years of the fifteenth century, the Florentine-born Tommaso Spinelli (1398–1472) became a prominent banker in Rome and sponsored numerous building projects and other artistic enterprises, especially in Florence. This book gives an overview of the Spinelli family, concentrating on Tommaso and discussing in detail his business activities and his donations to the church of Santa Croce, the cloister and infirmary that he built there, the palace nearby, and his villa in the hills east of the city. Some of these matters had already been touched upon by Filippo Moisè (Santa Croce di Firenze: Illustrazione storico-artistica [Florence… Full Review

No one would mistake an artist with a name like Hans Holbein for an Englishman. Yet, as Susan Foister’s new book sets out to demonstrate, Holbein the Younger not only flourished during his tenure in England but also produced works integrally connected to the artistic context of the Tudor period. In Holbein and England, Foister hopes to revise common assumptions by reframing the artist geographically, arguing that Holbein’s experiences in Germany informed his English work and that early-sixteenth-century England was no backwater for the visual arts Misconceptions and unfamiliarity have assured a dearth of literature about English art of… Full Review

Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600 is an ambitious and highly informative exhibition. With 376 items on display from 53 lending institutions—such is the wealth of material that it is hard to believe it took barely fifteen months to assemble—the show constitutes an important part of a program of all things Turkish in London. The aim is to unravel the cultural origins of the Ottomans (or the Turks, as Ottomans were commonly known in the West), but soon it becomes clear that this is no easy task. Thus Turks skillfully unfolds before our eyes as the widest possible… Full Review

The sacrament of baptism is the most fundamental initiation rite of Christianity. In the earliest centuries of Christian worship, it was a lustration that welcomed new converts into the church. During the Middle Ages baptism was typically performed only on Easter and Pentecost; rules that the rite should be performed during these two feasts held sway until the twelfth century. Baptism, like most rituals, evolved gradually over time, and eventually it assumed a new significance linked to the notion of salvation rather than conversion. By the eleventh century, the ritual was performed not only on Easter or Pentecost, but also… Full Review

Much history penned by the American generation that came of age during (and since) the 1960s deploys the narrative mode of a struggle between two binaries. Anthony Alofsin’s new history of design education at Harvard University goes so far as to include the word in its title. For Alofsin, the study of what is one of America’s leading institutions for architecture, landscape, and planning education revolves around a struggle for modernism. Importantly, the ultimate outcome of that skirmish was not the various attitudes that followed modernism, sundry posts, and their ilk, but instead an essential hijacking of America’s inevitable professional… Full Review

Hal Foster’s Prosthetic Gods is a Lacanian-driven contribution to art history and theory. The book does not address problems in the writing of art history, for example, why such writing is prone to monumentalizing artifacts or is crucial in canon formation. Instead, it uses theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to quarantine modern art and art history by taking the special interpretive codes of Freud, and then Lacan, and transferring them to a general code of interpretation. Prosthetic Gods historicizes art history through Lacanian theory. This strategy produces a circularity in which an object, an interpretation thereof, and institutional… Full Review