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Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing well into the 1990s, a number of academics, critics, and curators turned to the question of California modernism asking, in short, if there was such a thing and, if so, to what did it owe its unique place in the annals of American art. Anne Bartlett Ayres, Bram Dijkstra, Susan Ehrlich, Paul Karlstrom, Susan Landauer, Peter Selz, and Richard Cándida Smith, among others, suggested, in a generous collection of books, essays, and exhibitions that not only did California modern art reveal a distinctive form and content but that it was far closer to… Full Review

Tamarind Techniques for Fine Art Lithography significantly updated the chemistry, technology, and aesthetics that The Tamarind Book of Lithography (1971) offered. I am fortunate to have had the chance to introduce both books.To me, then and now, Tamarind represents an “informed energy,” not a tradition built on rote and recipes. The core problem is still the same: how to differentiate what is merely novel from an aesthetic advance of long-term importance. (From the foreword.) —June Wayne Tamarind Techniques for Fine Art Lithography continues the legacy of “informed energy” that June Wayne (founder and director of the Tamarind Institute)… Full Review

Labor and photography are inseparable. From the muddy newspaper photos of fallen Triangle fire sweatshop workers, to Lewis Hine’s “Icarus” sky boy building the Empire State Building, to Milton Rogovin’s portraits of deindustrialized steelworkers, labor history is partly learned through photographs. In this massive study of the interrelationship of images and farm labor in California, Richard Steven Street excavates a story of struggle, power, endurance, and harsh, dangerous, physical labor. It is a hybrid book—historical, biographical, scholarly, political, critical, technical, multi-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary. Street positions himself among the “three-eye people,” as photographer-historian-activist, both participant and observer. A photographic history of… Full Review

In 1998, Kirk Savage‘s first book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press), was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American Studies. His second book, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape, should have been a finalist for this year’s general non-fiction Pulitzer Prize, but perhaps it will receive another American Studies award or an art-history honor. Dell Upton, UCLA’s highly respected professor of architectural history, praises this book on its dust jacket as “at once an art history… Full Review

In Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State, Alick McLean presents the disclaimer that medieval Prato should be considered ordinary, at least when compared to its famous neighbors, Florence or Siena. However, by the end of this fascinating, finely researched book, the reader is left feeling that the architectural and urban design (and, ultimately, visual culture) of this Tuscan commune is, simply, extra-ordinary. McLean’s book is a diachronic exploration of the city and architecture of Prato in relation to social, political, and cultural developments, largely from its origin in the Carolingian era until its demise in… Full Review

Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, provides an English-speaking audience an essential framework with which to place this scarcely known artist. The catalogue, written by Sarah Lees with contributions from Richard Kendall and Barbara Guidi, distinguishes itself from typical studies of Boldini (1842–1931) by examining and illustrating the full range of his work stylistically and thematically. Its format, organized largely by genre, is vividly supported by dozens of color plates, and illustrates Boldini’s explorations both in relation to his French environment after 1871 and his earlier Italian… Full Review

Even before Francisco Pizarro set foot in South America, the people, wealth, natural resources, and social organization of the prehispanic Andes were already being documented in text. The earliest known document of this kind, the Sámano account, was copied into the Spanish royal record by Juan de Sámano around 1528. By recounting the first European explorations in the region, the Sámano account established a tradition of recording and collating information about the Andes in written documents, a practice that continues today in projects like Joanne Pillsbury’s Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900. In the three volumes… Full Review

Pika Ghosh’s Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal breaks new ground in its exploration of Hindu temple architecture. This deeply researched, well-argued work considers a radically new form of temple design that was first consolidated in mid-seventeenth century Vishnupur, capital of the Malla dynasty of western Bengal. Ghosh weaves together histories of architecture, religion, culture, and sacred poetic literature to explore the genesis and early development of the temple form proclaimed by its patrons navaratna ratnam—in her translation, “new bejeweled temple”—in an inscription on the mid-seventeenth-century Shyam Ray Temple at Vishnupur. Ghosh concentrates on the formative… Full Review

In The Pygmalion Effect Victor Stoichita makes the astonishing claim that there is a libidinal component to mimetic production. Western art history—taken here to be a history of mimesis, of copies—has a dark, disavowed, erotic heart: the simulacrum. The simulacrum differs from the copy in that it is magical rather than mimetic, invites touch rather than merely looking, and is autonomous rather than merely derived from a model; Pygmalion’s statue is its founding myth. Arguing that “the simulacrum was not completely banished by Platonism” (3), Stoichita explores the “reverberations” (5) of the Pygmalion myth through Western art, paying close attention… Full Review

The modest title of Matthew Reeve’s book Thirteenth-Century Wall Painting of Salisbury Cathedral: Art, Liturgy and Reform only hints at the rich investigation contained therein. Salisbury Cathedral furnishes an unusual instance in which the building itself was constructed on a virgin site in one long campaign (ca. 1220–58), and where there is extensive evidence of the structure’s painted program. Moreover, the details of the celebration of the liturgy within this space are known since it was made to house the newly minted Sarum Rite, written at Salisbury perhaps by the bishop who inaugurated the cathedral-building program, Richard Poore (r. 1217–28)… Full Review