Recently Published Reviews

Stephanie O’Rourke’s Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and Its Colonial Networks, 1780–1850 invites us to look again. It asks: what does it mean to view nineteenth-century painting and visual imagery alongside the extractive regimes that made them possible? Throughout the book, familiar artworks reveal unexpected histories, while written sources and metapictures come together to recreate the exploitative worlds from which they emerged. A striking example is provided by Caspar David Friedrich’s sundown landscape in Time of Day: Evening (ca. 1820). Where we might see a meditation on nature, typical of Romantic art, O’Rourke reorients our gaze, arguing… Full Review

For a ten-week period, from early May to mid-July, the sky swallowed the Renaissance Society. Two consecutive exhibitions, Palomar (Part 1) & Palomar (Part 2), each five weeks long, transformed the exhibiting spaces into a castle of clouds. Set out to traverse this aerial terrain, a journey into a realm of the unknown, twenty-nine artists became a single constellation to probe our heavens. Opting to keep many but not all of the artworks, which ranged in media, consistent between each exhibition, curator Karsten Lund sequenced a temporal evolution into the group-show experience.  Separately, the individual shows were distinct enough… Full Review

The first room of Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ólǫ́ at the Henry Art Gallery is a portal that invites you into his contemporary hogan (home). Inside the hogan, you are surrounded by his collaborator/alter ego named Hólǫ́, larger-than-life strands of beads, and a colossal weaving comb. A hogan is a traditional Diné home marked by an eastward entrance to face the sunrise. Riege’s work incorporates elements of Diné art and aesthetics in ways that collapse time. The future, the past, and ephemerality are a steady beat throughout the exhibition, beginning and ending in the hogan. Ojo|-|ólǫ́ was curated at the Henry Art… Full Review

Karl Marx quipped that historical events and personages appear twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Fortunately, the adage does not apply to book publishing. Thus, there was considerable buzz in classical and eighteenth-century scholarly circles when word spread that Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s influential guide to the leading Greco-Roman sculptures of the Grand Tour, published by Yale in 1981, would get a substantial update for the new millennium. New millennium is right, since a regal red cover design was advertised already in 2016: at the time the large-format single volume boasted only 400 pages… Full Review

Southeast Asia has generally been cast within the art-historical canon, when included at all, in one of two roles. First, as the archetypal zone of in-betweenness, situated geographically and culturally at the crossroads of China and India, home to traders, missionaries, diplomats, and pirates. Second, as a playground for colonial ambitions, an outpost of empire where fortunes were made and legacies born. Roger Nelson seeks with Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices to pry open the persistent hold of these habits of thought, to deprovincialize and decolonize the modern and contemporary history of the region and… Full Review

Claudio Perna: Idea como Arte at the Institute for Studies on Latin America (ISLAA) marks the first retrospective in New York of the Venezuelan conceptual and experimental artist, Claudio Perna (1937–1997). Curated by Olivia Casa and Clara Prat-Gay, this exhibition arrives at a timely moment, as Venezuela has recently gained considerable media attention due to escalating tensions with the United States following a military coup aimed at controlling natural resources such as oil—a relationship also explored in Perna’s practice. How the social and political inform art are themes explored throughout the five series featured in the exhibition… Full Review

In the second gallery of Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest, viewers encounter a large, colorful canvas of two thickly bearded men dancing face-to-face: Mark Tobey’s Dancing Miners from 1922–27. With their legs high-stepping below their intertwined hands, the surrounding abstract space full of bursts of greens, blues, and whites sets off the bright red shoes of one of the dancers. Tobey’s picture is a remarkable example of the unique confluence of regionalism and modernism that fueled artistic innovation in the 20th-century Pacific Northwest. Theresa Papanikolas, the Ann M. Barwick curator of American Art at Seattle Art Museum, combines rarely… Full Review

Tiffany E. Barber’s Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation, a part of the Minoritarian Aesthetics Series at New York University Press, offers a significant intervention in Black visual studies, feminist aesthetics, and contemporary art history and criticism by proposing a new analytical framework for reading Black women’s visual work. Through sustained engagement with the work of Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, and Narcissister, Undesirability and Her Sisters asks what Black feminist aesthetics might look like once repair is no longer assumed to be its primary ethical obligation. What might it mean… Full Review

Morgan Ng’s Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy is a fascinating book; full of ideas, lavishly illustrated, and densely referenced but always a pleasure to read. It provides so many insights into the complex interrelated themes of Renaissance technology and culture—both military and civil—that it is difficult to know how best to focus a condensed review of his work. Ng himself makes it clear from the start that his book is “not a history of fortification,” even drawing back from labelling it a “work of architectural history.” Indeed, the book is not a standard history… Full Review

Susan Stronge’s book, The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence, accompanying the brilliantly curated eponymous exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, provides, in Stronge’s words, “a fresh perspective on the arts made for the elite of the empire while highlighting the internationalist culture of the court.” Several landmark exhibitions of Mughal treasures have been mounted in the UK, US, and other countries in previous decades: In 1947, the omnibus Art of India and Pakistan exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, Burlington House, London, showcased a large number of paintings, illustrated manuscripts, carpets, textiles, and what were… Full Review

Eugène Delacroix was the most controversial artist of his generation, discussed in journals and among literati throughout nineteenth-century Paris. As one of his critical admirers, Théophile Gautier, explained in an essay after the artist’s death: “Each of his works occasioned deafening clamors, storms, furious discussions. The artist was showered with insults more offensive and ignominious than would ever have been addressed to a thief or assassin . . .” (Correspondances esthétiques sur Delacroix, Editions Olbia,1998). Perhaps for this reason, art historians of nineteenth-century France have written legions of books and articles on Delacroix, and engaging in Delacroix scholarship… Full Review

Gothic architecture never possessed a Vitruvian or Albertian treatise or manifesto defining its forms, proportions, or boundaries. This basic lacuna has long complicated its study, a problem exacerbated by the many centuries over which Gothic developed and coexisted with other artistic modes and styles. The imposition of anachronistic labels and external interpretive frameworks, reinforced by nationalist historiographies, effectively marginalized (and in many cases actively disparaged) much Gothic architecture produced after 1300, particularly beyond England and France. The recent anthology Lateness and Modernity in Medieval Architecture seeks to counter the long shadow of historiography that has cast “lateness” as repetition, decadence… Full Review

At the entrance of Parasol Press: Breaking New Ground at the Addison Gallery of American Art, organized by assistant curator Rachel Vogel, sixteen vibrant, geometric prints by Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) form a precise grid on a freestanding wall along the viewer’s sightline. For this series, Bands of Color in Four Directions & All Combinations (1971), LeWitt utilized only two etched plates: a rectangular shape and a pointed diagonal form. Despite this limited set, the artist accomplishes various permutations through layering, rotating, and varying the color on each page. Along the left wall of the main gallery is a second LeWitt… Full Review

Recent scholarship on transcultural exchanges among socialist-aligned countries during the Cold War has moved away from treating socialist realism as a Soviet model exported to other countries, instead emphasizing how global socialism was actively reinterpreted in diverse local contexts. Both Sino-Mexican Art and Cultural Exchanges in the Twentieth Century and Art and Modernism in Socialist China: Unexplored International Encounters 1949–1979 contribute to this shift by reexamining transnational networks that shaped Chinese art. By centering China within international circulations of ideas, artists, exhibitions, and so forth, these volumes move beyond the framework of “socialist cosmopolitanism,” which remains bounded by the socialist… Full Review

In this admirable celebration of Black US artisanship, the furniture maker and author Robell Awake advances a welcome, forceful argument for the recognition of Black makers in the history—material and otherwise—of the United States. Awake declares early on, “I’m not an academic. I never even finished college” (13). Yet his casual tone and accessible language belie the eye of a meticulous craftsperson who conveys complex material processes with the legibility of a skilled storyteller. Combining incisive visual analysis with anecdotal history, Awake’s engrossing capsule narratives animate his selected artifacts, affirming the vibrancy of the communities and traditions that produced them. … Full Review