Browse Recent Book Reviews

Rebecca Peabody’s Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race is the first monograph solely about Kara Walker’s work since Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw’s Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (2004). To be sure, a dizzying amount of literature exists about Kara Walker and her creative output in book chapters, journal articles, and exhibition catalogs. With this in mind, Peabody’s sustained and thematic reading of Walker’s work is welcome, vital, and necessary because she introduces new ways of understanding Walker’s work by focusing on her literary influences. Peabody’s title is apt because Walker’s stories do consume the… Full Review

Didi-Huberman and the Image by Chari Larsson is the first book-length study in English of the work of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, with a focus on his theories about images. Given the fact that Didi-Huberman has written over fifty books in a career spanning four decades and that he is one of the most well-known French theorists of images, such a study is long overdue. In French, German, and Spanish art history and visual studies, Didi-Huberman’s work is an established reference point, awarded with prestigious accolades such as the Adorno Prize. That his work has never received… Full Review

Out of Breath is a critical study of the significance and politics of breathing, guided throughout by explorations of breath and air in contemporary art. A slender book of just ninety-six pages, written in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is as much an essay about the political implications of humanity’s dependence on a shared substrate of air, and air’s implication in global injustice and violence, as a study of art history or criticism. But by the same token, it is also an incisive example of how contemporary art can lend itself to being treated as theory or as… Full Review

The title of Shana Klein’s book, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion, promises a great deal. Each part of the title could be a book in and of itself, and as the author writes “traverses many different disciplines and subject areas” In some ways, this volume succeeds and in other ways falls short. As American painted depictions of fruit ostensibly serve as the primary focus, there are too few illustrations and little in-depth discussion of these pictures. Selecting paintings of five different fruits to illustrate American expansion and… Full Review

Adrián Gorelik’s La grilla y el parque: Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires first appeared in print nearly a quarter century ago, in 1998, but the persistence of Eurocentricity within the disciplines of art and architectural history have delayed its translation and, thus far, limited its reach to primarily Latin Americanist circles. Now, thanks to the translation efforts of Natalia Majluf, it is available in English in paperback and as a free e-book from Latin American Research Commons (LARC). The Grid and the Park: Public Space and Urban Culture in Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 is the first… Full Review

This ambitious and at times quite astonishing book aims at a radical new interpretation of the six poesie that Titian, at the height of his powers and fame, prepared for Philip II from approximately 1553–62. The six paintings of the cycle present narratives of the mythological gods, with a focus on the interaction between gods and mortals. The book is divided into three separate sections. Part I sets out the goals and background of the commission, emphasizing the dynastic ambitions of Charles V and how this is developed in earlier Habsburg imagery. Part II contains individual chapters on each of… Full Review

The subject of Deborah Kahn’s probing book is the way in which narration in eleventh-century France manifested social and political power in Christian kingdoms—in particular, the outward display of a saint’s life in figurative stone sculpture on one church’s exterior. The outstanding contribution of this book is its close reading of the vita of an obscure saint, Eusice, written by Letaldus of Micy (fl. ca. 990s–1020s) and printed here in Appendix I (with full transcription and facing English translation by Steven Burges with Bailey Benson). Kahn interprets the sculpted figural reliefs at Selles-sur-Cher through saintly visions and striking anti-Jewish characterizations… Full Review

A growing body of scholarship on Indigenous visual culture of colonial Latin America has come about since the Columbus Quincentenary. Much of it calls attention to the active participation of Indigenous artists, patrons, and other marginalized groups in the production and consumption of objects and images. Significantly, it challenges earlier scholarship in the field, much of which advanced the problematic idea that the European conquest of the Americas was successful in eradicating key aspects of Indigenous ideology, cosmology, and artistic practices. The eleven scholarly essays that comprise Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas contribute to this critical… Full Review

In early modern South Asia the sale of cloth was the second highest financial generator in the economic market. As a commodity it was prized across the world. Moreover, it was an important status symbol, connecting the far flung outposts of the Mughal Empire (1526–1858). It is therefore surprising that a history of South Asian textiles from this pivotal period has never been written before now. Fortunately, what Sylvia Houghteling presents in The Art of Cloth in Mughal India is more than a straightforward narrative. Rather, it maps a history of a specific art form while offering a multilayered methodological… Full Review

Can we uncover the intention of the artist? With Emulating Antiquity: Renaissance Buildings from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, David Hemsoll has written a detailed new volume that proposes a definitively positive answer within the domain of Renaissance architecture in Florence and Rome. His interest lies primarily in one aspect of the architecture of the period: its relationship to the antique prototypes that provided source material for many works. He posits, with infectious optimism, that a close reading of the full oeuvres of the five architects under consideration will permit “a full and detailed account . . . of how and… Full Review