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Julie Anne Plax's Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France belongs to what we might call the "third wave" of writing on Watteau that has transpired during the two centuries following the artist's own. The first, nineteenth-century manifestation of Watteau writing presented the paintings as dreamy, imaginative poems and the artist himself as a melancholy visionary. Early in the following century began a second, more objectivist trend that sought to codify and interpret the artist's oeuvre through historical documentation, connoisseurship, and iconographic studies. This "second wave" of writing on Watteau culminated in 1984 with an international exhibition and catalogue… Full Review

This catalogue accompanied an exhibition made up of sixty-six sheets constituting the Royal collection's entire holdings in this area. All of the drawings are illustrated in color, including any significant versos. As he has done in the past with Leonardo and Poussin, Martin Clayton, the organizer of the exhibition and sole author of the catalogue, does a masterful job bringing together a great deal of information in a form that makes an often complex field accessible to the general reader. The introductory essay breaks little new ground. In it Clayton provides an outline of the basic shapes of the careers… Full Review

Michael Fried wrote a number of essays about contemporary painting and sculpture in the 1960s to which arguments about these topics still return. Some will think it ironic that it should be an essay about sculpture which has become the most widely read and influential, as Fried has mostly concerned himself with painting. Since the sixties Fried has devoted himself almost exclusively to historical subjects, but this has not meant that he has become less influential—only that when people gather to discuss topics germane to contemporary art, they are likely to refer to something Fried has said about Manet and… Full Review

Marjorie Welish has done an admirable job of identifying key issues that have occupied artists during postmodern times. Her essays "investigate the fate of the concept of the brushstroke" during a period when the boundary conditions of art were being aggressively re-evaluated. The various approaches taken by the major members of the New York School—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Barnett Newman, among others—are constantly in the background of her discussions. She argues that the brushstroke, or more generally the "mark" or the "touch," was a fundamental unit of meaning for the Abstract Expressionists, and she… Full Review

Milly Heyd's Mutual Reflections is a fascinating study of the ways that African Americans and Jewish Americans have depicted each other in the visual arts over the last century. While this distinctive, complex relationship has been explored in cultural, social, religious, and political areas, this book is the first to analyze that linkage through its visual dimension in a substantive way. Heyd investigates how these artists have viewed each other in ways ranging from symbiosis to disillusionment via painting, sculpture, cartoons, comics, and installations. Heyd weaves together thematic and chronological approaches in six chapters. She asserts that as… Full Review

Originally published—in print and entirely online—in 1995, William J. Mitchell's City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn resembles a relic of early cyberculture scholarship, going back and forth between visionary insight and embarrassing naiveté. As one of the earliest attempts to reimagine and reconceptualize architecture and urbanism in an age of digital information, City of Bits provides a thought-provoking and generous glimpse into the cities—and citizens—of tomorrow. At the same time, the vision, emanating from what may be the most privileged vantage point for the new millennium, MIT substitutes celebratory breadth for critical depth, and along the way all… Full Review

With each passing year, the geographic area of modernism seems to increase. Similar to the expansion of NATO, but lacking the political strife, modernism's boundary gradually moves eastward to include lands that were abandoned to their own sphere of influence following the Second World War. In recent years though, Western art and architectural historians have begun to rediscover what was, in fact, the heartland of modernism: Central Europe. However Central Europe is defined—whether geographically, by a history of shared monarchs, or overlapping spheres of influence centered on one or another capital city—the boundaries separating the West from this heartland, now… Full Review

With recent works such as Lucy Lippard's On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place (New York: The New Press, 1999), the intersection between the academic discipline of art history and the study of tourism has received increased attention from art historians and art critics. One of the roles of art history within the cultural practice of tourism is, for example, to establish and authenticate a canon of monuments that serves as a resource for tourism as well as to provide the etiquette of behavior that includes gazing and photographing. In the view of this, it is regrettable that the… Full Review

During his lifetime, Peter Behrens was able to enjoy a great deal of press--thanks to his extensive activity in typography, design, and architecture. In addition to the numerous articles that accompanied his published projects, Behrens became the subject of a monograph by Fritz Hoeber in 1913, while still in the midst of his career. Behrens died in 1940, but remained respected even after World War II, although his achievement was considered to be the work of an early proponent of modernism, rather than that of a designer independent of any group. Not until the sixties, when a more thorough investigation… Full Review

This century's second great period of artistic invention lasted from around 1944 to around 1972—from Abstract Expressionism, that is, to Conceptual art. Artists since then have basically been involved in digesting the implications of that earlier period—a serious task for work that remains unfinished. Art historians have been at it too, at least as far as revisiting the '40s and '50s. Now we're starting to see the '60s and early '70s in historical perspective as well, and part of the essential groundwork for this effort has been rediscovery and republication of significant early documents in anthologies like Pop Art: A… Full Review