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

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Patricio del Real
New Haven and London: Yale Universtiy Press, 2022. 320 pp.; 33 color ills.; 69 b/w ills. Hardcover $65.00 (9780300254563)
In recent years, architectural history has seen a sizeable growth in research focusing on the built environments of Latin America. Architecture, architects, and increasingly systems and institutions from this area of the so-called “Global South” have been brought to light, analyzed, and given critical attention to the point of shifting the supposed centers and axes of “canonical” modernity. Patricio del Real’s recent book, Constructing Latin America: Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art is a most welcome addition to this expanding body of scholarship.  To be sure, this book can be categorized in a variety of manners… Full Review
October 10, 2023
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Mechtild Widrich
Rethinking Art's Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. 256 pp. Paperback £25.00 (9781526168115)
Mechtild Widrich’s new book offers an argument and a demonstration: To engage with public art today—whether in a scholarly or a public forum—requires a “multidirectional method” attentive to how, within a single site, “multiple historical references reinforce one another and build connections” (14). Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art presents a significant intervention in the art history of public art that makes site-specificity its key term. The book is also a bold contribution to contemporary debates about monument activism. Widrich emphasizes that Monumental Cares is the product of both “research and public engagement” (15)—she is, amongst other public-facing… Full Review
October 4, 2023
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Mark Staff Brandl
New York: Bloomsbury, 2023. 240 pp.; 21 b/w ills. $115.00 (9781350073838)
A worthy contribution in the still-growing efforts to de-silo theory from practice in writing and teaching about contemporary art, Mark Staff Brandl’s A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art is approachable and informal while being specific and sincere, and a tonal success for the way it loosens up and shakes out the rhetoric, jargon, and tropes common to so much scholarly writing about art. Visual tropes and metaphors (as opposed to literary ones) are central protagonists in Brandl’s philosophy of art, and they anchor his major propositions about the mechanics of visual communication and interpretation. They are not glib… Full Review
October 2, 2023
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Maria Stavrinaki
Trans Jane Marie Todd Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 448 pp.; 78 b/w ills. Hardcover $35.00 (9781942130659 )
In 2007 a popular science book was published, The World without Us, that considered how long it would take for the signs of civilisation to disappear if, by some instantaneous cataclysm, all living humans suddenly vanished. The author, Alan Weisman, suggested that after a few centuries, nature would have reclaimed nearly everything, and then went on to speculate about a distant future in which all human history would be reduced to a layer, just a centimetre or so deep, in the geological record. The book was one of many that have shown a fascination with civilizational apocalypse, motivated by… Full Review
September 27, 2023
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Jennifer Gross, ed.
Exh. cat. Princeton, NJ: 232 pp.; 173 color ills.; 65 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780691239842)
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, April 6–September 17, 2023
“The flux of life,” wrote Mina Loy in a letter published in The Transatlantic Review in 1924, “is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears—and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition. Modernism says: why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensory everyday life?” (23). The sublime hidden in the everyday, openness to chance and intuition, the democratization of art—all these served… Full Review
September 26, 2023
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Sarah-Neel Smith
Berkeley, CA: University of Califoria Press, 2022. 232 pp.; 42 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780520383418)
Formal analysis and interpretation of artworks often consider art funding trivial compared to historical and social background, especially in societies where art funding is sparse. Sarah-Neel Smith’s Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey focuses on this subordinate, if not often-overlooked aspect of art creation and cultural production. Proposing economy as a crucial metric to production, Smith analyzes the art scene in 1950s Turkey by focusing on two galleries and several influential artists of the time, while giving an overview of social, political, and economic exchange between the United States and Turkey. In doing so, Smith exemplifies recent… Full Review
September 21, 2023
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Sara Blaylock
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. 328 pp.; 81 b/w ills. $34.95 (9780262046633)
Scholarship about art and culture in the 1980s Central European socialist bloc often evinces a certain impatience motivated by hindsight. Simply put, we know what is coming to Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in 1989. As a result, inquiry is approached through the lens of the imminent political change and sets as its task the diagnosis of the terminal symptoms preceding these events. In Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany, Sara Blaylock, associate professor of art history at University of Minnesota Duluth, invites us to slow down and approach this era outside this teleological frame. By engaging… Full Review
September 18, 2023
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Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, January 6–May 28, 2023
Although fin-de-siècle Vienna is often thought of as having been strictly Austrian, it is worth remembering that Vienna was one of two capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Divided between the dual monarchy of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, the empire’s borders extended from parts of modern-day Italy and Croatia to Romania and Ukraine. Fabricating Empire: Folk Textiles and the Making of Early 20th-Century Austrian Design, the small yet impactful exhibition curated by Genevieve Cortinovis at the St. Louis Art Museum, provides a hearty challenge to Austrian-centric historiography. Rather than refute Vienna’s importance, the exhibition situates it… Full Review
September 13, 2023
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Perrin Stein, ed.
Exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale Universtiy Press, 2022. 308 pp.; 242 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781588397461)
Few artists have been as profoundly involved in their political milieu as Jacques Louis David. In this regard, the subtitle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of the artist’s drawings—“Radical Draftsman”—makes perfect sense. Indeed, its signature image, The Oath of the Tennis Court, shows David at the zenith of his artistic service to the nascent republic: members of the Third Estate unite in the highly finished study, which he displayed at the Salon of 1791 to inspire citizens to fund an ambitious painting, one he ultimately never completed. Less triumphant proof of the artist’s embroilment in the French… Full Review
September 11, 2023
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Jennifer Borland
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022. 240 pp.; 33 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Hardcover $114.95 (9780271090597)
In this finely produced monograph, Jennifer Borland offers a compelling case study of medical illustration and bookmaking in the later Middle Ages. This case consists of seven deluxe manuscripts of a French-language medical regimen, all bearing initials richly illuminated with scenes of medicine and domestic life. These initials provide Borland with evidence for the active part of women in caregiving and domestic management. Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the ‘Régime du corps’ places this seven-manuscript corpus at the center of its investigations and expands outward from there, from the finely wrought design of historiated initials to… Full Review
September 6, 2023
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