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

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Timothy McCall
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. 240 pp.; 36 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Hardcover $109.95 (9780271090603)
In the introduction to Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy, Timothy McCall states that it is his intention to " . . . explore and interpret how [fifteenth-century Italian princes] . . . used art, spectacle, and especially clothing and adornment to reinforce and advertise power, and to seduce those who beheld them." McCall’s focus on aristocratic masculine dress is a significant addition to the growing literature on Renaissance male fashion. Central and unique to McCall’s argument is the assertion that quattrocento rulers such as Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Borso d’Este, and Alfonso d’Aragona purposefully attracted the… Full Review
November 18, 2024
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Jeehey Kim
London: Reaktion Books, 2023. 272 pp. Cloth $50.00 (9781789147100)
Jung Joon Lee
Durham: Duke University Press, 2024. 304 pp.; 30 color ills.; 44 b/w ills. (9781478025993 )
What constitutes Korean photography? How do photographs of and in Korea shape national identity? Or perhaps more accurately, how are photography and the nation mutually constituted? And how might Korean photography intervene in the history of photography itself? The historiography of Korean photography brings forth a set of methodological issues that continue to shape the field of Korean art history at large. Demanding the construction of “Koreanness” in which a photograph must demonstrate its unique national and cultural authenticity, Korean photography is compartmentalized and perceived as a peripheral modernity that serves or catches up to Euro-American modernity. Two recent works… Full Review
November 15, 2024
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Branden W. Joseph and Drew Sawyer
London: Phaidon Press, 2023. 448 pp. £34.95 (9781838667085)
Brooklyn Museum November 17, 2023–March 31, 2024 Vancouver Art Gallery May 12–September 22, 2024
In September 1934, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), announced that it was staging The Making of a Museum Publication, an exhibition that displayed the entire production process of its own publications, step by step. From manuscript through to multiply-reproduced object, typeset and laid-out, printed and bound, the MoMA show not only reinforced the critical role of printed matter as a medium for display in a modern art museum but also ushered in a heightened sense of self-reflexivity in relation to the catalog as an object of art-historiographical attention. In the subsequent ninety years, the question… Full Review
November 13, 2024
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T.K. Sabapathy and Patrick Flores, eds.
Volume I & II. National Gallery of Singapore, 2023. Cloth (9789811406645)
Southeast Asia is a region of ambiguity and complexity. Existing countries in the region went through different historical transformations before coming into being with diverse linguistic heritages. There is no unified lingua franca. Although—on the surface—there is geopolitical unity (such as through ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), art practitioners often struggle to establish cross-cultural understanding because of a lack of resources and knowledge about their neighboring countries. The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader is an attempt to establish such common ground. With the support of National Gallery Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University, Centre of… Full Review
November 11, 2024
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Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Durham: Duke University Press, 2024. 320 pp.; 62 color ills. Paperback $28.95
The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History is a collection of essays written by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw that address African American artists working in the United States from the end of the eighteenth century to today. Many of the essays are revised and expanded from previously published works and taken together demonstrate both the breadth and focus of Shaw’s scholarly and curatorial work over a twenty-year period: to challenge the discipline of art history for its exclusions, to grapple with the imperatives of history and representation in Black aesthetic practices, and to call for critical engagement… Full Review
November 7, 2024
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Michelle Rich, ed.
Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2023. 360 pp.; 312 color ills.; 13 b/w ills. $65.00 (9780300266870)
In their heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, museum catalogs of permanent collections of art from the ancient Americas fulfilled an indispensable role recording the appearances, whereabouts, and growing knowledge of objects in a then-nascent field. At the same time, they frequently aspired to portray a newly amassed collection as “encyclopedic” and posit its significance. Such catalogs—for example, Lee Parson’s Pre-Columbian Art: The Morton D. May and The Saint Louis Art Museum Collections, published in 1980—regularly commemorated major acquisitions from private collections and, as things of beauty themselves, were typically gifted to potential donors to solicit future… Full Review
November 4, 2024
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Rachel Stephens
University of Arkansas Press, 2023. 340 pp. Cloth $45.00 (9781682262337)
Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture joins two trends broadening art history’s scope: exposing racial ideologies and analyzing popular art. While others have focused on antislavery imagery, Stephens opens new pathways by illuminating art that supported slavery in the United States, gaining access to unseen works, and researching manuscripts to understand the artists and their clients. For art historians, the book offers greater context for interpreting Southern art; for historians of slavery, it offers visual analysis often missing from studies of political culture. It provides a lay of the land and establishes key waypoints. At the… Full Review
October 30, 2024
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Rémy Cordonnier
Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. 183 pp.; 74 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Cloth GPB74.00 (9782503600826)
This volume, L’iconographie du Bestiaire divin de Guillaume le clerc de Normandie, by Rémy Cordonnier provides an excellent introduction to the Divine Bestiary (Bestiaire divin, ca. 1210–11)) by Guillaume le clerc of Normandy, through the presentation of the complex textual tradition and an introduction of what is known of the author and the context. In his text, Guillaume explains that he translated Latin prose into French verse. Though originally from Normandy, Guillaume lived in England and was married with children. Working for patrons in the West Midlands, he wrote poetry, moral allegories, and exempla. The Bestiaire divin … Full Review
October 28, 2024
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Cathleen A. Fleck
Visualising the Middle Ages, Volume 14. Leiden: Brill, 2022. 344 pp. Cloth GPB150.87 (9789004523081)
For anyone concerned with the Middle Ages (and beyond), Jerusalem represents a challenge and an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration. For centuries, the holy city has presented itself to the observer as a liminal space in which the symbolic, legendary, allegorical, and metaphorical dimensions are inextricably superimposed on perceptible reality and tend to overshadow it, to such an extent that any distinction proves useless and even senseless. If there is one constant in the history of Jerusalem, it is its ability to bewilder, puzzle, and thrill its observers, whether they be devout pilgrims of the times past or scholars trying… Full Review
October 25, 2024
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Sampada Aranke
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 232 pp.; 41 color ills.; 0 b/w ills. $25.95 (9781478016663)
Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power highlights visual culture as a tool of anticapitalist and antiracist revolutionary struggle, and is a key methodological guide for those interested in the idea of art history after Black studies. Analyzing the lens-based and print media authored by the Black Panther Party (BPP) that embodied a Black radical aesthetic in the years 1969–1971, Sampada Aranke makes a forceful and convincing argument about how and why “the visual life of Black Power is activated through Black radical death” (4). The book explores a historic condition that has become more acute in… Full Review
October 23, 2024
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