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Since the 1936 publication of Walter Benjamin’s groundbreaking essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the revolutionary impact of the photographic medium has been widely acknowledged, while the extent and nature of this impact has been much debated. Following Benjamin, some scholars have focused on photography’s effect on the nature and status of the art object; others have concentrated on its role in spectacle, on its ability to aestheticize everyday life, including the realm of politics, which is what Benjamin observed, and feared, in 1930s Germany. Part of this aestheticization of politics involved the visualization of… Full Review

It goes without saying that “naturalism” has played an absolutely central role in art-historical discourse. This is true in two broad senses. On one hand, there is artistic practice: artists have, in various ways, relied on the observation of the visible world in the creation of images. On the other, there is the standard art-historical narrative, articulated by scholars from Pliny through Vasari to the present, which posits a diagnostic role to the perception of naturalism, gauging the degree of an image’s naturalism to discern intention and meaning, and assigns particular works to one or another art-historical epoch. Jean Givens’s… Full Review

Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych serves as an excellent companion to the exhibition catalogue for Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, also edited by John Oliver Hand and Ron Spronk, along with Catherine Metzger (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). The product of two roundtable discussions, its thirteen fine scholarly essays present a rich array of related topics. In the first essay, Victor Schmidt addresses the development of diptychs prior to 1400. He begins by showing that the term “diptychum” or “diptycha” originally referred to a set of… Full Review

“Imagine you are lying on Freud’s couch. What can you see?” This is the question that opens “Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist,” John Forrester’s classic essay on the collecting habits of Sigmund Freud (Dispatches from the Freud Wars, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 107). In “The Image in Psychoanalysis and the Archaeological Metaphor,” the lead essay in her edited collection Psychoanalysis and the Image, Griselda Pollock returns to this scene, turning Forrester’s question around to muse: “As Freud sat in his analyst’s chair, what did he see?” (16) The one thing that neither the patient nor Freud could… Full Review

From its early dismissal by established critics to its rapid embrace by the public-at-large, Pop art represented a dramatic turning point in the development of postwar art. For that reason, it has whetted scholarly interest and has been the focus of numerous art-historical studies over the years. In her eminently readable and engaging book Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture, Sara Doris dives into the debates that greeted Pop upon its emergence in the late 1950s and that have continued to the present day. Doris aims to provide a deeper and more nuanced reading of Pop art… Full Review

The language of war in the post-Vietnam era is all about clinical precision: as in “surgical strike,” “smart bombs,” or “friendly fire.” Designed to communicate the idea that brutality, risk, senseless killing, and torture are qualities of the past, this language promotes the belief that war has somehow become clean and non-lethal. The 2004 appearance of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, which showed in horrific detail U.S. soldiers violating the human rights of supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist and Iraqi insurgency suspects, came as a clear challenge to this perception. And yet, as Stephen Eisenman argues in his new book, The… Full Review

Since the early 1990s, several prominent artists, curators, and professors have opened a dialogue to address the definitions and meanings of Jewish American Art. This surge coincided with, but was not part of, multiculturalism and identity-based art and politics. (For clarification, like Bloom I am interested in Jewishness the culture rather than Judaism the religion). Over the past decades many important articles, exhibitions, and catalogues demonstrate how being a Jew has shaped the careers of art professionals, and how Jews in the art market and the academy often saw (some perhaps still do) their status as Jews as something to… Full Review

To adapt John Donne’s famous phrase, no art form is an island, and Ellen Conant aims to confirm this by connecting the relatively isolated art-historical landmasses of the Edo period (1615–1868) and the Meiji period (1868–1912) via a volume of essays focused primarily on the time period 1840–90. Her purpose is to elucidate Meiji arts as part of a continuum of artistic experimentation and innovation during the nineteenth century. In her introduction, Conant asks readers to seek the essays’ “fundamental commonality” (2). These shared themes include an examination of novel art forms in the mid-nineteenth century, a consideration… Full Review

The book of hours emerged from its union with the psalter at the very end of the thirteenth century like ripe fruit dropping off a tree, to use Victor Leroquais’s famous simile. Six independent English horae from before 1300 are cited in the Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles; twenty-one others span the 1300s (Nigel Morgan Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1190–1285, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1982 and 1988; and Lucy Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1986). From this wealth of early English material, Kathryn Smith has selected three personally commissioned books… Full Review

Delhi today is the capital of the nation state of India, and many think of it as the capital of much of India since the late twelfth century, when Muslim political authority established itself in north India. This is, of course, an oversimplification, for there were periods when Delhi was not the capital of any particular regime. All the same, the city has captured the imagination of a number of scholars working on South Asia. Jyoti Hosagrahar’s book, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism, adds to the already rich literature on Delhi by probing the intersection between colonial authority… Full Review