Browse Recent Book Reviews

In pre-Columbian art history, the Andes and Mesoamerica command almost all the scholarly attention. These more heavily studied geographical zones are outnumbered by the neglected ones—the Antilles, Isthmo-Colombia, and Amazonia-Orinokia, or AIAO for short. Is it simply the absence of monumental ruins, as some have suggested, that causes art historians especially to relegate these regions to the margins or is it the relative lack of archaeology on which we can rely? In fact, archaeologists have been excavating and accumulating data in these areas for well over a century and, over that period, some parts of the AIAO were not as… Full Review

From the 1940s until the 1990s, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, all major and most minor archaeological sites from the Maya culture were plundered to meet the demands of the international art market. To name a few examples, Richard E. W. Adams recounts that starting in 1976 the deep jungle Maya city of Río Azul was targeted by an intense looting operation that eventually employed up to eighty diggers (Río Azul: An Ancient Maya City, 1999, 5). Von Euw and Graham recorded that in 1975, more than fifty looters trenches were dug at the site of… Full Review

Scholarship on the theory of the gaze explores the power dynamic within the act of looking and being looked at. The male gaze, the racist gaze, and the colonial gaze are analytical concepts that help us understand how representation is implicated in the construction of gendered and racialized hierarchies and systems of control. They also reveal how subjects resist visuality’s capture through processes of self-representation and aesthetic defiance. Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See offers a profound reconceptualization of the politics of visibility and spectatorship within contemporary art. The book features nine artists who work… Full Review

Author’s note: This article capitalizes the movement of Impressionism only when transcribing a quotation or with deliberate emphasis in discussing the book’s definition of the movement. In its goals to transport readers “to the moment in history when Impressionism made beholders alert and uncomfortable” (7) and to offer a springboard for future inquiries, André Dombrowski’s edited volume Companion to Impressionism succeeds. Its thirty-four essays dive into single-object studies, scrutinize critical reception, and integrate transnational examples with a diverse set of methodological tools to analyze impressionism’s imbrications of the objective and subjective, the perceptual and the sensual, in rendering a world… Full Review

“Qui suis-je?” André Breton asks at the opening of his anti-novel Nadja (1928): Who am I? And then, a line down, whom do I haunt? It is a well-known and by now overdetermined couple of lines, which nevertheless, as much as the entire novel itself, have had a considerable impact on generations of writers, poets, and artists around the world since its publication. One deeply impacted group is explored by Joanna Pawlik in the second chapter of her book on the reception of (chiefly French) Surrealism in the United States from the 1940s onward: Beat and San Francisco writers. In… Full Review

Rakhee Balaram’s Counterpractice: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Art of French Feminism is a resolute rejoinder to an assumption within art history that radical feminism’s agitations of May 1968 are no longer relevant in a post #MeToo world. Despite the relatively short period covered by Counterpractice (ca. 1970–81), Balaram presents an extraordinary breadth of visual, literary, and historical material accompanied by a depth of research, significantly expanding current understanding of the myriad artists, movements, and practices in the decade after 1968 in France, with special attention to how artists were catalyzed by the philosophy of French feminist vanguards Hélène Cixous, Luce… Full Review

When riding Line 1 of the Paris Metro you might encounter the Louvre-Rivoli station. As you exit the train you come face-to-face with antique statuary displayed in niches along the dimly lit platform. In the shadowy commotion of mass transit you may even notice the Venus de Milo stir to life among the crowd of Parisians and tourists. This contact between ancient sculpture (in fact, copies of works housed in the Louvre that were installed in the Metro in 1968) and that quintessence of modern life—taking the subway—has rich precedents, traced by Sarah Betzer in Animating the Antique: Sculptural Encounter… Full Review

Lucy Bradnock’s No More Masterpieces: Modern Art after Artaud offers a reassessment of Artaud’s reception among artists in the United States (and particularly artists who could be grouped within the American avant-garde). Looking at the period when his work was introduced to the English-speaking world in the 1950s and tracing its circulation through informal networks and official publications, Bradnock deftly demonstrates the challenges, limitations, and opportunities of Artaud’s emergence in the United States. The result is a well-researched and highly readable reconsideration of his legacy and influence there. Artaud’s texts—often opaque and contradictory—offer fertile ground for artists, who can interpret… Full Review

The past two years have seen a comic turn in African American visual culture. From Jean Lee Cole’s exploration of the earliest forms of Black humor in the final chapter of How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895–1920 (2020) to Danielle Fuentes Morgan’s analysis of contemporary Black comedy as a vehicle to expose and critique racial hierarchies in Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and to Richard J. Powell’s comprehensive examination of Black satire as a language of resistance in Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), there has… Full Review

A 1938 draft of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland opens with Abbott’s Brooklyn Bridge: Water and Dock Streets, Brooklyn. The steel construction of the Brooklyn Bridge spans the image, forming a stark contrast to the old brick warehouse in the foreground. The disruptive horizontality of waterfront construction partially obscures the verticality of New York’s skyscrapers in the background. If skyscrapers and construction are emblematic of the march of progress, the image’s layers and obfuscations suggest that change is not so linear. Instead, Abbott compresses the past, present, and future within the flat planes of the… Full Review