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

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Ann Boulton, Jay Fisher, Dorothy Kosinski, Steve Nash, and Oliver Shell
Exh. cat. Baltimore, Dallas, and New Haven: Baltimore Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, and Nasher Sculpture Center in association with Yale University Press, 2007. 312 pp.; 261 color ills.; 35 b/w ills. $60.00 (9780300115413)
Exhibition schedule: Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, January 21–April 29, 2007; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 9–September 16, 2007; Baltimore Museum of Art, October 28, 2007–February 3, 2008
“I myself have done sculpture as the complement of my studies. I did sculpture when I was tired of painting. For a change of medium. But I sculpted as a painter. I did not sculpt like a sculptor. Sculpture does not say what painting says. Painting does not say what music says. They are parallel ways, but you can’t confuse them.” —Henri Matisse Matisse’s statement, printed high on the wall in the Dallas Museum of Art foyer, sums up the motivation for Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, an ambitious exhibition jointly organized by the Dallas Museum of Art,… Full Review
August 29, 2007
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Fereshteh Daftari, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006. 112 pp.; 98 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (0870700855)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 26–May 22, 2006
Venetia Porter, ed.
Exh. cat. London: British Museum Press, 2006. 144 pp.; 204 color ills. Cloth (0714111635)
Exhibition schedule: British Museum, London, May 18–September 2, 2006
Contemporary art from the Middle East has only begun to emerge from obscurity in the past decade. Its struggle for recognition by the mainstream art world stems from an indefinable hesitation, lack of understanding, and the absence of established standards by which to evaluate it. A handful of major museums have started to collect this art seriously, while others continue to resist such acquisitions, often dismissing them as derivative and of questionable quality. Two recent exhibitions that focused on contemporary art from the Middle East and helped to put it on the map were Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking… Full Review
August 16, 2007
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Charles McClendon
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 280 pp.; 35 color ills.; 175 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300106886)
Charles McClendon’s recent book sets forth, perhaps for the first time in English, a substantial prehistory of medieval architecture from late Roman Antiquity through the “Dark Ages” and the Carolingian Renaissance. Ranging over nearly a half-millennium, he focuses on the period between 600 and 900 in explaining the roots of Romanesque architecture. A lavish scholarly apparatus includes a plethora of carefully placed photographic illustrations, many line drawings, and numerous measured ground plans that closely support the meticulously documented, well-written text. An eloquent celebration of a little-known era of architectural history that is plainly meant for the enjoyment and edification of… Full Review
August 15, 2007
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Véronique Plesch
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. 488 pp.; 123 color ills.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780268038885)
Many of us have had the experience of walking into a little-known church in a quaint European town where we were so intrigued that we considered conducting research on the church’s elaborate decorations. Unlike most of us, who recognize the daunting nature of such an undertaking, Véronique Plesch has spent the last decade documenting, investigating, and analyzing the extensive fresco cycle by Giovanni Canavesio in the church of Notre-Dame des Fontaines at La Brigue. This church, located about eighty kilometers north of Nice, is home to the most well-preserved of four extant fresco cycles completed by Canavesio in the 1480s… Full Review
August 14, 2007
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Christina Riggs
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 358 pp.; 8 color ills.; 126 b/w ills. Cloth $199.00 (019927665X)
The theme of cultural intersection in Ptolemaic and Roman-period Egypt has recently captured scholarly attention, particularly that of philologists and historians. Jacco Dieleman’s Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100–300 CE) (Leiden: Brill, 2005), for example, and Susan Stephens’s Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) underscore the interlaced debt of Greeks and Egyptians. And with scarce exception, the articles in the often-cited Life in a Multi-cultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond (edited by Janet H. Johnson; Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1992) also rely… Full Review
August 9, 2007
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The ninth Clark Art Institute spring conference was organized by Marq Smith, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Visual Culture, along with Michael Ann Holly and Mark Ledbury, director and associate director, respectively, of the Clark’s Research and Academic Programs. In her opening remarks, Holly noted that a handful of those initially invited to speak declined on the grounds that research was simply what they did and there was really nothing much more they could imagine saying about it. Something of this sense is reflected as well in remarks by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai cited by both Smith and Holly… Full Review
August 8, 2007
A. A. Donohue
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 278 pp.; 43 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (0521840848)
Alice Donohue’s new book examines descriptions of ancient Greek sculpture written in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and the light they shed on the intellectual history of classical archaeology. She argues that the practice common in archaeological publication of isolating description from interpretation was instrumental in perpetuating a false empiricism, characterized by the denial of the subjective nature of vision. Her inquiry focuses on the historiography of early Greek sculpture, a category that she maintains was evaluated through misguided comparisons with Classical and Hellenistic works, and conceptualized in accordance with theories of stylistic development which inappropriately applied evolutionary models to… Full Review
August 8, 2007
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Robert S. Nelson and Kristen M. Collins
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2006. 320 pp.; 236 color ills.; 36 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0892368551)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, November 14, 2006–March 4, 2007
The greatest gift of the exhibition documented in this catalogue is exemplified by catalogue entry 44 (by Glenn Peers), a small panel of just two figures. The desert father Makarios stands to one side, straight and intensely decorous in the “angelic robe” of the monk, his right hand resting on his long beard, his left lightly raised. Beside him looms a seraph, its upswept wings echoing Makarios’s hood, its cherubic face intent. Gently, it takes the monk’s left wrist in its small, red hand. Monastic inspiration is distilled here in an image of penetrating simplicity. Previously published only once, the… Full Review
August 2, 2007
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Pierre-Yves Le Pogam
Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2005. 813 pp.; 318 ills. Cloth €160.00 (2728307296)
“The pope plieth in an old palace of the bishops of this city [Orvieto], ruinous and decayed. . . . The place may well be called Urbs Vetus. No one would give it any other name. Cannot tell how the Pope should be described as at liberty here, where hunger, scarcity, bad lodgings, and ill air keep him as much confined as he was in Castel Angel. His Holiness could not deny to Master Gregory that captivity at Rome was better than liberty here.” (107) This description of the papal residence in Orvieto written by Henry VIII’s representatives to… Full Review
July 31, 2007
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Oliver Impey and Christiaan Jörg
Boston: Hotei Publishing, 2005. 384 pp.; 600 color ills.; 57 b/w ills. $350.00 (907482272X)
In Japanese Export Lacquer, 1580–1850, Oliver Impey and Christiaan Jörg quote English collector William Beckford writing in April of 1781, “I fear I shall never be . . . good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, [and] collecting old Japan” (296). Beckford’s idea of “collecting old Japan” is a reflection of the importance that the black-lacquer and gilt-decorated furnishings, caskets, and assorted decorative objects made for the European market came to occupy by the mid-eighteenth century. That the collection of these objects should command a place in this short list of a gentleman’s… Full Review
July 26, 2007
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