Recently Published Reviews

Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction was an exhilarating and expansive exhibition (and accompanying catalog) of the artist’s uniquely syncretic practice. Organized by Anne Umland (Museum of Modern Art), Walburga Krupp (independent curator), Eva Reifert (Kunstmuseum Basel), and Natalia Sidlina (Tate Modern), the project covers Taeuber-Arp’s nearly thirty-year career between World War I and World War II. As installed at MoMA, the exhibition was a knockout. It offered a thrilling vision of the artist’s work at every stage of her career—a presentation strikingly emancipated from hierarchies of patriarchy and media. The most surprising decision was the almost total exclusion of works by… Full Review

In the fractured social landscape of the United States, as we move into 2022, questions of identity haunt us. Identity politics, individual choice, the boundaries of the body and the state are all contested and unstable. This terrain of instability, which can feel like a collapse of the aesthetic projects of both modernism and postmodernism, is an opportune moment for investigating the continued significance of portraiture. Left Side Right Side, at Jacksonville’s Museum of Contemporary Art, adroitly gathered works in a variety of media that address and contest the meaning and use of the portrait in the twentieth and… Full Review

The spare beauty and formal patterning of succulents and magnolia blossoms are hallmarks of Imogen Cunningham’s most celebrated photographs. But most fascinating in Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective, recently on view at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), was the combination of clever form and psychological intensity in her portraits and nudes. Cunningham’s high-contrast close-up of Martha Graham from 1931 highlights the inward focus of the dancer’s mind as equal in importance to the expressive physical gestures she performs. The striking image of Graham, eyes closed with a neutral expression, conveys intense concentration in the act of translating emotion into… Full Review

The term “autotheory” first caught my eye in late 2019, if I am remembering pre-pandemic time correctly. I had just finished Heather Christle’s lyrical The Crying Book (Catapult, 2019) during a particularly rough and emotional period in my life, when I often found myself weeping or full-on crying in the kitchen, what Christle named “the best—I mean the saddest—room for tears.” At the time, I was a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, simultaneously working through personal loss while generating new words around Hannah Wilke’s performance art from the 1970s. Working on Wilke necessitates recognition of the deep… Full Review

In one of the first descriptions of Indigenous arts of the Americas, in the late fifteenth century, Fray Ramón Pané recognized that sculptures in what is now Hispaniola were not like those he knew in Europe. Inspired by environmental forces of deities and ancestors—known to the Taínos as zemís (or cemís)—rulers and sculptors collaborated to embody specific identities in three-dimensional forms that were then activated in ceremonies to become vital, oracular agents in their communities. Their extraordinary, volumetric forms and complex imagery confounded Pané, especially the faces of the zemí beings. They were grimacing as if… Full Review

Why talk about sculpture and the decorative arts together? A number of scholars, such as Penelope Curtis, Martina Droth, and Claire Jones (the latter coedited both the volumes reviewed here), as well as the exhibitions Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (Henry Moore Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008–09) and Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (Victoria & Albert Museum and Yale Center for British Art, 2014–15), have convincingly made the case for doing so. The fact that this approach still feels novel more than a decade after the question was first put forward… Full Review

In the final passages of Art for People’s Sake, Rebecca Zorach offers a remarkable reading of a photograph of a young man using shaving cream to write “Black Power” at the intersection of Homan and Madison on Chicago’s West Side. The photograph, taken by journalist Kenneth Lovette, was published in the Chicago Sun-Times to document the rioting that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. For Zorach, however, it also documents an event in the history of African American art. “With brilliant creativity,” Zorach writes, the young man “captions the entire experience of the riots, making… Full Review

Islam and Heritage in Europe is based on a workshop held in 2019 at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), founded and directed by Sharon Macdonald at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The volume’s twelve contributions reflect a strong connection to the CARMAH group and its anthropological focus, but they also address a larger range of fields where Islamic heritage in Europe is relevant. Interestingly, the disciplines and specializations of the authors are mostly located at the intersections of anthropology, art history, media studies, musicology, political science, and sociology. Islamic studies and (trans-)regional studies… Full Review

The edited volume Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918–1948 is an ambitious, complex book that makes significant contributions to the history of photography on a number of fronts, going well beyond the specific context of Palestinian photo history, compelling as that subject is. The book is part of a current research project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), “Crossroads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1920–1950); A Connecting History.” Other components of the research project have included an international scholarly workshop and a 2020 exhibition of the work of the… Full Review

An overwhelming display of selfish ambition, treachery, betrayal, and megalomania defines the art—from small works to large—commissioned by Ludovico Sforza and analyzed by Simon Hewitt in Leonardo da Vinci and the Book of Doom: Bianca Sforza, the Sforziada & Artful Propaganda in Renaissance Milan. A dedication to detail characterizes Hewitt’s chronicle, opening with synopses of the lives of those persons central to the volume, which are extremely helpful, given the historical complications of the text. Next, “Notes on Names” tracks the genealogy of the Sforza-Viscontis, identifying monikers so that readers will not be confused, as intricate genealogical connections are… Full Review

I intend to engage the book under review with the respect and sympathy its challenging, adventurous spirit requests. This encounter was, indeed, a transformative experience; Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages not only made me examine assumptions of my own positionality as a scholar of Byzantine art history, but also asked me to read more deeply—to listen in to—the writings of excellent scholars in the field of intersectional studies. Byzantine art history needs interventions such as this book. It is known as a field that has made small steps toward reckoning with contemporary trends in art… Full Review

A row of framed black-and-white photographs of artist Judy Baca hang on a hot-pink wall. Titled Judith F. Baca as La Pachuca (1976), this series depicts Baca styled as a “Pachuca,” a Mexican American female stereotype from the 1950s. In the photos, Baca wears a white, collared, button-up top, with a pack of Marlboros tucked into the cuff of her rolled-up sleeve. Her dark hair is teased, her painted eyebrows are dramatically arched, her eyeliner winged, her lips outlined, and a scarf is knotted around her neck. In each photograph, she puffs on a cigarette poised between long-nailed fingers, with… Full Review

To describe a piece of culture as “mesmerizing” or “electrifying” is so commonplace today that you might, like me, have heard these phrases countless times without giving much thought to how and why they became critical clichés. Mesmerism and electricity both emerged as subjects of scientific inquiry in the eighteenth century—the same period when art criticism itself was coming into existence—so perhaps it is not surprising that this language seeped into the cultural lexicon at the time, to become part of the repertoire of terms that we continue to use to characterize aesthetic experience. But it would be a mistake… Full Review

An exquisite but incomplete stone sculpture of the god Krishna, found at Phnom Da, Cambodia, close to the pre-Angkorian capital city Angkor Borei, was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) in 1973. Krishna is depicted as a vital youth raising up Mount Govardhana with a single arm. In this myth, first articulated in the early centuries of our era, Krishna holds up the mountain for seven straight days and seven nights. Rain and winds lash the landscape all around. Men, women, children, and animals huddle beneath the mountain. Through his effortless strength the boy-god shelters his… Full Review

Romy Golan’s book, Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s, proposes a new methodological approach to thinking about art made during that volatile decade. Rather than a chronological account of the period, Golan puts forth the theoretical and temporal models of the flashback, eclipse, and mise en abyme as a means to draw out the ambiguities and ellipses that characterized its art. Such a strategy reveals, she suggests, suppressed memories of Italian fascism as well as “various liberatory moments of political and cultural resistance,” or what the author terms the “political imaginary” of artists, curators… Full Review