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

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Gary Garrels, Jon-Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017. 256 pp.; 120 color ills. Hardcover $45.00 (9781588396235)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 24–October 9, 2017; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, November 15, 2017–February 4, 2018; The Munch Museum, Oslo, May 12–September 9, 2018
“My art has been an act of confession.” So opens the preface to Gary Garrels, Jon-Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff’s exhibition catalogue for Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed, which took place in San Francisco, New York, and Oslo from June 2017 to September 2018. Edvard Munch (1863–1944) made this comment toward the end of his life, which is significant since the paintings he produced in his later years formed the focus of the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, the latter of which is the subject of this review. It may come as no surprise that Munch’s… Full Review
May 23, 2019
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Shelley Drake Hawks
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. 304 pp.; 96 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780295741956)
Shelley Drake Hawks’s The Art of Resistance: Painting by Candlelight in Mao’s China is a valuable contribution to Chinese art history and China studies that illuminates the plight of artists during the Cultural Revolution (1966­­–76). Hawks argues that in spite of overwhelming oppression, Chinese artists endured the Cultural Revolution by visualizing their feelings of disillusionment and dissent through art. The expression “painting by candlelight” (ix) refers to the unsanctioned, clandestine, and sometimes dangerous means artists took to create art—painting in secret, encoding works with subversive meaning, or writing Maoist poetry as a formalist rather than political pursuit. Lavishly illustrated and… Full Review
May 22, 2019
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Kathryn Brown
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 392 pp.; 8 color ills.; 82 b/w ills. Cloth £110.00 (9781501326837)
From the end of World War I to his death in 1954, Henri Matisse engaged in a number of notable experiments with the livre d’artiste. Kathryn Brown’s expansive study aims to show how Matisse’s artistic production and his thinking on creativity developed through an ongoing dialogue with literary texts, bringing to the fore the important role played by book production within the artist’s overall output. Through multiple fascinating case studies, Brown explores a range of intersecting questions about text-image interactions, about Matisse’s use of the book as an artistic-critical laboratory, and about the cultural importance of the illustrated book… Full Review
May 20, 2019
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William Schaefer
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 304 pp.; 8 color ills.; 38 b/w ills. Paperback $27.95 (9780822369196)
A picture of flickering bamboo leaves in a slick Shanghai magazine is carefully inscribed in Chinese characters as a “painting album” (huaben) and is impressed with an artist’s seal—not of a brush-and-ink painter, but of the photographer of the plant. A short story features a narrator who spots an earthen mound from a train window and imagines an Egyptian-style mummy of a royal concubine entombed within emerging to haunt the streets of Shanghai. A painting entitled Ruci Shanghai (Such is Shanghai) shows the city to be a montage of transparent, ghostly visages and body parts: eyebrows, lips, and… Full Review
May 17, 2019
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Judit Bodor, Adam Czirak, Astrid Hackel, Beata Hock, Andrej Mircev, and Angelika Richter, eds.
Berlin: neue Gesellschaft für bildene Kunst, 2018. 206 pp. Paperback €24.00 (9783938515730)
neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin, February 3–March 25, 2018
In the winter of 2018, a project group of six curators (Judit Bodor, Adam Czirak, Astrid Hackel, Beata Hock, Andrej Mircev, and Angelika Richter) presented a fresh account of East-Central European performance art in their exhibition Left Performance Histories, at the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (NGbK) in Berlin. The exhibition provided a fascinating and nuanced look at performance-art practices in the region, which both expanded our understanding of that history and brought lesser-studied material to light. The entrance to the show set the scene for the entire exhibition, presenting a “labyrinth” of identity—a literal maze composed of photographs… Full Review
May 16, 2019
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Michael Rooks
Exh. cat. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2018. 265 pp.; 104 color ills.; 88 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9781932543520)
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 17, 2017–March 18, 2018
An artist who studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and moved to New York in 1970 to assist Robert Rauschenberg, Al Taylor was consumed with perception and the logic of things. What Are You Looking At?, the title of a survey of his work at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia (2017–18), was also Taylor’s own sly suggestion for the epitaph on his tombstone. At once an innocent question and a phrase uttered to someone rudely staring, “What are you looking at?” is often met with the response, “Nothing much.” Whether made up in his imagination or… Full Review
May 15, 2019
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Randi Korn
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 254 pp.; 49 ills. Cloth $79.00 (9781538106358)
“The most important thing is to have an impact on people,” said Kaywin Feldman to the Washington Post’s Peggy McGlone for an article in January 2019 about her historic appointment as the first female director of the august National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In an era of political upheaval, climate change, demographic shifts, technological takeover, and economic uncertainty, forward-thinking museum leaders like Feldman are reconsidering what counts as success. Numbers of visitors, members, acquisitions, square feet, exhibitions, programs, publications, and social media followers have limited significance unless a museum is working intentionally to make a meaningful impact… Full Review
May 13, 2019
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Denver Art Museum, November 19, 2018–March 17, 2019; Dallas Museum of Art, May 19–September 1, 2019
Advertised as the first retrospective of the House of Dior in the United States, Dior: From Paris to the World transported visitors from the interior of the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building through the doors of a storied atelier to enter the exhibition gallery. Curated by Avenir Foundation Curator of Textile Art and Fashion Florence Müller and designed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA New York, the exhibition was presented in a series of irregularly shaped rooms. An individual gallery was devoted to each of the seven head designers of the House (Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré… Full Review
May 10, 2019
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Colin Gunckel
Exh. cat. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. 240 pp.; 12 color ills.; 110 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780895511652)
Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, September 16, 2017–February 10, 2019
In 1967, the first pages of the publication La Raza were printed in the basement of the Church of the Epiphany, in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, under the encouragement of Father John Luce, an Episcopalian priest who supported the Chicano Civil Rights Movement (also known as El Movimiento). Over the next ten years and the course of four dozen issues, the newspaper chronicled El Movimiento, expanding into a magazine in the process. By 1977, conflict, political repression, and exhaustion had caused the movement to wane, and La Raza ceased publication. Throughout that time, an archive of nearly twenty-five thousand… Full Review
May 8, 2019
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Donna De Salvo
Exh. cat. New Haven and New York: Yale University Press in association with The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018. 384 pp.; 350 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (9780300236989)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 12, 2018–March 31, 2019; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 19–September 2, 2019; The Art Institute of Chicago, October 20, 2019–January 26, 2020.
As curator Donna De Salvo readied Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, the revelatory retrospective exhibition recently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she plainly understood that a return to Warhol at this moment and in this venue would need to land with maximum impact. In the nearly three decades since the last such retrospective was mounted in New York, the late Kynaston McShine’s landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, general consciousness of the artist has gone from widespread suspicion and skepticism to the conferral of Picasso-like status as the… Full Review
May 6, 2019
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Sébastien Allard, Côme Fabre, Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Michèle Hannoosh, Mehdi Korchane, and Asher Miller
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. 328 pp.; 288 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781588396518)
Musée du Louvre, Paris, France, March 29–July 23, 2018; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 17, 2018–January 6, 2019
On June 22, 1863—less than two months before his death—Delacroix concluded his Journal with a maxim that had guided his hand for some four decades: “The chief merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eye.” Entwined with this pursuit of visual delight was an insatiable appetite for pathos to which he had earlier confessed in a letter to Baron Charles Rivet (February 15, 1838): “My tragic inclinations always dominate me, and the Graces rarely smile on me.” The fertility of this convergence of pleasure and pain was writ large in the exhibition that opened at the… Full Review
May 2, 2019
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Morrison H. Heckscher
Exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (Spring 2018). 48 pp.; 55 color ills. Paperback $14.95 (9781588396471)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 14, 2018–January 27, 2019
The year 2018 marked the three-hundredth birthday of London cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale (1718–1779), whose legacy embodies an international style as much as actual designs and examples of furniture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition celebrated the master while also reflecting on the cultural relevance of antique furniture today. Tucked into the American Wing’s Virginia and Leonard Marx Gallery, the two-room exhibition offered a brief examination of Chippendale’s original pattern books along with an assortment of furniture created in the cabinetmaker’s style. Why should an American museum pay homage to an eighteenth-century British cabinetmaker? What did visitors, including those uninitiated… Full Review
May 1, 2019
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David J. Roxburgh and Mary McWilliams, eds.
Exh. cat. Cambridge, MA and New Haven, CT: Harvard Art Museums in association with Yale University Press, 2017. 192 pp.; 232 ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300229196)
Harvard Art Museums, August 26, 2017–January 7, 2018
To say that arts of the Qajar dynasty (r. 1779–1925) are, without a doubt, en vogue in recent exhibition circuits is not an overstatement. In the last few years alone, one could see any number of shows featuring these Iranian imperial arts, ranging from The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past (NYU’s Institute for Study of the Ancient World, New York), Qajar Women: Images of Women in 19th-Century Iran (Museum of Islamic Art, Doha), and The Prince and the Shah: Royal Portraits from Qajar Iran (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC) to the… Full Review
April 29, 2019
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Martha H. Kennedy
Exh. cat. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. 255 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781496815927)
Library of Congress, Washington, DC, August 2–October 20, 2018
In 1915 artist Cecilia Beaux wrote, “I very earnestly believe . . . that there should be no sex in Art. . . . I am pointing, I know, to a millennium at least . . . when the term ‘Women in Art’ will be as strange sounding a topic as the title ‘Men in Art’ would be now” (xi). This quote becomes a rallying cry for Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists at the Library of Congress. Prominently displayed in the exhibition and reiterated on the first page of the catalogue, it suggests that more than one… Full Review
April 26, 2019
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Milette Gaifman
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 196 pp.; 127 color ills.; 5 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300192278)
Milette Gaifman’s The Art of Libation in Classical Athens focuses on the ritual practice of offering liquids, commonly depicted on Athenian vases. Depictions of Greek animal sacrifice have been the focus of several research projects, broaching the topic from the textual and pictorial sources. The less prominent libation rituals have been approached in the study of visual culture only for specific cases, e.g., deities offering libations. With her study, Gaifman aims to “explore . . . the visual potency” (4) of libation scenes by focusing on the rich material of fifth-century BCE Athens, especially on painted vases. The understanding of… Full Review
April 24, 2019
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