Browse Recent Book Reviews

In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77), the journal October published the results of a four-part “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” that the editors had sent to a range of scholars, artists, and critics the previous winter. Outwardly hostile to the then-emerging field of visual culture, the survey’s editors made no secret of their disdain for the type of work being done in the name of visual studies, which they suggested “is helping in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (October 77 [1996]: 25). The October questionnaire was a defining moment in the history of visual culture studies. For Margaret Dikovitskaya, it is the defining moment. In her book, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn, Dikovitskaya takes as her project to provide “a new perspective on the interdisciplinary nature of visual studies through its interrogation of how art history and cultural studies intersect as they are practiced and taught in academic communities in the United States” (2). Visual Culture is an odd book. Comprised of an introduction, two chapters, and a long appendix consisting of the author’s interviews with seventeen notable scholars in the field, the text...

Amazon.com has one customer review of Adam Hardy’s earlier study, Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Transformation, the Karṇāṭa Drāviḍa Tradition, 7th to 13th Centuries (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1995), from a reader “fascinated by ancient Indian temples,” looking for “beautiful pictures with some descriptive text spattered about here and there,” who concluded from its over-many “hand-drawings of details after details” and black-and-white plates that the book “was not for me (a reader with a casual interest in temple architecture), but probably is an excellent source for the academic architect.” Hardy’s new study addresses this audience, condensing his architectural analysis, examining many more of India’s architectural traditions, and illustrating them generously not only with hand drawings and black-and-white plates but also a beautiful selection of color photographs, supplied in large part by that indefatigable photographer of Indian architecture, Gerard Foekma. I think Amazon’s reader, however, might come to a similar conclusion. Hardy has spent his career deeply committed to training students to see and understand “the set of parts” that, in his view, is used to make up Indian temples. “The aim of this book, however, has not been to provide recipes for transforming a great architectural tradition into new architecture, but...

The past decade or so has seen the emergence of a great deal of stimulating writing on Ingres, including important work by Carol Ockman, Adrian Rifkin, Susan Siegfried, and others.[1] One defining characteristic of this new writing is its interest in and acceptance of tensions and paradoxes in Ingres’s work and reception. As Siegfried writes in the introduction to a special issue of Art History devoted to the artist, the “new way of thinking about Ingres . . . illuminates the artist as a subject of contradictions, which are . . . constitutive of his practice and deeply embedded as well in critical and art-historical writings on him” (651). Andrew Shelton’s book shares this interest in contradiction, but sees it in terms of a strategic question: how could “an academically indoctrinated artist . . . establish his supremacy in what was essentially a post-academic age?” (11) In seeking an answer to this question, Shelton focuses on Ingres’s exhibition practice and critical reception between 1834 and 1855, a period often characterized as one of semi-retirement for the artist. Shelton resists this characterization and argues instead that during this time Ingres continuously and subtly manipulated exhibition rhetoric and the contemporary press in...

This past summer I went to see, for the first time, Judy Chicago’s notorious The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum, its first permanent home since its creation in 1979. The work—which spurred heated controversy and a plethora of both hostile and heartfelt responses—represents a dinner party of thirty-nine accomplished but largely forgotten women from history; each attendee is symbolized by her own place setting, including a plate illustrating her genitals. Having studied feminist art for nearly a decade, I was looking forward to this moment—mainly for the chance to see the thing of myth, to put a face to a name, to see a relic with my own eyes. But, in retrospect, what I did not expect was to actually look at the work—to use my eyes. What surprised me about the art was the work itself. It was elegant, filled with lustrous surfaces and neat ceramics, along with painstakingly detailed, colorful, and vibrant needlework—a highlight is a stitched, three-dimensional graphic rendition of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, both moving and light, appealing and horrific at the same time. It almost came as a surprise to me: The Dinner Party, so shrouded in narratives of...

In January of this year, I visited Longmen on a grey and chilly day. Amy McNair’s Donors of Longmen was deliberately my companion. As I walked through the site, up and down the ramps of stairs that give access to the cave temples, the fourteenth-century Muslim poet Sadula’s description of Longmen, which McNair quotes on page 160, resonated with sad truth in my mind: Along both river banks, men in the past bored into the rock to make large caves and small shrines no fewer than one thousand in number. They sculpted out of the rock sacred images of various Buddhas, bodhisattvas, mahasattvas, arhats, indestructibles, heavenly kings, and Dharma-protecting gods. There are full length statues and busts projecting from the cliff. . . . Those seated cross-legged, standing, and in attendance are also no fewer than ten thousand in number. But all of these stone statues were damaged long ago. They have been defaced by people. Some have heads broken off; some have lost their bodies; their noses, ears, hands, and feet are missing, either partially or completely. It is not my intent to diminish the tremendous accomplishments of Chinese archaeologists and administrators who since 1949 and especially in the...

Thomas Campbell’s Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court is a must read for anyone interested in tapestry, patronage studies, and cultural history. It is the latest addition to an important group of books mapping the tapestry patronage and collections of early modern royalty and nobility: Clifford Brown and Guy Delmarcel examined the Gonzaga collection (Tapestries for the Courts of Federico Ii, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzaga, 1522–1563, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996); Lucia Meoni has already published two out of four volumes that focus on the Medici tapestries (Gli arazzi nei musei fiorentini. La collezione medicea: catalogo completo. I: La manifattura da Cosimo I a Cosimo II (1545–1621) [Livorno: Sillabe, 1998]; and Gli arazzi nei musei fiorentini. La collezione medicea: catalogo completo. II: La manifattura all’epoca della reggenza delle granduchesse Cristina di Lorena e Maria Maddalena d’Austria. La direzione di Jacopo Ebert van Asselt (1621–1629) [Livorno: Sillabe, 2007]); Pascal-François Bertrand analysed the Barberini tapestry patronage (Les tapisseries des Barberini et la décoration d'intérieur dans la Rome baroque, Turnhout: Brepols, 2005); Hanns Hubach is re-creating the tapestry collection of the Electors Palatine; and Iain Buchanan will present in the near future his eagerly awaited study...

The Indian Temple Traceries by M. A. Dhaky, dean of Indian architectural historians, is a fascinating study of the variety to be found within a single element of the fabric of Indian temples—the jāla or jālaka (Sanskrit), jālī (Hindi), tracery, pierced screen, grill, or lattice. Dhaky’s starting point is the terminology of the Sanskrit architectural treatises, which provide names for the types of jāla but generally do not define them. Providing plausible identifications depends not only on comparing the terms in different texts but on an encyclopedic knowledge of the appearance of jāla through the ages. Dhaky’s analysis is accompanied by 348 illustrations of jāla at Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Islamic, and other structures, from all parts of India (plus a few from Java), ranging in date from the second century BCE to the early twentieth century. Nearly all the photographs were taken by the survey team of the American Institute of Indian Studies and are a demonstration of what an extraordinarily important resource the institute photo archive has become. In Dhaky’s summary chart, thirteen texts are listed along with sixteen different jāla types; each text names anywhere from four to ten types, with a terminology not consistent from text to...

In early 1927, Julien Levy informed his father that instead of finishing his last semester at Harvard University, he was sailing to Europe with the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to begin his career as an experimental filmmaker. Six months later he returned home to New York with a new passion, Surrealism, and a new calling, gallery director. Levy has long been considered one of the foremost champions in New York of Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, only episodic attention has been paid to an important aspect of his activities: photography. In 1976, David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, organized the exhibition Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection: Starting with Atget, which drew upon the dazzling selection acquired by the institute. Additional exhibitions held in New York in 1977 and 1998, Mexico City in 2002, Paris and Pasadena in 2004, as well as the excellent scholarship of Ingrid Schaffner, have helped fill in Levy’s collecting history. Then in 2006 an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focused on the major gift of around 2,500 photographs given to the museum in 2001 by his widow, Jean Farley Levy, and Lynne and Harold Honickman. The...

In his Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (ca. 1633), the artist Anthony Van Dyck turns to gaze out at the viewer. With one hand he points to himself while holding up for display the gold chain recently presented to him by his patron, the English monarch Charles I; with the other he gestures toward a large sunflower that seems to mirror the artist’s pose. Both the man and plant appear animated, as his tousled hair and the flower’s thick petals appear to respond to the shifting light and billowing atmosphere surrounding them. The picture’s intertwined themes have long been recognized: Van Dyck represents himself as the ideal courtier, whose devotion to his monarch is likened to the flower’s natural inclination to follow the path of the sun, while he also promotes a claim for the nobility of pictorial art. In The Look of Van Dyck, John Peacock develops and specifies these themes in a wide-ranging investigation of the cultural milieu in which the picture was produced. More particularly, he argues that the Self-Portrait offers a subtle, learned, and imaginatively realized meditation on an idealist conception of painting as a mode of vision that apprehends both the natural world and its transcendent...

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 details Venice’s role as a commercial, political, and diplomatic hub, strategically situated at the center of Mediterranean trade, and examines how the city absorbed artistic and cultural ideas from the Islamic world. With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase of the resources compiled by its editor, Stefano Carboni, who also served as the exhibition’s curator. Carboni eloquently guides the reader through the major themes and contributions of the catalogue in his introductory essay, “Moments of Vision: Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797.” The essay is organized around momentous dates, beginning with 828, the year the relics of St. Mark were purloined from Alexandria by “two merchants from the emergent and ambitious city on the lagoon” (13), and ending with the demise of the Serenissima Republic in 1797. Carboni emphasizes his preference for the term “pragmatism” to describe Venice’s attitude toward the Islamic world, as the city always managed to balance its mercantile interests, which lay with the Islamic world, against...