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While the essays in Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, edited by Elizabeth Mansfield (New York: Routledge, 2002), explored art history's beginnings as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, her latest edited volume on the subject, Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, examines its recent past. The consistently high-quality contributions link principles and assumptions that have structured art-historical study with current dilemmas and developments. Key for Mansfield is the notion of art history as institution as embodied in a group of identifiable "organizing principles" able to shape conduct and propagate "particular… Full Review

Audiences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African art can frequently be found pressing their noses up against museum-cabinet glass trying to find a better view of the object. This is because one of the most exciting aspects of African sculptural work is the complex surface detail. Even more aggravating for the viewer, the exhibition label often features a non-descript text noting that the work is made of “wood and organic matter.” But what is it? Surely the museum tested the object to identify these different sculptural surfaces. Editors Leonard Kahan, Donna Page, and Pascal James Imperato seek to placate the audience’s… Full Review

The health of a discipline is often revealed in the questions it asks of itself, and in its self-consciousness about its origins and development over time. Internationalizing the History of American Art, edited by Barbara Groseclose and Jochen Wierich, is marked throughout by such questioning and self-examination. It distinguishes itself from other overviews of the development of the history of American art by its critical examination of “the transmission and exchange of ideas about American art and its history in an international context” (1),[1] a context embodied, in part, in the biographies of the authors included in the anthology… Full Review

Literature and photography grew up together, François Brunet observes in his valuable survey of interactions between the two forms. At the invention of photography in 1839, literature was taking shape as a specialized type of writing, most often fiction and poetry, “an individual pursuit with a reflexive, aesthetic ambition, as well as a claim to deliver truths about society” (10). Consequently, William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844–46) deserves to be understood not only as the first photography book but as an assertion of “photography as experience,” as “expression of the self,” along the lines of contemporaneous literary explorations… Full Review

In 1870, a North Adams, MA, shoe manufacturer named Calvin Sampson faced a labor crisis. His mostly French Canadian workforce had organized themselves into a union and had gone out on strike, demanding a closed shop and the right to tie their wages to Sampson’s profits. Sampson sent his superintendent to San Francisco to hire strikebreakers. On June 13, 1870, 12,000 local residents gathered at the North Adams train station to await the arrival of Sampson’s new recruits: seventy-five Chinese laborers, mostly under twenty years old. Miraculously, the newcomers made it to Sampson’s factory unscathed. Sampson’s first act, oddly enough… Full Review

The three volumes constituting The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture are based upon The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner (London: Macmillan, 1996). The entries from those sections dealing with Islamic art and architecture have been pulled out, and often rearranged under new titles. Notably, the long entry on “Islamic art” on pp. 94–561 of vol. 16 of the Dictionary has been divided into appropriate subtopics, and each listed alphabetically. Some new entries have been added, but the 1996 texts have in most cases remained as they were, although supplemented with additional bibliography. The illustrations are… Full Review

Classical mimesis, the privileged aesthetic model for antiquity, involved a combination of imitation, invention, and idealization. To paint the ideal beauty of Helen of Troy, for example, the fourth-century BCE Greek artist Zeuxis copied and combined the best features of five live female models. In Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis, Elizabeth C. Mansfield argues that the myth of Zeuxis selecting models is “about” classical mimesis itself, and the fundamental contradiction between its means, copying from the real, and its end, a visual rendering of the ideal. The story has held a preeminent place in Western art… Full Review

Cézanne and Beyond is the impressive catalogue published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009. Conceived as a companion to the catalogue of the 1995–96 Cézanne retrospective, also shown in Philadelphia, which spelled out the critical fortunes of Cézanne’s art during his lifetime, this volume focuses exclusively on the artistic reception of Cézanne’s art as seen in the work of sixteen artists ranging from Henri Matisse to Jeff Wall. Joseph Rishel and Katherine Sachs, the editors of Cézanne and Beyond (and the major organizers of the exhibition), make clear in the… Full Review

In 1661, in his mid-fifties, Rembrandt van Rijn painted himself as the Christian apostle Paul (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). Typical for the artist, this late work circled back to an interest that had occupied him since the beginning of his career (e.g., Two Old Men [Peter and Paul?] in Disputation [1628, Melbourne]). Typically, too, Rembrandt took the opportunity to transform this exotically garbed figure into an essay in unsparing self-reflection. Significantly, however, of nearly seventy self-portraits this is the only one in which the artist assumed the guise of an identifiable Biblical character. Thus, his self-identification with Paul is not to be… Full Review

Near the end of Seeing Mexico Photographed, Leonard Folgarait names the subject of inquiry that unfurls in his meticulously elaborated study of post-revolutionary Mexico: “photographic thinking” (180). We can say that this meditative book is itself an experiment in such thinking, which the author simultaneously describes and enacts in three distinctive chapters. While the historical period is more or less the same as his important study, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940: Art of the New Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), the methodology and the knowledge produced here represent significant departures from this earlier work… Full Review