Browse Recent Book Reviews

Kobena Mercer’s Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s gathers eighteen essays written in the span of twenty years, from 1992 to 2012, which offer an extraordinarily rich journey into the intellectual process of one of the most significant critics to emerge from the British cultural studies tradition in the 1980s. This is a journey of discovery and exploration of the work of artists of the black diaspora working under the sign of the “postcolonial modern,” as indexed by the collection’s very title, i.e., Travel and See, which is an inscription Mercer found on a sea… Full Review

Sabine Kriebel’s book Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield is a study characterized by its exceptional rigor and intellectual intensity. Although written in a meticulously sculpted language, precise and full of imagery, this work does not claim to be a definitive, closed, or unequivocal object. Focusing on the monteur John Heartfield, a major artist who curiously has received little scholarly attention until now, Revolutionary Beauty does not belong to the monographic genre, nor is it yet another formalist study. Rather, it explores a medium—photomontage—laden with a substantial critical and interpretive past. Even though the volume focuses on the… Full Review

“Look at the Christs of Gauguin,” Émile Bernard once complained in an 1891 letter to Émile Schuffenecker, “they are human, they are of this world. Christ absolutely did not cry silly tears on beautiful, veiny hands. All that is Gauguin, which is to say self-worship, pure secularism, Renan.” For Bernard, an artist who had already returned to a devout Catholicism, a humanized image of Christ derived from the liberal theology of the day—Ernest Renan’s unmiraculous Vie de Jésus (1863) looms large—lacked both religious and artistic weight. And the one problem folded into the other. Paul Gauguin’s modernism was as much… Full Review

The political efficacy of architecture and urban planning is brought to the fore in Timothy Hyde’s cogent analysis of architecture and constitutionalism in Republican-era Cuba (1933–59). Focused primarily on Havana, Hyde brilliantly accounts for the relationship between legal discourse and architectural production. Divided into three parts, the book claims a tripartite of trajectories: the textual, the graphic, and the physical. The first part of the book explores the creation of the 1940 Constitution of Cuba, a key political document in the founding of the modern Cuban state. Cuba’s 1933 revolution led to the immediate dissolution of the 1901 Platt Amendment… Full Review

Mexican plazas are the “public living rooms” of urban centers large and small, and they have been shaped by social intercourse for over four thousand years, sometimes rhythmically and slowly, sometimes violently and suddenly. These communal spaces still resonate with Pre-Columbian symbolism, as Logan Wagner, Hal Box, and Susan Kline Morehead demonstrate in Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza: From Primordial Sea to Public Space. Whereas the pioneering studies of colonial Spanish architecture in the past century brought attention to architectural forms, Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza instead attends to the open volumes shaped by architecture, arguing that… Full Review

Global Renaissance studies, which include the examination of contributions by elite women to early modern European culture and considerations of courtly culture and ritual, have been some of the more productive avenues of recent research in the field. Holly S. Hurlburt’s engaging Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance, a biographical study of Caterina Corner (1454?–1510), the Venetian-born Queen of Cyprus, engages with these themes. Hurlburt situates Corner within the tumultuous political situation of the eastern Mediterranean in the later fifteenth century, where Cyprus sat uneasily between the Ottomans and Mamluks, and was… Full Review

Christina Normore’s first book gracefully crosses disciplines in its examination of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century art. A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet encompasses performance, so-called “decorative” arts, book illumination, painting, and literature. Normore posits the feast as a major artistic form that has much to reveal about culture. Which culture, may one ask? The attractive book title does not reflect Normore’s real focus, which is the theatrical productions commissioned by the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Good for his famous Feast of the Pheasant staged in his palace in Lille in 1454. The purpose of… Full Review

With the recent publication of two thoughtful and provocative monographs in rapid succession, Ömür Harmanşah has emerged as one of the ancient Near East’s most theoretically aware and intellectually ambitious scholars of art history and archaeology. Tapping into a wealth of cultural criticism and social theory concerning space and place, Harmanşah weaves this literature into case studies drawn from the second and first millennium BCE in ancient Anatolia and surrounding regions. In his first monograph, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East (henceforth Cities), the subject is a comparative analysis of the urban character of… Full Review

We should “work the ‘mirror with a memory,’” the photographer Minor White once said about photographic practice, as if the camera were “a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor” (Minor White, “The Light Sensitive Mirage,” 1958, in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981, 396). In the second volume of her wide-ranging study, The Deaths of Photography, whose title echoes that of the homage Jacques Derrida wrote after the death of his friend Roland Barthes, the photography theorist Katharina Sykora explores this… Full Review

Irene V. Small’s Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame and Elena Shtromberg’s Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s offer complementary perspectives on the postwar Brazilian avant-garde. At first, they have much in common, with key terms such as “art as social system,” “art as language,” “art as communication,” and “art and politics.” Both also propose a new social-art history, which posits the artwork as a gateway onto knowledge. Small’s innovative monograph presents Hélio Oiticica’s work from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, highlighting folding, diagramming, coloring, and the body as object as four foundational artistic procedures in four chapters,… Full Review