Browse Recent Reviews

Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, currently mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new West Wing (the onetime May Company Building on Wilshire) is a chronological overview of the artist's career as a painter, comprising seventy works from 1882 to 1890. Imposing chestnuts (The Potato Eaters, Vincent's Bedroom) and masterful achievements (The Harvest (Blue Cart), Blossoming Almond Branch) co-mingle with pictures of modest scale and accomplishment. The unevenness of the offering—in addition to indicating the organizing institution's reluctance to lend its full arsenal of "masterpieces" documents the artist's sometimes warring preoccupations and… Full Review

The Cleveland Museum of Art held a monumental exhibition of Buddhist art from August 9 through September 27, 1998. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan writes in her catalogue essay that "the Cleveland Museum of Art, in bringing the art of the Nara National Museum before an American audience . . . in all their [its] richness and diversity, is in itself an act of lasting merit that helps to preserve one of the great traditions of Asian art" (p. 33). In effect, an exhibition catalogue is similar to a pilgrimage souvenir that one might obtain during a visit to a temple, serving… Full Review

Pragmatism maintained that a proposition must be tested, rendered active, before it can be deemed valid. The criteria of judgment that William James set out is simply "what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world formula or that world formula be true." It is therefore appropriate that the first American school of theory should be used to test the operations of contemporary American art. William James's criteria is extended by the philosopher John Dewey, who asks that a proposition not only be tested to make a difference, but that… Full Review

When the International Congress of Byzantine Studies convened in Istanbul in 1955, none of its delegates was able to enter the Byzantine church now known as the Kalenderhane Camii, even though it lay barely five minutes from Istanbul University. Locked and abandoned, the building was not penetrated until a decade later, when Striker received permission to cut the lock, the key having long since disappeared. The state of decrepitude he found could not disguise the Kalenderhane's historical significance. Happily, dereliction made it possible for Striker, in collaboration with Kuban, to undertake the detailed analysis, excavation, and restoration of the building… Full Review

In 1891, Wilhelm Vöge inaugurated the modern academic study of Ottonian book illumination with the publication of his dissertation, Eine deutsche Malerschule um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends (Trier, 1891). Vöge's still classic monograph assembled a cohesive corpus of selected Ottonian manuscripts based on an investigation that included stylistic, iconographic, and textual criticism; his Malerschule has since been attributed to the monastic scriptorium of Reichenau. Despite the occasional attack, the Reichenau school has remained the bedrock of Ottonian manuscript studies; dated to ca. 1000, such magnificent books as the Otto Gospels, the Bamberg Apocalypse, and the Pericopes of Henry… Full Review

The brevity and informal nature of these essays, first published in German in 1992, should not obscure their density, just as the length and extremely formal nature of Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art should not obscure the clarity of its essential argument. That dichotomy—dense, "formless" evocation versus brief, "rational" argument—will be familiar to Belting, since it is one of the manifestations of the "troublesome" relationship between German and Italian art. The question of the national characteristics of art is important but treacherous, perhaps especially in Germany's case.… Full Review

This splendidly illustrated book provides a meticulous documentation of the restoration of one of the finest works of medieval Islamic woodwork surviving today. Restoration began as a result of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1992 exhibition "Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain" in which the minbar (pulpit) of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh was featured in the catalogue but, due to its fragile condition, could not suffer transport for display in New York and Granada. In 1996–97 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Moroccan Ministry of Cultural Affairs, assembled a technical team to clean, stabilize, and support… Full Review

This book focuses on the fundamental philosophical issues of art and the actual problems of modern art history. It unfurls a polyphonic tapestry of the development of art from antiquity to the twentieth century in relation to various stages in the development of European culture. However, the chief purpose of O. A. Krivtsun's work appears to be not so much the reproduction of historical and artistic factual details as raising, and finding answers for, questions of the art process theory. The book includes eight sections and thirty-five chapters. The sections include: "Philosophy of Art History," "General Theory of Art," "Sociology… Full Review

This morning I drank my green tea from my lavender Monet-signature mug. This same autographic logo is reproduced as the first word of the title of Monet in the 20th Century, the catalogue of a major exhibition seen in the fall at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and appearing this spring at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. I wasn't able to join the international throng of visitors who saw the show in Boston and London, but I am nonetheless grateful to the guest curator, Paul Hayes Tucker of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, whose formidable curatorial capacities also… Full Review

As the author notes in his introduction, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio is preceded by nine major monographs on the artist. Without question, Butterfield's reconsideration of the sculptural production of Verrocchio adds considerably to what remains a surprisingly uncertain chronology—despite the earlier monographs and countless other articles on individual works (including the essays published in 1992, Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, ed. Steven Bule et al., Florence: Le Lettere). Andrea del Verrocchio was born between 1434 and 1437 in Florence and died in 1488 in Venice. He produced some of the most important large-scale,… Full Review