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

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Julie Reiss
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 205 pp. Paper $23.00 (9780262681346 )
Mark Rosenthal
Munich: Prestel, 2003. 96 pp.; 14 color ills.; 44 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (3791329847)
Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry
New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004. 208 pp.; 268 color ills.; 49 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (0500284512)
Claire Bishop
New York: Routledge, 2005. 144 pp.; 268 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (0415974127)
As an inherently heterogeneous practice, installation art presents a challenge to those who would define it and write its history. The task is both to determine its consistent attributes without being too exclusive and to parse the expanding number of works described as “installation art” into categories coherent enough to provide a critical framework. To complicate matters, these generally ephemeral pieces have often been only poorly documented in photographs and first-hand accounts. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that the approaches and potential audiences for the four books under review are so varied: they range from broad surveys to… Full Review
February 6, 2006
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David Peters Corbett
University Park and Manchester, UK: Pennsylvania State University Press in association with Manchester University Press, 2005. 256 pp.; 22 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (0271023619)
The concluding dozen pages of The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914, spell out two concerns or commitments that underpin, but are not allowed to dominate, the preceding text. First of these is an assertion of the fundamental value of attention to the physical properties of the work of art, to what we actually see, and a renunciation of approaches, notably the social history of art, that tend to look elsewhere. The second is an attack on widespread acceptance of Virginia Woolf’s famous response to Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition that “on or about December… Full Review
February 3, 2006
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Craig Clunas
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. 232 pp.; 63 color ills.; 35 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0824827724)
This book is a distinguished addition to a distinguished body of work and an important contribution to studies of the Ming period. By looking at Wen Zhengming’s calligraphy and painting as objects embedded in complex networks of obligation, patronage, and reciprocity, Craig Clunas provides richly detailed new perspectives on familiar events and questions of the period. Although good English-language studies of Wen have been done in the past, this one is a significant advance. It incorporates much recent scholarship in Chinese, including letters and other materials assembled by the contemporary scholar Zhou Daozhen that were not included in the official… Full Review
February 3, 2006
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Oliver Watson
Kuwait: Thames and Hudson in association with Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait National Museum, al-Sabah Collection, 2004. 512 pp.; 900+ color ills. Cloth $65.00 (0500976295)
This deluxe catalogue featuring Islamic ceramics from the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject. Although a few catalogues of Islamic ceramics collections have been published in the twenty-first century (for example, Géza Fehérvári’s Ceramics of the Islamic World in the Tareq Rajab Museum, London: I.B.Tauris, 2000), the exceptional quality and range of the al-Sabah collection set it apart. In the introductory chapters of Ceramics from Islamic Lands, Oliver Watson broaches questions that other cataloguers of private collections might have avoided, namely fashions in collecting, the gulf between the types of… Full Review
January 27, 2006
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David A. Levine and Larry Silver
College Art Association.
H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson, History of Art: The Western Tradition, 6th rev. ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004). 1032 pages; 1326 illustrations, 976 in color. Cloth $95.00 Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 12th ed; 2 vols. (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005). 1150 pages; 1306 illustrations, almost all in color, Paper w/CD-ROM $189.90 Marilyn Stokstad et al., Art History, 2nd rev. ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005). 1264 pages; 1409 illustrations, 1004 in color. Cloth w/CD-ROM $120.00 Frederick Hartt, Art: A History of Painting,… Full Review
January 25, 2006
Felipe Pereda and Fernando Marías, eds.
Madrid: Nerea, 2002. 398 pp.; 309 color ills.; 8 b/w ills. Cloth (848956986X)
One of the joys of archival research is making a discovery. Would that everyone’s could be as significant as the recovery by Felipe Pereda and Fernando Marías of a manuscript atlas of maps and bird’s-eye views of the entire coast of Spain assembled between 1622 and 1634 by the Portuguese cartographer, Pedro Teixeira (alternately, Texeira as used in the volume under review). The atlas survives at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, home also to the impressive collection of views of Spanish cities made for Philip II between 1562 and 1570 by another foreign subject of the Spanish… Full Review
January 23, 2006
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Elisabeth A. Fraser
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 286 pp.; 8 color ills.; 69 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (0521828295)
Elisabeth Fraser’s fine study of the French painter Eugène Delacroix’s early career is as much a work of inventive cultural history as of art history. Reading the paintings that made the artist’s reputation in the 1820s as part of the wider visual culture of post-revolutionary France, she challenges a standard view that equates Romanticism with liberalism and links Delacroix with political opposition to the Bourbon monarchy restored after the fall of Napoleon in 1814. Instead, she highlights his success under royal patronage, and suggests that “Delacroix’s art was as much formed by monarchical rule as it was part of the… Full Review
January 23, 2006
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John House, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, and Jennifer Hardin
Exh. cat. St. Petersburg and Gent, Belgium: Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in association with Snoeck, 2005. 206 pp. $35.00 (9053495452)
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Fla., January 16–April 24, 2005; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, N.Y., May 27–September 4, 2005; Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts, Baltimore, Md., October 2–December 31, 2005
At first glance this exhibition seemed misnamed, since, far from focusing exclusively on Monet, it presented a diverse group of dozens of artists and image-makers including European and American painters, printmakers, and photographers, all of whom were fascinated by the River Thames. A catalogue entry by the exhibition organizer, Jennifer Hardin, chief curator at the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, explains that the original motivation for the exhibition was the museum’s own Monet, Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog (1903). Unlike this work, the majority of those shown in the exhibition were not Impressionist, and anyone expecting roomfuls of… Full Review
January 23, 2006
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Patricia Meilman, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 388 pp.; 103 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0521791804)
Peter Humfrey, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 384 pp.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0521662966)
Two of the latest, and unfortunately among the last, additions to the Cambridge Companions to the History of Art series are devoted to Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Together, the two books trace a trajectory from Bellini’s first documented notice in 1459 to the death of his one-time apprentice and eventual rival, Titian, in 1576. Edited by Peter Humfrey and Patricia Meilman, respectively, The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini and The Cambridge Companion to Titian feature new essays by major scholars in the field. Intended as supplements to the standard monographs, they are of interest to specialists and… Full Review
January 17, 2006
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