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

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Craig Campbell
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 288 pp.; 19 b/w ills. Paper $27.00 (9780816681068)
In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes famously refused to reprint what he referred to as the Winter Garden photograph of his mother as a child, but he reflected on its meaning and details extensively (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). In Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia, Craig Campbell reverses this strategy, presenting many photographs and photographic fragments of early twentieth-century Siberia, but refusing to analyze or discuss individual images. This is a deliberate choice, one that stems from Campbell’s assumption that photographs are… Full Review
October 22, 2015
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David Bindman
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 220 pp.; 30 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780300197891)
From the outset, David Bindman makes it clear that Warm Flesh, Cold Marble: Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Their Critics is about the use and abuse of Immanuel Kant in interpretations of sculpture. In his preface, he states that the book constitutes a defense of a “discrete” Kantianism. He argues that Kant’s ideas circulated and trickled down, pervading theoretical aesthetics and artists’ discourses—but that the ideas were transformed in the process. Bindman’s convincing claim is that a vulgar or unauthorized Kantianism operated in the work of the main sculptors of Kant’s era, between about 1780 and 1840—including the medium’s two leading practitioners… Full Review
October 22, 2015
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Robert Farris Thompson
Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2011. 179 pp.; 126 color ills.; 41 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9781934772959)
Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music is arguably Robert Farris Thompson’s most canonical study of visual art, music, and dance in the Black Atlantic world. True to its subject, the book attempts to identify and examine commonly held traits among these modes of creative expression. Presented in twenty-five relatively short chapters (two of which are interviews), the book is effective in its aim by providing readers with a broad yet simultaneously succinct view of Afro-Atlantic music, dance, art, and, more importantly, the individualized and collective cultural meanings ascribed to each of these artistic outlets. Aesthetic of the Cool… Full Review
October 15, 2015
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Scott Bukatman
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 286 pp.; 31 color ills.; 38 b/w ills. Paper $31.95 (9780520265721)
Scott Bukatman’s The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit appears, at first glance, to be a book about the work of pioneering cartoonist, animator, and chalk-talker Winsor McCay (1867–1934). After all, McCay’s most celebrated work—Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–11)—is explicitly referenced in the title, and three illustrations from two distinct Little Nemo strips adorn the front and back cover. But Bukatman’s book, although organized around an extended examination of McCay’s life and work, is much more ambitious than this. For Bukatman, Slumberland is not merely a fictional nation visited by Nemo in the strip that bears… Full Review
October 15, 2015
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Melinda Hartwig, ed.
Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World Series, Number 109.. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. 634 pp.; 10 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. Cloth $195.00 (9781444333503)
A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art, a volume of essays on a wide range of topics related to the study of Egyptian art, is part of Blackwell’s series “Companions to the Ancient World.” The book as a whole is impressive in its scope and theoretical sophistication, helpful to students of both Egyptology and art history, and vital as a snapshot of the current state of Egyptian art history. Its editor, Melinda Hartwig, is to be thanked for the thought and effort involved in producing such a volume, particularly in assembling the impressive list of contributors. The collection is organized… Full Review
October 8, 2015
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Henry Matthews
Istanbul: Ege Yayinlari, 2014. 370 pp.; 300 color ills. Paper $34.95 (9786054701414)
Architectural historian Henry Matthew’s Greco-Roman Cities of Aegean Turkey: History, Archaeology, Architecture is intended to be an educated layperson’s detailed travel companion to the archaeological sites of western Turkey. Given Turkey’s popularity as a tourist destination for history buffs, it is surprising that such a book has not been written previously. As such, it fills a lacuna and is a welcome addition to the genre of guidebooks in the vein of Freya Stark’s Ionia: A Quest (London: John Murray, 1954), George Ewart Bean’s Aegean Turkey: An Archaeological Guide (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), Ekrem Akurgal’s Ancient Civilizations and Ruins… Full Review
October 1, 2015
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Wei-Cheng Lin
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. 344 pp.; 12 color ills.; 90 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780295993522)
Few sites in China have engaged the religious imagination with more intensity than Mount Wutai, so named for its five “peaks” or “platforms.” Situated in northeast Shanxi Province, nowadays a four-hour bus ride from the city of Taiyuan, and long considered the abode of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, Mount Wutai has been a destination of pilgrimage for people of all walks of life. The Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–1796) famously visited the site six times during his life. Not surprisingly, Mount Wutai has been the subject of a number of recent English-language studies, which encompass such fields as literary studies… Full Review
October 1, 2015
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Megan Holmes
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 396 pp.; 80 color ills.; 178 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300176605)
By 1600, there were over fifty miraculous images in Florence: weeping Madonnas, bleeding Christs, paintings and sculptures—often veiled and only occasionally exposed to direct view, surrounded by heaps of votive offerings left by the faithful in gratitude for miracles experienced. Their proliferation during the previous three hundred years in churches, oratories, and street tabernacles throughout the city occurred alongside the founding of many more cults across Florence’s hinterland, or contado. Indeed, as the commune extended its territorial domain, so the new subject-cities spawned miraculous images—a process of sacralization strongly supported by the Florentine regime. With painstaking scholarship, Megan… Full Review
October 1, 2015
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Natalie A. Mault, ed.
Exh. cat. Baton Rouge: LSU Museum of Art, 2014. 88 pp.; 64 color ills. Paper $40.00 (9780615878300)
Exhibition schedule: LSU Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, March 8–July 13, 2014; Telfair Museums, Savannah, January 30–May 3, 2015
In his contribution to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Visual Blues, R. A. Lawson writes, “The Harlem Renaissance could not have happened in the South, but it could not have happened without the South” (31; emphasis in original). This statement deftly establishes the raison d’être of the exhibition: to interpret the Harlem Renaissance as a northern phenomenon indebted to its southern musical roots in blues and jazz music. The book draws upon earlier studies that paired African American music and visual arts such as The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, edited… Full Review
September 24, 2015
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Conrad Rudolph
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 626 pp.; 29 color ills.; 49 b/w ills. Cloth $120.00 (9781107037052)
The Mystic Ark is not for the faint of heart. The title refers to one of the most dazzling scholarly achievements of the Middle Ages, an astonishing work that emerged from the intense environment of theological debate that marked Paris as the intellectual capital of twelfth-century Europe. Hugh of Saint Victor (ca. 1096–1141) can be credited as the author of this ambitious undertaking, though “author” does not quite reflect the true nature and full extent of Hugh’s work. Unlike his other major projects, such as the better-known De sacramentis christianae fidei, The Mystic Ark was not conceived as a… Full Review
September 24, 2015
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