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Something we call “the image” flickers oddly in and out of art history. Sometimes it appears at what we often take to be the margins of the discipline—it can, for example, seem definitive of visual culture after “the end of art” or prior to “the era of art.” When it appears in these places, it can suggest the need to redefine art history in ways that not only remove explicit art—aesthetic art, art from the Renaissance through some moment of the recent past—from the center of the field but that tend also to transform what we’ve taken as importantly historical… Full Review

The cover of Phoenix: 21st Century City invites the viewer to fly into the Valley of the Sun: PHX is printed in large letters against a blue sky and a plane is visible at a distance. One’s introduction to Phoenix continues inside the cover with a series of boldly cropped photographs of upscale shopping centers, car dealerships, desert cacti, hipster skateboarders in front of the futuristic Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Courthouse, and classic 1960s neon signs advertising laundromats, car dealerships, and florists. The photographs are linked together by swooping, aerodynamic white lines. The bold layout continues inside. The… Full Review

The initial premise of Gavin Butt’s Between You and Me is that new ways of looking at the New York art world of the 1950s and ’60s can be found by examining the gossip of queer men within that circle. To many the idea that queer men run the art world, while insatiably gossiping with one another, seems to support homophobic constructions of queer identity. I am relieved to say that Butt presents his material in such a way that the artificiality of such stereotypes is fully acknowledged, occasionally celebrated, but mostly subverted. None of the themes of this book… Full Review

Since classical antiquity, Greek sculpture has occupied a premier position in the history of art. Pliny the Elder relied on earlier writers such as Xenokrates, Antigonos, and Pasiteles for his accounts of ancient Greek statues in marble and bronze, which appear in chapters of his Natural History devoted to stone and metals. Materials and techniques were of primary interest to Pliny, but his treatment—and those of many modern art historians until quite recently—nonetheless focused largely on stylistic development and the seemingly inevitable “progress” toward more naturalistic rendering of the human form, which is Greek sculpture’s principal subject. The past… Full Review

Besides dealing with objects and images, the art historian inevitably works also with stories. Some are “the facts” that place a piece of art within a context; some are the myths and legends that surround the art: stories about creation and origin or artistic intention and imagination, as well as stories about the history of a work, its influence and importance (or lack of such) over time. Clearly the stories about a work can be important; yet the dangers in selecting and interpreting these are numerous. Moreover, in a field like art history, in which coffee-table volumes and “general interest”… Full Review

From its first words, “Picture this,” Rebecca Zurier’s important new book offers readers vivid visual and intellectual insights into both Ashcan School images and the modern culture of urban New York in which they developed. Beginning with a lively evocation of the details in John Sloan’s Hairdresser’s Window (1907), Zurier analyzes the rapidly developing processes of representation, display, and active looking that shaped the city’s changing cultural milieu from the late nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth. What did it mean, she asks, to live in a culture of newly exciting visual spectacle provided by street advertising… Full Review

The sight of John Varriano’s Caravaggio: Art of Realism on the list of new literary offerings inevitably raises the question whether the art world really needs another treatise on Caravaggio. The provocative image of Victorious Love (1601–2) chosen for the book jacket, moreover, awakens the fear that Varriano’s contribution may be yet another wearisome exploration of the sexuality of the seventeenth-century artist. The recent literature on Caravaggio can be overwhelming. In the realm of biographies, readers can select anything from Helen Langdon’s brilliant Caravaggio: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) to Peter Robb’s lamentable flight of… Full Review

Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century is an important contribution to the growing literature on race and visual representation in American culture. The beautifully illustrated catalogue includes three essays by guest curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania), two of which expand upon the ideas in her first book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). It also contains an introduction by Karen C. C. Dalton… Full Review

“If we try to enclose him in his own time and look into his works instead of outward from them,” John Summerson lamented with a distinct echo of William Kent more than 200 years before him, “we find ourselves gazing at something extremely hard to bring to focus” (Inigo Jones, London: Penguin, 1966, 13). They were both speaking about Inigo Jones, the first intellectually complex architect England has produced in its history of the built environment. John Webb, Jones’s son-in-law, actively promoted Jones as a heroic figure for English architecture; in his book on Stonehenge, Webb carefully edited… Full Review

From the twelfth to the fifteenth century, a remarkable group of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic vessels for ceremonial hand washing were made in medieval Germany. Employed in the service of the Mass and at the noble table, aquamanilia ranged in shape from single animals such as dragons, lions, and peacocks to more complex compositions, including mounted knights and Samson fighting the lion. The appearance of these objects in Germany in the twelfth century is remarkable for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, they mark the resurgence of the technology for casting hollow metal objects in medieval Europe, a skill that… Full Review