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

Brigitte Buettner
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. 272 pp.; 35 color ills.; 55 b/w ills. Hardcover $99.95 (9780271092508)
Brigitte Buettner explores the cultural significance of gemstones in the European Middle Ages in her brilliant and eagerly anticipated book The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture. Medieval inventories of people’s belongings demonstrate that the majority of the net worth of elite individuals often was tied up in gold and silver plate and in jewelry set with sumptuous rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls. The inherent value of these objects tempted owners throughout the centuries to melt them down whenever a financial crisis arose, so only a small percentage of goldsmiths’ gem-laden masterpieces that once existed… Full Review
July 10, 2023
Thumbnail
Liana De Girolami Cheney
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. 318 pp.; 26 color ills.; 61 b/w ills. Cloth £67.99 (9781527557000)
In the last five years, Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) has received increased attention in terms of exhibitions and scholarly publications, as well as a resurgence of interest in her work in the art market. In 2019–20, the Museo del Prado hosted the exhibition A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana and this year, the National Gallery of Ireland will unveil Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker. Both shows are accompanied by substantial exhibition catalogs; in addition, a handful of articles and volumes have been devoted to Lavinia Fontana, including Un apice erotico di Lavinia Fontana by Enrico… Full Review
Thumbnail
Anna Grasskamp
Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2022. 220 pp.; 70 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Cloth Euros109.00 (9789463721158)
With the rise of the early modern maritime trade, seashells became marine objects of curiosity and desire across regions. Conch and nautilus shells appeared in Dutch still life paintings among sumptuous exotic objects, were finely carved to become ornamental drinking cups in southern China, and entered European cabinets of curiosity as specimens, curios, and mounted pieces of art. How can we comprehend the multivalent thingness of shells as they straddle and cross the boundaries of nature and culture, material objects and visual representations, Europe and China, land and sea? What are their values and significance in early modern Eurasian visual… Full Review
June 26, 2023
Thumbnail
Robert Slifkin
MACK, 2022. 242 pp. Paperback $30.00 (9781913620073)
Robert Slifkin’s Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work investigates Hare’s documentary photography, charting his initial interest in and eventual disengagement from the medium, and his combat with those in the upper echelons of the photographic world. Taken during the 1960s and 1970s, Hare’s subjects, white- and blue-collar workers, were Hare’s colleagues, or those he encountered in several cross-country journeys. Slifkin organizes his meditations thematically, in short essayistic chapters, following Hare’s relationship to family, gender relations, employment, postwar documentary photography, and art institutions. Ultimately these are explorations of Hare’s sense of self, or “authority” as Slifkin articulates it. Some… Full Review
June 12, 2023
Thumbnail
Caitlin Meehye Beach
Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 240 pp.; 74 color ills.; 14 b/w ills. $60.00 (9780520343269)
Not since Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monuments in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Freeman Murray’s germinal text Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Press of Murray Brothers, 1916) has a scholar so adeptly and rigorously tackled the relationships between race, enslavement, and sculpture as does Caitlin Beach in Sculpture at the End of Slavery. The book’s table of contents gives early indication of the geographically expansive and historically rich terrain through which Beach navigates. Each chapter is anchored by the work of a singular artist, which the… Full Review
June 5, 2023
Thumbnail
Sonya S. Lee
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. 296 pp.; 119 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780295749303)
In 2020, the flooding Yangtze River covered the feet of the giant Buddha statue at Leshan, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. As a local proverb warns, “When the Great Buddha washes his feet, the world is in chaos.” In 2022, drought revealed three Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) Buddha statues on an island in the Yangtze located within Chongqing municipality, also in southwest China. These examples underscore the timeliness—indeed, the urgency—of Sonya S. Lee’s Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan. Lee takes up the question of how Buddhist art has survived in Sichuan’s humid, rainy environments from the Tang dynasty… Full Review
Thumbnail
London: Routledge, 2021. 436 pp.; 143 b/w ills. Cloth $200.00 (9780367232344)
The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture, edited by Anna Sokolina, is a welcome addition to the understanding of the varied contributions women practitioners have made to the built environment, particularly across the twentieth century. She has drawn together a collection of essays, twenty-nine in all, that showcase women’s individual contributions to architecture in different ways, from speculative projects to developer-builders. The essays are grouped into five sections in chronological sequence. The first encompassing the preindustrial age to the early 1900s, with the four sections that follow spanning the twentieth century. Most of the chapters utilize biography as the… Full Review
May 24, 2023
Thumbnail
Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler, eds.
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022. 168 pp.; 19 b/w ills. Paper $18.95 (978-0-271-09328-4)
Although the study of premodern art history often relies on fragmentary evidence, the absent object remains curiously understudied—acknowledged but rarely examined as a critical component to the shape of art history itself. When the object of study is gone—inaccessible through deliberate destruction or the events of time—the art historian must confront this loss doubly: as evidence and as absence. The collection of essays in the compact and provocative book, Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were, not only addresses this art historical problem as its central line of inquiry but it also reveals how, as editors Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler suggest, that ‘‘attending… Full Review
May 22, 2023
Thumbnail
Sarah Louise Cowan
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 280 pp.; 98 color ills.; 12 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300264296)
In Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, the first monograph devoted to the artist, activist, and MoMA curator, Sarah Louise Cowan focuses on Howardena Pindell’s paintings and collages made between the late 1960s and early 1980s, underscoring her forays into sculpture and video along the way. In doing so, Cowan traces the artist’s ambivalent exploration of modernist form. Teasing out Pindell’s alignment with and strategic revisions of all-over painting, the grid and surface treatments, Cowan ultimately unspools modernist grammar from the narrow, yet nevertheless dominant history of midcentury abstraction developed within mostly white male artistic enclaves. In turn, modernism as a… Full Review
May 17, 2023
Thumbnail
Alessandra Giannotti
Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2021. 116 pp.; 50 color ills. Paper €30.00 (9788822267771)
In 1907, the Chicago heiress Hortense Mitchell Acton and her British husband, Arthur Acton, bought La Pietra, a Renaissance villa in the hills outside Florence, as a home where they might live surrounded by their growing art collection. Among the many treasures they gathered within its walls were eight sixteenth-century terracotta sculptures of religious subjects, examples of a type of decorative object commonly found within Florentine Renaissance homes. The works were made independently of one another by different artists and only assembled as a group by the Actons in the twentieth century. Nearly all stand under two feet high, and… Full Review
May 15, 2023
Thumbnail
Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023
The paradox of Monochrome Multitudes is more than titular: Of multitudes there are many, as all but one of the galleries of the Smart Museum are taken up by this ambitious review of the outsized genre. Indeed, much of the work is not truly singular in color at all but tinted, toned, or shaded within a hue, if not outright multicolored. To account for the coming cacophony, we are made to understand at the outset that the exhibition aims to revisit “this notoriously hermetic art to reveal its creative possibilities and complicate its histories” without attempting a comprehensive survey. In… Full Review
Thumbnail
Joanne Allen
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 367 pp.; 180 color ills. Cloth $100.00 (9781108985659)
Most people tempted by the title of this book probably know something about choir screens, especially those in Florence. We, as the author acknowledges, all owe a profound debt to Marica Hall’s work on Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, initially presented in Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce (Oxford University Press, 1979). Her explanations for the dismantling of the screens in those two Florentine mendicant churches has shaped our collective understanding of Florentine tramezzi. Joanne Allen’s new book expands exponentially on that topic. She outlines the history, function, and meaning… Full Review
May 8, 2023
Thumbnail
Carla Acevedo-Yates, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: DelMonico Books, 2022. 288 pp. Cloth $65.00 (978-1636810614)
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, November 19, 2022–April 23, 2023; ICA Boston, October 5, 2023–February 24, 2024
Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Iris Colburn, Isabel Casso, and Nolan Jimbo, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the Caribbean diaspora not as a given, but as a framework for critiquing the homogenizing consequences of categories imposed upon its makers and their visual practices. As Acevedo-Yates declares in her catalog essay, Forecast Form seeks to “challenge the very legibility of so-called Caribbean art itself—what it is, how it looks, and who makes it” (24). Commencing its reframing of the Caribbean, the exhibition starts in the fourth-floor lobby with two large-scale… Full Review
May 3, 2023
Thumbnail
Catherine Hall-van den Elsen
Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021. 144 pp.; 83 color ills.; 4 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9781606067321)
This book examines the all too unusual case of the sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652–1706), who successfully navigated the challenges of being a woman artist in early modern Spain. The role of women in art throughout Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been under-researched until recently. Spanish art too, has remained less well known or studied in the Anglophone world, compared with Italian art. Sculpture in Spain, which in this period was generally polychromed, has only lately begun to attract the attention it deserves. Catherine Hall’s book provides a welcome new contribution to all these fields. In it, she… Full Review
May 1, 2023
Thumbnail
LaNitra M. Berger
New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. 192 pp.; 46 ills. Hardback $110.00 (9781350187498)
Author’s note: Historical terminologies of racial classification, including “Black” and “Coloured,” which were instantiated by the Population Registration Act of 1950, in South Africa, are used throughout Berger’s book so as not to erase the violence of policies enacted under apartheid. Maid in Uniform, a 1955 portrait of a Black South African domestic worker, is arguably one of the strongest works by painter Irma Stern (1894–1966). Dressed in the uniform typical of her profession, Stern’s defiantly unwilling subject purses her lips and crosses her arms; her eyes demur from the viewer. The maid’s expression signals the complex social relations… Full Review
April 28, 2023
Thumbnail