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

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Benjamin Schmidt
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 448 pp.; 24 color ills.; 179 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (9780812246469)
Historian Benjamin Schmidt’s Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World picks up, chronologically speaking, where his prior book, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), left off—in 1670. In Innocence Abroad Schmidt trained his scholarly gaze on Dutch encounters with and conceptions of the New World in the first century of the Dutch Republic. In Inventing Exoticism he casts a wider net, to describe how around the turn of the eighteenth century “a new conception of the exotic world and a new conceit of Europe came to be, and… Full Review
September 22, 2016
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Ian F. Verstegen
Early Modern Studies, Vol. 14. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2015. 171 pp.; 8 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9781612481326)
Ian Verstegen’s new book, Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation, examines the interior decoration of the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, specifically the altarpieces of the chapels, in light of the order and their beliefs. His focus is on Barocci and how his style corresponded so well to the tenets of the Oratorians that they repeatedly sought his paintings, despite the fact that other artists were available and Barocci was expensive, slow, always in demand by numerous patrons, and did not even live in Rome. Verstegen asks some key questions that successfully frame his… Full Review
September 21, 2016
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Ilan Stavans and Jorge J. E. Gracia
Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014. 240 pp.; 13 color ills. Paper $22.95 (9780822356349)
E. Carmen Ramos
Exh. cat. London: D Giles Limited, 2014. 365 pp.; 265 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781907804441)
Exhibition schedule: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 25, 2013–March 2, 2014; Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, March 28–June 22, 2014; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, September 21, 2014–January 11, 2015; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, February 6–Mary 17, 2015; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, October 16, 2015–January 17, 2016; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, March 5–Mary 29, 2016
There are two questions that must be considered before a review of these two books is presented: What is a Latino and what is Latino art? The term Latino, as used by the authors of these very interesting and different perspectives on the subject of Latino art in particular, refers to the descendants of people of Latin America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula who were either born in or moved to the United States. Today, the Latino community's numbers are growing rapidly. Latinos already outnumber non-Hispanic whites in New Mexico and California, and by 2050 the U.S. Census… Full Review
September 21, 2016
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Stefanie Solum
Visual Culture in Early Modernity. Burlington: Ashgate, 2015. 288 pp.; 4 color ills.; 75 b/w ills. Cloth $119.95 (9781409462033)
Stefanie Solum opens this stimulating book by discussing a question fundamental for those interested in artistic patronage in Renaissance Florence: whether or not laywomen commissioned significant paintings, sculptures, or buildings in the city during the fifteenth century. Archival sources, the lifeblood of patronage studies, suggest that they did not; essentially nothing in the existing documentary record ties any woman, as patron, to any major fifteenth-century project (6). Arguing that archival silence should not stymie investigation of this issue, Solum contends that one can address the topic by employing a methodology that considers the work of art as, essentially, a document—a… Full Review
September 16, 2016
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Megan R. Luke
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 352 pp.; 22 color ills.; 98 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780226085180)
Doing justice to the importance of Megan R. Luke’s compelling study of the German artist Kurt Schwitters’s late work of the 1930s and 1940s requires taking stock of how Schwitters’s richly contradictory art has previously been understood. The story as usually told—following John Elderfield’s foundational monograph (Kurt Schwitters, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985)—goes something like this: soon after the end of the First World War, Schwitters began making what he called Merzbilder, works joining the recent innovations of abstraction and collage to one another in an unprecedented manner. In 1919, in his first statement about these… Full Review
September 15, 2016
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Anne Umland, Blair Hartzell, and Scott Gerson, eds.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. 350 pp. E-book $24.99 (9780870708046)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 13–June 6, 2011
Begun in the winter of 1912 and known collectively as the papiers collés, Pablo Picasso’s collages of pasted papers, from newsprint and wallpaper to fine drawing paper, have been the battleground for several of the most fraught methodological debates in modernist art history. In the 1980s and 1990s, the interpretive field was divided between, on the one hand, scholars who read the newspapers as incorporating conscious reference by Picasso to the political events or mass cultural phenomena of his day and, on the other, those who objected that such readings succumbed precisely to the naturalistic and referential logic dissected… Full Review
September 14, 2016
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Michael Hall
New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2015. 508 pp.; 200 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (9780300208023)
The study of Victorian architecture has matured. At the forefront of recent achievements in scholarship now stands Michael Hall’s enormous and enormously rich biography of one of the greatest High Victorians, George Frederick Bodley (1827–1907). Hall’s monumental achievement is twofold. First, he has conquered the intrinsic difficulty of the project. Bodley’s personal and office papers are lost, and this unhappy paucity is complemented by the almost more troublesome richness of the surviving documentation that is dispersed among myriad clients and acquaintances. Hall has mastered this hard-to-assemble material and masked the difficulty of this encyclopedic accomplishment in a biography that, while… Full Review
September 1, 2016
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Foong Ping
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 318 pp.; 63 color ills. Cloth $79.95 (9780674417151)
The cover of Foong Ping’s The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court features a detail from a painting titled Early Spring, dated 1072 and signed by Guo Xi. By virtue of its imposing size and matchless virtuosity of brushwork as well as the relative abundance of historical records concerning Guo Xi, a famed court painter of the Northern Song period (960–1127), this magnificent work in ink and light colors on silk occupies a central position in our understanding of the history of Chinese painting; it also epitomizes the achievements of one of the… Full Review
September 1, 2016
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Kristine Juncker
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. 216 pp.; 28 color ills.; 15 b/w ills. Cloth $74.95 (9780813049700)
In Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería, Kristine Juncker combines the study of material culture with the methodological tools of anthropology to trace the history of Afro-Cuban religious arts. Hers is a longitudinal study that begins with the abolition of slavery in 1886, when former slaves migrated to Havana, and ends in an old building in Harlem in the 1960s where Caribbean immigrants congregated to ask the spirits of the dead for guidance. She locates the traces of this history in the artworks produced by a prominent lineage of female religious leaders: Tiburcia… Full Review
August 25, 2016
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Leon Wainwright
Rethinking Art's Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. 208 pp.; 20 b/w ills. Paper $30.95 (9780719085949)
Theoretical literature on Caribbean art is rare, which is why any book that is published on the topic deserves particular attention. In Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean, Leon Wainwright explores the state of transnational Caribbean art in five chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. Arguing for a greater consideration of the Caribbean in the writing of a new transnational art history, he looks at the contributions of Caribbean artists to modern and contemporary art. Key theoretical threads throughout the book revolve around questions of spatiality and temporality—including belatedness, anachronism, and contemporaneity—that have affected the abilities of Caribbean… Full Review
August 25, 2016
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