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

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Charles Colbert
Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America.. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 320 pp.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780812243253 )
Charles Colbert sets Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art against the backdrop of industrialization. His book addresses a range of artists and critics who worked between the 1840s and 1910s—a period of time that saw the rise of the transcontinental railroad, the factory system, and the modern city. Colbert asserts that within the explosive consumer culture these developments engendered, visual art threatened to become just another object or commodity. But, it did not; rather, he observes over the course of the long nineteenth century a “growing willingness on the part of many Americans to hold the fine arts in high… Full Review
September 17, 2015
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Nancy J. Troy
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 320 pp.; 22 color ills.; 65 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780226008691)
On a trip to Los Angeles during graduate school, I made my way to the Mondrian hotel on the Sunset Strip to see James Turrell’s Hi Test (1996). On every floor, light emanated from a hole in the wall shaped like a television screen (pre-flat screen). The sources of light were out of sight, televisions hidden, each tuned to a different channel, each producing diverse, ever-modulating tones. As I read Nancy Troy’s book, even before I reached her discussion of the hotel in question, I found myself working hard to recall the details of that visit, which I hadn’t thought… Full Review
September 17, 2015
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Michael W. Cole
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 160 pp.; 20 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780300208207)
While the core argument of Michael W. Cole’s Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure owes something to his brilliant article “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body” (Art History 24, no. 4 [September 2001]: 520–51), his subsequent work on later sixteenth-century Florentine art has facilitated a book of broader significance. The opening lines signal Cole’s critical self-positioning: Historians of Italian Renaissance art like origin stories. When we write or talk about our period, we pause at those moments when art began to employ new or newly recovered visual idioms: perspective, for example, or… Full Review
September 10, 2015
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Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 216 pp.; 75 color ills. Paper $24.95 (9780674725348)
Hypercities is an unruly book that does not want to behave. With its attendant website, it is neither fish nor fowl, for it is simultaneously a scholarly book, an introduction to a digital mapping platform, an extension of web-based projects that use the platform, and an activist text. Yet, rather than a lack of organization or rigor on the part of the authors, their intent is clearly to present the reader with a mash-up of genres and points of entry that strive for multiple users along a spectrum ranging from coders, to academics just getting their feet wet in… Full Review
September 10, 2015
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Craig Clunas
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. 248 pp.; 60 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $57.00 (9780824838522)
Craig Clunas’s Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China is a new landmark in the study of the history of the visual and material culture of China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644), succeeding his five earlier and equally important monographs on the arts and culture of this period, including Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) (click here for review) and Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003) (click here for review). Screen of Kings provides a revisionist view of the role of… Full Review
September 10, 2015
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León Krempel, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Prestel, 2014. 208 pp.; 130 color ills.; 349 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783791353470)
Exhibition schedule: Haus der Kunst, Munich, June 20‒October 12, 2014; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, June 6‒September 20, 2015
Jacques Derrida loved the word “observe.” He paid special attention to its root word, “serve” (in French: server), which tied observation to respect, service, and deference. To observe something, he thought, was an act of humility. You gave yourself over to the details, gathering data and storing it in reserve for the future (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 23). Stan Douglas uses lens-based media to facilitate this kind of servitude to details. I mention Derrida not to overemphasize the theoretical… Full Review
September 3, 2015
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Lindsay J. Twa
Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. 322 pp.; 16 color ills.; 54 b/w ills. Cloth $119.95 (9781409446729)
Lindsay J. Twa’s Visualizing Haiti in U.S. Culture, 1910–1950 offers the most thorough examination yet written of Haiti’s representation in visual media that circulated in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Twa’s monograph dexterously spans many disciplines to survey cultural production as diverse as Aaron Douglas’s illustration and painting, Katherine Dunham’s choreography and dance, Alexander King’s photojournalism and illustration, Paul Robeson’s acting, Maya Deren’s filmmaking, and William Edouard Scott’s painting (to name only a few of the central subjects here). Indeed Visualizing Haiti blends approaches inspired by work in the field of Postcolonial Cultural Studies… Full Review
September 3, 2015
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Sarah Monks, John Barrell, and Mark Hallett, eds.
Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 278 pp.; 8 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $109.95 (9781409403180)
Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England consists of papers first delivered at a conference at the University of York in 2008. It is presented as a “companion volume” to Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836, David H. Solkin’s exhibition and edited book (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Courtauld Institute Gallery, 2001), which so memorably reconstructed the Royal Academy’s exhibitions at Somerset House between 1780 and 1836. More generally, the present volume builds on a now substantial… Full Review
September 3, 2015
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Massimiliano Gioni
Exh. cat. New York: Skira Rizzoli in association with New Museum, 2014. 224 pp.; 140 color ills.; 8 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780847844562)
Exhibition schedule: New Museum, New York, October 29, 2014–February 1, 2015
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum in New York City, Chris Ofili: Night and Day was the title of the first retrospective of the contemporary British artist’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures to be shown in the United States. The accompanying exhibition catalogue’s visual and textual narratives provide a loosely chronological survey of Ofili’s most celebrated artworks, with each contributor highlighting particular influences and experiences in the artist’s life that have served as catalysts for his creative expression. These include: “Lush Life,” Gioni’s scene-setting introduction and curatorial contextualization; “Inspired by Ovid,” National Gallery of London curator Minna Moore Ede’s… Full Review
August 27, 2015
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David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds.
Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 1: The Impact of Africa.. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2014. 320 pp.; 195 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780674052673)
David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds.
Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 2: The Rise of Black Artists.. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2014. 368 pp.; 224 color ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780674052697)
Originally conceived in 1960 by French U.S.-based philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil, The Image of the Black in Western Art was “prompted” by what one of the project's patrons, Dominique de Menil, described as “an intolerable situation: segregation as it still existed in spite of having been outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954” (Dominique de Menil, “Acknowledgements and Perspectives,” The Image of the Black in Western Art. Volume 1: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire, Fribourg, Switzerland: Office Du Livre, 1976, ix). Within the volatile social and racial politics of the 1960s and… Full Review
August 27, 2015
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