Recently Published Reviews

Writing in 1964, the Algerian painter Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991) identified “that day in 1910 when the Russian artist [Wassily] Kandinsky created the first nonrepresentational work” as marking the birth of “nonfigurative (or abstract) painting.” (Note: For the sake of consistency, I have used the exhibition curators’ transliteration of artists’ names.) Published in Révolution africaine, the National Liberation Front’s weekly newspaper, Khadda’s piece was the first of three artists’ statements titled “Éléments pour un art nouveau” (Elements for a new art), in which the authors grappled with the question of the role of the artist in the postindependence state. While… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today’s highlight is Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, reviewed by Alison Syme. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today we spotlight Kate Flint’s discussion of The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain by Lynda Nead. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. First up, Erin Silver considers Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun by Jennifer L. Shaw. Full Review

A current and valuable effort in art history is the examination of a well-known topic with greater attention to the contributions of women and other marginalized individuals. This expansion of familiar narratives is grounded not in rewriting historical facts but in rehabilitating figures—whether they be artists, gallery owners, curators, or collectors—who have been largely or even entirely overlooked, not only to shed light on their accomplishments but also to establish a broader understanding of a moment in time, which allows for a deeper historical account. Christina Weyl’s book The Women of Atelier 17, focused on women artists working at… Full Review

The history of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black photographers founded in 1960s Harlem, is documented and analyzed from multiple, beautifully blended perspectives in this important, substantial book. I had expected to study it after viewing the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) exhibition for which it serves as a catalog. However, shortly after the exhibition opened, the venue was closed to the public, another museum casualty of COVID-19. Louis Draper, the founding member and mainstay of the collective, wrote in his history of the workshop: “‘Kamoinge’ is derived from the Kikuyu [a language of Kenya]… Full Review

In this monograph, Halle O’Neal investigates a genre of Buddhist painting known as “jeweled pagoda mandalas” (kinji hōtō mandara; hereafter JPM), which was popular in Japan during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Three full sets and a few lone examples separated from their original sets remain. At the center of these vertical compositions on indigo-dyed paper, a multistory pagoda appears surrounded by narrative vignettes from a popular sutra. The central pagoda is constructed from a transcription in gold of the very sutra that the painting features in the surrounding vignettes, in some cases with further embellishment in… Full Review

It is tempting for biographers of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) to wax poetic about the artist’s supernatural talents and divine genius, but instead the Louvre’s blockbuster exhibition Léonard de Vinci offered a cerebral and technical approach to understanding the old master’s virtuosic oeuvre. Cocurated by Vincent Delieuvin, the Louvre’s curator of paintings, and Louis Frank, curator of drawings and prints, this much-anticipated retrospective coincided with the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death. As stated in the wall text and accompanying booklet, the primary goal of the exhibition was to demonstrate “Leonardo’s revolutionary approach,” which “aimed to make painting a science encompassing… Full Review

Reading any book of art history inevitably involves looking back into at least two different periods of history: the one that produced the art discussed in the book and the one that produced the book itself. In reading a newly published book, one often assumes that it was written in something like the present. In reading the book under consideration here, however, I found that even the recent past seemed very distant. When the original French edition of this book appeared in 2013, Notre-Dame in Paris was being visited by vast crowds every day, and authors Dany Sandron and Andrew… Full Review

When a midsize museum devotes its entire space to an exhibition by a recently hired curator, that’s a statement. In Plain Sight, at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, was organized by Shamim M. Momin, two-time curator of the Whitney Biennial (she co-organized the 2004 and 2008 editions) and founder of Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), which generates site-specific installations in public spaces. Not only was In Plain Sight Momin’s first large-scale exhibition since she was brought on by the Henry as senior curator in the fall of 2018; it also displayed her long commitment to interdisciplinary… Full Review

Jennifer A. Pruitt’s Building the Caliphate explores the Fatimids’ architectural patronage. Followers of the Ismaili subbranch of Shi‘ism, the Fatimids (909–1171) established the first dissident caliphate against the Sunni Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad (751–1258). Originating in North Africa, they conquered Egypt in 969, where they built their new capital, Cairo. They envisaged overthrowing the Abbasids, but the Seljuks ruling on the latter’s behalf put an end to that project. Egypt consequently became the permanent center of Fatimid rule. Architecture was instrumental to the construction of this rule and to the dynasty’s political-religious visual representation in the region’s traditionally Sunni context… Full Review

Mark Dion is a self-described lover of stuff. His materials include broken buttons, vials of insects, antique toys, decaying trees. Shopping at flea markets and gleaning from his environs, he works intuitively. He relies on a certain duration with and proximity to “things” in order to find those that inspire. Indeed, Dion has come to “identify with the mission of the museum, where you go to gain knowledge through things.” He, like the museum, believes in the power of objects to inform and enrich, but his sculptures and installations question the authority of institutional knowledge production. Sometimes working at the… Full Review

The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aimed “to shift the focus away from the two imperial powers [Rome and Parthia] and towards cities and communities, focusing on culture and religion, regional and local issues, and even personal matters” between the first century BCE and the third century CE (iv). The exhibition also aimed to engage “with complex questions about the preservation of cultural heritage.” These ambitious goals were explored through some 190 objects, from the Met’s collections as well as loans from Amman, Beirut, Berlin, Copenhagen, Jerusalem… Full Review

Located in northern China, Mount Wutai, or the Five-Terrace Mountain, is the earthly paradise of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, commonly known as the Mahāyāna Buddhist deity of wisdom. Since the seventh century, pilgrims have encountered various apparitions of Mañjuśrī on this mountain. Not until the publication of Wen-shing Chou’s book Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain did it become clear that Mount Wutai was also a key site in Inner Asian tantric Buddhist practices and lineages associated with the Gelukpa traditions that the Manchu court promoted during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Indeed, Chou’s well-researched and finely illustrated monograph presents… Full Review

The aim of Nathaniel B. Jones’s book Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome is to reconsider the nature of Roman wall painting by focusing on the “paintings within paintings,” or “fictive panels,” as Jones prefers to label them, that are a dominant feature of the medium. By doing so, the plan is to shed light both on the nature of Roman aesthetics and on the practical and metaphorical roles that art, particularly Greek art, played in Roman life (the “ethics” part of the title). Central to the investigation is configuring the point of the Greek nature of these panels, not… Full Review