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Gerald and Sara Murphy were admired—adored—by many of the best-known members of the transatlantic avant-garde in the 1920s. John Dos Passos, their frequent guest both in Paris and on the Riviera, wrote happily of being “entertained . . . with great elegance and a great deal of gin fizz.” For Fernand Léger, Gerald was “the only American painter in Paris.” F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is the Night to them; the novel’s protagonists, the Divers, were modeled on the Murphys. Perhaps the best indicator of the breadth of their sparkling circle is a souvenir menu from a party they threw… Full Review

Although not well known to the general public, the eighteenth-century French painter and draughtsman Gabriel de Saint-Aubin has long compelled specialists working on virtually every aspect of Parisian social and cultural life. His exuberant depictions took the form of drawings in chalk, ink, and watercolor, as well as etchings and a few oil paintings, while his subjects ranged over most aspects of the cultured world around him: social interaction both high and low; theater; royal ceremony; legal proceedings; portraiture; history; architecture and ornamental design; and the unique product for which he is best known, miniature depictions of other artists’ works… Full Review

Bernini pittore, the title of the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s painterly practice as well as of the accompanying catalogue, is a provocative reconstruction of this lesser-known aspect of the Baroque artist’s multidisciplinary career. Conceived and curated by Tomaso Montanari for the recently restored Palazzo Barberini in Rome, the comprehensive exhibit and catalogue offer a new monograph on Bernini’s painting under a purposely familiar title. Montanari’s version of “Bernini pittore” is preceded by two catalogue raissonnée of the same name: Luigi Grassi’s pioneering monograph, Bernini pittore (Rome: Danesi, 1945), and the recent book by Francesco Petrucci, Bernini… Full Review

In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77), the journal October published the results of a four-part “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” that the editors had sent to a range of scholars, artists, and critics the previous winter. Outwardly hostile to the then-emerging field of visual culture, the survey’s editors made no secret of their disdain for the type of work being done in the name of visual studies, which they suggested “is helping in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (October 77 (1996): 25). The October questionnaire was a defining moment… Full Review

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, curated by Okwui Enwezor, explores a variety of ways in which contemporary artists appropriate, investigate, and reconfigure archival materials and structures. It focuses on photography and film while at the same time conducting, as Enwezor argues in his catalogue essay, “critical transactions” against “the exactitude of the photographic trace” (11). The term “archive” is thus meant to suggest not the literal image of a dusty file cabinet full of old documents but, following Michel Foucault’s influential The Archaeology of Knowledge (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan… Full Review

The past decade or so has seen the emergence of a great deal of stimulating writing on Ingres, including important work by Carol Ockman, Adrian Rifkin, Susan Siegfried, and others.[1] One defining characteristic of this new writing is its interest in and acceptance of tensions and paradoxes in Ingres’s work and reception. As Siegfried writes in the introduction to a special issue of Art History devoted to the artist, the “new way of thinking about Ingres . . . illuminates the artist as a subject of contradictions, which are . . . constitutive of his practice and deeply embedded as… Full Review

Amazon.com has one customer review of Adam Hardy’s earlier study, Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Transformation, the Karṇāṭa Drāviḍa Tradition, 7th to 13th Centuries (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1995), from a reader “fascinated by ancient Indian temples,” looking for “beautiful pictures with some descriptive text spattered about here and there,” who concluded from its over-many “hand-drawings of details after details” and black-and-white plates that the book “was not for me (a reader with a casual interest in temple architecture), but probably is an excellent source for the academic architect.” Hardy’s new study addresses this audience, condensing his architectural analysis, examining many… Full Review

This past summer I went to see, for the first time, Judy Chicago’s notorious The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum, its first permanent home since its creation in 1979. The work—which spurred heated controversy and a plethora of both hostile and heartfelt responses—represents a dinner party of thirty-nine accomplished but largely forgotten women from history; each attendee is symbolized by her own place setting, including a plate illustrating her genitals. Having studied feminist art for nearly a decade, I was looking forward to this moment—mainly for the chance to see the thing of myth, to put a face to… Full Review

I kept the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) title photograph of Joseph Cornell at work as the main wallpaper on my cell phone for over a month. It is a wonderful and unexpected image: a forty-four-year-old Cornell leans over an uncluttered worktable, where the empty shell of a large box and a few art supplies are neatly laid out. The lean frame of the artist forms a silhouette of dark hair and clothing against a white paper backdrop. It looks totally staged—somewhere between a cooking demo and a magic act. Perhaps it was the jolt of seeing a… Full Review

In January of this year, I visited Longmen on a grey and chilly day. Amy McNair’s Donors of Longmen was deliberately my companion. As I walked through the site, up and down the ramps of stairs that give access to the cave temples, the fourteenth-century Muslim poet Sadula’s description of Longmen, which McNair quotes on page 160, resonated with sad truth in my mind: Along both river banks, men in the past bored into the rock to make large caves and small shrines no fewer than one thousand in number. They sculpted out of the rock sacred images… Full Review