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

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James A. Van Dyke
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 340 pp.; 4 color ills.; 56 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780472116287)
Well-written, magisterially conceived, and impeccably documented, this volume is both a superb introduction to Franz Radziwill, an intriguing figure almost unknown outside Germany, and an authoritative social history of art that thoroughly revises understandings of the world of modernism during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. As he considers the ambiguities and contradictions of Radziwill’s art, politics, and self-presentation, James A. Van Dyke confronts issues of how to write about and exhibit the works of artists who were sympathetic toward or lived under National Socialism. Radically historicized accounts of “Weimar culture” and the Third Reich, Van Dyke argues,… Full Review
September 25, 2012
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Jae Emerling
New York: Routledge, 2012. 288 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Paper $45.95 (9780415778558)
Kathrin Yacavone
London: Continuum, 2012. 272 pp.; 17 b/w ills. Cloth $110.00 (9781441118080)
It is not farfetched to assume that theoretical reflections on photography will pay close attention to historical perspectives and that histories of photography will take into account theoretical issues. However, Jae Emerling has discovered that hardly any publications on photography have interwoven history and theory in a sustained fashion. Emerling’s Photography: History and Theory demonstrates how insightful this integrated approach can be. This same quality also characterizes Kathrin Yacavone’s Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, also released in 2012. Almost every volume dealing with photography theory discusses the views of both Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes—often combined with… Full Review
September 12, 2012
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Dana Buntrock
New York: Routledge, 2010. 275 pp.; many color ills. Paper $62.95 (9780415778916)
Dichotomies have provided a convenient way to categorize practices and for affiliated architectural groups to contest positions. Prominent dichotomies range from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian to echoes in Kenzo Tange’s Yayoi and Jomon categories relating historic positions to post-World War II modern Japanese architecture, and from continued tensions between notions of modern and traditional as well as global and local. Related contestations shaping architectural production are evident in the Museum of Modern Art’s “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” 1948 debate between modernists, Lewis Mumford, and Bay Area regionalists and more recent postmodern debates between the Whites and Grays… Full Review
September 12, 2012
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Ming Tiampo
Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011. 264 pp.; 12 color ills.; 69 b/w ills. Paper $39.00 (9780226801667)
Few today would dispute the fact that the Japanese collective Gutai Art Association (1954–1972) is the most renowned postwar avant-garde movement coming out of East Asia. If, on the one hand, Gutai’s assertively internationalist attitude ultimately paid off, on the other, its members often paid a high price for embracing internationalism when what was expected from a Japanese avant-garde collective was mainly the particular and exotic. Ming Tiampo’s excellent Gutai: Decentering Modernism, the first English-language monograph on Gutai, explores Gutai’s internationalism as a structuring element in the group’s long and diverse creative trajectory. In doing so, the book contributes… Full Review
September 7, 2012
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Jacqueline Francis
A McLellan Book.. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. 256 pp.; 12 color ills.; 47 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9780295991450)
Jacqueline Francis dedicates her book, Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America, to Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber, the three interwar-era artists who serve as her principle case studies. This gesture is not only touching (who among us doesn’t feel indebted to “our” artists?); it also indicates something about Francis’s stakes. Like so many studies of minority American artists before this one, Making Race is fundamentally a restorative project. But unlike earlier scholarship, which sought to admit more artists to the art-historical canon, Making Race pursues something different—and more exciting. Deploying the lessons of critical… Full Review
September 7, 2012
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Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg, eds.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 472 pp.; 110 color ills. Cloth $69.95 (9780812242850)
Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, edited by Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg, is devoted to the representation of Jews and Judaism in Christian art, with an emphasis on contemporaneous ecclesiastical anxieties on issues concerned with both Christianity and Judaism. The exceptions are one essay on a Jewish subject created by a Christian and another on the architecture of the Venetian ghetto. The essays are framed by Nirenberg’s introduction and final chapter, “The Judaism of Christian Art,” in which he discusses a major theme of the book: that Christians regard art made for… Full Review
September 7, 2012
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David Clarke
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. 272 pp.; 116 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9789888083060)
David Clarke’s Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World is composed of six essays in three sections: “Trajectories: Chinese Artists and the West,” “Imported Genres,” and “Returning Home: Cities between China and the World.” Earlier versions of five of the essays have appeared before, as has some of the information in the first. It is a good idea for a scholar to bring together individual essays and chronologically discontinuous views in a single volume since these then become more easily available for reference and present a kind of informational penumbra for the topics they discuss. The usefulness of this… Full Review
August 30, 2012
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Jonathan Hay
London: Reaktion Books, 2010. 440 pp.; 223 color ills.; 6 b/w ills. Cloth £35.00 (9781861894083)
In Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China, Jonathan Hay strives to understand how the human body senses and interacts with ornament, or “pleasurable things,” as the essayist and comic writer Li Yu (1610–1680) put it. Hay imagines how the hand and eye connected with the shape and texture of a decorated cup or figurine, how a moving body experienced an “object landscape” in a residential interior where luxury goods were displayed and used. Moving outside conventional studies in connoisseurship and technology, Hay juxtaposes objects made from a variety of materials, ranging from ceramics and paintings to… Full Review
August 30, 2012
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Renée Ater
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 214 pp.; 8 color ills.; 63 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780520262126)
When she died at the age of 91 in 1968, Meta Warrick Fuller left behind a long and productive life as a sculptor, but she also bequeathed a formidable challenge to art historians. In 1910, a warehouse fire destroyed her early sculptures, including the student work she made while at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts and the sculptures from her three years (1899–1902) studying in Paris. The formative works stored in that warehouse are known today only through black-and-white photographs. Further complicating the scholar’s task is the fact that Fuller’s most public sculptures were made for fairs… Full Review
August 24, 2012
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Maurice Berger
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 224 pp.; 37 color ills.; 53 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780300121315)
Martin A. Berger
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 249 pp. Paper $27.50 (9780520268647)
Two recent books on visual culture and civil rights envision the pathway through race and nation as an endeavor privileging the visual and utilizing the corporeal. However, these books diverge at the point of “seeing,” with Maurice Berger investing in the expansive range of twentieth-century visual culture as it pertains to African Americans and Martin Berger zeroing in on what he calls “the complex social dynamics of the civil rights movement” (4). The latter, in other words, examines how images aided and abetted racial hegemony and comfort, racial expectation, and national investment. Both For All the World to See… Full Review
August 24, 2012
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