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

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Stephen F. Eisenman
London: Reaktion Books, 2007. 142 pp.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $19.95 (1861893094)
The language of war in the post-Vietnam era is all about clinical precision: as in “surgical strike,” “smart bombs,” or “friendly fire.” Designed to communicate the idea that brutality, risk, senseless killing, and torture are qualities of the past, this language promotes the belief that war has somehow become clean and non-lethal. The 2004 appearance of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, which showed in horrific detail U.S. soldiers violating the human rights of supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist and Iraqi insurgency suspects, came as a clear challenge to this perception. And yet, as Stephen Eisenman argues in his new book, The… Full Review
December 18, 2007
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Lisa E. Bloom
New York and London: Routledge, 2006. 194 pp.; 66 b/w ills. Cloth $105.00 (9780415232203)
Since the early 1990s, several prominent artists, curators, and professors have opened a dialogue to address the definitions and meanings of Jewish American Art. This surge coincided with, but was not part of, multiculturalism and identity-based art and politics. (For clarification, like Bloom I am interested in Jewishness the culture rather than Judaism the religion). Over the past decades many important articles, exhibitions, and catalogues demonstrate how being a Jew has shaped the careers of art professionals, and how Jews in the art market and the academy often saw (some perhaps still do) their status as Jews as something to… Full Review
December 13, 2007
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Ellen P. Conant, ed.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006. 312 pp.; 15 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $54.00 (0824829379)
To adapt John Donne’s famous phrase, no art form is an island, and Ellen Conant aims to confirm this by connecting the relatively isolated art-historical landmasses of the Edo period (1615–1868) and the Meiji period (1868–1912) via a volume of essays focused primarily on the time period 1840–90. Her purpose is to elucidate Meiji arts as part of a continuum of artistic experimentation and innovation during the nineteenth century. In her introduction, Conant asks readers to seek the essays’ “fundamental commonality” (2). These shared themes include an examination of novel art forms in the mid-nineteenth century, a consideration… Full Review
December 12, 2007
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Kathryn A. Smith
London and Toronto: British Library in association with University of Toronto Press, 2003. 384 pp.; 8 color ills.; 145 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780802086914)
The book of hours emerged from its union with the psalter at the very end of the thirteenth century like ripe fruit dropping off a tree, to use Victor Leroquais’s famous simile. Six independent English horae from before 1300 are cited in the Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles; twenty-one others span the 1300s (Nigel Morgan Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1190–1285, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1982 and 1988; and Lucy Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1986). From this wealth of early English material, Kathryn Smith has selected three personally commissioned books… Full Review
December 5, 2007
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Jyoti Hosagrahar
New York: Routledge, 2005. 256 pp.; 45 b/w ills. Paper $165.00 (9780415323758)
Delhi today is the capital of the nation state of India, and many think of it as the capital of much of India since the late twelfth century, when Muslim political authority established itself in north India. This is, of course, an oversimplification, for there were periods when Delhi was not the capital of any particular regime. All the same, the city has captured the imagination of a number of scholars working on South Asia. Jyoti Hosagrahar’s book, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism, adds to the already rich literature on Delhi by probing the intersection between colonial authority… Full Review
November 29, 2007
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Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, eds.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006. 185 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780719067846)
The title page of Louis Huart’s 1841 Physiologie du flâneur shows two fashionable women walking side by side while a man behind them has stopped on the pavement in order to stare intently at them. The female faces betray their hesitancy as they draw near to each other. The male figure, whose facial features are obliterated, communicates his confidence by the swagger of his pose as he leans jauntily on his walking-stick, a haughty Van Dyck type transposed to the pavements of Louis-Philippe’s Paris. This male walker and observer, the flâneur as social type, has received the majority of critical… Full Review
November 28, 2007
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Steve Edwards
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 368 pp.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $97.95 (9780271027134)
Joanne Lukitsh
London: Phaidon, 2006. 128 pp.; 56 b/w ills. Cloth $24.95 (071484618X)
The topic of photography presently affords an excellent case study in the changing styles, methods, and presumptions of art-historical practice. Once a new and marginal offshoot of a very traditional field, photography has become solidly entrenched within the new art histories, in part because the photographic medium lends itself so congenially to many contemporary theoretical preoccupations. At the same time, more traditional catalogues raisonnés, exhibition catalogues, and monographs devoted to the work of renowned photographers are being published. The history of photography is thus at a crossroad—or, rather, a fruitful zone of hybridity. Though occasionally productive of dialogic gaps between… Full Review
November 27, 2007
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Fiona J. Griffiths
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 412 pp.; 18 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780812239607)
Herrad of Hohenbourg's Hortus deliciarum has remained, despite the best efforts of a series of scholars since the early nineteenth century, one of the most enigmatic manuscripts of the central Middle Ages. Although it was destroyed in 1870, a casualty of the bombardment of Strasbourg's Library during the Franco-Prussian war, enough of its contents had already been either traced or edited to give historians and art historians a good impression of the wealth of texts and images generated by the manuscript's author, Herrad, abbess of Hohenbourg. This evidence was assembled and a reconstruction posited by Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine… Full Review
November 21, 2007
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Robin Kelsey
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 286 pp.; 89 b/w ills. Cloth $52.00 (9780520249356)
Archive Style is an excellent book. Focusing on three U.S. survey artists—one well-known, two others obscure—Robin Kelsey shows that American expeditionary art of the nineteenth century is more pictorially innovative and more rigorous than many readers might have thought. “The representation of straightforwardness has never been straightforward,” he writes (5); and Archive Style, like the work of the artists it studies, like many strong books that lucidly examine the mysterious subtleties and intricacies of their topics, is a labyrinth laid in a straight line. Timothy O’Sullivan is Kelsey’s better-known subject, the focus of the second of the book’s… Full Review
November 20, 2007
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Eleanor P. DeLorme, ed.
Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. 208 pp.; 125 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (0892368012)
The collecting practices of Martinique-born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de Pagerie might have held little art-historical significance were it not for her second marriage, in 1796 at the age of thirty three, to General Napoléon Bonaparte. Instead it might be argued, as Eleanor DeLorme has in Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire, that Joséphine’s collecting practices, or more specifically her personal taste, shaped what has come to be known as Empire style. DeLorme is certainly no stranger to her subject, having published, among other things, the biography Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress (New York: Harry N. Abrams) in 2002. In… Full Review
November 15, 2007
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