Jonathan Weinberg’s new book is comprised of a series of thoughtful, original essays on the workings of fame and desire on the production and reception of a select number of twentieth-century American paintings and photographs. A social art historian writing in the wake of postmodernism, Weinberg remains committed to a modernist faith “in the viability of painting” (xxi), even as his sensitive and erudite readings of particular works test and complicate that faith in light...