Browse Recent Book Reviews

The later phases of Jacques-Louis David’s career have received far less attention than his earlier work during the Ancien Régime and Revolution. Art in general during Napoleon’s Consulate and Empire has, perhaps surprisingly, been comparatively neglected until recently. Philippe Bordes’s exhibition and catalogue are an extremely valuable contribution to the reassessment of David’s later career and to an understanding of art in France in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Bordes, a professor at the Université Lyon 2, was the founding director of the Musée de la Révolution française in Vizille and has published extensively on David and French… Full Review

Over the past year, the United States was fortunate to host two traveling exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts movement: International Arts and Crafts, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, showed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (September 25, 2005–January 22, 2006), and The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880–1920: Design for the Modern World, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, closed its national tour at the Cleveland Museum of Art (October 16, 2005–January 8, 2006). Given the interest in the Arts and Crafts movement generated by these exhibitions, Judith… Full Review

The coast south of Naples is one of the most beautiful and evocative areas of Europe, a dramatic setting for the works of art produced at the height of Amalfi’s importance as a trading center. Jill Caskey’s Art and Patronage in the Medieval Mediterranean focuses on the art produced during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the wealthy communities around Amalfi, and her central premise is that these artistic projects exemplify the art of mercatantia: the private churches palaces, pulpits, and doors that are the material expression of the conspicuous and ambitious “getting and spending” of its merchants. Commerce… Full Review

In David Getsy’s account of the “unprecedented and rapid increase in the interest in sculpture” (2) that emerged in late nineteenth-century Britain, the group of artists labeled the New Sculpture movement is given a long-overdue reappraisal. Focusing his study on five artists at the time considered central to the sculptural revival, the author presents detailed analyses of a small number of “imaginative” or “ideal” statues made between 1877 and 1905 by Frederic Leighton, Hamo Thornycroft, Alfred Gilbert, Edward Onslow Ford, and James Harvard Thomas. Body Doubles is generously illustrated with more than a hundred black-and-white illustrations. Some color plates of… Full Review

Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City brings together twelve commissioned essays, the impetus for which was the conference that accompanied the exhibition, “Florence and the 1470s: Contexts and Contrasts,” curated by Patricia Rubin and Alison Wright in 1999 at the National Gallery in London. It was during this conference that the importance of the recurring concepts of cultural translation and exchange became evident to Campbell and Milner. The volume scrutinizes these aspects of the artistic and intellectual life of Italian urban cultures in the early modern period. The introduction by the editors, in particular, examines the… Full Review

Rather than rehearse traditional narratives, Briony Fer’s The Infinite Line: Re-Making Art After Modernism refreshingly shifts the established canon of post-war art by positioning lesser-studied artists like Piero Manzoni, Hanne Darboven, and Agnes Martin in relation to venerated figures such as Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse, and Mel Bochner. Her subject is chronologically circumscribed by what she defines as the period of transition between modernism and postmodernism, formally characterized by the shift away from a collage aesthetic. In modern art, collage carries connotations of the disorder and disintegration of the modern world, exemplified by a seemingly random overlapping of disparate elements… Full Review

The specter of Michael Fried’s imperious rhetoric looms large over Pamela Lee’s study Chronophobia: On Art and Time in the 1960s. Indeed, part 1 of her three-part study and (rather confusingly) the first of its five chapters both bear the title “Presentness Is Grace,” a quote taken from the last line of “Art and Objecthood,” Fried’s now seminal disavowal of “literalist” art, first published in Artforum in 1967. As many have done before her, Lee subjects Fried’s essay to an extended close reading, honing in on the discussion of temporality that motivates Fried’s comparison of Minimalist practice with that… Full Review

Making Cairo Medieval addresses the urban and architectural evolution of Cairo during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interest in this topic has increased considerably over the past two decades, and this book is a recent example of this interest. For quite some time, a major source for the investigation of this subject remained Janet Abu Lughod’s highly regarded Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), even though the work addressed the overall evolution of Cairo, and its chronological scope therefore extended beyond the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since then, a number of publications… Full Review

Qusayr ‘Amra is perhaps the most enigmatic of the so-called Umayyad “desert castles” that inhabit the landscape of the Syro-Jordanian steppe and the more arid regions to the east of it. These “castles,” or qusur as they are commonly referred to in Arabic, are in fact residences, bathhouses, hunting lodges, and farms built by the elites of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750 CE). Built sometime in the first half of the eighth-century CE, Qusayr ‘Amra consists of a bath complex (a large hall and three small bathing rooms), a deep stone well, a cistern, and a hydraulic installation with a waterwheel… Full Review

Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre was the first major exhibition of the artist’s work since the 1991–92 retrospective in London and Paris. It was also the first large-scale show of both his paintings and prints in the United States in more than twenty-five years. In contrast to its predecessors this show focused on a single theme—the relationship of Lautrec’s art to Montmartre, the bohemian and lower-class Parisian district where he worked and where he found his characteristic subjects. The accompanying volume provides substantial documentation and analysis in support of the exhibition’s mission of setting the artist’s work in its socio-historical… Full Review