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

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Marjorie Garber
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 272 pp.; 1 b/w ills. Cloth $24.95 (9781400830039)
The issues at stake in Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts could not be more pressing. Published in 2008, this short overview of America’s government, university, corporate, and private donor-based arts patronage structures—together with some of their European precursors and global alternatives—arrives at a moment when the House Republican Study Committee (among others) has proposed the elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the governors of Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina are advocating a complete defunding of the arts at the state level. It is precisely this context, however, that makes it difficult to embrace Garber’s… Full Review
October 13, 2011
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Cornelia H. Butler and Alexandra Schwartz, eds.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Many color ills.; Many b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780870707711)
Because it is the first wide-ranging account of its kind to be produced by the Museum of Modern Art, I particularly wanted Modern Women to be a milestone for feminist art history. I was thus all the more disappointed when it fell slightly short of this goal. Cornelia Butler, the MoMA curator and co-editor (with Alexandra Schwartz) of the volume, encourages readers to think in such optimistic feminist terms in her introductory essay, and Aruna D’Souza, in considering MoMA’s feminist future, even suggests that the museum might consider how it could become a “site for community-building and for the utopian… Full Review
October 13, 2011
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David Kunzle, ed.
Trans David Kunzle Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 672 pp.; 376 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781578069460)
David Kunzle
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 224 pp.; 115 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (9781578069484)
If Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) can be called the “Father of the Comic Strip,” then David Kunzle is surely its godfather, for it is to him that we owe the establishment of the comic strip as a subject for scholarship. His two-volume History of the Comic Strip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973–90), today a collector’s item, is still unsurpassed as the basic text about this art form, and he has now published two additional books that also are destined to become basic reference works. The first, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, is a monograph on the artist… Full Review
October 13, 2011
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David Cast
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 272 pp.; 16 color ills.; 28 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780271034423)
If only Giorgio Vasari were as clear and straightforward as Nicolas Poussin. When the French theorist Paul Fréart de Chambray petitioned the artist for his definition of painting, Poussin replied: “It is an imitation made with lines and colors on some surface of everything that is seen under the sun, its end is delight (délectation)” (Lettres et propos sur l’art, Anthony Blunt, ed., Paris: Hermann, 1989, 174). Poussin’s response was deceptively simple, perhaps even coy in answering his somewhat pedantic interlocutor. Both doubtless understood delight to encompass, beyond sensual delectation, the goals of instruction and edification that had… Full Review
October 13, 2011
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Giovanni Curatola
Trans Jo-Ann Titmarsh New York: Abbeville Press, 2010. 280 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780789210821)
Over the last decades, historians of Seljuk and Ottoman art and architecture have paid increased attention to the ideological implications of their scholarship; many have worked hard to dispel Orientalist, nationalist, and various other outdated paradigms. Among these, one may count: the need to demonstrate artists and patrons’ Turkish ethnicity in the service of the image of a homogenous Turkish nation-state; the idea that one single genius-artist can represent a nation’s essence; the notion that after the “golden age” of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire (1299–1923) experienced decline in all aspects of life; and the repulsion of outside influences… Full Review
September 29, 2011
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Karsten Harries
Contributions to Phenomenology, vol. 57. . New York: Springer, 2009. 216 pp. Cloth $159.00 (9781402099885)
Karsten Harries’s commentary on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” opens with the interesting suggestion that the key to reading Heidegger’s influential essay is found in its epilogue. What makes the epilogue crucial for understanding the project’s underlying motivations is the manner in which Heidegger evokes Hegel’s famous pronouncement of the death of art. Harries encourages readers to understand “The Origin of the Work of Art” in view of Heidegger’s response to Hegel; in approaching the text this way, i.e., beginning from its end, an illuminating historical twist is given to Heidegger’s ontology. As Harries… Full Review
September 29, 2011
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Jan Mrázek and Morgan Pitelka, eds.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 318 pp.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780824830632)
Eclectic and challenging, What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context seeks to illuminate, through interdisciplinary inquiry, the relation between the functions and objectification of art made in Asia. The expansive intellectual foundations of the book began in discussion of a possible panel proposal for the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, and were developed through calls for participation posted to online discussion forums. The result is a provocative book characterized by unusually diverse authors and topics. The specialist reader, accustomed to texts of more narrow chronological and geographical focus, might find the book daunting. Yet… Full Review
September 29, 2011
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Christine Göttler
Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation. Vol. 2. . Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010. 471 pp.; 25 color ills.; 156 b/w ills. Cloth €130.00 (9782503523972)
Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform by Christine Göttler is an important contribution to the study of Jesuit-sponsored visual culture in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. The artistic style associated with the Counter-Reformation (or the Catholic Reform), usually called the Baroque, was long linked to the Jesuits, so much so that it was dubbed “the Jesuit style” in nineteenth-century German and French art history as a pejorative reference to its propagandistic character. Göttler investigates this issue of control in her study, specifically the question of who is in control of the viewing… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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Jean Wirth
Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2010. 416 pp.; 209 color ills. Paper $140.00 (9782600012317)
This long-awaited study of the marginalia in European manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, directed by Jean Wirth, follows on half a century of intense research on images in the margins by many prominent scholars of medieval material culture, much of it inspired by Lilian Randall’s publications in the 1950s and 1960s. In dealing with this perplexing material since the 1980s, interpretive strategies and theoretical frameworks have become as significant as source hunting and social context. Memorization and punning, laughter and fear, have been evoked as reader responses in varied circumstances. Those scholars, such as Michael Camille, whose interrogation… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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Murat Gül
London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2009. 256 pp.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9781845119355)
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 346 pp.; 8 color ills.; 154 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (9780271027760)
Shirine Hamadeh
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 368 pp.; 8 color ills.; 97 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780295986678)
These three books on Istanbul are welcome additions to an emergent field that it might be possible to call “Istanbul Studies,” with new research centers dedicated to the study of the city, and an increasing number of doctoral students working on Istanbul in Turkey and abroad, mostly at U.S. programs. The ascension of Istanbul into the ranks of global cities must be credited for arousing general interest in the city, both popular and academic. Yet, the number of scholarly works on the architectural urban history of the city, especially in English, does not match this rising interest. Thus, together these… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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