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

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Murat Gül
London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2009. 256 pp.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9781845119355)
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 346 pp.; 8 color ills.; 154 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (9780271027760)
Shirine Hamadeh
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 368 pp.; 8 color ills.; 97 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780295986678)
These three books on Istanbul are welcome additions to an emergent field that it might be possible to call “Istanbul Studies,” with new research centers dedicated to the study of the city, and an increasing number of doctoral students working on Istanbul in Turkey and abroad, mostly at U.S. programs. The ascension of Istanbul into the ranks of global cities must be credited for arousing general interest in the city, both popular and academic. Yet, the number of scholarly works on the architectural urban history of the city, especially in English, does not match this rising interest. Thus, together these… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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Todd Porterfield, ed.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 240 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780754665915)
Caricature still has the power to inflame. In the last five years, several incidents—from the Danish satires depicting Muhammad to the racially tinged caricature of Barack Obama as a crazed chimp published by the New York Post early in his presidency—have shown that caricature can still spark rage as well as pleasure. Developed in tandem with modern conceptions of identity, caricature is a quintessentially modern visual language. Caricature paradoxically reveals the truth of a person’s interior through the deformation of her or his exterior, thus making the invisible visible and satisfying a cultural desire for transparency and the unmasking of… Full Review
September 15, 2011
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Jeff Rosenheim
Exh. cat. London: Steidl, 2009. 408 pp.; 400 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9783865218292)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 3, 2009–May 25, 2009
Luc Sante
Portland, OR: Yeti, 2009. 160 pp.; 127 ills. Paper $24.95 (9781891241550)
Since the early 1980s, there has been a small but steady stream of publications on the cultural, historical, and artistic importance of postcards. Some of the most academically rigorous discussions on postcards have dealt with themes of colonialism, tourism, and representations of cultural and racial otherness. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb’s edited volume Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1998) stand out as two notable examples. Other publications by collectors and historians in the 1980s and 1990s honed in on specific… Full Review
September 15, 2011
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Sheila Dillon
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 238 pp.; 171 b/w ills. Cloth $115.00 (9780521854986)
Sheila Dillon’s Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles does not attempt to present a comprehensive history of Greek portraiture, but focuses on anonymous portraits that cannot be definitively associated with any historical individuals. Dillon neatly eschews vexing questions of specific identity, and the resulting volume is a compelling exploration of formal, theoretical, and contextual issues fundamental to the very genre of portraiture itself. In effect, Dillon disengages from previous preoccupations with individual identification and effectively rescues these mostly anonymous portraits from the general scholarly obscurity in which they have long languished. Dillon rigorously applies methodologies derived from … Full Review
September 15, 2011
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Caroline M. Rocheleau
Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008. 105 pp.; 42 b/w ills. Paper £26.00 (9781407303376)
The architecture of the Amun temple holds an exceptional significance in the study of ancient Nubia. As in Egypt, kingship in Nubia was strongly associated with the Amun cult; yet, unlike their counterparts in Egypt, the Amun temples of Nubia were consistently built of friable sandstone, frequently located in regions of much higher rainfall, and often inscribed in a Meroitic language not yet intelligible to modern scholarship. As a result, deductions about a given Nubian locale’s political and economic role within the state have often been based heavily upon its public architecture, and the function of that architecture has in… Full Review
September 1, 2011
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John Bender and Michael Marrinan
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 296 pp.; 8 color ills.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780804745048)
With the Culture of Diagram, John Bender and Michael Marrinan have written a complex and ambitious study examining the transformation of perception and cognition over the past two hundred and fifty years. How do we describe our world, they ask, and how has that process of description changed since the mid-eighteenth century? While Diderot and d’Alembert’s celebrated Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, provides the starting point for their investigation, Bender and Marrinan examine subjects including the development of French history painting, theater design, linguistics, descriptive geometry, Cubist drawings, and quantum mechanics. This partial list of their dizzying… Full Review
August 25, 2011
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Erica E. Hirshler
Boston: MFA Publications, 2009. 262 pp.; 25 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (9780878467426)
Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting is a thoroughly researched biography of John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and featured in the recently opened Art of the Americas wing. This canonical American painting portrays the four daughters of Sargent’s friends Edward (Ned) and Mary Louisa (Isa) Boit in the front hall of the family’s apartment in Paris. This book, presented as a biography, traces the life of the painting, from conception and production to exhibition and reception, and provides a detailed account of its… Full Review
August 17, 2011
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Marco Folin, ed.
Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors' Club, 2010. 444 pp.; 272 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9781851496433)
Courts and Courtly Arts in Renaissance Italy, an Italian edition of which was published in 2010, draws together the work of twenty-four recognized Italian scholars into an ambitious examination of the historical context and artistic production of the best-known courts across Italy from the end of the fourteenth century, a critical period of consolidation, to 1530, the year Charles V’s coronation in Bologna effectively rearranged the power structures across the peninsula. Although explorations of individual Italian courts such as those of Milan or Florence abound and have been followed by regional investigations, Courts and Courtly Arts provides a broader… Full Review
August 17, 2011
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Walter S. Melion
Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts, vol 1.. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2009. 442 pp.; 157 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (9780916101602)
Walter Melion’s The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625, like the early modern works it studies, calls for a disciplined eye and close reading. Although the text is quite lengthy and includes numerous Latin references, it is neither dry nor tedious to read. Nonetheless, it is demanding. For readers willing to face the challenge, Melion’s book reveals the complexities and nuances of early modern visual piety in a fresh and powerful manner. Not only does it provide a new interpretation of prints seldom studied, it also encourages readers to examine artistic and devotional practices linked to… Full Review
August 17, 2011
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Anne Lacoste
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010. 208 pp.; 168 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9781606060353)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, December 7, 2010–April 4, 2011
The exhibition catalogue Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road celebrates a 2007 gift from the Wilson Centre for Photography to the J. Paul Getty Museum of more than eight hundred photographs by the Italian-born photographer Felice Beato. The gift tripled the size of the Getty’s Beato holdings, making it the world’s largest institutional collection of his photographs, which almost exclusively depict subjects in Asia and the Near East. The exhibition catalogue features 120 of these photographs, organized chronologically to showcase Beato’s long and productive career. Framing this work are informed and thoughtful commentary by Anne Lacoste, assistant curator… Full Review
August 11, 2011
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