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

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Kaira M. Cabañas
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 192 pp.; 90 b/w ills. Paper $27.50 (9780226174594)
In Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), Isidore Isou declares “ISOU will unmake words into their letters,” completing what he identifies as modern poetry’s “phase ciselant” (chiseling or reductive phase)—the avant-gardist project of purifying language of all semantic function inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire’s elevation of form above poetic “anecdote.” Isou founded the literary movement Lettrism in 1946 shortly after fleeing his native Romania for Paris. Kaira M. Cabañas’s Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde shows how Isou’s influential film of 1951, Traité de bave et d’éternité (“Treatise on Venom… Full Review
February 7, 2017
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Alexandra Stara
The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950. Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 198 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Paper $54.95 (9781138245402)
When Alexandra Stara learned the Louvre was mounting an exhibition accompanied by a catalogue with twenty-seven contributors on the same subject as her recent Oxford doctoral thesis—the Museum of Monuments, as she refers to it—she must have anticipated being run over by a Gallic bus. It is fortunate, therefore, that the Louvre’s publication Un musée révolutionnaire: Le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir (Paris: Hazen, 2016) not only confirms the significance of this short-lived institution, but also does nothing to contest Stara’s core argument: the Museum of Monuments “heralded the modern understanding of artifact-based history” (90). The Museum… Full Review
February 3, 2017
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Mary Ellen Miller and Claudia Brittenham
Austin and Mexico City: University of Texas Press and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2013. 285 pp.; 600 ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780292744363)
When a group of late eighth-century Maya painters working at the modestly sized site of Bonampak rendered a dazzling mural program that presented local nobility with pomp and optimism, they were unaware that theirs would be among the final artistic efforts of the southern lowland Maya region. Their paintings, dating to 791 CE, span the walls of a three-room building in the rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, and present confident scenes of military victory and courtly pageantry that appear at odds with the presumed realities of a society in decline. Rediscovered in 1946, these fortuitously preserved works have provided scholars with… Full Review
February 2, 2017
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Dell Upton
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. 280 pp.; 59 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780300211757)
Within years after the end of Reconstruction (the period from 1863 to 1877 during which the federal government controlled states of the former Confederacy and African Americans attained fundamental rights of citizenship), supporters of the Confederacy began commemorating its short-lived existence, its soldiers, and the “Lost Cause” interpretation of the Civil War by placing monuments throughout the South. For the most part, these monuments stood uncontested until the 1970s, when activists and some politicians began demanding the removal of Confederate memorials. Other politicians and activists vigorously defended the monuments, and most still remain in public view. In the late twentieth… Full Review
February 1, 2017
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Lisa Saltzman
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 232 pp.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780226242033)
Lisa Saltzman’s Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects distinguishes itself from most theories of photography, both in content and approach, via a lucid analysis that considers the characteristics of photography less as unique to one medium than as qualities that migrate. She brings together heterogeneous objects that share a distinctive relation to time, identity, and memory, such as Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home (2006), W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001), David Claerbout’s video installation Sections of a Happy Moment (2007), and Vik Muniz’s The Best of Life series (1988–90)—the last of these a palimpsest-like entanglement of photographs taken from drawings… Full Review
January 26, 2017
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Arthur J. DiFuria, ed.
Visual Culture in Early Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2016. 208 pp.; 64 color ills. Cloth $149.95 (9781472449146)
Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives, edited by Arthur J. DiFuria, consists of eight essays on the topic. DiFuria’s own introduction is followed by two studies addressing genre painting during the sixteenth century, and, thereafter, five that explore this artistic phenomenon during the seventeenth century, though mainly in the Dutch Republic. According to DiFuria, scholars engaged in the study of genre imagery must contend with its reception, origins, and definition. Hitherto, these critical facets of inquiry (all explored in detail in his introduction) have been approached separately when, in this author’s opinion, they should be treated… Full Review
January 25, 2017
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Donald Albrecht, ed.
Exh. cat. San Francisco: Contemporary Jewish Museum, 2014. 185 pp.; Many color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780991641109)
Exhibition schedule: Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, April 24–October 6, 2014; Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, March 30, 2015–January 18, 2016
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco offered a fresh take on the popular topic of twentieth-century domestic design with its 2014 exhibition Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism, organized by the eminent curator Donald Albrecht. This exhibition is part of a spate of shows that has addressed the architecture and design of the period. An exhibition devoted to Charles and Ray Eames is currently making international rounds to various design museums—organized by the Barbican in London before moving on to Sweden and Portugal, through 2017. The press has been phenomenal, describing the “power couple” as the “ultimate examples… Full Review
January 25, 2017
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Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane, eds.
Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2016. 500 pp.; 350 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9783777420639)
Exhibition schedule: Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, March 24–June 19, 2011
In their scholarly and visually magnificent book Images Take Flight: Feather Art In Mexico and Europe 1400–1700, the editors—Alessandra Russo, associate professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University; Gerhard Wolf, director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institute and honorary professor at the Humbodt-Universität zu Berlin; and Diana Fane, curator emerita at the Brooklyn Museum—have selected and carefully arranged thirty-three essays by different authors that reveal how feathers, birds, and images of flight became defining signifiers within art, thinking, and history during the geographical expansion of Europe into the Americas from the fifteenth through… Full Review
January 18, 2017
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Clare Robertson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 460 pp.; 80 color ills.; 220 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300215298)
The reign of Clement VIII (1592–1605) witnessed a confluence of extraordinary circumstances culminating in the Jubilee of 1600, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims descended upon Rome. The aftermath of the Council of Trent and the founding of several new religious orders led to a growing understanding that art could be used as a valuable vehicle for disseminating the church’s message, prompting, in part, a flurry of church construction and renovation. Meanwhile, the city experienced an influx of artists from all over Europe, arriving to study from both the city’s famed antiquities and “old masters” like Raphael and Michelangelo, and… Full Review
January 10, 2017
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Thijs Weststeijn
Leiden: Brill, 2015. 452 pp.; 178 ills. Cloth $161.00 (9789004283619)
Thijs Weststeijn’s Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain: The Vernacular Arcadia of Franciscus Junius (1591–1677) is a well-researched, thoughtful, and timely argument for the seminal role played by the various versions of Franciscus Junius’s The Painting of the Ancients in Three Books or, in Latin, De pictura veterum libri tres (1637) within the history of early modern Netherlandish art theory and also in the broader European tradition. As Weststeijn shows, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Junius’s text was read and quoted widely across Europe, whether in its Latin, English, or Dutch iteration. Yet, while the English version… Full Review
January 10, 2017
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