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

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Amanda Lillie
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 370 pp.; 184 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (0521770475)
The received history of the fifteenth-century Florentine villa begins with Careggi, Trebbio, and Cafaggiolo, the brooding strongholds built for Cosimo de’ Medici by Michelozzo, then proceeds to the serene, cubic Villa Medici at Fiesole, and concludes with the all’antica forms of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano. In Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, Amanda Lillie suggests this standard sequence is both generalizing and reductive, and notes that an assumed familiarity with this architectural type is in fact based upon the evidence drawn from the five principal Medici villas. In her book—a self-described “quest for a more representative… Full Review
March 24, 2006
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Lianne McTavish
Aldershot, UK and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005. 272 pp.; 29 b/w ills. Cloth $89.95 (0754636194)
Lianne McTavish’s book, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France, is part of an Ashgate series entitled Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, a group of collected essays and single-authored volumes that investigate subjects as diverse as identity politics, widowhood, and the book trade. Ashgate is, indeed, one of the few publishing houses still willing to produce these sorts of studies, especially in the form of collected essays, and we are indebted to them for their efforts to bring new studies of women and gender into the scholarly realm. Like the other books in… Full Review
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Philippe Bordes
Exh. cat. Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 400 pp.; 80 color ills.; 95 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300104472)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, February 1–April 24, 2005; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, June 5–September 5, 2005
Although many of Jacques-Louis David’s best-known paintings are in French public collections, over the past century U.S. institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Clark Art Institute have managed to snap up significant works by the artist. The presence in the United States of these images, which date mainly from the Napoleonic Empire and David’s period of post-Napoleonic exile in Brussels, was the stimulus for an exhibition of David’s late work at both the Getty and the Clark last year. The exhibition was accompanied by… Full Review
March 15, 2006
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Claudia Swan
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 256 pp.; 69 b/w ills. Cloth (0521826748)
It’s unfortunate that Jacques de Gheyn II is not widely known beyond Dutch specialists. He exemplifies the richness of his immediate cultural context and, more broadly, of the period surrounding 1600, when so many paradigms of European art began to change dramatically. New literature on his work is most welcome. The primary book on the de Gheyn family, I. Q. Van Regteren Altena’s Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983), was based on the author’s dissertation research in the 1930s. Although full of valuable insights and providing a useful catalogue of works by the de Gheyn family… Full Review
March 15, 2006
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Wu Hung
Chicago: University of Chicago Press in association with Reaktion Books, 2005. 240 pp.; 60 color ills.; 133 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (0226360784)
Wu Hung, Chinese born, has become a well-known U.S. art historian. Author of a number of distinguished books discussing the art of his native country, in Remaking Beijing he tells the history of Tiananmen Square, the gate to the Imperial Palace. Every tourist who goes to Beijing visits this central site. Coming from the east, you go north to buy a ticket and enter the Forbidden City. But if you walk south just before entering the Square, you reach the Museum of Chinese History, which now contains displays of art and a waxworks exhibition showing the communist rulers, various emperors… Full Review
March 13, 2006
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Oliver Leaman
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. 211 pp. Paper $25.00 (9780268033699)
Over a century of scholarship in Islamic art has produced numerous monographs, catalogues, and surveys; yet until recently, only a few studies have been published on the aesthetics of Islamic art. The last three decades, however, have seen several books and exhibitions that claim to deal with the “common principles,” “aesthetics,” and “philosophy” of Islamic art. Oliver Leaman’s book is both a contribution to and a critique of this particular tradition Although according to Leaman his book is intended to “establish a solid foundation for the aesthetics of Islamic art” (vii), the book is in fact not solely focused on… Full Review
March 13, 2006
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Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 208 pp.; 36 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $34.95 (0807829560)
Despite its modest format, this is a monumental book. The author has fitted into comparatively few pages one of the most carefully considered methodological assessments, historical analysis, and art historical interpretations of eighteenth-century Central European culture to have appeared in the last half-century. This is no unremarkable accomplishment, as it can only have been written in the maturity of a scholarly career engaged with the history, culture, and art of Europe in its full geographical and intellectual breadth, from the Renaissance through the Baroque into Neo-Classicism. But as striking as is the erudition informing the book’s multiple theses, equally impressive… Full Review
March 10, 2006
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Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, eds.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005. 392 pp.; 52 b/w ills. Paper $29.00 (0824828690)
The title of this collection, Chinese-Language Film, proposes a linguistically based category through which to consider a block of films, directors, and styles. This grouping obviously works against the notion of national cinema, but it also works against a transnational ethnic identification that would include, for example, films about Chinese life in the United States, Europe, South America, or other locales if those films’ predominant language is English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or any language that is not Chinese. Given that language specificity and its implications are often ignored in many fields—under the utopian desire, perhaps, for transparency and easy… Full Review
March 9, 2006
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Alanna Heiss, Klaus Biesenbach, and Glenn D. Lowry
Long Island City, NY: P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 2005. 392 pp. Cloth (0870709879)
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, March 13–September 26, 2005
On the evening I attended the Greater New York 2005 exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, I was surprised to find that the line queuing around the block was not there to see the works of one hundred and sixty of New York’s freshest artistic talents hanging in the galleries, halls, stairwells, bathrooms, and boiler room, but was waiting to join the mass of bodies slowly packing into the building’s courtyard. As it turns out, on summer Saturday nights P.S.1 hosts d.j.ed dance parties with liquor licenses (my admission ticket was a self-stick fiberglass wrist band). Much of the crowd… Full Review
March 8, 2006
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Jenny Anger
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 342 pp.; 8 color ills.; 75 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (0521822505)
At the dawn of abstraction in the early twentieth century, it was not unusual for artists and critics to locate in the decorative or ornamental a model of pure form. At the same time, the decorative’s varied associations with the “decorative arts,” “craft,” the domestic realm, femininity, utility, and the everyday always rendered it suspect as an art free from the material realm. Ultimately, the decorative as a source for the modernist notion of art’s purity or autonomy was aggressively suppressed by modern artists and critics. Ernst Gombrich observed, “There is nothing the abstract painter . . . dislike[s] more… Full Review
March 8, 2006
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