Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History, Elizabeth Ferrer highlights the contributions of Latinx individuals to the history of American photography. Loosely defined as a term whose genesis resides in ethnic, linguistic, and class-based systems of identification, “Latinx” quickly turns into an exhortation to abandon the implicitly exclusionary structures of language through an affirmative, gender-neutral, and inclusive form of self-identification. With this claim, the author intervenes in the historiography of the medium by calling for more inclusive narratives. The book is illustrated with emblematic images of aesthetic and historical value and provides more than eighty biographical… Full Review

It has now been some time since historians and critics began to seriously attempt a definition of contemporary art understood not simply as the art produced today but as a historical phenomenon. Beginning in the second half of the 2000s, scholars including Terry Smith, Amelia Jones, Peter Osborne, and Richard Meyer offered analyses of this phenomenon, exploring its relationship to modernism, its philosophical underpinnings, and its aesthetic characteristics—insofar as aesthetic considerations can still be considered to play a role in its definition. Octavian Esanu’s The Postsocialist Contemporary serves as both a deepening of these previous efforts and a methodological and… Full Review

Reading Joseph C. Williams’s Architecture of Disjuncture feels both like stepping back into familiar architectural-historical territory and peering forward to the exhilarating advances heralding the discipline’s future; in this sense, it is very much a product of the current slow but inexorable transitioning of the study of medieval architecture to the digital age. The book is devoted to the meticulous scrutiny of a single building, the Romanesque cathedral of Molfetta, Apulia, Italy, via the implementation of a diverse array of research methodologies ranging from the hands-on examination of the building fabric with the aid of modern technology to the reconsideration… Full Review

The title of this study of early Florentine book printing calls to mind two classic texts: Martin Wackernagel’s The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market (1938) and Lauro Martines’s The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (1963). All three books describe the conditions of cultural production in quattrocento Florence in the context of government structures, family ties, trade alliances, innovation, and patronage. Artisans, merchants, and humanists emerge as members of social groups that shaped their lives and professions. Lorenz Böninger’s study contextualizes early book printing in Florence as an investment opportunity that… Full Review

Amanda Phillips’s Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean is a welcome intervention in the fields of Ottoman material culture and global textile studies. Building on surveys of Ottoman silk and weaving such as Nurhan Atasoy, Walter B. Denny, Louise W. Mackie, and Hülya Tezcan’s İPEK: Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets (Azimuth Editions, 2001), Phillips delves deep into the silk-weaving industry in the early modern Ottoman empire (ca. 1400–1800), informed by expert readings of archival sources and material evidence alike. Two chapters in each of the book’s three parts are framed roughly chronologically and thematically, with… Full Review

Tracing the development and transformation of Japanese design amidst larger social contexts—such as rapid economic growth and the shift in Japan’s standing within the world after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka World Exposition, the first world’s fair held in Asia—is challenging. Ory Bartal takes on the task of understanding this development by examining design as a form of protest and identity making that addressed social issues linked to both global and local concerns for Japanese designers and consumers in the final decades of the twentieth century. Bartal’s research on Japanese design and visual culture culminated in his… Full Review

Yi Gu’s Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting provides a revisionist history of Chinese landscape painting from the early 1910s to the late 1960s. Foregrounding the importance of visual perception to modern Chinese art, Gu locates an “ocular turn” in landscape painting circa 1911 that shifted premodern Chinese painters’ preoccupation with the literary to a modern artistic subjectivity anchored in visual perception. This ascendancy of vision occurred when Republican-period painters, anxious to establish themselves as modern subjects, embraced open-air painting as a practice that underscored direct observation, linear perspective, and a pseudoscientific means to view the world. Continuing to… Full Review

The scholarship on nineteenth-century photography has long been preoccupied with nationality, origin stories, and technical innovations. Makeda Best charts a different path. In her important new book, we are introduced to Alexander Gardner not as Civil War or western-survey documentarian, not as the favorite portraitist of President Abraham Lincoln or the force behind Mathew Brady’s studio, and not as entrepreneur or experimenter or defender of intellectual property. He may be all of these things, but he is first a Scottish liberal deeply involved in the global reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century, a vocal advocate of workers’ rights, and a… Full Review

Any art historian who has conducted field research at early modern churches in Latin America and the southwestern United States knows that ecclesiastical textiles constitute an important portion of the Spanish colonial patrimony preserved in such sites. Yet these pieces are for the most part underappreciated and understudied, with very few scholarly works throwing light on their technical, aesthetic, and functional qualities. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi’s Clothing the New World Church provides the first in-depth and hemispheric study of such pieces, a good portion of which reveal the ways in which Native American ideas and practices intertwined with European crafts and beliefs… Full Review

The publication of Anne Derbes’s lavishly illustrated book on the baptistery of Padua is a welcome and timely contribution, both for this building and the city. Recently inserted in the UNESCO World Heritage List (Padova Urbs Picta) because of its late fourteenth-century frescoes by Giusto de’Menabuoi (1320–1391), the baptistery is now free of scaffolding following the two-year restoration of its wall paintings and altarpiece. Fina Buzzacarini’s tomb canopy has also been restored, allowing us to distinguish between carved elements that were subsequently painted and painting that mimicks carving. Indeed an observer from the ground can see that only… Full Review