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

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Teresa A. Carbone
New York: Brooklyn Museum in association with D Giles Limited, 2006. 1152 pp.; 160 color ills.; 860 b/w ills. Cloth $350.00 (1904832083)
The Brooklyn Museum’s scholarly catalogue documenting its entire collection of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century American paintings is a landmark contribution to American art scholarship. Its elegant, clean, and user-friendly design belies the impressive breadth and depth of its content. It is fortuitous—though surely not originally foreseen—that the publication of the book, begun twenty years ago in response to the Luce Foundation’s grants program to support major museum catalogues of American paintings, coincides with the completion of the Brooklyn Museum’s Luce Center for American Art. The publication’s extensive entries and data on nearly 700 American paintings by 360 artists make a… Full Review
January 29, 2007
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Exhibition schedule: Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, Norwich, England, July 8–August 9, 2006
EAST International, the open-submission exhibition that takes place annually in and around Norwich School of Art and Design, displayed its well-earned self-confidence in 2006, when programming material boasted that, “The trust of artists in the democratic structure of an open exhibition has enabled EAST to become an annual challenge to the expertise of the contemporary art establishment. Not a bad achievement for a small art school gallery in a provincial city.” Perhaps to find this challenge we should look to such galleries in such cities detached from London’s monolithic art establishment (Norwich is in the historic capital of the… Full Review
January 25, 2007
Ptolemy Dean
Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. 208 pp. Cloth (1840142936)
Architect, historian, and television presenter Ptolemy Dean’s latest book on the work of Sir John Soane (1753–1837) constitutes a significant, intensely researched, and sumptuously illustrated contribution to the study of the late-Georgian British architect. Yet, as with many recent works on Soane, it also emanates something of the incense-filled air of a many-chambered and well-attended shrine wherein every scrap of paper, masonry, woodwork, or glazing that the great man might possibly have laid eyes on is consecrated for the reader’s study and admiration. Its value to Soane scholars and admirers is very tangible; its meaning to a wider public engaged… Full Review
January 25, 2007
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Rediscovering Venetian Renaissance Painting was the closing event of several associated with the exhibition Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, June 18–September 17, 2006. Previous events included a Robert H. Smith Curatorial/Conservation Colloquy entitled Venetian Underdrawing at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Among the participants were Paolo Spezzani, X-ray and infrared specialist from Venice; Jill Dunkerton, conservator from London National Gallery; Barbara Berrie and Elizabeth Walmsley of the Washington National Gallery; and Carmen Bambach, curator of the Metropolitan Museum Drawing Department. On… Full Review
January 24, 2007
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Bruno Chenique and Sylvie Ramond, eds.
Exh. cat. Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2007. 240 pp.; 173 color ills.; 38 b/w ills. Paper €35.00 (2754100989)
Exhibition schedule: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, April 21–July 31, 2006
Wall texts and labels in museum exhibitions, often written in bland and impersonal prose, tend to obscure the voice of the curator. The exhibition Géricault: La Folie d’un Monde provides a glorious exception to the rule. Bruno Chenique, an independent scholar and author of numerous publications about Théodore Géricault, develops his thesis not only in the exhibition’s catalogue (which is often the venue reserved for more theoretical art history in the present museum climate) but also, refreshingly, in the thought-provoking, witty, and at times caustic wall texts, brochure, and audio guide commentary. As with any great curatorial eye, Chenique makes… Full Review
January 24, 2007
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Thomas Crow, Branden W. Joseph, Paul Schimmel, and Charles Stuckey
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005. 317 pp.; 170 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Paper $45.00 (0914357921)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 20, 2005–April 2, 2006; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, May 21–September 11, 2006; Musée national d’arte moderne, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, October 25, 2006–January 21, 2007; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February 17–May 6, 2007
One of the first objects encountered upon entering Robert Rauschenberg: Combines at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was Satellite (1955). This modestly scaled Combine is composed of a sundry collection of materials including a pair of dirty cream-colored socks, two dainty discolored doilies, a strip of worn paisley sheet, sections of cardboard, paint-soaked comic strip broadsheets, and dripping, sensual passages of red, yellow, white, and blue oil paint. This mess of elements is topped off by a swaggering, taxidermied chicken caked in thick oil, who struts defiantly across the paint-encrusted upper ledge of the picture, his downward… Full Review
January 18, 2007
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Macau Museum of Art
Exh. cat. Macau: Macau Museum of Art, 2006. 422 pp.; 300 color ills. MOP750.00 (9993754943)
Exhibition schedule: Macau Museum of Art, Macau, August 9–November 19, 2006
The Palace Museum, Beijing, the Shanghai Museum, and the Macau Museum of Art have collaborated again to produce a compelling exhibition. The present show follows earlier exhibits on Ba Da Shan Ren with Shi Tao (2004) and one dedicated solely to Dong Qichang (2005). The Macau Museum of Art is one of the premiere locations for exhibitions of art in south China and is the only museum devoted to art in Macau. The present show is under the direction of Chan Hou Seng, the museum’s curator of Chinese paintings and calligraphy. The magnificent artwork of Ming dynasty artists Xu… Full Review
January 11, 2007
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Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina Esteras Martin, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2004. 412 pp.; 250 color ills.; 105 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (030010491X)
The monumental exhibition The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530–1830, held in the fall of 2004 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, signaled recognition of the tapestry and silverwork masterpieces produced during the viceregal period in the Andes. One of the achievements of the exhibition’s curators, Elena Phipps and Johanna Hecht, and consulting curator, Cristina Esteras Martín, was their ability to obtain from both private collectors and institutions vital objects that had rarely, if ever, been exhibited. The result was a remarkable collection of many of the most significant artistic treasures from the late pre-Hispanic Inca and colonial periods… Full Review
January 11, 2007
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Charles Beddington
Exh. cat. New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art and Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2006. 220 pp.; 120 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (0300119690)
Exhibition schedule: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, October 19–December 31, 2006; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, January 24–April 15, 2007
Visitors entering Canaletto in England at the Yale Center for British Art are confronted with two large canvases reunited for the first time in a century: a 1745–46 view of the Molo in Venice on Ascension Day (cat. 54, presumably painted in Venice), and a view of the Thames below Westminster on Lord Mayor’s Day a year or so later (cat. 23, painted in London). It is an instructive comparison that sets up the themes of style, subject matter, and patronage explored by this exhibition. The Venetian view features all of the mature vedutista’s familiar hallmarks, with its frontal… Full Review
January 2, 2007
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Geoffrey Batchen
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. 160 pp.; 80 color ills. Cloth $29.95 (1568984502)
Rumors of a tight relationship between photography and memory have been circulating since the nineteenth century, despite the many objections raised in both scholarly and fanciful works. A feature of these attacks is the prosecutor’s reluctance to produce evidence. Roland Barthes writes a long meditation on photography as a form of counter-memory that ultimately rests on a portrait of his mother that he allows no one to see. Siegfried Kracauer launches his skeptical study of photography and memory by evoking a magazine illustration of the “demonic diva,” whose image lures consumers into the memory-vacuum of an eternal present. And who… Full Review
January 2, 2007
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