Browse Recent Book Reviews

This edited anthology is the result of a symposium held in Chicago in 2005. It includes seven essays that “explore how and why people bought, sold, donated, and received works of art in the Edo period (1600–1868)” (i). The book is a much-needed addition to the growing literature on collecting and material culture in early modern Japan. The essays deal mainly with the acquisition of prints and paintings, but omit other collecting practices entirely. For example, the volume’s lack of attention to one of Japan’s most important cultural practices—the ritual culture of tea (chanoyu)—is astonishing, as tea was… Full Review

Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. The contributors insist that “things,” the objects that surround us, are endowed with agency that goes unnoticed because of our compulsion to fill the world with meaning. In our concern to make sense of our surroundings we fail to notice that we are not the only ones responsible for shaping the order we impose on the world. Things cry out for our attention and decisively… Full Review

These two publications represent opposite ends of the spectrum of approaches to art history today and are clearly intended for different audiences. While Maria Loh approaches Padovanino’s “remaking” of Titian’s compositions in the early seventeenth century with the stated goal of “wrenching the writing of art history from a discourse that secures privileged seating for its ‘great masters’” (14), Peter Humphrey’s volume is the first in a series projected by Ludion called the “Classical Art Series,” with forthcoming volumes on Bruegel, Vermeer, Velasquez, and Van Eyck. Loh’s focus is on copies or repetitions (of compositions by Titian and his contemporaries)… Full Review

When describing The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1855) in a letter to a friend, Gustave Courbet notoriously quipped, “It’s pretty mysterious. Good luck to anyone who can make it out!” Art historians have long grappled with the ambiguities of Courbet’s oeuvre, and recent books by Linda Nochlin and Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, as well as an online publication by the Getty Museum, demonstrate the ever-present allure of works that in spite of many fine formal, socio-historical, and psychoanalytical analyses continue to exude an aura of mystery. Both Nochlin and Chu… Full Review

What happens when a discerning historian of urban public art is asked to join the administrative body responsible for regulating the very art that she has so shrewdly critiqued in the past? She writes a book that turns her gimlet eye upon her own endeavor, placing it in historical context while using the past to help explain the present. The Politics of Urban Beauty is the product of Michele Bogart’s service as the “lay” member of the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) from 1999 (the year of her appointment by the Giuliani administration) to the end… Full Review

Perhaps most famous in art history as Antonio Moro, a name he assumed while portraitist for the Spanish court of King Philip II, Anthonis Mor enjoyed a long career in the Netherlands, chiefly around his native Utrecht. In this extensive analytical study, Joanna Woodall restores to the painter his full career, including a serious output of religious subjects. Indeed, Woodall’s perceptive characterizations sometimes seem colored by a portentous wish to convey the ultimate seriousness and salvific purpose of his vocation. If Christian content enjoys extensive attention here, it arose with Mor’s origins, for he was a “disciple” (Woodall’s word,… Full Review

Collectors, it sometimes seems, are a necessary evil. Artists create, and we art writers explain the significance of what they make. But collectors, who usually are privileged people, mostly only pick up the check. Too often they treat art as a form of speculation, and so are ready to resell when its value increases. And many of them are not shy about hustling for tips. As a dealer explained to me over dinner, after the newly rich purchase their houses and yacht, they come to his gallery to get their art. Well, they have to do something with their money… Full Review

Reviewing the Van Abbemuseum’s recent exhibition Forms of Resistance (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, September 22, 2007–January 6, 2008), art historian and critic Hal Foster poses the questions, “What is the ‘social’ that ‘desires’ to be ‘changed,’ and how might ‘forms of resistance’ bear on this change? Do radical art and politics converge only at moments of crisis?” (Artforum XLVI, no. 4 [January 2008]: 273). How can we describe the relationship between political activism and the production of contemporary art? While of course there are no simple answers to these questions, editors Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette propose that the concept… Full Review

Though a distinctive genre, scholarly treatment of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits has been infrequent following Alois Riegl’s 1902 Das Holländische Gruppenporträt. Twentieth-century engagement with group portraits has largely focused either on the example of Rembrandt, as in the contributions by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann (Rembrandt: The Nightwatch, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Margaret Carroll (“Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and the Iconological Traditions of Military Company Portraiture in Amsterdam,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1976), or else considered the paintings as straightforward historical documents of the groups represented, as in the catalogue to the 1988 exhibition Schutters in Holland at the Frans… Full Review

This lucidly written and well-illustrated book examines how the effort to create the appearance of spaciousness in individual dwellings has shaped middle- and upper-class housing in the United States. While recent real estate trends mean that fewer and fewer “middle-class” buyers can afford much spaciousness of any kind, in this book Isenstadt engagingly traces the role and desirability of spaciousness in American housing design. It joins earlier books whose authors have also tried to find larger patterns in the North American residential environment, notably those of Sam Bass Warner, Gwendolyn Wright, Robert Fishman, Kenneth Jackson, Margaret Garb, along with many… Full Review