Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Kristin Lohse Belkin and Fiona Healy
A House of Art: Rubens as Collector
Exh. cat. Antwerp: Rubenshuis & Rubenianum, 2003. 342 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Cloth $87.95 (9076704694)
David Jaffé and Elizabeth McGrath
Rubens: A Master in the Making
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 208 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (1857093712)
As an exhibition, A House of Art: Rubens as Collector provided the unique experience of showing a substantial portion of Rubens’s personal art collection within his own house. When I visited the exhibition for the first time, a pail and mop lay inadvertently forgotten in a corner, further adding to the domestic atmosphere. Rarely is an exhibition as perfectly suited to its setting, and for this apt pairing the curators Kristin Belkin and Fiona Healy deserve to be congratulated. The catalogue cannot duplicate the in situ experience, but it provides the important alternative perspective of tracking the transformation of the… Full Review
August 7, 2006
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Janet Abramowicz
Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 288 pp.; 41 color ills.; 71 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300100361)
Recent history has witnessed renewed interest in the work and life of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), famous for the muted tones and graceful volumes that epitomize his intimate still-life and landscape paintings, unadorned compositions that defy association with a single artistic movement. Characterized as stubbornly solitary, Morandi filled his canvases with barren combinations of forlorn bottles, vases, and other miscellaneous containers, producing clusters of architectonic bodies that allude to cathedrals, sculptures, and even the human figure in images whose “ambiguity of figure and ground” arrest the viewer (103). The Bolognese painter’s subdued landscapes oscillate between meditative abstract floating… Full Review
August 7, 2006
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Jay Fisher
The Essence of Line: French Drawings From Ingres to Degas
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, The Walters Art Museum, and Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. 408 pp. Paper $39.95 (0271026928)
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, June 19–September 11, 2005; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, June 19–September 11, 2005; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, February 19–May 14, 2006;
Published in conjunction with the exhibition by the same title, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas is a study of the superb nineteenth-century French drawings collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, and the Peabody Institute Art Collection of the Maryland State Archives (on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art). The core holdings of drawings at each institution are private collections amassed by Baltimoreans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, quite remarkably, have remained intact, thereby providing scholars a window into period taste and connoisseurship.… Full Review
August 2, 2006
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Caroline Jones
Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 544 pp.; 23 color ills.; 127 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0226409511)
The last word on the history of the New York School is far from having been written. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses announces a new chapter in the study of mid-century art and criticism by attempting to conclude one. At the end of her preface, Caroline Jones reveals, “More than anything else I’ve written, this book exists to end its subject—to construe the Greenberg effect, in order to be done with it” (xxix). Her central claim is that Greenberg’s art criticism served to limit and reduce experience to the visual, which, in the process… Full Review
August 2, 2006
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Allen Hockley
The Prints of Isoda Koryūsai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 336 pp.; 8 color ills.; 51 b/w ills.; 59 ills. Cloth $60.00 (0295983019)
Allen Hockley’s long-awaited monograph on Isoda Koryūsai (1735–90) is a welcome addition to the literature on Japan’s eighteenth-century print culture. Not only does he focus on one of the too-long neglected masters of the period, he also presents a fine analysis of some of Koryūsai’s major themes as well as his best-known series of single prints, Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh Young Leaves. That this study is, indeed, long overdue can be inferred from the fact that Koryūsai has received little scholarly attention in spite of the sheer number of designs for which he was responsible. As… Full Review
August 1, 2006
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Andrew Schulz
Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 255 pp.; 80 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780521821056)
Francisco de Goya's Los Caprichos (1799), a series of eighty etchings and aquatints, are widely known as satiric criticisms of human ignorance and folly. The artist is democratic in his critical assessment of society and its customs, from the superstitious beliefs of the lower classes to the genealogical obsession of aristocrats. Although the series includes themes particular to Spain at the turn of the century, Goya often veils these fixed references with ambiguous meanings, settings, and figures. Thus, many of the critiques expressed pictorially by Goya have application for locations and times outside of late-eighteenth-century Spain, giving the series a… Full Review
July 13, 2006
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Christopher B. Donnan
Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 220 pp.; 258 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (0292716222)
Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru is a welcome addition to the literature on the art of ancient Peru. The Moche were a state-level society who prospered in the first seven or so centuries AD on the desert coast of what is now northern Peru. They were prolific and prodigious artists in many media, the most famous being metalwork, the most numerous being ceramics. The gold-filled graves at Sipán and other Moche sites have been discovered in the last twenty years, and much progress has been made in our knowledge of this important ancient American society and its art. Christopher… Full Review
July 5, 2006
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Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, ed.
Paintings for the Planet King: Philip IV and the Buen Retiro Palace
Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2005. 304 pp.; 140 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth (1903470439)
In an inspired act of programming, in the summer of 2005 the Prado Museum exhibited a selection of paintings associated with the legendary Palace of the Buen Retiro. Not only does the accompanying catalogue shed light on an unparalleled chapter in the artistic patronage of Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621–65), it also marks a resourceful initiative by the Prado to draw attention to the strengths of its own holdings. The museum, which borrowed just three of the roughly sixty works in the exhibition, used the occasion to commemorate an enterprise generally accorded fragmentary coverage in the literature on seventeenth-century… Full Review
July 5, 2006
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Ellen Perry
The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Visual Arts of Ancient Rome
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 224 pp.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0521831652)
Ellen Perry offers a clear and forthright, if sometimes oversimplified, account of the complex, highly sophisticated discourses that characterized the Roman "aesthetics of emulation." In so doing, she seeks to transform the debate on Roman copying, with a particular focus on Roman statues of gods and heroes, so-called ideal sculpture. This debate has important repercussions for Romanists, and indeed for the field of art history as a whole. After all, Roman ideal sculptures are familiar to most art historians—but not as Roman works of art. Instead, statues that appear stylistically Greek, such as the Apollo Belvedere… Full Review
June 29, 2006
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Jeremy Tanner
The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society and Artisitic Rationalisation
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 348 pp.; 54 b/w ills. Cloth $114.00 (0521846145)
In chapter 1, after a brief discussion of "Greek art, the idea of freedom, and the creation of modern high culture," which treads mostly familiar ground, Tanner takes on some twentieth-century accounts of ancient art and (unsurprisingly) finds them wanting—too literary, too anachronistic, and so on. His own (quasi-Parsonian and somewhat jargon-filled) solution is to characterize art as a form of expressive cultural symbolism, constructing "affective experience on the basis of cultural-level codifications of sensuous form generated in some degree of abstraction from immediate social relationships (21). He then mobilizes Karl Weber's concept of rationalization to account for art's different… Full Review
June 29, 2006
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