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

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Christopher B. Donnan
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 220 pp.; 258 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (0292716222)
Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru is a welcome addition to the literature on the art of ancient Peru. The Moche were a state-level society who prospered in the first seven or so centuries AD on the desert coast of what is now northern Peru. They were prolific and prodigious artists in many media, the most famous being metalwork, the most numerous being ceramics. The gold-filled graves at Sipán and other Moche sites have been discovered in the last twenty years, and much progress has been made in our knowledge of this important ancient American society and its art. Christopher… Full Review
July 5, 2006
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Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, ed.
Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2005. 304 pp.; 140 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth (1903470439)
In an inspired act of programming, in the summer of 2005 the Prado Museum exhibited a selection of paintings associated with the legendary Palace of the Buen Retiro. Not only does the accompanying catalogue shed light on an unparalleled chapter in the artistic patronage of Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621–65), it also marks a resourceful initiative by the Prado to draw attention to the strengths of its own holdings. The museum, which borrowed just three of the roughly sixty works in the exhibition, used the occasion to commemorate an enterprise generally accorded fragmentary coverage in the literature on seventeenth-century… Full Review
July 5, 2006
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Ellen Perry
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 224 pp.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0521831652)
Ellen Perry offers a clear and forthright, if sometimes oversimplified, account of the complex, highly sophisticated discourses that characterized the Roman "aesthetics of emulation." In so doing, she seeks to transform the debate on Roman copying, with a particular focus on Roman statues of gods and heroes, so-called ideal sculpture. This debate has important repercussions for Romanists, and indeed for the field of art history as a whole. After all, Roman ideal sculptures are familiar to most art historians—but not as Roman works of art. Instead, statues that appear stylistically Greek, such as the Apollo Belvedere… Full Review
June 29, 2006
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Jeremy Tanner
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 348 pp.; 54 b/w ills. Cloth $114.00 (0521846145)
In chapter 1, after a brief discussion of "Greek art, the idea of freedom, and the creation of modern high culture," which treads mostly familiar ground, Tanner takes on some twentieth-century accounts of ancient art and (unsurprisingly) finds them wanting—too literary, too anachronistic, and so on. His own (quasi-Parsonian and somewhat jargon-filled) solution is to characterize art as a form of expressive cultural symbolism, constructing "affective experience on the basis of cultural-level codifications of sensuous form generated in some degree of abstraction from immediate social relationships (21). He then mobilizes Karl Weber's concept of rationalization to account for art's different… Full Review
June 29, 2006
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Orange County Museum, June 4–October 2, 2005; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, December 4–February 26, 2006; Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, March 15–June 4, 2006
Comprised of one wonderful work after another, Villa America: American Modern, 1900–1950 makes a strong impression. Beyond presenting many excellent works, the exhibition illuminates the visual dialogue concerning style and theme undertaken between and among U.S. artists during the first half of the twentieth century, a particularly exciting period in U.S. art history. With its illuminating juxtapositions of works and its many self-portraits, Villa America brings to life the excitement and energy that percolated within the U.S. art world during this now rather distant era. The exhibition presents for the first time selections from the private collection of Myron Kunin… Full Review
June 28, 2006
Robert D. Aguirre
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 296 pp.; 29 b/w ills. Paper $19.95 (0816645000)
Robert Aguirre should be commended for calling our attention to the less-studied area of the circulation between, and symbolic function of, collections and displays in nineteenth-century Britain and parts of Latin America. Largely centered on nationalist discourses, Aguirre's very useful and informative Informal Empire explains the ways that England, in the place of direct military colonization of post-independence Mexico and Central America, and in the face of increasing interventions by the United States, nonetheless managed to play a vital, if not controlling, economic role in those regions. England did so, Aguirre argues, through the appropriation, trans-Atlantic exchange, and display of… Full Review
June 28, 2006
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Phillip Dennis Cate, ed.
The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 2005. 240 pp.; 410 color ills. Paper $45.00 (1976903016)
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, October 23, 2005–March 12, 2006
The two titles of this exhibition curated by Phillip Dennis Cate are in many respects contradictory. The subtitle, Sculpture in Paris from Daumier to Rodin, is utterly banal and could apply to any of the dozens of exhibitions mounted in the past thirty years on the sculpture of the second half of the nineteenth century: an assemblage of masterworks, of famous names, of marbles and bronzes. But the main title, Breaking the Mold, announces an entirely different agenda: It recalls the moment when, at the end of the bronze-founding process, the clay form that surrounds the poured metal… Full Review
June 27, 2006
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Christopher Whitehead
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. 290 pp.; 45 b/w ills. Cloth $120.00 (0754632369)
Christopher Whitehead’s well-researched book, The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery, contributes significantly to the narrative of Britain’s first public museum. The National Gallery was originally conceived in the early nineteenth century as a public institution accessible to the general population. As the museum evolved throughout the nineteenth century, an attempt was made to accommodate the often conflicting desires and ideas of museologists, artists, donors, politicians, and the public. A debate arose during the mid-nineteenth century over the appearance and function of the public art museum. Should it be a public educational… Full Review
June 19, 2006
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Dorothy Wong
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003. 244 pp.; 125 b/w ills. Cloth $52.00 (9780824827830)
Chinese Steles is an exceptional work, useful for those unfamiliar with the genre of steles yet thorough enough to satisfy a scholarly need for depth. Dorothy Wong presents her study in a very coherent fashion: beginning with an overview of the stele within a broader Chinese historical context before moving on to consider the form as it was appropriated by Buddhist and Northern Wei concerns. With the brunt of the study focused on Buddhist steles, Wong effectively argues for an appropriation of the medium to relay the new Buddhist message, and she uses a regional construct to chart the connections… Full Review
June 19, 2006
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Ann Percy and Mimi Cazort
Exh. cat. University Park and Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 300 pp.; 80 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0271025387)
Exhibition schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 30, 2004–February 21, 2005
This handsome catalogue accompanied an exhibition of Italian drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year. The show featured one hundred-and-fifty drawings from the permanent collection, whereas the book catalogues eighty of these drawings, ranging in date from c. 1539 to 2001. The publication includes a long essay by Ann Percy, curator of drawings at Philadelphia, tracing the formation of the collection. Seventy-eight of the eighty catalogue entries were written by Mimi Cazort, former curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery in Ottawa; one entry was written by E. James Mundy and one by Ann Percy. Both… Full Review
June 19, 2006
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