Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century China, 1660–1760, Chi-ming Yang contributes to the growing body of scholarship that reinvestigates and reconceptualizes the complex effects of Chinese taste on Western Europe (on England, see David Porter, Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, Elizabeth Hope Chang, and Peter J. Kitson; on France, Christine A. Jones; on Italy, Adrienne Ward [to name only a few]; most recently in art history, see Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014) (click here for review). Specifically, Yang joins the ranks of those who increasingly… Full Review

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Drapetomanía: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba, this volume is on a mission. Grupo Antillano, a diverse group of artists and intellectuals, was active in Cuba between 1978–83—spanning the moment (1981) when the so-called “New Cuban Art” first rose to prominence. But while the latter movement has become the global face of contemporary Cuban art, the work of Antillano is all but unknown, whether on the island or beyond. With this ambitious exhibition and book project, curator, historian, and essayist Alejandro de la Fuente means to correct that omission. Grupo… Full Review

It seems fitting to approach a book about faces by starting with an examination of the publication’s own face, namely its cover. On first view of Hans Belting’s new book, Faces: Eine Geschichte des Gesichts, only the white and yellow letters of the title emerge clearly. A second look is necessary to make out the female figure located behind the text; it is a portrait of the famous U.S. photographer Lee Miller, taken ca. 1927 by Arnold Genthe. The young woman is slightly turned to the left, as she looks over her shoulder and away from the spectator’s gaze… Full Review

In The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent, James M. Córdova contributes to the current scholarly discourse about gender and identity formation in late-colonial Mexico through a multifaceted examination of monjas coronadas (crowned-nun) paintings, portraits of women at the time of their profession into the religious life. Expanding on previous research, Córdova investigates these images in the shifting world of viceregal Mexico and offers thorough analyses and new insights. Explaining their increased popularization in eighteenth-century New Spain, he asserts that these paintings became part of a broad effort to claim a distinct… Full Review

The publication of Stacey Sloboda’s Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain demonstrates the extent to which histories of Britain’s commercial past have broadened over the last fifteen years. In this period consumption, and more specifically ideas of luxury and novelty, have become key to the debate (see Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999; and Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In 2005, Berg’s Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain… Full Review

In Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910, Paul B. Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield have collected twelve essays that explore the variations and limits of the stylistic-cultural term “neoclassicism” and how the social-aesthetic concept of good taste intertwined with and inflected upon it. To a certain extent, this book treads a lengthy investigative path walked by earlier generations of art historians, such as Josef Strzygowski, Alois Riegl, or George Kubler, scholars who analyzed the transformation of stylistic forms across time and borders. The difference is that Niell and Widdifield are less interested in… Full Review

In The Melancholy Art, Michael Ann Holly has provided a strikingly poignant articulation of some of the more trenchant conundrums of what in modernity has come to be fabricated as the discipline of art history—an academic field whose distinctiveness, in her words, “generated by the physical nearness of its objects . . . can quicken certain reflections on the psychic undercurrents of the historical temperament” (xii). But how might melancholy help art historians to come to terms with the nature of its disciplinary transactions with the past? That is, literally, their mournful interactions and reckonings with what is staged… Full Review

The affective turn in the humanities and social sciences has only very recently started to have an impact on writing about photography. To date, the main books published on the topic are: Barbie Zelizer’s About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Suzie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010) (click here for review); Sharon Sliwinski’s Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) (click here for review); and Margaret Olin’s Touching Photographs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012) (click here for review… Full Review

Their Way of Writing is the material record of “Scripts, Signs, and Notational Systems in Pre-Columbian America,” a symposium held at Dumbarton Oaks in October 2008. Framing contributions by symposiarchs Gary Urton (chapter 1) and Elizabeth Hill Boone (chapter 15) contain thirteen case studies from both Mesoamerica (chapters 2–9) and the Andes (chapters 10–14). Accompanied by black-and-white and color illustrations—including several never-before-published images from the Andes—these contributions vary widely in their level of legibility to non-experts. The Mesoamerican chapters begin in the twentieth century, with Michael D. Coe’s consideration of why Soviet linguist Yuri Knorosov, and not British… Full Review

Marcia Pointon’s scholarship over the past three decades on eighteenth-century British portraiture has shaped art-historical understanding of the genre in that period. Her most recent publication, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, compiles five essays that return to the topic while also examining materials across a wide chronological and geographic span. Defining portraiture as “a tool that makes possible the registering of identity in relation to the social” (11), Pointon’s essays strongly move to sever the implicit connection between the portrait image and its subject, a connection that too often structures interpretations of works in the genre. Her case… Full Review