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

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Martha A. Sandweiss
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 416 pp.; 148 b/w ills. $39.95 (0300095228)
Martha Sandweiss is not an art historian, and her ambitious new book is not a work of art history. Nonetheless, art historians interested in nineteenth-century photography in the United States should get their hands on a copy, because for them this book is not merely important but indispensable. The historian Sandweiss has written a cultural history of how, between the 1840s and the 1890s, photography and the American West came to be entwined. Her primary concern is with the history of this nexus within public discourse, and consequently she attends mainly to photographic productions of public note,… Full Review
March 11, 2003
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Xavier Barral, ed.
Paris: Centre Pompidou et du Musée National d’Art Moderne in association with Editions de la Martinière, 2001. 576 pp.; 900 ills. Cloth $75.00 (2732429023)
Centre Pompidou et du Musée National d'art Modern, Paris, June 26–September 23, 2002
For almost forty years, Daniel Buren has challenged the dominant systems of cultural production and reception, mounting a two-pronged attack consisting of an ongoing series of in situ works that reveal the often-invisible institutional framework that structures cultural experience, and his voluminous body of writings, an independent project of theory, philosophy, and commentary on art. The rigor of his project is exemplified by his continual employment of what he terms his “visual tool” (vertical 8.7 cm stripes on either a clear or white background). This rigor has made Buren’s work among the most interesting and important of the neo-avant-garde; it… Full Review
March 11, 2003
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Frances Colpitt, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 212 pp.; few b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0521808367)
David Ryan
New York: Routledge, 2001. 264 pp.; 38 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (0415276292)
David Ryan opens his introduction to Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters with the inquiry, “How do we connect the contemporary condition of abstract painting with its history?” (Ryan 1). He sees the question as necessarily posing two further ones: What do we mean by abstraction? And how do we construct history? Talking Painting sets out to explore these issues by juxtaposing Ryan’s interviews of twelve abstract painters with each artist’s choice of a critical text about his or her own work. The essays are primarily reprinted from journals and catalogues, and the interviews took place mainly between… Full Review
March 11, 2003
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Martha Hollander
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 263 pp.; 10 color ills.; 89 b/w ills. Cloth (0520221354)
The fascination of seventeenth-century Dutch painters with the manipulation of pictorial space is a persistent theme in scholarly literature. Whether one reads about representations of Dutch homes, contemplative interiors of whitewashed churches, or courtyards and markets bustling with activity, one of the salient points for discussion is the complex spatial order of these renderings of daily life, whose dizzying sense of accuracy is inevitably a result of contrived artistry. It may therefore appear curious that Martha Hollander’s book, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, constitutes the first sustained analysis of the fundamental role… Full Review
March 11, 2003
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Joan Simon
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. 280 pp.; 180 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0810941600)
Ann Hamilton, an internationally recognized performance and installation artist, began her artistic training in textiles at the University of Kansas before attending Yale University, where she earned a graduate degree in sculpture. Since earning her M.F.A., Hamilton has taught and produced multimedia art. She is best known for lavish, multiple-room installations in which she disrupts protocols of artistic experience and invites visitors to reexamine their accustomed ways of encountering art. Over the past twenty years, Hamilton has received considerable critical recognition for her distinctive pieces at such locations as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Capp Street Project; Banff… Full Review
January 23, 2003
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Cynthia Hahn
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 455 pp.; 8 color ills.; 149 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0520223209)
Cynthia Hahn’s new study of illustrated saints’ Lives offers its readers a penetrating account of a highly important category of medieval imagery, as well as a thoughtful treatment of topics of interest to scholars working in a wide range of fields within art history. On its most basic level, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century lucidly describes how the concept invoked by its title—the belief that visual images are “portrayed on the heart” as a result of their viewers’ devout attention—underlay the importance assigned to narrative imagery within… Full Review
January 17, 2003
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Keith L. Eggener
New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 256 pp.; 25 color ills.; 75 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (1568982674)
Keith L. Eggener’s recent book, Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal, published by Princeton Architectural Press, is a welcome in-depth study of the urban design, landscape, and architecture of Barragán’s 1,250 acre Gardens of El Pedregal residential subdivision, sited in the El Pedregal lava fields in the southern part of Mexico City. This well-researched book provides much-needed critical commentary on this elusive project, which is now mostly destroyed and is primarily known to us through the evocative photographs of Armando Salas Portugal. Luis Barragán is probably Mexico’s best-known architect and landscape architect of the twentieth… Full Review
January 14, 2003
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Michael D. Rabe
Chennai, India: Institute of Asian Studies, 2001. 298 pp.; 91 b/w ills. Cloth $30.00
The South Indian beach town of Mahabalipuram, once known as Mamallapuram, was the primary seaport of the Pallava kings who claimed authority over the surrounding Tamil-speaking region from the sixth to ninth centuries C.E. While the Pallavas reigned, artisans carved the site’s natural granite outcroppings into elegant sculptures and many architectural forms. The most dramatic of these, an entire cliff sculpted with dozens of colossal yet graceful figures of humans, animals, and deities, is the focus of this book. The subject of this composition has been a matter of extensive scholarly debate for over a century. Does it describe celebrations… Full Review
January 13, 2003
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Making Culture Visible: The Public Display of Photography at Fairs, Expositions, and Exhibitions in the United States, 1847–1900 addresses the changing reception of photography from its early days up to the turn of the century as a function of expanding exhibition opportunities and strategies. It is the eighth volume in the Gordon and Breach series “Documenting the Image” (now distributed by Routledge) intended to promote visual collections from around the world and to bring out the influences and implications of visual documentation and communication. Julie K. Brown’s study is a worthy addition to… Full Review
January 10, 2003
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Todd P. Olson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 316 pp.; 25 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300093381)
More than a generation ago, Anthony Blunt and Denis Mahon developed ways of thinking about Nicholas Poussin and his art that, although recently the subject of prolonged scrutiny and occasional criticism, still remain canonical. Poussin, the French-born philosopher-painter, returned to his native country as an adult only briefly, when commanded by Cardinal Richelieu to organize the renovation of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. This great painter was by choice a lifelong resident of Rome--and all the essential sources of his art were Italian. Poussin’s stylistic development was mapped out with care by Mahon, and a great deal was said… Full Review
January 9, 2003
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Monica Blackmun Visoná, Robin Poyner, Herbert M. Cole, Michael D. Harris, Rowland Abiodun, and Suzanne Preston Blier
Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall in association with Harry N. Abrams, 2001. 544 pp.; 129 color ills.; 600 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (0810934485)
A History of Art in Africa is the product of two decades of research and writing by a team of scholars who represent Africanist art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and other teachers of African visual culture in the United States. Led by Monica Visonà and Robin Poynor, the team includes Herbert M. Cole and Michael D. Harris. The book is intended to be a general undergraduate text on African art and so fills a gap that has plagued Africanists for years. Until recently, they were forced by the lack of such a book to make do with occasional exhibition catalogues and… Full Review
January 8, 2003
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Joan B. Landes
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. 288 pp.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (080143811X)
In her latest book, Joan B. Landes tackles one of the French Revolution’s most recalcitrant iconographic paradoxes. How is it, she asks, that popular prints relied so heavily on female figures to embody notions of liberty, justice, and the French Republic at a time when the flesh-and-blood women of France were decisively drummed out of public political activity? She finds her answer in a deeply divided realm that she terms “graphic politics,” where visual and political rhetoric interacted to produce citizens of the newly imagined French republic. Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France… Full Review
January 7, 2003
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Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art in association with Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. 297 pp.; many color ills.; some b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (0271022353)
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, October 6, 2002–January 5, 2003; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, February 14–May 18, 2003
Who knew? Certainly there were documents from the sixteenth century around the publishing house of Christopher Plantin in Antwerp that mentioned payments to artists who added color to intaglio prints. At the same time in Germany, a quite respectable living was made in the print trade by individuals known as Briefmaler, or print colorists, who were included among the depicted professions in Jost Amman’s Book of Trades (Frankfurt, 1568). Not to mention all those surviving woodcuts from the earlier fifteenth-century, which were almost always religious images of Christ and the saints and were almost inevitably colored, especially with vivid… Full Review
December 31, 2002
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Antonio Natali, ed.
Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2000. 127 pp.; 115 color ills.; 46 b/w ills. Cloth $110.00 (8882152766)
Several publications released in the past decade have reinvigorated studies of Leonardo da Vinci and, more specifically, have spurred an ongoing critical reappraisal of his early work. Thorny matters, including the nature of his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, the range of his experience before entering into that master’s workshop, his delayed matriculation in the Florentine painters’ guild, and--perhaps the slipperiest question of all--how the young artist struggled to find his own style, have been addressed in a groundswell of articles, exhibitions, and monographic studies. Even as the exotic legends surrounding his biography are debunked and the theme of his… Full Review
December 18, 2002
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Ingrid Ehrhardt and Simon Reynolds, eds.
Munich: Prestel, 2000. 334 pp.; 130 color ills.; 154 b/w ills. Cloth (3791323385)
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, February 26-April 30, 2000; Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England, May 26-June 30, 2000; and Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, Sweden, August 25-November 5, 2000
While a number of recent exhibitions have examined Symbolist art in a European context, Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in Germany 1870–1920 was the first international show to focus exclusively on German art from the turn-of-the-century period.[1] Despite the inclusive parameters in its title, most of works included date from the Wilhelmine period (1890–1914). Coorganized by the English art historian, Simon Reynolds, and Ingrid Ehrhardt, curator at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, Kingdom of the Soul presented almost two hundred works of painting, sculpture, and graphic arts to audiences in Germany, England, and Sweden. Since many of these nearly seventy artists… Full Review
December 13, 2002
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