Browse Recent Book Reviews

In spite of decades of scholarship on the history of the book in the age of print, the central mystery that plagues any given history of the book or a book remains the elusive nature of readers’ reception and interpretation of both words and pictures. While the works of Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Lisa Jardine, and Anthony Grafton have contributed substantially to the history of reading in Western Europe, there are many questions that remain about the nature of book reception. Such questions are particularly salient when the texts in question are thought to have initiated paradigm shifts in the… Full Review

As the title suggests, Emily C. Burns’s Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France is an evocative look at the “transnational frontiers” where visual art and cultural performance intersected alongside notions of identity, nation, and belonging for French citizens, American image-makers, and Native American performers between 1865 and 1914. This is a powerful study that focuses on different conceptions, depictions, and deployments of “the American West,” which Burns rightly notes is “a slippery concept” when considered within an international setting. By tracing the circulation of visual and material culture of the American West in France at that time, Burns considers… Full Review

Social housing constructed in Middle Eastern cities since the 1940s has been presented as a solution to several pressing problems, from the crisis of slums and inadequate accommodations for industrial workers to the urban segregation and inequality sustained by colonial housing policies. Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity, edited by Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour, discusses the conditions that call for social housing as well as the societal ramifications of the domestic designs that engage with global “transnational modernity” in urban planning and services. Each region discussed in the book—Tunisia and Egypt in… Full Review

When the artist Olafur Eliasson, with the help of geologist Minik Rosing, hauled eighty tons of Greenland ice to Place du Panthéon for Ice Watch Paris (2015), releasing thirty tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so that Parisians and anyone who had traveled to the city (some for the United Nations Climate Change Conference), burning their own quantum of fossil fuel along the way, could feel they were watching the melting of our polar ice caps, he channeled the Arctic’s cold waters into a river of his spectators’ warm tears. One thing Christopher Heuer does in his timely Into… Full Review

This book by the late Mary D. Sheriff is a study of islands in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Not just any islands, but islands, real and fictive, ruled by “beguiling women who captivate men through both literal and figurative enchantments” (2). These enchantresses promise love and pleasure to the men who arrive on their shores, but their aim is to dominate, corrupt, and emasculate. If manly virtue is to be restored, their charms have to be resisted and their island domains conquered. The trope of the enchanted island came to ancien-régime France by way of a canon of ancient and… Full Review

Michael Baxandall, who died in 2008 just shy of his seventy-fifth birthday, is one of a handful of postwar scholars who were quickly recognized as some of art history’s greats. A string of classic texts and a restless, searching expansion of his range from the Italian Renaissance to the Northern one and into the eighteenth century, combined with a firmly original scholarly viewpoint, afforded him the status of a deep thinker who merits careful study. During Baxandall’s lifetime, Adrian Rifkin edited a volume, About Michael Baxandall (Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), subjecting his methods to scrutiny. The book under review was published in… Full Review

Margo Natalie Crawford’s titular concept in Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics is oceanic: it is multifaceted and much encompassing. As the introduction explains, black post-blackness is an aesthetics of expressions of free self-determination, of a future blackness that shapes the present still. It is a mood and a shape of time, and also an understanding of that cultural mood and temporal shape as interdependent and in flux.  More concretely, Black Post-Blackness seeks to correct reductive constructions that situate twenty-first-century art and literature by artists and writers such as Glenn Ligon, Claudia Rankine, Kerry James Marshall, and… Full Review

Christopher Lakey’s book, Sculptural Seeing: Relief, Optics, and the Rise of Perspective in Medieval Italy, makes a bold if ultimately problematic argument: Lakey suggests that the origins of perspective in Renaissance art are to be found in medieval relief sculpture, that the Albertian system of perspective evolved from the practices and concepts of medieval stone sculptors beginning with the revival of architectural sculpture associated with Romanesque art, around 1100. The book’s argument, however, is like a thought experiment in which it is necessary to accept the hypothesis as a premise to sustain the conclusion. Lakey aims to prove that… Full Review

Chanchal B. Dadlani’s From Stone to Paper adds an exciting new chapter to a growing body of scholarship exploring the arts and architecture of Asia beyond the “canonical” limit of the seventeenth century by considering the 150 years of the “long eighteenth century,” which, in this case, connects the heyday of the Mughal empire with the advent of the British Raj. Monuments, urban spaces, building practices, and modes of theorizing and representing architecture are examined “on their own terms,” building a case for the primacy of internal forces in shaping the concept of a “Mughal style” in architecture. Crisp, engaging… Full Review

Consider two nineteenth-century paintings, made in the same year and same Europe, each alluding to a work by Titian. One is Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), a picture central to the modernist canon. With simplified brushwork and pared-down tonality, Manet transplants Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) into contemporary Paris. The painting, which ventures a commentary on modern life through its presentation of the Venus as a modern woman, works because of its bold departure from its source. At the same time across the channel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was painting Fazio’s Mistress (1863), a very different sort of allusion to another work… Full Review