Browse Recent Book Reviews

The essays in No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity interrogate humor as a transcultural device used to address the thorny issue of racial, social, and political difference. Each of the book’s contributors carefully considers human representation and classification and how stereotypes are constructed through visual culture. One of the book’s coeditors, the late Angela Rosenthal, argues that visual humor must be rigorously examined because comedy attracts our attention to issues of human worth and variance. For Rosenthal, interpreting visual satire is one key to understanding the fluidity of socially fixed categories such as race… Full Review

Both frank and richly detailed, Sharon Louden’s broad collection contains forty concrete accounts, fascinating autobiographies in miniature, from artists describing the various ingenious means by which they strive to sustain “a creative life.” There are vital insights here, but often they beg further elaboration. Admittedly, Louden concedes a “hands-off” editorial approach, allowing contributors to speak with their own voices. Nevertheless, attempts are made to bind these accounts together in the book’s five short, somewhat more theoretical commentaries: a preface, a foreword, and three conclusions. Here the book could have gone further: by pushing these accounts to divulge their commonalities, or… Full Review

The history of photography, film, and technology often builds its narratives around significant dates that seem to map precisely the beginning or end of certain developments in these media. The invention of photography in 1839 and the birth date of film in 1895 are such events, and historiography has repeatedly treated them with reference to one another. This dominant schema presents the development of instantaneous photography teleologically as a precursor to the projected film image, as if the spirit of invention and attainment of knowledge had evolved itself strictly between the two dates. In her most recent publication, Zeitspeicher der… Full Review

In this ambitious, generously illustrated, and beautifully produced book, Louis P. Nelson convincingly shows us that Jamaica and its architecture is not peripheral, but central to our understanding of the British Empire in the long eighteenth century (from 1692, the year of the Port Royal earthquake, to 1838, marking emancipation). Departing from the emphasis of many architectural histories of early modern Americas, Nelson focuses on the movement of people (whites and blacks), goods, ideas, and capital in and around the Atlantic World to reveal the complex entanglement of involvements, identity, and architecture. In this sweeping history, both West Africa’s coastal… Full Review

The German-Jewish art historian August Liebmann Mayer (1885–1944?) was one of the most distinguished specialists of Spanish art active in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also one of the most prolific. His publications on this subject number in the hundreds, ranging from comprehensive monographs on the leading figures of Spain’s Golden Age to groundbreaking articles that feature important documentary discoveries and new attributions. Mayer was instrumental in expanding interest in Spanish culture among twentieth-century European audiences. Yet despite his achievements, his work has received little attention in recent years. In her ambitious intellectual biography of Mayer… Full Review

South Africa: The Art of a Nation threads together a narrative of breathtaking chronological scope, beginning with the Makapangsgat Pebble, the earliest evidence—three million years old—of a hominid choosing to keep an object for aesthetic reasons, and ending with contemporary art that uses both local and global artistic idioms to grapple with the aftermath of apartheid. The catalogue of the British Museum’s 2016–17 exhibition of the same name, South Africa represents a conscientious effort to braid the conflicting histories and definitions that make up this impossibly broad mandate—for indeed, nowhere else in the world could the chronological scope be so… Full Review

Near the end of Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience, Neil Harris concedes that “[i]nstitutions are much more than the sums of their staff and supporters. They change over time, effacing the impact and even the memory of their earlier leadership” (508). Nevertheless, he argues that the impact of an exceptional director can be profound. Such was the case with J. Carter Brown and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Harris identifies his book as an “institutional biography” of the gallery, neither a biography of Brown… Full Review

In his new book, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East, Ali Behdad connects Orientalist theory, photographic history, and the politics of the Middle East. This disciplinary confluence positions photographs in a cross-cultural dynamic where they “play a performative function in producing certain cultural and political meanings” (13). Camera Orientalis arrives on the heels of critical contributions from the fields of history, the history of art and science, as well as anthropology. Authors such as Ahmet Ersoy, Nancy Micklewright, Mary Roberts, Staci Scheiwiller, Edhem Eldem, Elizabeth Edwards, Christopher Morton, Christopher Pinney, Deborah Poole, Patricia Hayes, and Deborah… Full Review

Edward Sullivan’s book-length disquisition on Francisco Oller is an engaging narrative that traverses a wide historical range, from the personal to the national to the transnational and to artworks and their histories. Oller, whom Sullivan describes as the most prominent Caribbean artist of the nineteenth century, lived and painted during a period of intense social and political transformation. Born in 1833 in Puerto Rico to a father who had migrated there from Spain, Oller was forty by the time slavery was abolished. During his lifetime, Puerto Rico went from being a Spanish colony to a US dependency, with Oller capturing… Full Review

Kellie Jones’s South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s illuminates a blind spot in existing histories of contemporary art in Los Angeles. Those who know Los Angeles know that the area “south of Pico”—dominated by the north-south arteries of Central and Crenshaw avenues, which connect the neighborhoods of Watts, Compton, Leimert Park, and Baldwin Hills—has historically been the center of black life in the city. As Jones writes, Pico Boulevard is a physical “demarcation of division” that also represents a “hidden history of blackness” (15). Written in highly readable, compellingly detailed prose, South… Full Review