Recently Published Reviews

Recent publications have dramatically refined our knowledge of the late medieval manuscript workshops of northern Europe. Scholars have studied centers of production (e.g., Paris, Amiens, Lyons, and Tournai), major artistic monuments (e.g., the Turin-Milan Hours and the Chroniques de Hainaut), and the oeuvres of individual artists and shops (e.g., Willem Vrelant and the Master of the Champion des Dames). Gregory Clark’s weighty study falls into this latter category, as it closely examines the works ascribed to the Master of the Ghent Privileges (or “Privileges Master,” for short). This master was first associated with an oeuvre by Friedrich Winkler in 1915,… Full Review

The fascination of the late Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work, both the pleasures of the photographs and the interest of his project for those who think about the problems of art, lies in his concept of the “decisive moment.” His work exemplifies a central mode of photographic practice—the snapshot—but the snapshot is not just a way of making pictures. It is also a clear demonstration of a technical determinant of the medium. All photographs, from the staged, long-exposure tableau in the studio to the digital montage, are on some level snapshots. Instantaneity forms the core of photography. The snapshot taken in the… Full Review

Noel Brann’s magisterial volume offers a sweeping survey of the critical fortunes of a contentious but powerfully operative concept in quattrocento and cinquecento Italy: the notion of genial melancholy. In the course of revolving the problem, Brann, a historian of philosophy, Christian thought, and arcana, explores a constellation of ideas on which he has been musing for many years. He produced important articles on aspects of melancholy in medieval and Renaissance culture in the late 1970s. The convergence of hermetic, magical, and naturalist thought, which looms large in the present volume, was the subject of a 1985 article on melancholy… Full Review

Randall Griffin’s well-written and accessible study analyzes a selection of largely canonical paintings by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Anshutz in light of period art criticism and artistic, social, and economic transformations of the late nineteenth century. The book aims to illuminate how artists, critics, and patrons made use of art to navigate the conflicted and amorphous nature of American national identity during the Gilded Age. After an introduction that provides an overview of significant currents in Gilded Age art and culture, individual chapters analyze the following subjects: Homer’s Veteran in a New Field (1865) and the ways in… Full Review

Ulrich Pfisterer’s Donatello und die Entdeckung der Stile 1430–1445 is the product of a talented scholar who, though working on well-tilled terrain, manages to unearth new material and to produce some very fruitful analyses. Amid a dazzling array of data and a cat’s cradle of intersecting proposals, the fundamental argument of the book—sometimes difficult to discern—concerns the ability of art to convey complex ideas. At stake is the intellectual status of the artist, in this case Donatello. This artist’s sculptures of the 1430s and early 1440s explicitly reveal, Pfisterer contends, a successful struggle to make visible certain concepts current in… Full Review

James Elkins’s book The Domain of Images is an argument for extending aesthetic inquiry beyond the conventional bounds of images that typically provide the focus for art-historical research. Elkins strives to look at the world of images rather than the pragmatic relation that images bear to the world, which he believe characterizes paintings and drawings. The book promotes a few iconoclastic attitudes, broadens some horizons, and seeks to make philosophers, art historians, and art critics more aware of the present ferment in approaches to writing art history. In other words, despite Elkins’s explicit refusal to attend to the normative dimensions… Full Review

That most Chicagoans who have encountered Dan Peterman’s work have done so without knowing it seems as fitting a tribute to the artist’s ambitions as does the current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). Indeed, as much as I enjoyed seeing Plastic Economies, I have equally enjoyed using Peterman’s installation Chicago Ground Cover (1997)— without realizing it was an installation—while learning to samba, salsa, shimmy, and shake atop the smooth surface during classes held by Grant Park’s SummerDance program. The highly functional exterior dance floor, made of reprocessed, postconsumer plastic, extends Peterman’s earlier, gallery-based project, Ground… Full Review

Shortly before I visited the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago to see the exhibition Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte”, an art historian friend in Berlin wrote me, asking if the show was traveling to Europe. The answer is no, and visitors to the exhibition are told the reason why: in 1958, a fire broke out at New York’s Museum of Modern Art while A Sunday on La Grande Jatte was on display there. Though Georges Seurat’s canvas was unharmed, the Art Institute decided that the painting would never again be lent. That absolute stipulation… Full Review

The title of this volume of essays on illustrated manuscripts in the Wellcome Library, London, says more than editor Nigel Allan may have intended. The notion of gems plucked from an exoticized Orient, replete with objects there for the taking, fills colonialist—and, to build on the title, Orientalist—fantasy, including that of Sir Henry Wellcome, who founded the pharmaceutical company that bears his name and who built the collection. The Wellcome Library, a center for the history and understanding of medicine, houses a splendid collection of manuscripts, both Western and Asian. It also maintains a continuing exhibition schedule at the library… Full Review

For several years now, the MIT Press has pursued a mission to acquaint English-language readers with the modern art and architecture of east-central Europe. With impressive dedication, MIT editor Roger Conover has sought experts living or born in the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia, and he has also brought forth exhibition catalogues and source readers authored in the United States. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of these efforts in expanding Slavic and Eastern European Studies, fields that have perennially been oriented to the study of literature and political history and closed to those not… Full Review

Many of us in the field of East Asian art history watched with curiosity, respect, and incredulity when the former National Museum of Korea in Gyeongbok Palace, Seoul, was imploded with fanfare in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of Korean liberation from Japanese occupation. The structure, erected in 1926 to house the Japanese Government-General, stood directly in front of the throne hall, symbol of Korean sovereignty. Even after its postwar conversion for use as the National Museum, the building’s inauspicious position and painful history were a national affront. Despite substantial practical and financial drawbacks, the structure was razed; such recent events… Full Review

It takes only a few minutes of reading to discover that A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV is a most unusual book. First, it is the product of close collaboration between a historian and an art historian. In this case “close” is not a cliché. John Elliott is a historian with an extraordinarily deep knowledge of and appreciation for art. Jonathan Brown is known for an approach to art history that eschews the abstractions of theory for exhaustive archival research aimed at contextualizing from cradle to grave—that is, from the networks of… Full Review

In this book Douglas Nickel explores the density of meaning and cultural significance in the photographs Francis Frith (1822–1898) took during three trips to the Middle East between 1856 and 1860. Nickel evaluates Frith’s images within the context of their production and reception: a short-lived but potent mid-Victorian configuration of aesthetics, conflicts between religious faith and scientific authority, moral improvement and photographic reproduction—all marshaled in support of Orientalist ideologies. In the introduction Nickel sets out his argument for a history of photographic meaning that emphasizes relationships between photographic discourse and broader patterns of Western thought; Frith’s coordinate in this field… Full Review

As the subtitle to Imagining Identity in New Spain indicates, Magali Carrera’s study of race, lineage, and the body in casta paintings and portraiture is much more than a strict art-historical analysis. Students of Latin American art, history, literature, and colonial studies, in particular, will find this book of interest. Carrera’s interdisciplinary approach integrates art history with social and political history and examines their relation through colonial theory. As she states early on, her aim is to consider how casta paintings and portraiture visually express the social and political constructions of the inhabitants of eighteenth-century New Spain. For the informed… Full Review

Anyone familiar with Joseph Leo Koerner’s book on Albrecht Dürer, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), will approach this new work with high expectations. The earlier one offered a philosophical, yet also poetic, interpretation of one of the best-known artists of the Northern Renaissance. With its powerfully articulated thesis—that Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500 was responsible for creating “the age of art”—supported by engaging, erudite, and convincing arguments, this book is a landmark in the historiography. Together with Erwin Panofsky’s monograph on this artist, The Moment of Self-Portraiture constitutes our contemporary understanding of… Full Review