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

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Jane Taylor
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 165 pp.; 71 color ills.; 6 b/w ills. Hardcover $35.00 (9780226791203)
Jane Taylor, friend and longtime collaborator of William Kentridge, examines the artistic process behind Kentridge’s 2010 production of the Russian opera The Nose, which was based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 short story of the same name and composed by Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich in 1928. As Taylor tells us, the book is less about the production of the opera and more about the making of it. In other words, she is interested in examining how the artist deals with making as a problem-solving operation as well as the operations that happen between head and hand in the course of Kentridge’s… Full Review
May 31, 2018
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When SmartHistory.org, the online scholarly resource for art history students and instructors, debuted in 2007, it was a radical proposition. Instead of purchasing expensive textbooks, students could access videos modeling in-depth visual analysis of well-known works of art and architecture, robustly researched essays on single works and overarching themes, and images that articulate a global art history survey, free through their web browser. Both the website interface and the YouTube–style videos contained within were, in many senses, more germane to students’ consumption patterns and learning habits than a ten-pound textbook. SmartHistory cofounders Beth Harris and Steve Zucker, both graduates… Full Review
May 23, 2018
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Heidi C. Gearhart
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017. 236 pp.; 30 color ills.; 37 b/w ills. Cloth $94.95 (9780271077154)
Through the pages of Heidi Gearhart’s book, Theophilus and the Theory and Practice of Medieval Art, readers are introduced to the surviving medieval copies of Theophilus’s text, On Diverse Arts, and are provided the opportunity to reframe the academy’s classification of this celebrated treatise. Gearhart makes a convincing argument that based on physical evidence, along with the prologues and instructions of On Diverse Arts (often described as a practical handbook or a recipe collection), Theophilus methodically lays out the specific processes for a deliberate system of art-making principles and values—in essence “a distinctly medieval theory of art” (1)… Full Review
May 21, 2018
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Robert Williams
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 314 pp.; 113 b/w ills. Cloth £75.00 (9781107131507)
In Raphael and the Redefinition of Art in Renaissance Italy, Robert Williams has three aims. First, he wants to offer a new account of the achievement of Raphael, emphasizing his expansion of painting’s expressive and conceptual range. Second, he seeks to redefine the Renaissance in Raphael’s image, arguing that Raphael transformed Renaissance art in essential ways that he thinks have been misplaced by recent art historians. Third, he argues for the reorientation of the whole of art history itself, using Raphael to expose the prejudices of the field and the problems in current attitudes toward art and artists. Ultimately… Full Review
May 17, 2018
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Leon Wainwright
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. 240 pp.; 45 color ills.; 5 b/w ills. Paperback $34.95 (9781781384176)
With the objective of freeing the art of British artists of African, Asian, and Caribbean descent, known as “black British artists,” from its historically racialized silo, Leon Wainwright’s new book, Phenomenal Difference: A Philosophy of Black British Art, sets out the author’s ambitious project: to bring the philosophy of phenomenology to bear upon these artworks. This book is theoretically well-grounded, and Wainwright has clearly spent a great deal of time contemplating Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jacques Derrida, among others. However, he has also been in dialogue with scholars and critics… Full Review
May 14, 2018
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Heinrich Wölfflin
Trans Jonathan Blower 100th Anniversary Edition. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015. 368 pp.; 122 b/w ills. Paperback $34.95 (9781606064528)
Wölfflin and the Promise of Anonymity From a certain perspective, it is unclear why art history needs a new translation of Heinrich Wölfflin’s The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art. There are a range of other foundational documents of the discipline that have yet to receive even a first hearing. Moreover, the M. D. Hottinger translation of the text is in print and widely available, and retains much of the elegance, if not the letter, of Wölfflin’s  prose. I gather, too, that readers of the new hundredth-anniversary edition are hardly gravitating… Full Review
May 11, 2018
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Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez, eds.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. 392 pp.; 21 color ills.; 64 b/w ills. Hardcover $30.00 (9780295999579)
Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez have done a great service to the field of visual culture studies with the publication of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture. They have brought together an important collection of recent essays on the eponymous themes and topics, but they have also produced with this volume (stemming from a 2014 VolkswagenStiftung-sponsored symposium in Hanover, Germany) a nodal point in the broadening network of intellectual activity concerned with questions of blackness and the visual among academics and artists, from the emerging to the established. This rich scholarly collection bridges the gap… Full Review
May 9, 2018
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Jacqueline Jung
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 282 pp.; 30 color ills.; 180 b/w ills. Cloth $113.00 (9781107022959)
The Gothic Screen contributes to the body of integrative studies of Gothic art and architecture with an examination of the monumental choir screen that stood between the liturgical choir and the nave and ambulatory. Not a comprehensive catalogue of Gothic screens, the book seeks to “expand our sense of what screens accomplished in their ecclesiastical setting,” which is here understood as “both the physical setting of the Gothic church and the social environment that the church shaped” (2). In this vein, Jacqueline Jung focuses attention on how a screen’s architectural design and sculptural program forged community and structured identity among… Full Review
May 8, 2018
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Sarah Williams Goldhagen
New York: HarperCollins, 2017. 384 pp. Cloth $40.00 (9780061957802)
Critics lamenting the sorry state of today’s built environment are legion. Only a few recognize that many of those responsible for this situation are members of a professional and academic establishment that emerged during the past quarter century, virtually controlling the discourse in the design professions throughout the world. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a distinguished architectural historian who taught at Harvard for ten years and was the architecture critic at the New Republic for eight, begins her new book by suggesting that she is one of these enlightened few. In previous books about Louis Kahn’s monumental architecture and Moshe Safdie’s global… Full Review
May 3, 2018
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Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, eds.
Exh. cat. New York and New Orleans: Independent Curators International and Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, 2016. 230 pp.; 100 color ills. Hardcover $49.95 (9780916365899)
Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, March 7–June 7, 2015; National Gallery of the Cayman Islands, January 14–March 18, 2016; National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, April 28–July 10, 2016; DuSable Museum of African American History, May 23–August 13, 2017; Museum of the African Diaspora, September 20, 2017–March 04, 2018; Ulrich Museum of Art, April 21–August 12, 2018
EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean was published in conjunction with the launch of a traveling group exhibition showcasing the work of nine contemporary artists, each from the circum-Caribbean or its diaspora: John Beadle, Charles Campbell, Christophe Chassol, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Marlon Griffith, Hew Locke, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, and Cauleen Smith. The artists were commissioned to create performance works in public spaces in cities with active carnival traditions, from Nassau, Bahamas, and Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Notting Hill, London, and New Orleans, Louisiana. The catalogue features archival documentary traces of each performance using photographs… Full Review
May 3, 2018
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