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How did artists in Syria develop Arab modernist painting and aesthetic philosophies at the start of a century characterized by warfare and in the midst of the violent imposition of borders by colonial powers, the displacement of people, and the assignment of new identities? Anneka Lenssen’s Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria explores the question of modern art’s place in this turbulent era. The book is an authoritative study of the emergence of modernist art in the context of contemporary politics and territorial contestations in Syria, spanning from the last years of the Ottoman Empire through 1965… Full Review

In a rapidly growing canon of scholarship on food in art, Marni Reva Kessler adds her personal voice and unique approach to the subject in Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art. In four chapters on depictions of fish, butter, fruit, and ham by French artists Édouard Manet, Antoine Vollon, Gustave Caillebotte, and Edgar Degas, Kessler purposefully chooses not to focus on the food’s delicious and mouthwatering qualities—a striking choice, given France’s reputation for culinary excellence. Rather, Kessler analyzes unsettling pictures of fish postmortem, stabbed butter, and discarded meats that dismantle popular understandings of food pictures… Full Review

The role of a bodhisattva in Buddhism has often been compared to that of a saint in Catholicism: an intimate and approachable divine figure who would be willing to put their own enlightenment on pause in order to ensure the salvation of all sentient beings. Among all, the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin in Chinese), known as the Goddess of Compassion in English, has an outsize role in East Asian Buddhism. While she is ubiquitous in Chinese art, the Goddess of Compassion is woefully underrepresented in scholarly works, which focus mainly on imperially sponsored icons and primarily from the perspective of elite… Full Review

Readers may know Michèle Hannoosh best from her work on the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. Alerted to error-riddled versions of his famous Journal (while researching her landmark Painting and the “Journal” of Delacroix, Princeton University Press, 1995), Hannoosh returned to its sources. In her two-volume critical edition of the Journal (José Corti, 2009) and associated publications, Hannoosh brought to light a vast array of new material and ordered a labyrinth of cross-references. In Jules Michelet, Hannoosh focuses on an inaugural specialist in what Michel Foucault called “history itself” (L’Archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, 1969, 13). Two… Full Review

Like the Rococo style his work came to epitomize, the artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s life was seemingly unpredictable, liberated, and characterized by constant change. Fragonard (1732–1806) began his career by winning the coveted Prix de Rome, and in 1761 he presented an ambitious history painting as his reception piece to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. The painting placed the young artist in high ranking within the elite establishment, but after such success he unexpectedly turned away from public life as an academic painter, prioritizing instead inconsistent commissions from private clients and working in artistic styles that the Académie… Full Review

(An open-access version of this book is available at OAPEN: Open Access Publishing in European Networks.) Early in her important account of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, arguably the most significant critic-artist partnership to emerge in postcolonial India, Saloni Mathur characterizes her work as “an ongoing intellectual debt” (xii). The debt may be hers, but it is conveniently shared by everyone working on the history of twentieth-century art and criticism. Building on extended conversations and sustained archival research, Mathur considers Kapur’s writings between the years 1968, when she drafted In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in… Full Review

Historically defined by the hypermasculinity of the “Heroic Age” of polar exploration, political contestation, and scientific observation, Antarctica today represents a critical multidisciplinary meeting point. Polly Gould’s Antarctica, Art and Archive offers a timely contribution to the historical study of Antarctica and indicates the refractive interplay among visual media, temporalities, and histories. Gould is both author and artist, and her archival study of the work of Edward A. Wilson and the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13 is presented in conversation with her own artistic practice. Taken as a whole, the book brings together a complex series of interrelated histories, materials… Full Review

Must We Praise Sade? In her defense of the notoriously vile writings of the Marquis de Sade, “Must We Burn Sade?,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “In a criminal society, one must be criminal” (introduction to The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, Grove Press, 1966, 58). The oft-cited quote encapsulates the feminist philosopher’s tempered response to the eighteenth-century libertine texts of Donatien Alphonse François (better known as the Marquis de Sade) and their place within modern European history as bastions of unfettered freedom of expression. In novels such as The 120 Days of… Full Review

The contributors to the exhibition catalog Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal . . . write with depth and acuity about the artist’s complex body of work, which spans three decades. By asking questions about the role of the arts in democratizing visuality and creating a more civically engaged public, the essays by Julia Dolan, Sara Krajewski, and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, as well as an interview between Thomas and the art historian Kellie Jones, combine to convey a deeply reflective portrait of the artist and offer new insights into the breadth of his artistic growth. The catalog and the… Full Review

I doubt that this review can do justice either to its subject or to its author, though I was somewhat comforted to read that Bret L. Rothstein himself admitted to disliking puzzles. Still, I may not be the right person to review this book, for I confess that I also loathe most puzzles. Deeply frustrating, they make me feel unworthy to share the company of intelligent beings who appreciate them. What is it that allows some people to “get” a puzzle in a matter of minutes while others futilely ponder them, not getting anywhere? Another pause before proceeding: this book… Full Review