Browse Recent Reviews

Few statues are more familiar to students of Greek art than the korai from the Athenian Acropolis. From this important study of the korai and other Acropolis votive statues of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., we learn that we do not know them as well as we thought. Catherine M. Keesling takes a rigorously contextual approach to the Acropolis dedications, considering not only the statues themselves but also their inscribed bases and evidence for bronze dedications on the Acropolis, now lost, in an attempt to “rebuild on paper what the Persian invaders destroyed” (xiv). In… Full Review

Richard Ettinghausen once wrote of the Indian art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947): “[t]here are few scholars … whose publications cover a wider range …[:] philosophy, metaphysics, religion, iconography, Indian literature and arts, Islamic art, medieval art, music, geology, and, especially, the place of art in society” (Ars Islamica 9 (1942): 125). With the help of Coomaraswamy himself, Helen Ladd compiled a partial bibliography of his work in that same issue. Roger Lipsey published two volumes of Coomaraswamy’s Selected Papers and a biography in the Bollingen Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) that include a list of Coomaraswamy’s publications… Full Review

Jane Hawkes has become one of the leading iconographers of Insular, more particularly Anglo-Saxon sculpture, and the volume under review does nothing to disappoint. The Sandbach Crosses: Sign and Significance in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture clearly demonstrates the depth of Insular scholarship from the last twenty-five years, something of which the art-historical establishment remains willfully oblivious. Introductory textbooks present Insular art as though nothing had been written since Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in 1908, while Fred Orton’s blithe assumption that theory conquers all insults those who sweated interdisciplinary blood for years to reach a deeper understanding. Insular art demands attention to… Full Review

A growing literature has emerged describing and analyzing the production and reception of art objects as well as the institutions supporting artists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This recent book, the published version of Thomas Schmitz’s 1997 doctoral dissertation (University of Düsseldorf), is a thoroughly researched and cogently analyzed account of one of Germany’s unique institutions, the Kunstvereine (art unions). Additionally, he discusses the relationship of Kunstvereine to issues of class identity and cultural self-representation. He has no aesthetic or ideological ax to grind and therefore quite objectively discusses the art unions’ major features, including their strengths and weaknesses… Full Review

This informative and elegantly illustrated catalogue appeared in association with the exhibition Magnificenza! The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (in Italy, L’ombra del genio: Michelangelo e l’arte a Firenze, 1537–1631). The impressive scope of the catalogue covers works of art produced during the reigns of four Medici Grand Dukes: Cosimo I (r. 1537–74), Francesco I (r. 1574–87), Ferdinando I (r. 1587–1609), and Cosimo II (r. 1609–31). The curators of the exhibition, Marco Chiarini (Scientific Exhibition Commissioner for Italy, Florence), Alan P. Darr (Detroit Institute of Arts), and Larry J. Feinberg (Art Institute of Chicago), collaborated… Full Review

The last ten years have seen a marked increase in the frequency and kind of debates about the memory of the Holocaust. The planning of Holocaust monuments, the filing of class-action lawsuits by survivors, the flood of written and videotaped oral testimonies, and the establishment of Holocaust studies chairs and institutes have kept the Holocaust in the public eye and have all occasioned intense discussions about how it should be remembered and represented. Dora Apel’s intelligent and insightful book draws our attention to the role that art can play in understanding this phenomenon and the questions it poses about the… Full Review

Any outsider to the field surveying the recent spate of big thesis exhibitions could not fail to notice the discrepant narratives of the Baroque currently in circulation. The Genius of the Rome, 1592–1623 (held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2001) supported a story of individual styles and individual patrons’ taste, sometimes a chaotic situation, but one governed by individual choices that were only secondarily infringed upon by institutional needs or demands. By contrast, the organization of Visioni ed estasi: Capolavori dell’arte Europea tra Seicento e Settecento (held at the Vatican in 2003) was more decisive in… Full Review

Although this book accompanied an exhibition, its ambitions and contributions far exceed those of a standard exhibition catalogue. In Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation 1850–1900, we are given a very substantive analysis of photographic history in India, using the representation of architecture as its focal point. The inspired conceptualization that combined photography and architecture extends to the presentation of this scholarship and its sources: the volume is sumptuous in its presentation, absolutely gorgeous in its visual documentation, and helpfully laid out, with close proximity of examples and related text. The basic concept is riveting… Full Review

Lynn Gamwell’s expensively produced, beautifully illustrated, and deeply flawed book traces the influence of science on art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It begins with a question—Where did abstract art come from?—and by way of an answer provides a statement that lays out the thesis of the book: “I propose that two catalysts contributed to the precipitation of abstract art: the scientific worldview that developed after the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the secular concepts of the spiritual that developed thereafter” (9). Gamwell’s first catalyst, the… Full Review

Chicago was a beehive of construction activity in the 1870s as the city rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871 with structures that were more permanent in both fabrication and appearance. Technical advances such as steel-frame construction with terra-cotta fireproofing and the passenger elevator dovetailed nicely with the hardheaded pragmatism of real-estate investors who demanded the maximization of rentable square feet. On hand to guide the design and construction of the new city was a group of architects who possessed mainly practical experience and little academic training. The response of this group, called the Chicago School, to the problems set… Full Review