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Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) remains one of the most fascinating figures in the history of early twentieth-century American art, in no small part due to his extraordinary ability to act at once as a consolidator of boundaries and a boundary-crosser. In his best-known paintings, Hartley presented compelling images of American modernist, regionalist, and nationalist identity, iconic representations that seem to operate within the familiar parameters of place and character, just as they venture creatively beyond them. During the mid-nineteen-thirties, for example, Hartley developed a highly innovative compositional strategy in which he presented regional subjects so familiar that they were virtually interchangeable… Full Review

The Museum of Modern Art’s Odilon Redon show was a quiet triumph. In addition to a much-needed and long-overdue consideration of a major figure within the history of French Symbolism, this intimate exhibition provided a welcome respite from the mall-like spaces of the rest of MoMA’s cavernous emporium of modern art The exhibition was made possible by the Ian Woodner Family Collection donation in 2000 of more than one hundred Redon works on paper and canvas, and its breadth reveals Ian Woodner’s deep commitment to Redon’s work, from the artist’s drawings and charcoal noirs to his illustrated books and later… Full Review

Julie Codell’s study of biographies and autobiographies of artists in Victorian Britain offers a significant addition to the understanding of artistic life in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Focusing on the category of “lifewritings,” she examines the intersection of artistic practice and publicity, showing how these texts both reflected the machinations of the art world and shaped popular conceptions about art’s social roles. Nineteenth-century Britain was obsessed with biography. Narratives of exemplary individuals’ lives were deployed and disseminated across Victorian culture for a variety of political and social ends. This was, after all, the era that produced the daunting sixty-three-volume … Full Review

Meyer Schapiro, eminent mid-twentieth-century scholar of Early Christian, medieval, nineteenth-century, and modern art, gave these six lectures on Insular manuscript illumination in 1968 as the inaugural series of the Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The lectures reflect a segment of Schapiro’s two decades of study on Insular art, most of the results of which were “published” as public lectures in various fora; only three, on specific issues, were sent to press in Schapiro’s lifetime. The impetus to publish the Walls lectures originated with Lillian Schapiro… Full Review

Debate continues over whether visual culture studies represents a coherent field with the means to effectively train students in historical methods. The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader mounts a powerful challenge to the field’s critics both by providing a historical genealogy of visual culture studies as a discipline that may trace its origins to the role of vision and visuality in the works of key writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century such as Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Walter Benjamin, and by presenting a carefully chosen set of scholarly essays that make good on the opening claims… Full Review

Although the French seized upon the idea of national patrimony during the July Monarchy (1830–48) and have never let go, the constructed nature of the past this engendered has not been widely studied in France. In the past twenty years, Pierre Nora’s volumes of essays on “lieux de mémoire” have spawned French editions of the writings of Prosper Mérimée and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, among others. Jean Nayrolles’ L’invention de l’art roman à l’époque moderne is a welcome in-depth study of such sources for a nascent French art historiography. It follows his earlier titles from the mid-1990s as… Full Review

Tonio Hölscher’s essay belongs to a particular moment in art-historical scholarship, not to mention Roman art history. The moment, to be more precise, is the mid-1980s, when semiotics was a thriving method of inquiry and two of the most formidable Romanists in the German language, Hölscher and Paul Zanker, both indebted to structural linguistics, separately set out to explain why Roman art looks the way it does. For example, Zanker, in his book The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), explores the political language of both subject and style in Augustan… Full Review

The early Dutch Republic witnessed an explosive growth in the popularity of paintings and prints representing groups of handsome young men and women absorbed in social pleasantries. These “merry company” scenes, as they are often termed, characteristically show their ostentatiously attired figures occupying richly appointed interiors or elegant open-air gardens. Gathered around tables covered by freshly ironed linens and set with expensive goblets and platters, they engage in good-natured conversation, make music on various instruments, smoke pipes, drink wine from stemmed glasses, and play board games. What was the reason for the burgeoning popularity of these arresting pictures? Moreover, what… Full Review

For nearly ninety years, John G. Johnson’s bequest of 1,279 objects to his native Philadelphia has counted among the city’s great treasures. For over twenty years, Carl Strehlke, adjunct curator of the collection; Mark S. Tucker, the Philadelphia Museum’s vice chairman of conservation and senior conservator of paintings; and Tucker’s extensive team have focused scrutiny on ninety-seven early Italian pictures in the Johnson Collection and another twenty among the museum’s holdings. Their work has long constituted a vibrant force in the prolific, ever-dynamic scholarship of that field. The museum has published countless outstanding catalogues over many decades, and this meticulously… Full Review

The American Culture Association’s presentation of its 2006 Cawelti Book Award to Martin Berger’s Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture is an early indication of its deserved recognition and acclaim. This terse volume is doubly ambitious: as a groundbreaking investigation of a category of analysis mostly uncharted by the field of US art history, and as the delineation and defense of a provocative interpretive methodology that reads “artworks against the grain of their visual evidence” (24). First and foremost, Berger’s text represents the discipline’s overdue contribution to the relatively new but rapidly expanding field of whiteness studies. At the… Full Review