Recently Published Reviews

Alain Locke and the Visual Arts takes a deep critical dive into Alain Locke’s significant contributions to African American and Black diasporic visual culture through critical analysis of his cross-cultural and philosophical writings of the 1930s and 1940s. In his introductory chapter, Mercer establishes Locke as philosophical architect of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement, and as a public intellectual interested in social change in the pluralistic forging of African American identity via cultural pursuits such as art, literature, music, and theater. Mercer dissects Locke’s intercultural approach to the visual arts, reminding the reader that he was foremost a… Full Review

In recent years, architectural history has seen a sizeable growth in research focusing on the built environments of Latin America. Architecture, architects, and increasingly systems and institutions from this area of the so-called “Global South” have been brought to light, analyzed, and given critical attention to the point of shifting the supposed centers and axes of “canonical” modernity. Patricio del Real’s recent book, Constructing Latin America: Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art is a most welcome addition to this expanding body of scholarship.  To be sure, this book can be categorized in a variety of manners… Full Review

Mechtild Widrich’s new book offers an argument and a demonstration: To engage with public art today—whether in a scholarly or a public forum—requires a “multidirectional method” attentive to how, within a single site, “multiple historical references reinforce one another and build connections” (14). Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art presents a significant intervention in the art history of public art that makes site-specificity its key term. The book is also a bold contribution to contemporary debates about monument activism. Widrich emphasizes that Monumental Cares is the product of both “research and public engagement” (15)—she is, amongst other public-facing… Full Review

A worthy contribution in the still-growing efforts to de-silo theory from practice in writing and teaching about contemporary art, Mark Staff Brandl’s A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art is approachable and informal while being specific and sincere, and a tonal success for the way it loosens up and shakes out the rhetoric, jargon, and tropes common to so much scholarly writing about art. Visual tropes and metaphors (as opposed to literary ones) are central protagonists in Brandl’s philosophy of art, and they anchor his major propositions about the mechanics of visual communication and interpretation. They are not glib… Full Review

In 2007 a popular science book was published, The World without Us, that considered how long it would take for the signs of civilisation to disappear if, by some instantaneous cataclysm, all living humans suddenly vanished. The author, Alan Weisman, suggested that after a few centuries, nature would have reclaimed nearly everything, and then went on to speculate about a distant future in which all human history would be reduced to a layer, just a centimetre or so deep, in the geological record. The book was one of many that have shown a fascination with civilizational apocalypse, motivated by… Full Review

“The flux of life,” wrote Mina Loy in a letter published in The Transatlantic Review in 1924, “is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears—and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition. Modernism says: why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensory everyday life?” (23). The sublime hidden in the everyday, openness to chance and intuition, the democratization of art—all these served… Full Review

Formal analysis and interpretation of artworks often consider art funding trivial compared to historical and social background, especially in societies where art funding is sparse. Sarah-Neel Smith’s Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey focuses on this subordinate, if not often-overlooked aspect of art creation and cultural production. Proposing economy as a crucial metric to production, Smith analyzes the art scene in 1950s Turkey by focusing on two galleries and several influential artists of the time, while giving an overview of social, political, and economic exchange between the United States and Turkey. In doing so, Smith exemplifies recent… Full Review

Scholarship about art and culture in the 1980s Central European socialist bloc often evinces a certain impatience motivated by hindsight. Simply put, we know what is coming to Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in 1989. As a result, inquiry is approached through the lens of the imminent political change and sets as its task the diagnosis of the terminal symptoms preceding these events. In Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany, Sara Blaylock, associate professor of art history at University of Minnesota Duluth, invites us to slow down and approach this era outside this teleological frame. By engaging… Full Review

Although fin-de-siècle Vienna is often thought of as having been strictly Austrian, it is worth remembering that Vienna was one of two capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Divided between the dual monarchy of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, the empire’s borders extended from parts of modern-day Italy and Croatia to Romania and Ukraine. Fabricating Empire: Folk Textiles and the Making of Early 20th-Century Austrian Design, the small yet impactful exhibition curated by Genevieve Cortinovis at the St. Louis Art Museum, provides a hearty challenge to Austrian-centric historiography. Rather than refute Vienna’s importance, the exhibition situates it… Full Review

Few artists have been as profoundly involved in their political milieu as Jacques Louis David. In this regard, the subtitle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of the artist’s drawings—“Radical Draftsman”—makes perfect sense. Indeed, its signature image, The Oath of the Tennis Court, shows David at the zenith of his artistic service to the nascent republic: members of the Third Estate unite in the highly finished study, which he displayed at the Salon of 1791 to inspire citizens to fund an ambitious painting, one he ultimately never completed. Less triumphant proof of the artist’s embroilment in the French… Full Review

In this finely produced monograph, Jennifer Borland offers a compelling case study of medical illustration and bookmaking in the later Middle Ages. This case consists of seven deluxe manuscripts of a French-language medical regimen, all bearing initials richly illuminated with scenes of medicine and domestic life. These initials provide Borland with evidence for the active part of women in caregiving and domestic management. Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the ‘Régime du corps’ places this seven-manuscript corpus at the center of its investigations and expands outward from there, from the finely wrought design of historiated initials to… Full Review

Ikat is one of the most ancient and important traditional textile dyeing techniques connecting East and West, and in recent years has been growing in recognition. Ikat has a distinctive look with shaggy edges and shifted skinny lines. Commercially printed ikat-inspired designs are sold for such items as curtains and cushion covers as people enjoy the aesthetic of ikat in their living rooms. However, many people may not know about real ikat weaving processes. Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth, beautifully conceived and installed by curator of African and Oceanic art Pamela McCluskey, provides an important sense of the… Full Review

Painted Cloth offers a new dimension to the study of the Spanish Americas by asking how colonial subjects used fashion and fabric—painted, sculpted, woven, and worn—to think productively about the social and spiritual worlds around them. This stunning exhibition catalog showcases a selection of artworks and artifacts from primarily seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Spain and Peru and was the result of fruitful collaboration with private collections worldwide. Thoughtfully curated and edited by Rosario I. Granados, Marilynn Thoma associate curator for art of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton Museum, the catalog marks the occasion of the first large-scale exhibition of… Full Review

Michaelina Wautier and ‘The Five Senses’: Innovation in 17th-Century Flemish Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) is the first exhibition in the United States devoted to the Brussels-based female painter who, despite her unmistakable artistic talent and successful career, fell into obscurity after her death. Only recently have experts rediscovered and revalued the oeuvre of Michaelina Wautier (1604­–1684), mainly thanks to the scholarship of Katlijne van der Stichelen, professor in art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium. A pioneer in the study of female artists, Van der Stichelen began researching Wautier after she… Full Review

In 1783, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner posed a question to the Berlinische Monatsschrift’s readers: “What is the Enlightenment?” One year later, Immanuel Kant, professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg, responded with an aphorism: “Sapere aude!” or “Dare to Know!” Kant went on to define the Enlightenment as the “resolution and courage” to use one’s own reason to comprehend the world, unrestricted by prejudice and the guidance of others. Two hundred years after Kant’s response, Michel Foucault called attention to the temporal structure of this question. Zöllner and Kant, Foucault argued, described the Enlightenment in the present tense… Full Review