Browse Recent Book Reviews

On January 13, 2013, the contemporary artist Wade Guyton visited a blog on Tumblr, the less-is-more, image-driven social-media platform that resembles an online corkboard. He downloaded thirty days’ worth of the blog’s contents and transposed them into that good old thing, the book, calling it One Month Ago. The title refers to the way in which Tumblr automatically tells website visitors how far away they are, temporally speaking, from the post they are currently looking at (from, say, one hour ago, to one week ago, to one month ago, and so on). The Tumblr in question is not your… Full Review

The title of Erin Griffey’s meticulously researched book is well suited to its principal argument: that early modern sovereigns, especially powerful women such as Queen Henrietta Maria of England, projected their authority through the specific and calculated allure of their material luxuries. All aspects of dress, appurtenances, architecture, and furnishings (including paintings and other fine arts) contributed to an overall “magnificence” which did not burnish the image of the monarch so much as it constituted the very essence of how she was publicly known. Only through attentive study of this complicated material culture, Griffey argues, is it possible to interpret… Full Review

Junko Aono’s Confronting the Golden Age: Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting, 1680–1750 focuses on the generation of Dutch genre painters that succeeded the “great masters” of the seventeenth-century such as Gerard Dou and Frans van Mieris I. The book’s main objective is to investigate how artists working in the waning light of the Golden Age dealt with the illustrious artistic past, and particularly how they emulated the inventions of their predecessors in order to create a niche market for themselves. This subject is in line with renewed interest in Dutch art from the later decades of… Full Review

Lawren Harris is among the most famous Canadian painters. The general public in Canada know him as one of the members of the Group of Seven, artists who exhibited together in the 1920s, popularizing a new, colorful, modernist style of painting that celebrated the Canadian landscape. But Harris’s celebrity status stops at the border. The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, attempts to bring this star of Canadian art to the attention of a U.S. audience. While the exhibition was shown first at… Full Review

Matisse in the Barnes Foundation continues a laudable program to publish the holdings of this renowned collection of modern European, African, and American art in systematic, scholarly catalogues. Yve-Alain Bois, long one of the most compelling writers on Henri Matisse, is the project director, editor, and lead author, joined by Karen K. Butler and Claudine Grammont. Conservation and condition issues, now a welcome concern in many major museum publications, are treated by Barbara A. Buckley and Jennifer Mass (for paintings) and Thomas Primeau (for works on paper). Every one of the Barnes Foundation’s fifty-nine artworks by Matisse is reproduced… Full Review

The role of modernity in influencing vision has produced such a wealth of insightful scholarship that it can be surprising when a new study contributes substantially to the field. Jason Weems’s Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest provides an engaging and thoughtful analysis of how the elevated vantage point helped to create the modern Midwestern landscape and, in turn, informed the region’s identity. Weems explores how the aerial, synoptic view of the prairie fostered changes in the perception of that landscape through a series of case studies beginning with the piecemeal pioneer settlement of individual farms that… Full Review

Rachel Cohen’s clear, concise, and gracefully written retelling of the life of Bernard Berenson is far more manageable than Ernest Samuels’s long, magisterial biography published in 1979 (Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). It would be unfair to think a much shorter account would cover any part of Berenson’s life in equal depth to Samuels’s study, but a reader might reasonably form that expectation about at least one aspect of it, for Cohen’s book is part of a Yale series of biographies entitled Jewish Lives. Whether these are life stories… Full Review

In his iconic 1964 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Leo Marx surveyed early American literature and painting to uncover a uniquely American understanding of the collective landscape. Elizabeth Milroy—framing her lens on early Philadelphia—has produced an equally authoritative and compelling portrait of how a city’s actual landscape fabric has been fashioned through a process of negotiating and representing a dominant idea about landscape’s place in American culture. It is as if these two works, separated by a half century, were meant to be read together: one laying out a… Full Review

The architecture of shrines has been neglected in Islamic architecture scholarship until recently. Among others, Kishwar Rizvi and John Curry have demonstrated how architectural patronage and the writing of hagiographies are intricate political acts and deserve a common analysis (Kishwar Rizvi, The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: Architecture, Religion and Power in Early Modern Iran, London: I.B. Tauris, 2011; and John J. Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350–1650, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Zeynep Yürekli successfully utilizes and furthers this methodology in Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman… Full Review

Robert DeCaroli’s book bears the title Image Problems. But I read the text as Image Answers, for DeCaroli provides some remarkable insights into the conception and production of images by mining textual sources, both Buddhist and Brahmanical, in enormously impressive ways. For almost as long as the history of South Asian art has been studied, the question of when and where the Buddha image was first created—invented, some even might say—has been central. Given the long history of image worship, if that is the right way of phrasing it, in the West, the assumption has been that this innovation… Full Review