Browse Recent Book Reviews

Color—its optical properties, its physiological effects, its natural and human origins, its cultural and emotional associations—has been John Gage’s subject of choice for several decades, and no one has worked in this area more, or more fruitfully, than he. Gage’s most recent book is apparently narrower in scope but turns out to be more comprehensive in its claims than his Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (New York: Bulfinch, 1993) and Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Those earlier studies explored the symbolic and practical functions of color throughout… Full Review

David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America ends with the cultural phenomenon whose emergence it explains: the Victorian parlor, described by T. S. Arthur in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1849 as a sort of Daguerreian Gallery stuffed with mass-produced goods from Hitchcock chairs and bronze shelf clocks to colorful, machine-woven carpets and illustrated books. Each of these commodities, Jaffee demonstrates, “took its meaning from the ensemble” (323). Contrary to what one might expect, he argues, this emergent middle-class aesthetic had its origins not in the city but in the New England countryside—a claim he… Full Review

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s composite paintings are surely among the most entertaining images produced in Europe during the sixteenth century. Twenty-first century viewers respond to them immediately with delight and curiosity, and usually also remark on how much they are like Surrealist paintings. The same sorts of responses are found in art-historical scholarship. Renaissance studies has long neglected Arcimboldo altogether, with the result that his paintings remained to be effectively studied within their own context. In Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann seeks to rectify this lacuna in art-historical scholarship and to elucidate the deeper meaning… Full Review

Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti, editors of Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe, begin their introduction by reminding the reader that many early modern people did not live exclusively in houses. Instead, the period saw large numbers of women and men from diverse social backgrounds who experienced a variety of domestic arrangements in different types of institutions for part or all of their lives. The slight change of the book’s title from that of the 2004 conference at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum entitled “Domestic and Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe” from which it emerged reflects an… Full Review

Renewed scholarly interest in ancient clay figurines from Egypt, the Near East, and the broader Mediterranean world has driven a recent resurgence in coroplastic studies. Until recently, several factors limited these studies. Many of these figurines were uncovered in large-scale excavations during the early twentieth-century, when recording techniques and excavator priorities meant that context was only cursorily documented, if at all. Furthermore, many pieces in modern museums were acquired from the art market and have no provenance. As a result, research on figurine date and function has been limited, concentrating on stylistic analysis and (less frequently) methods of production. However… Full Review

To the modern day reader, hospitals and scientific societies might seem to be unlikely settings for exhibiting and discussing contemporary art. In The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism, Craig Ashley Hanson shows how it made perfect sense that such venues would foster art theory and practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The leading role in this book is played by the figure of the virtuoso, whose eclectic interests were united under the umbrella of curiosity. Encompassing activities as wide ranging as medicine (learned and unlearned), classical studies, and art collecting, patronage, practice, and… Full Review

Cherise Smith’s Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deveare Smith and John P. Bowles’s Adrian Piper: Race, Gender and Embodiment each explore performance, identity, and the role that the body plays in both. More than isolated studies of artists, however, these texts are equally concerned with the discourses that surround them. Through her survey of four female artists working in performance from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, Smith offers an analysis of the ideological, social, and artistic contexts in which these artists negotiate the boundaries of race, gender, and… Full Review

Kirsten Pai Buick has been establishing herself as the authority on Mary Edmonia Lewis over the past decade and a half with a series of monographic articles and a dissertation (University of Michigan, 1999). Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject is her anticipated full-length examination of this sculptor’s career. It is a thoughtful, groundbreaking study that should be a must-read for anyone interested in art of the United States and in a nuanced treatment of race, ethnicity, and gender. Buick’s book challenges late twentieth-century identity politics of current art… Full Review

Christiana Payne’s John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter is part of a broader trend in current scholarship to reevaluate the Pre-Raphaelites. Important texts such as Timothy Barringer’s Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) have focused new attention on the radical nature of the movement and the contested concept of artistic “realism.” In the past decade, major monographic exhibitions of the movement’s founding artists John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as a number of specialized scholarly studies, have expanded what Prettejohn… Full Review

For the first half of the twentieth century, Roman art history was dominated by questions of typology, chronology, and iconography as scholars attempted to articulate what was “Roman” about Roman art. The field has since embraced social-historical analyses, and contextual approaches remain a dominate trend. The variety of methodologies and the vast quantity and range of objects included in the category of Roman art have resulted in an extraordinarily diverse body of scholarship, the key themes of which have been summarized in The Art Bulletin state-of-the-field essays by Brunhilde Ridgway on ancient art and Natalie Kampen on Roman art (Brunhilde… Full Review