Browse Recent Book Reviews

For a few decades now, immigration has been at the center of societal debates and political programs, at least in the Global North. Migrant artists are rarely mentioned in these discussions, perhaps because professional artists make up a relatively negligible segment of the total immigrant population. Conversely, however, it seems likely that nowadays a high percentage of those making a living by making art are migrants; the same goes for art historians. Marije Osnabrugge, the author of this timely book, for example, is a Dutch scholar working on a subject requiring long research stays in Italy, professionally based in Switzerland… Full Review

In La griffe du peintre, Charlotte Guichard offers a reflection on the painter’s signature in France during the long eighteenth century, both as a sign of artistic identity and as a bearer of value. She convincingly argues that the topic is best served by anchoring analysis at the intersection of various perspectives, simultaneously tracing a “material history of easel painting and a cultural history of signature” (25; all translations are my own). Together, these approaches constitute what the author calls an “anthropology of painting” (23), a method she advocates that proceeds from the network of the actors (artists, dealers… Full Review

In this extensive study on eighteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul, Ünver Rüstem examines the evolution of baroque architecture under the patronage of five consecutive sultans, from Ahmed III (r. 1703–30) to Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–89), concluding with the significance of building activity during the reign of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) at the close of the century. Rüstem’s book thus presents one of the few comprehensive and chronological surveys of an entire century of sultanic patronage in Istanbul. In each chapter, architectural details are relayed in singular specificity and each monument is discussed through the use of numerous primary sources, Ottoman chronicles… Full Review

In the past few decades, the global contemporary art world has witnessed a significant revival of interest in the question of art’s social dimensions, including awareness of the public sphere, civic engagement, and participation in politics. This “social turn” has manifested as a critique of institutionalized postmodernism and neoliberal capitalism. The rise of socially engaged art in China has echoed this international art phenomenon. Artists, critics, and researchers are harnessing the power of art to pursue publicness, social criticism, community reconstruction, bottom-up citizen participation, grassroots interests, and social justice. In so doing, they have abandoned a continuing faith in the… Full Review

Gülru Çakmak’s book on the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme was a joy to read. It is the first monograph that I have read that engages seriously, thoroughly, and deeply with Gérôme’s academic paintings. It focuses on the artist’s most famous works from the 1850s, an early stage in what was to become a stellar career within the institutional framework of nineteenth-century Paris: Duel after the Masquerade (1857), Prayer in the House of an Arnaut Chief (1857), Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant (1859), Death of Caesar (1867, extant in three versions) and César (the lost 1859 “close-up” version of Death of… Full Review

A stimulating read from start to finish, Lamia Balafrej’s The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting is the first book-length analysis of one of the most important codices of Islamic art—the Cairo Bustan (The orchard). Currently preserved in Cairo, this fifteenth-century copy of Saʻdi’s (d. 1291) Persian book of poetry was produced in Herat (in today’s Afghanistan) for Husayn Bayqara (r. ca. 1470–1506), a ruler of the Timurid Empire, which dominated Central Asia and Iran from circa 1400 until 1507. The codex features an unsigned double-page frontispiece attributed to Miraq Naqqash—the head of the royal library in Herat—and… Full Review

Winslow Homer and Photography: A Reassessment Over the past decade, the Portland Museum of Art’s restoration of the Winslow Homer (1836–1910) studio on Prouts Neck in Scarborough, Maine, and the acquisition of his view camera by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art have spurred important new scholarship about Homer’s relationship to the visual culture of his day. The recent exhibition and catalog Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting carefully reexamine Homer’s life and art in relation to the emergence of photography over the course of his prolific career. Period photographs in particular have expanded our… Full Review

Asma Naeem’s book starts with one of those “aha” moments that occur when, as an art historian, you recognize that you have been overlooking a simple but persistent phenomenon relevant to your subject. Vision, it turns out, is not the only sense relevant to the field—hearing matters too. Naeem’s first sentence will not surprise most art historians: “Museums weren’t always the hallowed spaces of reflection that they are today” (1). However, she builds on this straightforward observation to provide a wide range of novel insights. Ultimately, Out of Earshot is framed by a simple but potent question: what if we… Full Review

Virginia Woolf recalled seeing a small Cézanne still life of apples at the home of John Maynard Keynes, as Carol Armstrong recounts in Cézanne’s Gravity. “What can 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. There’s their relationship to each other, & their colour, & their solidity” (34). It was a dozen years after Paul Cézanne’s death, but the spirit of the painter was very much alive among the Bloomsbury circle of artists and intellectuals viewing the work. The assembled company, which included the painter Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister) and the critic Roger Fry, “carried it into the next… Full Review

Kathleen Giles Arthur’s concise study illuminates the intersection of visual culture and the spiritual lives of Observant Franciscan women in fifteenth-century Ferrara, Italy. Her book is an outstanding and much-needed contribution to scholarship on art and the Poor Clares. Historians of this topic have focused primarily on the visionary treatise Le sette armi spirituali, written by Caterina Vigri (1413–1463), founder of the convent now usually known as Corpus Domini in Bologna. Caterina spent much of her life in Ferrara, first at the d’Este court of Niccolò III, where she served as lady-in-waiting to his wife Parisina. In 1426… Full Review