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

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Kristina Wilson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 256 pp.; 16 color ills.; 98 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300149166)
In The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934, Kristina Wilson examines the various rhetorical, cultural, and curatorial framing devices through which highly influential New York museums and galleries actively engaged in audience-building for modern American art during a pivotal inter-war decade. Throughout this beautifully illustrated and fascinating volume, Wilson explores the culturally resonant themes and strategies that united the otherwise diverse activities of Alfred Stieglitz and his later circle (chapter 1); the curators and trustees who organized The Architect and the Industrial Arts exhibition (1929) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (chapter 2); the… Full Review
February 25, 2010
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Patrick Noon
New Haven: Yale University Press and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2009. 472 pp.; 60 color ills.; 380 b/w ills. Cloth $125.00 (9780300134216)
Catalogue raisonnés are always long projects, running into decades, and often the life's work of their authors. Patrick Noon's Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings is no exception, written painstakingly over three decades. The volume is very well illustrated, and the meticulous and complete catalogue entries form a continuation of Noon's exhibition catalogue from 1991, Richard Bonington: On the Pleasures of Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press). Since that time, Noon has discovered archival material and has translated letters by Bonington's traveling companion, Charles Rivet. The few earlier studies on Bonington range from reliable to full of errors and misattributions… Full Review
February 23, 2010
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David Summers
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 232 pp.; 8 color ills.; 79 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780807831106)
In contrast to the vast scope (and scale) of his 2003 book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon), David Summers has dramatically focused his investigation in his newest volume, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, choosing instead to examine a few discrete moments in the history of Western art. Over the course of four chapters, Summers traces the development of optical theory and its related fields, describing their changing relationship to Western painting from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. According to Summers, the depiction of light and its interaction with… Full Review
February 23, 2010
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Christine Hediger, ed.
Culture et Société Médiévales Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008. 414 pp.; 43 b/w ills. Paper €65.00 (9782503525778)
An intriguing concept lies behind this anthology: in 1999, a group of graduate students under the direction of Yves Christe in Geneva began the systematic comparison of the iconography of the Bibles moralisées and the stained glass of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. In 2001, their results were presented along with other scholarship on the Sainte-Chapelle at an international colloquium organized by Christe and Peter Kurmann at the Collège de France. Four contributors from the Geneva project (Christe, as well as Christine Hediger, who also edited the volume and wrote its preface, Stanislas Anthonioz, and Maya Grossenbacher) are joined in this… Full Review
February 23, 2010
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Tim Ayers, ed.
New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain, 2008. 296 pp.; 152 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300116700)
The History of British Art, Volume 1: 600–1600 is the first of an ambitious new three-volume series produced by the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain. Edited by Tim Ayers, this volume is, temporally at least, the most ambitious of the three, covering the period of the conversion of Britain under Augustine around 600 AD to a rather more difficult period to account for, ca. 1600. The latter date—which denies the normal boundary for the British Middle Ages with the Dissolution of the Monasteries—does much to challenge still prevalent historiographical problems surrounding the inexact relationship between the periodization… Full Review
February 4, 2010
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Joan Lyons, ed.
Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 2009. 176 pp.; 226 color ills. Paper $35.00 (9780898221268)
Artists’ books are a strange genre in contemporary art, hovering between several different disciplines and having multiple histories. One of the persistent arguments in the field concerns the definition of an artist’s book. A reductive form of this argument might be: is it a craft practice or is it some kind of conceptual art form? Arguing definitions in the abstract is a fruitless and pointless activity, but examining the work of specific artists is rewarding and informative. The publication of a catalogue of work produced at the Visual Studies Workshop Press presents an opportunity to consider a diverse range of… Full Review
February 3, 2010
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Laura R. Bass
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 196 pp.; 50 color ills.; 14 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780271033044)
Over the last two decades much important research has been done on Spanish portraiture of the early modern period and court portraiture in particular. A feature of this research has been its interdisciplinary approach, such as Juan Miguel Serrera’s seminal essay on the uses of portraiture (“Alonso Sánchez Coello y la mecánica del retrato de corte,” in Alonso Sánchez Coello, exh. cat., Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 1990, 38–63) and Javier Portús Pérez’s groundbreaking publications on the representation of art and artists in the literature of the Golden Age (see, for example, Pintura y pensamiento en la España de… Full Review
January 27, 2010
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William Breazeale, Susan Anderson, Christine Giviskos, and Christiane Andersson
Exh. cat. Burlington, VT and Sacramento: Lund Humphries in association with Crocker Art Museum, 2008. 168 pp.; 56 color ills.; 71 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (9780853319887)
Exhibition schedule: Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, May 10–July 27, 2008; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, May 3–July 26, 2009; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery at Reed College, Portland, OR, August 30–December 5, 2009
Anyone who has ever wondered why and how representations of the human nude became so central to Renaissance and post-Renaissance Western art will derive great pleasure from this catalogue, which documents an exhibition of fifty-six drawings from the impressive collection of the Crocker Art Museum. The works splendidly demonstrate the skillful use of pen-and-ink and wash techniques as well as combinations of black, red, and white chalks, most by renowned artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacques-Louis David, and Albrecht Dürer, along with masterly works by less familiar artists. Its numerous high-quality reproductions, informative essays, and catalogue entries for each… Full Review
January 27, 2010
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Lori Boornazian Diel
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 208 pp.; 20 color ills.; 32 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780292718319)
Lori Boornazian Diel’s study of the colonial Mexican manuscript known as the Tira de Tepechpan is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly literature examining colonial historical documents, both pictorial and textual. The Tira de Tepechpan is an annals-style manuscript documenting the history and ruling lineage of the central Mexican town of Tepechpan. It was probably begun around 1553 and its imagery completed ca. 1590/96, with written annotations in Nahuatl added at an unknown time. Its various contributors organized the historical information along a continuous line of year dates taken from the fifty-two-year Mexican calendar. The manuscript, which… Full Review
January 27, 2010
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Henri Dorra
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 384 pp.; 40 color ills.; 110 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780520241305)
Over the past twenty years or so, Paul Gauguin’s imagery has drawn a good deal of interest from scholars who have analyzed it from feminist, post-colonial, and socio-historical perspectives. Taken together, the contributions of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Griselda Pollock, and Stephen Eisenman have deepened our understanding of the ways in which Gauguin operated uneasily within Western, patriarchal, imperialist norms and structures. For her part, Debora Silverman has anchored his work in nineteenth-century Catholic theology and visual culture (Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” Art in America 77 [July 1989]: 119–128, 161; Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Color of Art History… Full Review
January 20, 2010
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