Recently Published Reviews

The cover of Stephanie Dickey’s Rembrandt: Portraits in Prints reproduces the artist’s Self-Portrait at a Window from 1648, which is a cannily deceptive etching. The first impression it makes is of modest sobriety and straightforward presentation. But look a little further, a little longer, and the probing nature of Rembrandt’s self-examination, united with its representational ambiguity (Is he drawing? Is he etching?) lures the viewer into what is ultimately a virtuosic performance. This cover image not only stands as an appropriate, even intriguing introduction to the subject at hand, but it also hints at Dickey’s own achievements within. For this… Full Review

This book, a compilation of essays edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, examines ideologies and issues associated with commemoration and the creation of Civil War monuments. The fourteen chapters, essays written by scholars in a number of disciplines, are divided into four parts: “The Rites of Memory: Differing Perspectives,” “Heroes and Heroines of the South,” Celebration and Responses to the North,” and “Changing Times, Reshaping History.” A recurring theme throughout the compendium is society’s need to celebrate, romanticize, and filter history through the memorializing process. The introduction, written by Mills, succinctly provides an overview of the contents. Although… Full Review

At the start of the exhibition Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of French Landscape Painting, visitors are presented with a minor masterpiece by the mid-nineteenth-century French landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny, a remarkably fresh and boldly rendered vision of a modest corner of the French countryside at Optevoz, in the Bas-Dauphiné region of southeastern France. Painted around 1856, The Water’s Edge, Optevoz depicts a local fishing pond, rocky, overgrown, and devoid of human intervention. The handling of the paint is rough and direct—most clearly apparent in the brilliantly expressed sky—giving the canvas the feeling of an artist’s informal sketch, an… Full Review

Christopher Pinney’s ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India traces the development of prints, mostly chromolithographs, from the late 1870s onward. Specifically, he focuses on the intersection of printed images and political struggles from the colonial period to present-day India. Chromolithographs, complex color images printed from multiple stone blocks, developed from the basic lithographic technique invented by Alois Senefelder in Munich in 1798 and first used in India in 1820. Far from a Gutenberg galaxy, South Asia is a region where the visual image has played a powerful role and where the written word has… Full Review

In recent decades the field of American art has seen a renewed interest in the art of the 1930s and, in particular, the work of artists who expressed a leftist political perspective. Fueled initially by the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, this scholarship examines a decade when activist or political art achieved legitimacy in the eyes not only of certain segments of the art world, but also of significant individuals in the federal government and, to a certain extent, the general public. A recent and welcome addition to this growing body of literature on leftist art of the… Full Review

This fascinating new look at Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) offers a thoroughly innovative approach to, and understanding of, the man Jacob Burckhardt called “a wholly recognizable prototype of modern man” (Civilization of the Renaissance, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore [New York: The Modern Library, 1935], 330). In Margaret Gallucci’s recent book, Cellini is no longer seen as the forerunner of European Romanticism and of the modern virtue of heroic individualism (as Goethe and Francesco De Sanctis had proposed, to give just two examples of nineteenth-century critics responsible for Cellini’s current reputation as a swashbuckling hero); instead, the artist is… Full Review

Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s–1970s makes modern art’s recent past reflect meaningfully on the present. The word “beyond” in the exhibition’s title promises a look at evidence not covered or hidden by the noun to which it is attached. Although the years from 1940 to 1970 press for breadth, they also situate the exhibition in a specific era with no claims for timeless transcendence. In modern art, form—as separate from content—has a suspenseful, contentious history. During the Cold War (and even before, in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union), form and formalism were demonized and censored by the content-driven, socialist realist… Full Review

With Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman’s Perspective, Anabel Thomas sets out to correct what she considers to be general misconceptions about art in female religious communities in Renaissance Tuscany and Umbria. Among the most significant of these suppositions is the view that female religious communities not only housed few works of art, but that those works were limited to the public areas of the conventual complex and were intended solely for a lay audience. Equally important is the assumption that no substantive difference exists between art produced… Full Review

Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind, a traveling exhibition of Buddhist-inspired art by the internationally acclaimed Thai artist, Montien Boonma (1953–2000), leaves the viewer with vivid memories of transforming experiences. Boonma’s art is not marked by iconic images and didactic narratives, but rather expresses more conceptually the tenets and healing aspects of Buddhism. Most of the art in this exhibition dates from the early 1990s to 2000, a period during which Boonma’s wife became ill and died from cancer; he then became fatally ill himself. In this difficult time, Boonma turned more emphatically to Buddhism for spiritual and physical… Full Review

Critical Perspectives on Classicism in Japanese Painting, 1600–1700 is a compilation of papers presented at a symposium, entitled “Classicism in Japanese Art of the Early Edo Period,” held at the Clark Center in Hanford, California, in June of 1999. The book comprises a number of essays addressing “classicism”: its definition, appropriation, and application in shaping later scholarship concerning the art of the early Edo period (1615–1868). Elizabeth Lillehoj, the editor of the project, provides a useful introduction, in which she explains how such terms as “classicism,” with its origins in a Western aesthetic and cultural discourse, became pivotal in the… Full Review

While a veritable Aby Warburg industry has developed in Germany, interest has been slow to grow in Anglophone countries. It is ironic that one of our first Warburg monographs is an English translation of the first book on him to be written in French, Aby Warburg et l’image en movement (Paris: Macula, 1998), written by Philippe-Alain Michaud, film curator at the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Georges-Pompidou and with an introductory preface by Georges Didi-Huberman, the distinguished French art historian. Didi-Huberman published a book on Warburg four years later, L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art… Full Review

For students of the early history of prints, these are exciting times. Recent examinations feature print publishers, particularly in the Netherlands, and catalogues of additional individual printmakers. Jan van der Stock’s remarkable Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in a City, Fifteenth Century to 1585 (Rotterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive, 1998) engages issues of both production and consumption and expands our concept of prints far beyond fine art. Yet surviving evidence has remained scarce about the earliest collections, especially large ones, despite foundational studies by Peter Parshall, William Robinson, and Michael Bury. With The Print Collection of Ferdinand… Full Review

Catherine Scallen’s lively and informative book focuses primarily upon a curious episode in the history of art history: the sizeable and, in hindsight, largely unjustified expansion of the body of paintings ascribed to Rembrandt in the decades preceding World War I. Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship details the origins and evolution of that campaign, during which the number of pictures assigned to the master roughly doubled, while also investigating the social mechanisms that fostered such a dramatic reconsideration of Rembrandt’s artistic production. Scallen pins the development squarely upon the ambitions and working procedures of four highly influential, academically… Full Review

Sarah Burns opens her beguiling book by briefly reflecting on the story of American art that was in vogue when she was a student. This story, which celebrated the “landscape as type and emblem” of republican America, was bright; the glow that flooded these “sunny-side up” landscapes (think Luminism) emanated from the positivist Enlightenment (xv). In Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America, Burns subverts this tidy narrative by turning down the lights that shine on a handful of American paintings in order to get a sense of their dystopian auras. Her motive and… Full Review

In early 1964, shortly after acquiring the studio space at 231 East Forty-Seventh Street in New York that would become known as the Factory, Pop artist Andy Warhol commissioned British fashion photographer David McCabe to document his life for one year. Although the project resulted in over 2,500 photographs, none of the images were used by Warhol, nor were any published until last year’s release of McCabe’s book, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol (London: Phaidon Press, 2003). The book contains 450 of the shots arranged in chronological order, with captions and short stories by David Dalton, one… Full Review