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

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LaNitra M. Berger
New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. 192 pp.; 46 ills. Hardback $110.00 (9781350187498)
Author’s note: Historical terminologies of racial classification, including “Black” and “Coloured,” which were instantiated by the Population Registration Act of 1950, in South Africa, are used throughout Berger’s book so as not to erase the violence of policies enacted under apartheid. Maid in Uniform, a 1955 portrait of a Black South African domestic worker, is arguably one of the strongest works by painter Irma Stern (1894–1966). Dressed in the uniform typical of her profession, Stern’s defiantly unwilling subject purses her lips and crosses her arms; her eyes demur from the viewer. The maid’s expression signals the complex social relations… Full Review
April 28, 2023
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Jennifer M. Feltman and Sarah Thompson, eds.
London: Routledge, 2019. 344 pp. Cloth $160.00 (9780815396734)
What happens after the initial creative act? In her introduction to The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, Jennifer Feltman calls attention to the fact that art historical writing since Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects has typically prioritized the time of a work’s creation, and instead situates the case studies included in the edited volume in the time between then and now. The book makes the case that works we now label “medieval” are never exclusively so, as they have been transformed in later years, whether materially, semantically, or both. Overall, the collection… Full Review
April 27, 2023
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David Ekserdjian
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 496 pp.; 250 ills. Hardcover $75.00 (9780300253641)
David Ekserdjian describes his new and important book, The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative, as a work of “almost demented ambition” (6). The description is apt. A thorough introduction, seven chapters, a conclusion, two appendices, and the usual scholarly apparatus adds up to just over 400 pages of tightly-packed, double-columned text. And that text sets out to provide an almost encyclopedic account of the most frequently produced type of art object in Renaissance Italy. Accordingly, the author references “well over a thousand” (61) works of art. These involve the whole of the Italian peninsula, date from circa… Full Review
April 24, 2023
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Adrian Anagnost
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. 248 pp.; 62 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300254013)
Rivaled only by Mexico as a center of artistic modernism in the Americas, Brazil, with its wealth of innovative architecture, landscape design, urbanism, painting, sculpture, and performance art, has long attracted the attention of Anglophone scholars and curators. Apart from survey texts, architecture and the other arts have generally been treated separately, in both exhibitions and monographs, which have typically focused on a single person or phenomenon, or positioned Brazilian examples as part of a geographically broader study. Adrian Anagnost, however, brings the country’s arts into dialogue during the pivotal decades from the mid-1920s through the 1960s in Spatial Orders,… Full Review
April 17, 2023
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Adele Nelson
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022. 382 pp.; 50 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780520379848)
Adele Nelson’s new book is a significant contribution to the literature on twentieth-century Brazilian art and culture. Brazil has been central to art historical research in the last two decades, and numerous scholars, both international and Brazilian, have turned their attention to the art produced in the immediate postwar period, a moment when the foundation of the São Paulo Bienal and a surge of museum building transformed the artistic landscape in the country. Nelson’s study is groundbreaking in several ways: it challenges the dominant narrative that the emergence and evolution of abstraction in Brazil was tied primarily to a quest… Full Review
April 14, 2023
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Dario Donetti and Cara Rachele, eds.
Brepols, 2021. 176 pp.; 60 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Hardback € 85.00 (9782503591186)
Although architectural drawings were made before the Renaissance, the increasing availability of paper in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe had a profound influence on the tools and processes of architectural design. Paper was economical, flexible, portable, and an efficient medium for capturing ideas quickly and for conveying elaborate and complex ideas about masses and volumes in visual terms. But architects did not abandon centuries-old tools overnight, and throughout the Renaissance, drawings continued to be made with a variety of media and for diverse purposes. Generations of modern historians, however, have given primacy to drawings on paper and have studied… Full Review
March 27, 2023
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Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk, eds.
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 342 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth € 119.00 (9789462989085)
This volume, featuring nine essays and an extensive introduction by its editors, stems from scholarly discussions hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Written by a multidisciplinary group of established scholars affiliated with universities across the United States and Canada, this book attempts to shift the scholarly debate about postclassical Rome from the concepts of decline and renewal to those of continuity, adaptation, reuse, reconstruction, memory, and (creative) resilience—a concept highlighted in the introduction (25–26). In this endeavor, the volume is successful and should be of interest to those engaged with… Full Review
March 1, 2023
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Michelangelo Sabatino and Ben Nicholson, eds.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 408 pp.; 22 color ills.; 160 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9781517903145)
The typical monographic treatment of a building or a community begins with a discussion of the patron’s plan and then traces the construction and development of the site to completion. In some cases, the history of the building or community is traced through subsequent changes and adaptations, concluding with its present state—or its destruction. This book takes a somewhat different course, as it starts with the founding of a utopian community in 1814 by George Rapp and  a group of disaffected Lutherans from Württemberg in Germany who applied the name New Harmony (after their earlier Pennsylvania settlement) to their new… Full Review
February 27, 2023
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Angela Vanhaelen
Penn State University Press, 2022. 236 pp.; 14 color ills.; 47 b/w ills. Cloth $114.95 (9780271091402)
The artful protagonists of The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam are witty enchantments, products of active imaginations whose disappearance requires further imaginative action. Angela Vanhaelen brings to life the Amsterdam doolhoven, labyrinths attached to an array of entertaining displays that sprang up in the prosperous Dutch city beginning in the seventeenth century. This unprecedented study of a phenomenon unique to Amsterdam reveals a landscape of innovation, foreign-sourced artisanal knowledge, and moral edification pivoting around unexpected sites: early modern amusement parks that, along with taverns and inns, functioned as spaces for a cosmopolitan range of visitors to encounter astonishing works… Full Review
February 13, 2023
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Monica Bravo
New Haven: Yale Universtiy Press, 2022. 256 pp.; 110 color ills.; 33 b/w ills.; 143 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300253634)
The past two decades have seen an explosion of interest in early twentieth-century Mexican visual culture and especially in photography, which has been the subject of a number of important books which include Esther Gabara’s Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008), Roberto Tejada’s National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Andrea Nobile’s Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2010). Other recent books include discussions of photography in a larger context that also includes painting, design, and literature, such as Tatiana Flores’s… Full Review
February 6, 2023
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