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

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Claire Farago and Donna Pierce
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 376 pp.; 91 color ills.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0271026901)
Some of the most recognizable regional art forms in the United States today are New Mexican santos. These religious devotional objects include retablos (painted wood panels) and bultos (polychromed three-dimensional sculpture), and they originated in the Hispanic colonial period of New Mexico (late sixteenth–early nineteenth century). Their fabrication has continued into the twenty-first century, coinciding with a renewed interest in these objects. Numerous publications and exhibitions appearing since the early twentieth century attest to the popularity of santos, yet an understanding of them has plateaued in recent decades. Scholars have primarily focused on the santeros, or creators… Full Review
June 10, 2008
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Jeannine Diddle Uzzi
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 256 pp.; 75 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780521820264)
Jeannine Diddle Uzzi’s Children in the Visual Arts of the Roman Empire joins an increasingly crowded field of scholarship on ancient childhood, especially that concerned with the theme of its social “construction.” Recent work, from Beryl Rawson’s authoritative Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) to Ada Cohen and Jeremy Rutter’s new collection Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), has focused attention on how childhood was recognized and appreciated as a distinct developmental lifestage that, at the same time, was constantly reimagined (especially through art) to meet the needs… Full Review
June 10, 2008
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Charmaine A. Nelson
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 272 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Paper $27.50 (9870816646517)
Charmaine Nelson has produced an important book framing American Neoclassical sculpture within nineteenth-century discourses of race, gender, and colonialism. She explores the ways in which the intersecting categories of “blackness” and “femininity” are socially, politically, culturally, and psychically constructed in and through the representational practices of ideal statuary. As a black feminist scholar, Nelson wants to “render [her] methodological apparatus” transparent and is committed to pursuing a methodology that explores “race and racial signification as inextricable from sex and gender signification” (xvi, xxi). It is only recently that British, Canadian, and U.S. art historians have looked afresh at… Full Review
June 4, 2008
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Véronique Plesch
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. 488 pp.; 123 color ills.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780268038885)
Véronique Plesch’s Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue provides a detailed iconographic study of the Passion cycle painted by Giovanni Canavesio in the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines at La Brigue, an Alpine village in what is now France. Plesch provides ample context for the La Brigue cycle in terms of Savoyard Passion cycles in general, and she discusses in detail in both the text and an extensive appendix Canavesio’s various Passion cycles (although not his painted cycles on other subjects). The book’s organizing principle is less the cycle itself than Canavesio’s… Full Review
June 3, 2008
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Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Fort Worth and New Haven: Kimbell Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2006. 86 pp.; 55 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Paper $16.95 (9780300117363)
The Kimbell Museum’s Masterpiece Series introduces select works from the museum’s permanent collection to an audience both lay and specialist. As part of this series, Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s The Art of the Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop perfectly blends the often neglected art of careful connoisseurship with a wealth of visual and historical context. There is far more than one would suspect in the brief eighty-six-page text as Smith examines the silver-gilt Kimbell Virgin in exacting detail. He produces a rich visual analysis that explains technical production and describes the training and working methods… Full Review
June 3, 2008
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Mark Godfrey
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. 304 pp.; 40 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780300126761)
This past February, French President Nicolas Sarkozy aroused international controversy by revising the national school curriculum, requiring every fifth-grade student to “adopt” one of the 11,000 French children killed in the Holocaust by learning their story. The plan drew wide-ranging criticism for its pedagogical insensitivity and political opportunism. The terms in which Sarkozy framed his proposal––expressly affirming Judeo-Christian values––were especially inflammatory, given the traditional secularism of French governance and the intensity of ongoing debate around the politics of Islam. Less attention was devoted to a new German program in which middle-school classes will study the Holocaust using The Search… Full Review
May 28, 2008
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Tamar Garb
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 288 pp.; 70 color ills.; 140 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300111187)
An 1870 satirical cartoon from the journal Paris-Caprice depicts an artist, palette in hand, painting directly onto his female subject’s skin. Conflating the two meanings of “painting a face,” the artist eliminates the need for a canvas. Tamar Garb finds this spoof central to understanding the complex intersection of social, psychological, and symbolic factors involved in painted portraits. In The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814–1914, she suggests that the metaphorical relationship between applying makeup to a face and paint to canvas provides a useful key to analyzing the superficiality and artifice found in oil paintings of… Full Review
May 27, 2008
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Lisa Rosenthal
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 312 pp.; 8 color ills.; 85 b/w ills. Cloth $91.00 (0521842441)
As everyone who studies and loves the art of Rubens knows, the essential challenge posed by his work is a tension between the colorful, dynamic sensuality of his figures and the abstract concepts they often represent. Lisa Rosenthal’s ambitious, beautifully wrought study reveals that this tension is not only Rubens’s deliberate project but an especially fruitful one. In a felicitously tight structure, Rosenthal concentrates on just five paintings: four political and mythological works and a family self-portrait. She offers bold yet extraordinarily subtle and sympathetic readings of the pictures and other related images, marshaling semiotics, feminist, and psychoanalytic approaches in… Full Review
May 27, 2008
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Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, eds.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. 632 pp.; 70 b/w ills. Paper $27.95 (9780822338949)
“Is it real?” asks a French journalist as reported by contributing author, Howard Morphy, in the third section of the Museum Frictions anthology. She is watching a ceremonial performance by Yolngu people at the opening of the new National Museum of Australia in 2001 (489). Such a question, or the more pointed variation “What is real in a museum?” underlies the whole of this extensive (almost daunting) volume. It is a question that has already been addressed in the two books that precede it in the same series, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Durham: Duke University… Full Review
May 21, 2008
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Allan Antliff
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 292 pp.; 4 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9780226021041)
Allan Antliff’s study of the relations between American art and what he identifies as anarchist beliefs and political activity between 1908 and the end of World War I is a fascinating and important contribution to a knowledge of the wider circumstances of artistic production in the United States during this period. In a historical narrative connected solidly to thematic analyses, Antliff deals alternatively with organizations of varying kinds as well as with individual artists that, together, constituted a thriving anarchist political “micro-culture” of conjoined artistic production and critical discourse. Despite some of the weaknesses in Antliff’s account (elements of which… Full Review
May 14, 2008
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