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In his latest book, Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris writes with genuine gusto: “It is often said that seeing is believing. But we do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Believing is seeing, not the other way around” (93). While these types of statements are common in documentary films, serving to summarize a complex subject or individual, they can sound trite in a book that asks to be read in the fields of art history, visual culture studies, anthropology, and philosophy. They attest to the… Full Review

In his preface to Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099–1291, Jaroslav Folda asserts that the story of the art of the Crusaders is far less well-known than their history: “To tell the story of Crusader Art adequately,” Folda writes, “a richly illustrated book is required” (11). This slim but sumptuously illustrated volume fulfills that requirement. It is, in many ways, an encapsulation of Folda’s scholarly oeuvre in that it presents a survey of the most significant works of art produced in the Holy Land between Crusader conquests of Jerusalem in 1099 and the… Full Review

In her brilliant and lavishly illustrated new book on the history of wall painting in Europe from 1927 to 1957, Romy Golan’s subject is artworks specifically designed for architectural installation. Although there are several monographs about mural paintings by individual artists, or by groups of artists within a single national context, few historians have investigated how wall painting played out across many different countries during this period, and none have brought Golan’s innovative and rigorous brand of scholarship to the topic. Concentrating on France and Italy, but looking across to Spain, the United Kingdom, the Americas, and India, Golan’s study… Full Review

Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from its founding in 1949 to his eclipse from power in 1971, is hardly a household name in art history. He rarely appears in art-history texts as much more than a background figure. At most, he is referenced as the head of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]) and the man who built the East German state and its repressive bureaucratic apparatus. So it may come as some surprise for art historians, even those who specialize in postwar German art, to discover that Ulbricht played a fairly influential… Full Review

Along with David Summers’s Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon, 2003) (click here for review), Whitney Davis’s A General Theory of Visual Culture is one of the most ambitious and potentially foundational books on art history in recent decades. It is unusually dense in logical argumentation, so it is more than a convention to say that it cannot helpfully be summarized. Because longer reviews will be needed to assess the book’s arguments, I want to use the generally shorter review length here in caa.reviews to raise two points about the… Full Review

In the fields of architecture and urbanism there are few issues as pressing, or as vexing, as the suburban question. To the young, the cosmopolitan, and the ecologically minded, suburbia counts among our most egregious follies. Since at least the fifties, many have characterized suburbia as tacky, dull, and homogenizing, a position still taken by popular critics such as James Howard Kunstler. More recent anxieties about consumption—especially in connection with the body, racial inequality, and ecology—have generated new arguments that suburbia is environmentally unsustainable, terrible for our waistlines, and an impediment to social, economic, and racial justice. Yet,… Full Review

Carolyn Dean’s A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock and Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru offer important but very different contributions to the study of monuments—and more—in South America. One of the many achievements of Dean’s book is that it complicates any conventional description. She reckons with “pre-Hispanic Inka [her preference for the use of the Quechua language is significant] perspectives on stone, as they are articulated in and through the rocks themselves, as well as in Andean stories about stone” (1). While the author speaks of “Inka visuality,”… Full Review

Swati Chattopadhyay’s book, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny, and William Glover’s book, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City, share an interest in the development of a modern, urban city under British colonialism and shaped by local populations. Separated by more than a thousand miles, the subjects of these two books, Calcutta and Lahore, vary in terms of each city’s history, language, cultural features, and position in the British colonial empire. As both authors demonstrate, these cities were transformed by British colonial policies; however, shared colonial rhetoric and similar policies prompted different local… Full Review

An intimately scaled project at only eighty-eight pages of text interspersed with a number of illustrations, Peter H. Wood’s “Near Andersonville”: Winslow Homer’s Civil War is an immensely readable investigation of Winslow Homer’s 1865–66 painting of the same title. Wood introduces Near Andersonville—a modest oil on canvas depicting a monumental, black female figure standing in the doorway of a rough-hewn domestic structure and gazing solemnly out toward a line of Federal soldiers being led away by their Confederate captors—as one of Homer’s least-known paintings. Suggesting it also to be one of his more misunderstood, or, at least, underappreciated works… Full Review

As any serious student of the Middle Ages is well aware, an encounter with an illuminated manuscript can be both rewarding and confounding. The variety and complexity of material found within a single codex—or even on a single folio—can defy the expertise of even the most experienced scholar. The contours of current disciplinary guilds fail to encompass the range of interests, knowledge, and abilities of the makers and users of books in the Middle Ages. Leaves from Paradise: The Cult of John the Evangelist at the Dominican Convent of Paradies bei Soest centers on two folios that serve as a… Full Review