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John M. MacKenzie’s Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities is a hugely detailed exploration of colonial museums that narrates their establishment during the nineteenth century in Canada, South Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, while at the same time interrogating their purposes in communicating the messages and global reach of the power of the British Empire. The book also points to the changes in political influence and organization that the museum institution reflected and was subject to during the shift and ultimate demise of British colonial power that stretched into the twentieth century. MacKenzie’s… Full Review

The Social Work of Museums offers exactly what the title implies: a comprehensive survey of museums as a social work context. Lois Silverman, who is trained as both a social worker and museum scholar, undertook this work because, “it is long past time for museums to survey, organize, and integrate systematically from a theoretically grounded social work perspective the growing body of museum knowledge and practice currently scattered around the globe” (39). The result is no dry encyclopedia but a sympathetic call to action. Silverman artfully weaves together a number of seemingly disparate threads: international case studies of practice, including… Full Review

Few readers, I imagine, were surprised to discover that Yvonne Rainer’s stunning 2006 memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)—a sprawling book intertwining the artist’s early personal and artistic developments, rendering them inseparable—would conclude with an epilogue. Such a coda typically affords authors an opportunity to wrap up their ideas and cast a retrospective gaze over the whole of a book once its myriad elements have settled into shape. Rainer’s conclusion would seem only to follow protocol, in a sense. And yet this particular postscript, like so much of her production, effectively displaces expectations around such conventions… Full Review

From the time of its invention, photography has caused trouble for art. Now, in a belated stroke of reciprocity, art is causing trouble for photography. Early signs included photography’s absorption into museum collections and its embrace by the art market. Then came art historians, fueled by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, arguing that photography had eclipsed painting and sculpture to become art’s medium ne plus ultra. One of the most recent and influential contributions to this line of argument, Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) (click… Full Review

To begin with, I confess that I have some difficulties accommodating myself to wide art-historical surveys such as Alessia Trivellone’s L’Hérétique imaginé, which covers a span of six centuries with the aim of tracing a coherent development of a sole subject, the heretic. I am not stating that my skepticism will diminish if the survey is chronologically narrower or comprehending more subjects; the point is, rather, that I find serious problems with every sort of “coherent development.” The division of the volume into four sections corresponds more or less with what Trivellone maintains to be a coherent… Full Review

These two books, which describe how painters made a living in seventeenth-century Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Naples, synthesize the work of many dedicated scholars, including some by the authors themselves. As Patrizia Cavazzini notes in her introduction, most research on Italian painting has favored major painters and their patrons, neglecting the large supporting cast who also made a living as painters and decorators in Rome and elsewhere. Some worked assisting painters charged with covering extensive wall surfaces with religious or mythological scenes, providing illusionistic architectural frameworks [quadratura], or adding generic landscape vistas or patches of al antica… Full Review

Patricia G. Berman’s In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century is a beautiful book about an area of nineteenth-century art that is little known outside of Denmark. Although Robert Rosenblum and Kirk Varnedoe laid the groundwork for understanding the work in a larger European context, the scholarship and publications in English have been modest. Berman rectifies this situation with her well-illustrated and comprehensive book. In Another Light offers an overview of a range of discourses in Danish art, which Berman analyzes as she locates the works in their broader socio-cultural context. When applicable, Berman brings in examples of… Full Review

The art of Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) engaged the most crucial historical, religious, political, and literary issues about national identity in Britain with a rigor and breadth scarcely rivaled in the history of nineteenth-century British art. His work covered diverse historical subjects, including intimate easel paintings devoted to courtly love and large governmental murals celebrating chivalry and the Battle of Waterloo. The attempt by contemporary art historians to revise the canon of nineteenth-century art has encouraged scholars to study Maclise, but such serious attention to his work is new. Until recently, the lack of scholarly engagement with Maclise has partially resulted… Full Review

As declared on the dust jacket for The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700, “Cardinals occupied a unique place in the world of early modern Europe, their distinctive red hats the visible signs not only of impressive careers at the highest rank the pope could bestow, but also of their high social status and political influence on an international scale.” Often dismissed as a blip by both contemporaries and subsequent historians, the study of ecclesiastics has received limited scholarly attention (excepted for a few good essays and volumes), despite its interested appeal. This book, edited by… Full Review

In looking at modernist buildings, few would be surprised to see ceramic tiles or neocrete coating punctuating the pristine white surface of a rectilinear, multi-level, reinforced concrete building. Projects realized during the interwar period in Japan, however, might also feature wooden pilotis, tatami mats, and thatched roofs. Far from assuming “a style-less style,” as the architect Horiguchi Sutemi claimed of his own creations, the residential, civic, commercial, and recreational structures designed by Horiguchi and his forward-looking peers aimed to create an international architecture, kokusai kenchiku, that expressed the new and modern with distinctive regional inflections. International Architecture in… Full Review