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

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Claire L. Lyons, Michael Bennett, and Clemente Marconi, eds.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013. 288 pp.; 144 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9781606061336)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April 3–August 19, 2013; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, September 30, 2013–January 5, 2014; Palazzo Ajutamicristo, Palermo, February 14–June 15, 2014
Sicilian Greeks—who adopted a collective identity as “Sikeliotes”—celebrated a decisive victory over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera in 480 BCE, by tradition on the same day the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis (Herodotus 7.166). In 212 BCE Marcellus sacked Syracuse and brought Sicily under Roman domination. Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome, curated by Claire Lyons and Alexandra Sofroniew, focuses on this key period, when Sicily, situated geographically at a pivotal intersection between Greece, Italy, and North Africa, experienced a spectacular golden age of cultural productivity. Rather than the traditional Athenocentric narrative, which begins… Full Review
December 20, 2013
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Stephanie Schrader, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013. 128 pp.; 47 color ills.; 5 b/w ills. Paper $20.00 (9781606061312)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, March 5–June 9, 2013
Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia was a small exhibition with a big ambition. Roughly twenty objects including drawings, paintings, prints, costumes, and illustrated books were arranged in two galleries to suggest a comprehensive outlook of how Asia was conceived by Europeans in the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Special attention was given to Man in Korean Costume (ca. 1617), Peter Paul Rubens’s famed drawing owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum. The first section of the exhibition focused on how European missionaries encountered and viewed Asia—China, in particular—and how Rubens’s depictions helped to transmit such views as the… Full Review
December 20, 2013
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Christine Sciacca, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012. 448 pp.; 240 color ills. 240 $65.00 (9781606061268)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, November 13, 2012–February 10, 2013; Art Gallery of Ontario, March 16–June 16, 2013
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 was a momentous undertaking, an assembly of over one hundred works, most created for Florentine religious institutions. There is a hefty catalogue that will become an essential resource, not only for beautiful plates but for scholarly commentary. The bold title promised a panoramic vision. Even allowing for the customary hyperbole of exhibition titles, it did not disappoint. A primary objective of curator Christine Sciacca and her team was to argue on behalf of a view of trecento painting that extends beyond panels and frescoes to include paintings in… Full Review
December 11, 2013
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Karen Milbourne
Exh. cat. New York: Monacelli Press, 2013. 288 pp.; many color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781580933704)
Exhibition schedule: National Museum for African Art, Smithsonian Institution, April 22, 2013–January 5, 2014
In an era of constant discussion about climate change, rising sea levels, land degradation, energy use, and competition for land rights, the National Museum of African Art show Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa takes on a topic of urgent public interest. Curator Karen Milbourne has broken the exhibition into different conceptual approaches to “earth”— as a source for art materials or material wealth, the home of both human and ancestral realms in many cosmologies, and a place for geopolitical debates about ownership, identity, and belonging. The result is a show that asks many… Full Review
December 11, 2013
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Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2013.
Exhibition schedule: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, February 8–April 28, 2013
The past several years have seen the increasing incorporation of digital reproductions and mediations of artworks into exhibitions of premodern Chinese art. Perhaps most spectacularly, sculptural fragments removed from Xiangtangshan in the early twentieth century were virtually restored to their places of origin within the “digital cave” included in Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan (click here for review). More recently, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art experimented with intriguing forms of digital mediation in Journey through Mountains and Rivers: Chinese Landscapes Ancient and Modern. This exhibition paired nine of the museum’s greatest masterpieces… Full Review
December 11, 2013
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Judith W. Mann and Babette Bohn
Exh. cat. St. Louis and New Haven: Saint Louis Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2012. 376 pp.; 214 color ills.; 46 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300174779)
Exhibition schedule: Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, October 21, 2012–January 20, 2013 (under the title Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master); National Gallery, London, February 27–May 19, 2013
Students of the late John Shearman who were too young to have seen the exhibitions devoted to Federico Barocci (1535–1612) in Bologna and Florence in 1975—myself included—often heard that their beauty and interest had finally proved that exhibitions could be of real inspiration and value, subtly altering and enlarging one’s understanding of an artist’s achievement. Current generations had the possibility of experiencing the same pleasure and profit through exhibitions recently held in St. Louis and London. This monographic exhibition traced the work of the great Urbinate artist, who probably came of age in Pesaro in the later 1540s, attempted a… Full Review
December 4, 2013
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Giuseppe Pavanello, ed.
Exh. cat. Barcelona: Caixaforum, 2013. 304 pp.; 34 color ills.; 177 b/w ills. Paper $34.95 (9788461576371)
Exhibition schedule: Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, August 28, 2010–January 9, 2011; Caixa Forum, Madrid, April 24–September 9, 2012, and Barcelona, October 9, 2012–January 20, 2013; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, March 30–July 7, 2013
The advent of digitization has created methods of cultural production that bring new considerations to the relationships between ideas, artifacts, and audiences. Looking at the San Diego Museum of Art’s exhibition Piranesi, Rome, and the Arts of Design, conceived by Michele De Lucchi, one can observe the effects of digitization, as the eighteenth-century designer and fabulist’s work is expressed though twenty-first-century opportunities. The show goes far beyond previously typical methods of curation, creating entirely new incarnations of Piranesi’s work. The result is an exhibition of eighteenth-century work with the resonance of a twenty-first-century cultural spectacle. Its ambitions tread into… Full Review
November 29, 2013
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Mary McWilliams, ed.
Exh. cat. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2013. 304 pp.; 309 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300176414)
Exhibition schedule: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, January 31–June 1, 2013
In Harmony: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art, an exhibition at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, celebrated the university’s acquisition of Norma Jean Calderwood’s impressive, yet largely unpublished, private collection of Persianate art. Mary McWilliams, the Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art, certainly faced challenges in cohesively displaying this private collection, which consists of a disparate array of over 140 objects and spans a thousand years of production history. However, the exhibition ultimately provided a thoughtful and welcome display of Islamic art during a time in which Harvard’s permanent Islamic collection is… Full Review
November 29, 2013
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Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt, eds.
Exh. cat. Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2010. 128 pp.; 70 color ills. Paper £24.99 (9781851243136)
Exhibition schedule: Jewish Museum, New York, September 14, 2012–February 3, 2013
Illuminated manuscripts offer the best-surviving evidence of Jewish artistic production in the Middle Ages, bearing witness to the tastes of their Jewish patrons, the skills of Jewish scribes, and the aesthetic acuity of Jewish readers and viewers. Jews did not live in isolation, and the artists responsible for the decoration of their books—who were not necessarily Jewish but may have been—both drew from and contributed to the artistic conventions of the dominant culture. Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries, an exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2012–13 and online via the Jewish museum website… Full Review
November 20, 2013
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Maryam D. Ekhtiar, Priscilla P. Soucek, Sheila R. Canby, and Navina Najat Haidar
Exh. cat. New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2011. 448 pp.; 377 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300175851)
After eight years of intense study, research, conservation, and planning, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s former Islamic Art galleries were reinstalled and opened to the public in November 2011 under the name The Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. Navina Najat Haidar coordinated the reinstallation, with contributions by many members of the Department of Islamic Art, including senior colleagues Daniel Walker, Michael Barry, Stefano Carboni, and Sheila Canby. Almost twelve hundred objects are now on view in fifteen galleries, organized chronologically from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries, and covering a vast… Full Review
October 23, 2013
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