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

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Lara Evans, Ryan S. Flahive, Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, Stephen Wall, and Manuela Well-Off-Man
Exh. cat. Santa Fe: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2020. 148 pp.; 62 color ills. Cloth $30.00 (9781732840317)
Westmoreland Museum of American Art, February 26–May 28, 2023
Saint Louis Art Museum, June 24–September 3, 2023
Schingoethe Center, Aurora University, IL, October 2, 2023–January 7, 2024.
Abstract Expressionism still holds a mythic power over art historians, curators, and museum directors as the most “American” style of painting. Critics, notably Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, enshrined the movement’s artists and their canvases covered in pours and drips as expressions of personal freedom and a peculiarly American subjectivity. Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1945–1975 provides a welcome disruption. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb are present in the catalog texts and didactic labels, but none of their works hang on the walls. Action/Abstraction Redefined is the first in-depth presentation of how contemporary Native artists intersected with Abstract… Full Review
August 7, 2023
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Jesús Escobar
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. 288 pp.; 117 color ills.; 26 b/w ills. Hardcover $124.95 (9780271091419)
Few early modern European ruling dynasties generate such fascination as the Spanish Habsburgs. In particular, the figures of Charles V and Philip II are well-known as monarchs who understood how architecture could be employed to propagate an image of empire and did so by patronizing such works as El Escorial, the Alcázar de Toledo, the Alcázar de Madrid, and Charles’s palace at La Alhambra, while Philip reimagined Madrid as the empire’s capital city. Turning away from these figures, in Jesús Escobar’s new book, Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy, the author focuses on the period from 1620 to… Full Review
July 31, 2023
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Gabrielle Moser
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. 248 pp.; 64 b/w ills. Paper $37.95 (9780271081281)
As the twenty-first century progresses, imperial ties continue to loosen, but not without controversy and protest: the recent coronation of Charles III, for example, was greeted with enthusiasm by many—but not all—of his British subjects, and around Britain’s former imperial territories has prompted critical reflection on the legacies of British governance, including invasion, violence, slavery, and many other cultural practices and institutions now more universally recognized as exploitative and oppressive. The proposal that loyal subjects everywhere pledge their allegiance out loud to the King was greeted with particular astonishment, although some welcomed this as a participatory and inclusive new… Full Review
July 24, 2023
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Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Dieter Buchhart, and Vincent Bessières, eds.
Exh. cat. Editions Gallimard, 2022. 288 pp.; 175 color ills. Hardback $45.00 (9782072985942)
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, October 15, 2022–February 19, 2023
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music is “the first exhibition devoted to the role of music in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988),” and situates his origin story in lockstep with the explosion of cultural creativity that was happening around (and through) him in 1970s and 1980s New York. After an overview of the artist as a music lover, collector, and maker, the curators lay out the exhibition’s framework, stating in a wall text that “the extent to which Basquiat’s use of music reveals his engagement with the legacy of the African diaspora and the… Full Review
July 17, 2023
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Brigitte Buettner
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. 272 pp.; 35 color ills.; 55 b/w ills. Hardcover $99.95 (9780271092508)
Brigitte Buettner explores the cultural significance of gemstones in the European Middle Ages in her brilliant and eagerly anticipated book The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture. Medieval inventories of people’s belongings demonstrate that the majority of the net worth of elite individuals often was tied up in gold and silver plate and in jewelry set with sumptuous rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls. The inherent value of these objects tempted owners throughout the centuries to melt them down whenever a financial crisis arose, so only a small percentage of goldsmiths’ gem-laden masterpieces that once existed… Full Review
July 10, 2023
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Liana De Girolami Cheney
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. 318 pp.; 26 color ills.; 61 b/w ills. Cloth £67.99 (9781527557000)
In the last five years, Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) has received increased attention in terms of exhibitions and scholarly publications, as well as a resurgence of interest in her work in the art market. In 2019–20, the Museo del Prado hosted the exhibition A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana and this year, the National Gallery of Ireland will unveil Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker. Both shows are accompanied by substantial exhibition catalogs; in addition, a handful of articles and volumes have been devoted to Lavinia Fontana, including Un apice erotico di Lavinia Fontana by Enrico… Full Review
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Anna Grasskamp
Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2022. 220 pp.; 70 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Cloth Euros109.00 (9789463721158)
With the rise of the early modern maritime trade, seashells became marine objects of curiosity and desire across regions. Conch and nautilus shells appeared in Dutch still life paintings among sumptuous exotic objects, were finely carved to become ornamental drinking cups in southern China, and entered European cabinets of curiosity as specimens, curios, and mounted pieces of art. How can we comprehend the multivalent thingness of shells as they straddle and cross the boundaries of nature and culture, material objects and visual representations, Europe and China, land and sea? What are their values and significance in early modern Eurasian visual… Full Review
June 26, 2023
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Robert Slifkin
MACK, 2022. 242 pp. Paperback $30.00 (9781913620073)
Robert Slifkin’s Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work investigates Hare’s documentary photography, charting his initial interest in and eventual disengagement from the medium, and his combat with those in the upper echelons of the photographic world. Taken during the 1960s and 1970s, Hare’s subjects, white- and blue-collar workers, were Hare’s colleagues, or those he encountered in several cross-country journeys. Slifkin organizes his meditations thematically, in short essayistic chapters, following Hare’s relationship to family, gender relations, employment, postwar documentary photography, and art institutions. Ultimately these are explorations of Hare’s sense of self, or “authority” as Slifkin articulates it. Some… Full Review
June 12, 2023
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Caitlin Meehye Beach
Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 240 pp.; 74 color ills.; 14 b/w ills. $60.00 (9780520343269)
Not since Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monuments in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Freeman Murray’s germinal text Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Press of Murray Brothers, 1916) has a scholar so adeptly and rigorously tackled the relationships between race, enslavement, and sculpture as does Caitlin Beach in Sculpture at the End of Slavery. The book’s table of contents gives early indication of the geographically expansive and historically rich terrain through which Beach navigates. Each chapter is anchored by the work of a singular artist, which the… Full Review
June 5, 2023
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Sonya S. Lee
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. 296 pp.; 119 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780295749303)
In 2020, the flooding Yangtze River covered the feet of the giant Buddha statue at Leshan, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. As a local proverb warns, “When the Great Buddha washes his feet, the world is in chaos.” In 2022, drought revealed three Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) Buddha statues on an island in the Yangtze located within Chongqing municipality, also in southwest China. These examples underscore the timeliness—indeed, the urgency—of Sonya S. Lee’s Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan. Lee takes up the question of how Buddhist art has survived in Sichuan’s humid, rainy environments from the Tang dynasty… Full Review
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