Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Hatden B. J. Maginnis
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. 368 pp.; 16 color ills.; 112 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0271015993)
Some of the underlying tensions—I hesitate to use the word conflicts—in this ambitious book are expressed even before it is opened, in the juxtaposition of the name of the great Florentine artist, Giotto, with a detail of the Virgin and Child from the Rucellai Madonna painted by the Sienese master Duccio on the cover. Is the point that the era belongs (or has belonged) verbally or nominally to Giotto (i.e., Florence), but, in fact, visually to Duccio (i.e., Siena)? This would seem to be the sense, at least in part, of the author's dual preoccupation with words and images—with the… Full Review
March 18, 1999
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Alex Coles and Alexia Defert, eds.
London: BACKless Books in association with Black Dog Publishing, 1997. Paper $14.95 (1901033759)
The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity is the second volume in the De-, Dis-, Ex- series from BACKless Books. The volume features interviews with Julia Kristeva and Hal Foster, essays from Rosalind Krauss, Louis Martin, Timothy Martin, Beatriz Colomina, and Howard Caygill, and photographs of Candida Höfer, all of whom focus on the intermingling and friction between the schools of art, architecture, and theory. The anxiety develops when poststructuralist theory, born of literary and political discourse, enters the hardest, most crystallized science, architecture. The anxiety ferments, because the physical nature of architecture resists relativism. The anxiety fills the proponents of interdisciplinarity, because… Full Review
March 17, 1999
Sandra Hindman, Mirella Levi D'Ancona, Pia Palladino, and Maria Francesca Saffiotti
Princeton University Press in association with Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997. 256 pp.; 33 color ills.; 217 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0691059713)
At a session on the historiography of illuminated manuscripts held during the recent annual CAA conference in New York, it was generally agreed that the publication of catalogues was of particular importance to the advancement of scholarship in manuscript studies. Exhibitions, exhibition catalogues, and catalogues of collections are essential instruments in manuscript studies, because they bring illuminated manuscripts out of the sequestered environment of rare book libraries and into public view. Of course, the Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art hardly needs publicity. Only a few of the manuscript illuminations belonging to this celebrated group of objects, however… Full Review
March 17, 1999
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Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker, eds.
Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with Yale University Press, 1998. 372 pp.; 48 color ills.; 272 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (0300075219)
This long-awaited volume contains a large selection of the papers that were delivered at a symposia in Washington, D.C., in 1995 and The Hague in 1996 in connection with the Vermeer exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art and the Mauritshuis respectively. The monumental exhibition was itself a spectacular success, drawing immense crowds at each of its venues. In some respects the very occasion of the exhibition as the first one dedicated exclusively to the work of Vermeer could be construed as a culmination of decades of intense scholarly interest in the painter. Indeed, rarely in the discipline of… Full Review
March 17, 1999
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Linda Merrill
New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Smithsonian Institution, 1998. 408 pp.; 105 color ills.; 150 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300076118)
In 1875, Frederick R. Leyland, a prosperous Liverpool businessman and patron of the arts, invited two artists to design schemes for the interior of his new London house at 49 Prince's Gate. He asked his friend the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler to decorate the entrance hall and charged a designer of metalwork and japoniste interiors, Thomas Jekyll, to redesign the dining room to hold his large collection of Chinese blue-and-white Kangxi porcelain, as well as Whistler's painting La princesse du pays de la porcelain. Jekyll's scheme for the room included an elaborate system of open shelves, a Jacobean-style ceiling… Full Review
March 16, 1999
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Linda Rugg
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 293 pp.; 45 b/w ills. Paper $20.00 (0226731472)
In recent decades, some of the most influential books about photography have been written by authors outside of art history and American studies, the areas that have fostered photographic studies at universities since World War II. Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punishment increased interest in the social ramifications of photographic practice, and reoriented many scholars from strictly archival pursuits to the contemplation of photography's societal and psychological consequences. The enlarged scope of photographic studies, together with the broad presence of photography in contemporary art, continues to encourage scholars in the humanities and the social sciences to… Full Review
March 16, 1999
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Jaś Elsner
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 320 pp.; 68 color ills.; 79 b/w ills. Paper $16.95 (0192842013)
In his influential Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art, first published in 1953, Otto Brendel gave a masterful survey of prior accountings of the subject. He noted how Roman art has been the creation of the many presents from Ghiberti's notion that Roman art ended in the reign of Constantine through Winckelmann's privileging of ancient Greece to the detriment of Rome, to the early 20th-century nationalism/racism and formalism/structuralism of Strzygowski and Kaschnitz-Weinberg, respectively. The process continues with the French structuralism or European Marxism that have prevailed since Brendel wrote. This general state of affairs applies, of course, to the… Full Review
March 16, 1999
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Fredrika H. Jacobs
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 229 pp.; 32 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0521572703)
How is the critical language of art different for the women artists of sixteenth-century Italy than for the men? In a history of art dominated by male artists, how did writers from 1550 to 1800 differentiate the female capacity for creativity from that of males? In particular, what did it mean to be called a virtuosa, a term reserved for few women artists during the cinquecento? The author addresses these and other important questions in this provocative and illuminating study. Jacobs begins with an extraordinary statistic: Half of the forty women artists of cinquecento Italy have no surviving works.… Full Review
March 16, 1999
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Ding Ning
Beijing: Shenghuo Dushu Xinzhi Sanlian Shudian, 1997. 368 pp.; 23 b/w ills. $19.80
Mianyan zhi wei: zouxiang yishushi zhexue (Dimensions of Duration: Toward a Philosophy of Art History) is the first comprehensive introduction of the methodology of Western art history to a Chinese audience. Ding Ning, professor of art history at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, has focused on the revisionary writings on the theory and practice of art history that were published for the most part between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s in the Anglo-American world. The revisionist key is reflected in the author's borrowing of the 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's time concept durée (mianyan) in the title of… Full Review
March 15, 1999
Janice Driesbach
Oakland, CA: University of California Press in association with Oakland Museum of California, 1998. 148 pp.; 75 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (0520214323)
Exhibition schedule: Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, June 20–Sept. 13, 1998; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., October 30, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, June 20–Sept. 13, 1998–Mar 7, 1999; Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, Santa An Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, June 20–Sept. 13, a, Calif., April 17–June 6, 1999
Art of the Gold Rush, a book that accompanies an exhibition of the same name, sets out to present the impact of the gold rush on the northern California art scene. The authors' stated aim was to depict the era in works of art selected both for their visualization of gold rush themes, and for their intrinsic aesthetic quality. The project is a fascinating one, linking the influx of miners and artists with the rise in appreciation of the fine arts in San Francisco and Sacramento. The exhibition and book present more than genre paintings of the gold rush, extending… Full Review
March 15, 1999
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C. Jean Campbell
Princeton University Press, 1998. 294 pp.; 51 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0691012105)
All visitors to San Gimignano remember the vividly colored and enigmatic fresco decoration of a small tower room in the Palazzo Comunale, now a museum. A series of narratives in reds, pinks, and greens decorate the walls, notable both for the fancy dress of the characters and for their occasional lack of dress in what appear to be compromising situations: in bed, in the bath, and in various monetary transactions. Jean Campbell's study recalls much of the wonder and pleasure that accompanies a first encounter with the frescoes. Indeed, the book is the first comprehensive consideration of these frescoes (discovered… Full Review
March 15, 1999
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Robert E. Hegel
Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. 512 pp.; 67 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0804730024)
Craig Clunas
Princeton University Press, 1997. 221 pp.; 16 color ills.; 80 b/w ills. Cloth $39.50 (1861890087)
Both of these books deal extensively with printed and painted pictures made during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), commonly designated as part of the late imperial era. Clunas and others, however, refer to the years 1500-1800 as China's early modern period, in part to challenge Eurocentric definitions of modernization and modernity, but also to recognize global connections linking the economy of China with the economies of Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the world at this time. Craig Clunas is an art historian who has written extensively on Ming dynasty discursive practices regarding various arts. Superfluous Things: Material… Full Review
March 15, 1999
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Joanna R. Barnes and J. Patrice Marandel
Pennsylvania State University Press in association with American Federation of Arts, 1994. 191 pp.; 92 color ills.; 51 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (0812232755)
Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, N.C., October 14–December 11, 1994; Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Fla.; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta; Dahesh Museum, New York, September 22, 1998–January 2, 1999
The Dahesh Museum in New York was the latest venue for an exhibition titled French Oil Sketches and the Academic Tradition, organized by the American Federation of the Arts and previously shown, in a more expanded version, at the Mint Museum, the Society of the Four Arts, the Arkansas Art Center, and the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. The exhibition was composed entirely of works from a single private collection that is on long-term loan to the University Art Museum in Albuquerque. Perfectly suited to the Dahesh Museum, both for its size and its theme, this exhibition… Full Review
January 28, 1999
Benoy K. Behl
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. 256 pp.; 186 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0810919834)
When I first opened this book, the spine broke, a premonition of things to come. But let me start with the book's strengths, for certainly there are some. Benoy Behl is a photographer who enjoys the challenge of working in low-light conditions such as those of the rock-cut shrines that form the Buddhist monastery of Ajanta. His photographs bring out the extraordinary richness of Ajanta's paintings and capture details that I have failed to see or to see in the lush fashion that his photographs capture. It is too bad, however, that the book's many color plates represent details… Full Review
January 28, 1999
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Vincent Pomarede and Arlette Serullaz
Exh. cat. Thames and Hudson, 1998. 408 pp.; 250 b/w ills. $65.00 (0500092753)
Grand Palais, Paris, April 7–July 20, 1998; Philadelphia Museum of Art, September 15, 1998–January 3, 1999
"I am in that phase of life when the tumult of the mad passions does not mingle with the delightful emotions which works of art give to me. I don't know the meaning of dusty papers and hateful occupations, which is what almost all human beings must devote themselves to; instead of thinking of business, I think only of Rubens and Mozart: my great business, for a week, is the memory of an aria or a picture. I go to my work as others hasten to their mistress, and when I leave it, I carry away into my solitude or… Full Review
January 28, 1999
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