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

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Rebecca Zurier
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 418 pp.; 12 color ills.; 149 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780520220188)
From its first words, “Picture this,” Rebecca Zurier’s important new book offers readers vivid visual and intellectual insights into both Ashcan School images and the modern culture of urban New York in which they developed. Beginning with a lively evocation of the details in John Sloan’s Hairdresser’s Window (1907), Zurier analyzes the rapidly developing processes of representation, display, and active looking that shaped the city’s changing cultural milieu from the late nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth. What did it mean, she asks, to live in a culture of newly exciting visual spectacle provided by street advertising… Full Review
September 12, 2007
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John Varriano
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 288 pp.; 104 color ills. Paper $40.95 (0271027185)
The sight of John Varriano’s Caravaggio: Art of Realism on the list of new literary offerings inevitably raises the question whether the art world really needs another treatise on Caravaggio. The provocative image of Victorious Love (1601–2) chosen for the book jacket, moreover, awakens the fear that Varriano’s contribution may be yet another wearisome exploration of the sexuality of the seventeenth-century artist. The recent literature on Caravaggio can be overwhelming. In the realm of biographies, readers can select anything from Helen Langdon’s brilliant Caravaggio: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) to Peter Robb’s lamentable flight of… Full Review
September 12, 2007
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On April 22, 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sponsored a symposium to discuss issues surrounding the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797. The symposium brought together a group of experts on the interactions between Venice and Islam. In his introduction to the symposium, Stefano Carboni, curator of the exhibition and administrator of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum, emphasized the three concepts governing the exhibition: to show the reasons why Venice had so many trade relationships with the Islamic world, to examine the relationship between trade and diplomacy, and to discuss Venice’s… Full Review
September 12, 2007
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Miguel Falomir, ed.
Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007. 465 pp.; 206 color ills. Paper $90.00 (1903470463)
Exhibition schedule: January 30–May 27, 2007
The Prado’s exhibition on Tintoretto, mounted by curator Miguel Falomir, meets the standard that a show is justified by its educational value to both the specialist and the public. Occupying the central wing of the primo piano of the Prado, the exhibit is mounted spaciously and offers judicious juxtapositions of paintings, drawings, and technical data. While presenting itself as the first monographic exhibition for the artist since 1937, the show also disclaims any pretension to be complete. (During the Tintoretto anniversary year of 1994, the Accademia in Venice provided an exhibition of Tintoretto’s portraiture, at which time an itinerary of… Full Review
September 6, 2007
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Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Exh. cat. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art in association with University of Washington Press, 2006. 184 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Paper (0295985712)
Exhibition schedule: Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, January 14–March 26, 2006; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, April 21–July 17, 2006; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA, August 25–November 26, 2006
Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century is an important contribution to the growing literature on race and visual representation in American culture. The beautifully illustrated catalogue includes three essays by guest curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania), two of which expand upon the ideas in her first book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). It also contains an introduction by Karen C. C. Dalton… Full Review
September 6, 2007
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Christy Anderson
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 292 pp.; many b/w ills. Cloth $106.00 (0521820278)
“If we try to enclose him in his own time and look into his works instead of outward from them,” John Summerson lamented with a distinct echo of William Kent more than 200 years before him, “we find ourselves gazing at something extremely hard to bring to focus” (Inigo Jones, London: Penguin, 1966, 13). They were both speaking about Inigo Jones, the first intellectually complex architect England has produced in its history of the built environment. John Webb, Jones’s son-in-law, actively promoted Jones as a heroic figure for English architecture; in his book on Stonehenge, Webb carefully edited… Full Review
September 3, 2007
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Lin Po-t’ing, ed.
Exh. cat. Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2007. 495 pp.; 196 color ills. Cloth (1009503912)
Exhibition schedule: National Palace Museum, Taipei, December 25, 2006–March 25, 2007
In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, there is a scene in the Forbidden City after the 1911 Republican Revolution in which the already abdicated last emperor P’u-i (John Lone) warned his two chief eunuchs with these words: “I’ve recently learned that many pieces from the imperial collections were on sale in the antique stores of Peking!” Palace eunuchs were notorious thieves of imperial treasures. The Forbidden City, first built from 1406 to 1420, was not only the world’s largest palace complex for the twenty-four successive emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, but also the home to the magnificent… Full Review
August 30, 2007
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Peter Barnet and Pete Dandridge
Exh. cat. New York: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in association with Yale University Press, 2006. 256 pp.; 100 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0300116845)
Exhibition schedule: The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, July 12–October 15, 2006
From the twelfth to the fifteenth century, a remarkable group of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic vessels for ceremonial hand washing were made in medieval Germany. Employed in the service of the Mass and at the noble table, aquamanilia ranged in shape from single animals such as dragons, lions, and peacocks to more complex compositions, including mounted knights and Samson fighting the lion. The appearance of these objects in Germany in the twelfth century is remarkable for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, they mark the resurgence of the technology for casting hollow metal objects in medieval Europe, a skill that… Full Review
August 30, 2007
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William R. Cook, ed.
Boston: Brill, 2005. 298 pp.; 120 ills. Cloth $225.00 (9004131671)
It is humbling to realize how much has been written, yet how much remains uncertain, about the art associated with the medieval Franciscan order. Considering the tremendous growth of mendicant orders—Franciscan, Dominican, and other—in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the extravagant claims that have been made about their cultural influence, the attention given to the art of the Franciscans is not misplaced. Scholars have linked the Franciscan movement of the thirteenth century to the rise of naturalism and humanism in the visual arts, to the development of narrative painting and the vernacular lyric, to significant changes in Marian piety… Full Review
August 30, 2007
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Anne-Orange Poilpré
Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2005. 304 pp.; 4 color ills.; 26 b/w ills. Paper (220407571X)
As she writes in her foreword, the goal of Anne-Orange Poilpré’s new book on the Maiestas Domini is to analyze the origin and development of this iconographical theme from its emergence in Early Christian Rome and Ravenna until the reign of Charles the Bald (14). It is the most comprehensive work on the subject since Frederick van der Meer’s pioneering book of 1938, and is thus considerably broader in scope than other studies that have dealt with the Maiestas in the Carolingian and Romanesque periods.[1] Conspicuously displayed in church apses, sculpted Romanesque and Gothic tympana, as well as… Full Review
August 29, 2007
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