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

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Jonathan Demme, ed.
Kaliko Press, 1998. 63 pp.; 43 color ills. Paper
Selden Rodman Gallery of Popular Arts of the Americas and the Caribbean, Ramapo College, Mahwah, N.J., February 8–March 18, 2005; Waterloo Center for the Arts, Waterloo, Iowa., June 10–August 29, 2005
Ever since the American artist DeWitt Peters started the Centre d’Art of Port-au-Prince in 1944, Haitian art has attracted major European and American artists and collectors. Decades after Haitian art admirer André Breton called the landscape of the tropics the landscape of Surrealism, generous art donors and collectors with connections to the Midwest have raised the commercial value of Haitian art while establishing three major regional collections—at Iowa’s Waterloo Center for the Arts and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Organized by the Ramapo College of New Jersey, the exhibition Odilon Pierre: Atis d’Ayiti allowed… Full Review
December 7, 2005
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Jaime Lara
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. 312 pp.; 239 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (0268033641)
For much of the last half-century, the few North Americans interested in the extraordinary ecclesiastical architecture erected during the 1500s south of the U.S. border had to depend on just two monumental tomes in English: George Kubler’s Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948) and John McAndrew’s The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965). Perhaps because the scholarship of these works was so weighty, gringo aficionados didn’t deem it necessary to add anything further. Moreover, the colonial arts of Latin America were receiving little attention in general after World War… Full Review
December 5, 2005
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Beacon: NY: Dia:Beacon, 2005.
Dia:Beacon, Beacon, N.Y., April 14–November 7, 2005
Agnes Martin and Jackson Pollock were both born in 1912, but Pollock had died by the time Martin moved from New Mexico to New York in 1957 to establish herself as a painter. Martin came at the behest of Betty Parsons, one of many women artists whom Parsons took under her wing as the fervor of Abstract Expressionism faded. Many of these women deferred their artistic careers until midlife, after families or more traditional careers—Martin herself was a teacher. Throughout her life, Martin maintained a principled independence as an artist, existing outside the politics and ideologies of the art world… Full Review
December 5, 2005
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Chiyo Ishikawa, ed.
Exh. cat. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum in association with University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 300 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (0803225059)
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Wash., October 16, 2004–January 2, 2005; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fla., February 2, 2005–May 1, 2005
The exhibition Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492–1819 sprang from a collaborative enterprise between the co-curators Chiyo Ishikawa and Javier Morales Vallejo, with the support of three participating institutions: the Patrimonio Nacional of Spain, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. Their efforts are sumptuously represented in the catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition. The catalogue’s seven essays each explore a different aspect of the exhibition's thematic interests, including the idea of Spain and its empire, Spanish spirituality, cross-cultural encounters, and the role played by science in the Americas and Spain… Full Review
November 30, 2005
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Paul Goldman
Burlington, Vt.: Lund Humphries, 2004. 416 pp.; 230 b/w ills. Paper $55.00 (0853319049)
Sophia Andres
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. 288 pp.; 15 b/w ills. Paper $31.95 (0814251293)
On January 23, 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his friend William Allingham with regard to illustrations for a new volume of Alfred Tennyson’s poems, explaining he would pick those verses “where one can allegorize on one’s own hook on the subject of the poem, without killing for oneself and every one a distinct idea of the poet’s” (George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854–1870, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897, 97). The desire on the part of the young Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members to stake out new territory for the illustrator—providing commentary rather than… Full Review
November 29, 2005
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Carl Brandon Strehlke, ed.
Exh. cat. University Park and Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 184 pp.; 65 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (0271025360)
November 20, 2004–February 13, 2005
The thematic core of this exhibition was built around two vastly different but compelling unofficial portraits, Pontormo’s Alessandro de’ Medici (1534–35) and Bronzino’s Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus (ca. 1537–39), each in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Augmented by about fifty works selected from American and European collections, the exhibition explored the contribution of these two masters to the development and transformation of portraiture during the tumultuous era that witnessed the replacement of Florentine republicanism with autocratic Medici rule. It also traced the artistic debt between two painters mutually bonded through both art and personal… Full Review
November 28, 2005
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If ambiguity was something that could be seen or touched, it might have a tangible yet enigmatic effect. Perhaps it would be like a fragile lantern lit from within, neither solid nor translucent, with angles of light taking shape through sudden rips of fabric. Or perhaps it would be a metallic cube hovering over the ground like an imbalanced weight, yet with a surface as seemingly delicate as crumpled paper. Or perhaps it would be a cold glass entrance with ice rock chandeliers, where luscious, decorative folds in white walls peek through. Maybe, in short, ambiguity would take the shape… Full Review
November 28, 2005
Leo Rubinfien, Sandra S. Phillips, and John W. Dower
Intro Daido Moriyama Exh. cat. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press, 2004. 224 pp.; 28 color ills.; 131 b/w ills. Cloth $52.00 (0300106041)
Japan Society, New York, September 22, 2004–January 2, 2005; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 21–August 29, 2005; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 13–August 13, 2006; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, September 1–November 12, 2006
Euro-American modernity arrived in Japan during a precarious time. World War II had just ended, atomic bombs had devastated two major cities, land was barren following destruction by fire-storms, famine was widespread, and, for the first time in the country’s history, foreign soldiers occupied its land. Suddenly modern America, with its Coca-Cola, playing cards, and t-shirts, was everywhere, awkwardly overlying prewar Japanese aesthetics. Shomei Tomatsu, born in 1930, came of age during the occupation era and was keenly aware of the tension surrounding the transition from prewar aesthetics to American-style modernism. The photographs and essays collected for his first U.S… Full Review
November 18, 2005
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Giancarla Periti, ed.
Intro Charles Dempsey Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. 252 pp.; 44 b/w ills. Cloth $120.00 (0754606589)
This collection of essays is the record of a symposium held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome in July 2000. Organized by Giancarla Periti, the subject of that event was broad, covering both ecclesiastical and secular patronage in northern Italy (principally Emilia-Romagna, but also parts of current-day Lombardy) and Inventio—artistic invention—as it was conceived and practiced there. That many of the participants have long been interlocutors—either as students at Johns Hopkins University, working with Charles Dempsey, who wrote the book’s introduction, or as colleagues from other projects—provides another unifying component to the selection. Ashgate is to be commended for… Full Review
November 18, 2005
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Susan Donahue Kuretsky
Poughkeepsie, NY: Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2005. 352 pp.; 85 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. Paper $60.00 (0964426374)
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., April 8–June 19, 2005; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Fla., August 20–October 30, 2005; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Ky., January 10–March 26, 2006
One year before Vassar College first offered courses in 1865, the institution already had an art gallery and a collection. Purchases, beginning with that of the Reverend Elias Magoon’s American and English landscape paintings, and continuing into the present with acquisitions in various media from diverse cultures, have made the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (which occupies an elegant building by Cesar Pelli) into an important museum possessing 12,500 objects, and also—fulfilling the original intention—into an effective complement to the teaching of art and art history A good example of that synergy was the 1970 exhibition “Dutch Mannerism: Apogee and… Full Review
November 18, 2005
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