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

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Patrizia Tosini
Rome: Ugo Bozzi Editore, 2008. 584 pp.; 136 color ills.; 363 b/w ills. Cloth $375.00 (8870030431)
Born in Brescia in 1532, following a two-year period of study in Padua (1544–46) and three years in Venice (1546–49), Girolamo Muziano moved to Rome, where he would spend the rest of his life. The ambitious young painter and draughtsman, like so many other “foreign” artists, sought fame and fortune in the papal capital. Giovanni Baglione, the artist’s early biographer, goes so far as to write that Muziano, determined to become an excellent painter, “applied himself with the most insistent fervor of his spirit and care of mind not only to the study of the antiquities and best modern works… Full Review
August 5, 2009
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Michael Gaudio
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 232 pp.; 79 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (9780816648474)
Engraving has long been part and parcel of the European enterprise of ethnographic knowledge. Indeed, the discovery of the Americas occurred within decades of the development of copper-plate engraving. By the late sixteenth-century, engraving was one of several technologies that Europeans saw as distinguishing themselves from New World “savages,” precisely because these technologies enabled Europeans to acquire a grasp on the world that Native peoples seemingly could not achieve. In turn, these technologies, especially those associated with exploration, fostered the creation of new forms of knowledge, most notably accounts of the lives and customs of Native North Americans, a discipline… Full Review
August 5, 2009
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Sherry C. M. Lindquist
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. 282 pp.; 12 color ills.; 64 b/w ills. Cloth $114.95 (9780754660460)
The Chartreuse de Champmol is known to students of the fifteenth century as the burial mausoleum of the Valois Burgundian dukes and the location of such famous works as Claus Sluter’s Well of Moses, naturalistic portal sculptures of Margaret of Flanders and Philip the Bold, and Philip the Bold’s tomb with its pleurants. There has been renewed interest in both these individual works and the monument as a whole in the past decade, spurred by the recent Paris-Cleveland show Art from the Court of Burgundy (2004–5) and publications by Renate Prochno, Susie Nash, and Sherry Lindquist among others… Full Review
July 29, 2009
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Stella Panayotova
New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. 352 pp.; 347 color ills. Cloth $125.00 (9780500238523)
Virtually unknown before 2004, the Macclesfield Psalter has since emerged as a key work for the study of East Anglian book painting of the first half of the fourteenth century. Named for the Earls of Macclesfield in whose library at Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire, it had been housed, the manuscript was auctioned as lot 587 at Sotheby’s on June 22 of that year and was initially purchased for the department of manuscripts at the Getty Museum. It was subsequently prevented from exportation by the Minister of Culture and was purchased by the Fitzwilliam Museum in February of 2005, where it is… Full Review
July 22, 2009
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Nancy K. Anderson
Exh. cat. Washington, DC and Burlington, VT: National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, 2008. 224 pp.; 110 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9781848220065)
Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, September 14, 2008–January 4, 2009; Seattle Museum of Art, February 26–May 24, 2009
During the 1880s, George de Forest Brush produced a unique series of paintings of the American Indian. The exhibition George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings, organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Seattle Art Museum, put this series on display, with almost all of Brush’s major Indian paintings shown together for the first time. The paintings are remarkable for their combination of an intense style of French Academic realism and American subject matter. The accompanying catalogue is a collection of five critical essays devoted to the series, with an emphasis on the complex relationship… Full Review
July 22, 2009
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José Luis Díez and Javier Barón, eds.
Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007. 520 pp.; 286 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Paper £48.00 (9788484801269)
Exhibition schedule: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, October 31, 2007–April 20, 2008
El siglo XIX en el Prado (The Nineteenth Century in the Prado), the hefty catalogue for the exhibition of the same name, documents some ninety-five paintings and twelve sculptures from the Spanish museum. Thoroughly researched and generously illustrated, the catalogue is an important step forward in making the nineteenth-century paintings and sculptures in the Prado collections available for study. Except for Goya, Fortuny, and Sorolla, most of these artists are almost completely unknown outside the Iberian Peninsula. A shortened version of the catalogue, which lacks an essay on the institutional history of the collection as well as a compendium… Full Review
July 8, 2009
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Daniel R. Guernsey
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. 253 pp.; 72 b/w ills. Cloth $114.95 (9780754657200)
One intellectual consequence of the social and political upheavals of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe was the speculative search for meaningful patterns of historical development. Inspired by lofty notions of the artist as a poet-philosopher, a few exceptional painters joined the effort, producing grandiose schemes of “universal history.” Daniel Guernsey explores this material using four case studies: James Barry’s The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture (1777–1784), the mural cycle that he painted for the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London; Eugène Delacroix’s hemicycle and cupola decorations charting the rise and fall of ancient… Full Review
July 8, 2009
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John Onians
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 239 pp.; 42 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9780300126778)
It is just ten years since Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist from London University, published his Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). It was a small book, animated by a big idea: that recently established neurological facts about vision could go a long way toward explaining how the visual arts work. He suggested, for example, that artists interested in motion tend to paint with a more restricted palette than artists who focus on immobility, and that this tendency arises from the fact that perceptions of color, form, and motion are registered in different… Full Review
July 1, 2009
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Kenneth Baker
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 160 pp.; 1 color ills. Cloth $30.00 (9780300138948)
There are few works of art produced in the United States since the Second World War that have experienced a more uneven and generally unusual reception than The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria of 1977. Alongside Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), The Lightning Field iconically defines the type of large, site-specific Earthwork characteristic of Land Art’s critical and popular ascension in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet despite its centrality to the formation of Land Art, critics and scholars treat The Lightning Field more often as a splashy illustration for book jackets and magazine… Full Review
June 24, 2009
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Kenneth Bendiner
London: Reaktion Books, 2004. 240 pp.; 79 color ills.; 68 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (9781861892133 )
Kenneth Bendiner’s Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present presents a novel survey of food imagery in many guises—as still life; market, kitchen, and genre scenes; abstractions; and even landscapes. Covering art from the past six centuries in the West, he emphasizes paintings, while including a few works in other media (manuscripts, fresco, watercolor, and sculpture). The well-chosen illustrations—ranging from the Limbourg Brothers’ January (1413–16) in the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, to two examples from 1996 by Wim Delvoye and Damien Hirst (Susan, Out for a Pizza—Back in Five Minutes—George and This Little… Full Review
June 24, 2009
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