Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin, Celeste-Marie Bernier has written an intellectual and cultural biography of the artist. Her study is a deeply researched, archival-focused examination of the ways in which war, military service, race, identity, and art making were inextricably bound together for Horace Pippin (1888–1946). Suffering and Sunset is also polemical, challenging white-dominated archival and historical structures and official histories that have ignored and negated both the black male artist and the African American combat soldier. Understanding World War I as the defining experience for Pippin, Bernier reconsiders… Full Review

In recent decades, American and European museums have mounted major exhibitions highlighting individual Mesoamerican cultures, notably the Olmec, the Maya, and the Aztecs. Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico has a different focus. Using the culture hero Quetzalcoatl as its pivot, the exhibition and accompanying book investigate cultural and artistic traditions across Mesoamerica, and even beyond, during the period immediately preceding the Spanish conquest, known as the Postclassic (AD 950–1521). The exhibition was originally planned by curator Virginia M. Fields of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who sadly did not live to… Full Review

The heft of this volume and the comeliness of its jacket forecast the import and “handsome elegance” (334) of its contents. Richly illustrated, meticulously edited, and exquisitely produced, the object itself fuses ornament with substance in a kind of metonymic representation of its main argument. This work consists of twenty-six contributions grouped into seven sections, of which four reflect chronological groupings of medieval, early-modern, modern, and contemporary topics, while the remaining parts focus on conceptual themes. Geographically, the “global” reference in the publication’s subtitle is well justified, since the places discussed in its essays span several continents (the Islamic world… Full Review

Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space is a palimpsest of a book. It is rich with stories of intricate entanglements among capital, space, and politics; it provides a probing analysis focused on how this evidence allows for a new understanding of how the world operates. And it claims a role, albeit somewhat vaguely, for the agency of designers and others in crafting counter-narratives and insurgent practices. Easterling’s strength is in her convincing descriptions that flip the background into the foreground—we thought we knew how economies were optimized, but the process of optimization elicits hefty resonance. She describes the… Full Review

Philosophically inflected histories of modern painting take many forms. French phenomenology shapes one of the richest and most deeply ingrained of these. Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye offers an alternative to this standard way of charting European painting from roughly 1825 to 1900. His account is alternative in that it shifts emphasis decidedly away from what has become comme il faut in such philosophical studies, i.e., approaches that give pride of place to “impressionism” as an ordering concept. Alliez wants to resist this way of parsing the development of modern painting, and the artists and works he discusses are chosen to… Full Review

On Fiona Banner’s website, her publication Heart of Darkness is referred to as a magazine. On the publisher’s website it is referred to as a book in magazine format. Straddling these two categories, Heart of Darkness embodies multiple dualities and contrasting conditions, in line with the body of work Banner has been developing over the past two decades. The publication is part of Four Corners Books’ series Familiars, which pairs a classic novel with a contemporary artist’s interpretation of the text, resulting in highly experimental new editions. Banner’s Heart of Darkness, based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, is the twelfth… Full Review

Noting the manner in which Leon Battista Alberti treated the column in his architecture, French philosopher Hubert Damisch commented on its ambiguity: at times structural element, at times a nonstructural, expressive point of punctuation. If there is one motif recurrently embedded in Damisch’s writings on architecture, it is the column and its potent identity as a fixture of ambiguity and multiple meanings. The column is rendered structurally elemental, as it is conceptually, and presents two important points of departure for thinking about architecture critically. The first, tied to the issue of structure and form, is the column’s function as an… Full Review

Clementine Hunter: A Sketchbook, showcases twenty-six previously unseen paintings by renowned Louisiana artist, Clementine Hunter. The oil-on-paper sketches were completed in 1945, shortly after Hunter first began painting. She spent most of her adult life as a domestic and picking cotton on Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches Parish. Collector Richard Gasperi purchased the sketches from the Henry family during the 1970s. They were displayed for the first time in 2014 as part of the Gasperi Collection exhibition. In the introduction, Gasperi tells a riveting story about the survival of the paintings. On August 28, 2005, he was forced to choose from… Full Review

El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics was published to accompany an exhibition of works by Senegalese painter, curator, and cultural activist El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, generally known as El Hadji Sy or El Sy (born Dakar, Senegal, 1954). El Hadji Sy has been a key player in the complex contemporary construction of African artistic thinking and practice ever since the Senegalese government under Léopold Sédar Senghor (President of the Republic of Senegal, 1960–80) became heavily involved in the promotion of the country’s culture within the conceptual framework of négritude, first developed in Paris in the 1930s by black… Full Review

How does a history of art in Africa get written? This writing has to negotiate the shoals and reefs of both its own history of writing but also and perhaps more importantly the framing of its subject matter by another history of art—that of European modernism. The shoals are well known. They come in the form of prescriptions (to students): Do not use the word tribe—it belongs to a colonial era of framing people through their language and material culture that bears little relation to the actual history of identity formation. Do not use the word traditional—it shuts… Full Review