Art is neither created nor viewed in a vacuum. It is this notion perhaps that helped to inspire Vincent Bouvet and Gérard Durozoi in the organization of their recent book Paris Between the Wars 1919-1939: Art, Life and Culture. Bouvet and Durozoi’s effectively chosen subtitle prepares the reader to view the arts of the period in a set of wider contexts. With chapters discussing daily life in Paris, the history and experiences of this city, and the influential position held by the decorative arts, the authors subtly and effectively reframe their view of artistic life in this often-studied time and place. Tellingly, painting and sculpture are addressed together in the fifth chapter of the book, preceded by the chapters described above as well as “The World of Fashion.” With following chapters that discuss photography, film, advertising, literature, and music, readers are left with a strong understating of the cross-pollination endemic of artistic production in 1920s and 1930s Paris.

Nonetheless there are moments when the purpose of this inclusiveness is not entirely clear. Bouvet’s chapter “The City of Light” provides an overview of major infrastructure and civic development projects undertaken in Paris in the years after World War I. Each of these projects is treated briefly, as one might expect given the scope this book. Unfortunately what they meant for the development of the arts in Paris remains unclear. For example, Bouvet’s analysis of public transport in Paris discusses new motorways, the availability of air travel, and the development of Paris’ tram system. How did this mobility affect the production, display, or sale of art? Did it serve as a subject for art, or alter the consciousness of artists, or their sense of modernity? Certainly this new public mobility had effects on the lives of artists. Here, as in other areas, Bouvet and Durozoi have suggested areas of potential influence on the arts that may be further explored in more focused studies.

The second guiding principle of the book is to include an abundance of relevant, high quality images. Far from making the study into a picture-book, the images reproduced throughout the text serve to frame, inform, and illustrate the text quite effectively. For example, two color photographs of the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriel Modernes are displayed on pages 106 and 107. The photograph on page 106 shows the Porte d’Orsay entrance to the Exposition on what appears to be a quiet day. A few blurry figures stand near the entrance, while the sharply angled lighting and scattered leaves suggest early autumn. The entrance gate is overshadowed by a large decorative panel that is about 60 feet tall and decorated in a Cubist style. The image in this panel is composed of six figures arranged vertically, each representing one of the modes of art on display in the Exposition. The impressive scale of this entrance helps to underscore the powerful role that the 1925 Exposition has played in the development of both decorative and fine arts. Printed on page 107 is a color photograph showing two of the department store pavilions from the Exposition.  The distinctively Art Deco architecture and signage is familiarized by the green of the grass, blue tones in the sky, and sharp red fence demarcating space in the left background. That color photographs of high descriptive value survive at all from the 1925 Expo is remarkable. In the context of Bouvet’s chapter on the decorative arts, they help to bring the artistic experience described by the author closer to reality.

One of the great joys of studying history is the thrill of imagining living and operating in a different time and place. Though not often discussed by historians, this imaginary process is a great reward of deep archival and scholarly research. In the hands of Bouvet and Durozoi the reader’s imaginary experience is quite strong, supported by the numerous and descriptive images, and the ambiance of the everyday. Rich in quality images, thoughtfully organized, and lucidly written, Bouvet and Durozoi’s addition to the vast literature on Les Années folles is directed primarily at readers who are fairly new to its subject. Nonetheless I suspect that those who have studied the arts of the period will benefit from this text, and find its carefully selected images and broad overview of the experience of artistic Paris in the 1920s and 1930s rewarding.

This book offers an alternative to the view that Renaissance art struggled to break away from the confines and superstitions of medieval religion, but at the same time it ranges itself against the more recent tendency to let the art fall back into a long Middle Ages of ongoing religious devotion, civic ritual, and institutionally driven art. Many characteristics that we now recognize as typical of a modern conception of art–the taste for aesthetic refinement beyond the value of the materials or even the degree of technical master; the ability to see and choose from an array of styles, and the interest in correlating styles to geographical areas and historical eras; an art modeled on literature not only in the sense that it takes literary material as its content but also in the sense that it demands to be “read” using the interpretative faculties traditionally demanded by literature–seemed to many like excellent tools with which to reform religious art … For several decades, the most experimental strains in art-making joined forces with the most advanced religious thought …

Nagel’s book is ambitious. His synoptic treatment of historical and theological contexts proves forbidding for this non-specialist. But his close-up descriptions of individual works are often accessible and sometimes stunning, reminiscent of Michael Fried at his best. For example, Here is Nagel on Jan van Eyck’s “Stigmatization of Saint Francis“:

We do have the powerful sense that the sun-flushed figure of Francis is a portrait of an actual person. The effect is strange, and not simple. On the one hand, the portrait quality is of a piece with the carefully observed rocks and cityscape, or details such as the furrowing skin on Brother Leo’s temple, pushed up by his hand as his head becomes heavier with sleep. These descriptive effects offer a kind of visual traction, insisting that we have broken through any iconographic convention of the “story” of the Stigmatization, that we have somehow been transported to the actual place and are eyewitness to the event. At the same time, there is something unsettling about all this description. The figure’s head, with those full cheeks and that incipient double chin, attracts inordinate attention. It is not just a recognizably human face, someone we could know, an effect made more pointed by the fact that his hair, mussed as it is, is cut in a style fashionable in the Netherlands in the 1430s. All of this produces an effect of doubleness and dislocation, the sense that someone is “playing” Saint Francis.

(We’ll continue our reviews of the nominees shortly.)

Early writers make it clear that sculptors and their partisans mocked one another’s shortcomings, publicly … [M]ost vicious of all was the sculptor Michelangelo Naccherino’s denunciation of Giambologna, his former teacher, to the Inquisition in 1589 … We can only assume that artists so intent on undermining one another would also have paid close attention to the work their rivals produced.

Cole also puts the sculptors’ efforts into a larger context, in a belated attempt to bring T.J. Clark’s methods to the study of early modern Italian art, “to see the politics in pictures,” and specifically to ask how “shared ambitions led sculptors to become political actors”:

The sculptors worked primarily for a single individual, but the things they made addressed a broader public … The indifference they could show to any kind of market must have seemed a liberation as much as a limitation. This is not to say, however, that the Medici dukes deserve the adulation some recent fans of their collections have offered them. These were men who crushed the residual early republics of Europe, who unhesitatingly jailed enemies or disposessed them of home and property, and who invaded and colonized foreign territories, strategically using sculpture along the way. Exhibitions celebrating the dukes’ “treasures” and their “magnificence” have sometimes helped to render invisible these rulers’ brutality …

Cole evokes a time in which artists and patrons were outwardly pious but often much more interested in fame and power than the saints they were bronzing: “Giambologna, who may never have gone to mass or said confession … devoted much of his late career to the design and execution of chapels.” Those chapels bore witness not just to Giambologna’s genius but also to the godless score-settling of his patrons and their families. Cosimo de Medici (and his uncle, the Cardinal Giovanni Salviati) expelled the Dominicans from their own church, San Marco, flatly stating “San Marco was founded and built by my house and was mine, and I could dispose of it as my own possession and without license from His Holiness or any other person.”

Cole sees parallels between the late Cinquecento and today:

The artists this book concerns were working at the moment that the gallery was just beginning to take shape, the moment when it was just beginning to be possible for an artist to think of his or her paintings and sculptures as autonomous things. Not accidentally, it was also the moment when “Italian” art was becoming truly European, as the impact of travelers from abroad became unavoidable and as Italy’s products began in numbers to find homes well beyond the peninsula’s shores. It is a moment that suits our own, our identification of the modern with the cosmopolitan. Yet what we lose with our comparative, microscopic gaze is the experience of a place.

[This book is Buick's] anticipated full-length examination of this sculptor’s career. It is a thoughtful, groundbreaking study that should be a must-read for anyone interested in art of the United States and in a nuanced treatment of race, ethnicity, and gender. Buick’s book challenges late twentieth-century identity politics of current art history that maddeningly continue to insist that black or Native American or women artists reproduce their race and gender in their work … Buick situates her subject within the culture that shaped and instructed her in the cultures of “True Womanhood” and of “Sentiment.” But most of all, she reinserts her into the context of nineteenth-century American art, devoid of any hyphenated qualifier….

Contained within Buick’s reinterpretation of Lewis is a critique of, or at least a dialogue with, the field of art history itself … This is something that is definitely missing these days; the lively debates and disputes that used to pepper conferences and Letters to the Editors are now replaced with more politically correct and neutral comments … I find this willingness to take on one’s predecessors a refreshing breath of fresh air. Art historians need to recapture some of this give and take, as we shape the field for a new century and a new generation of scholars.

In an innovative twist, Peter Stewart embeds a summary of social-historical scholarship into his book on the functions and reception of Roman art … Each chapter focuses on a theme that has received much scholarly attention: artists and workshops, domestic and funerary art, portraiture, political and religious art, and art produced in the provinces…. Stewart advocates focusing on the immediate context of art produced in the provinces and points out that imagery does not always travel from the center to the periphery. New styles, whether found in the provinces or introduced during later time periods, indicate different aesthetic tastes, expectations, purposes, and modes of viewing and should be judged on their own terms, not as failures to meet earlier standards or standards in other parts of the empire…. Accessible to advanced students and scholars in related fields, The Social History of Roman Art challenges many long-held assumptions and inspires the reader to consider new avenues of inquiry.

Meanwhile Sheila Dillon has reviewed Jane Fejfer’s Roman Portraits in Context, also from 2008:

[P]ortrait statues and busts were arguably one of the most important and prominent forms of Roman public art and played a crucial role in constructing and communicating Roman social and political identity. Fejfer’s aim is to focus on the reconstruction of the socio-historical and physical contexts of portraits, rather than on more traditional scholarly concerns of portrait typology, chronology, and stylistic development, although these topics are dealt with as well … Fejfer has assimilated and summarizes a tremendous amount of secondary literature; while this avalanche of data can sometimes overwhelm the reader, there is a great deal here that is new and interesting. Even those whose research specialization is Roman portraiture will learn a lot from Fejfer’s book…. The material is endlessly fascinating and visually engaging, and the many new and provocative observations and interpretations contained in this study should provide fruitful avenues for research in Roman—and Greek—portraiture for many years to come.

Wendy A. Grossman’s thoroughly researched and lucidly written exhibition catalog Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens effectively reveals the process “by which African objects, formerly considered ethnographic specimens, came to be perceived as Modern art in the West” (XII). Photography and Man Ray are both at the center of this process, and given the wide range of interest which converges in the catalog, it will be of great interest to a variety of readers. At the core of the catalog is the argument that the photographs by Man Ray and other photographers of African art objects from the early twentieth century are anything but neutral. Grossman demonstrates that these photographs, in fact, not only serve to elevate the objects photographed from the status of ethnographic artifact to art object, but also to incorporate elements of those objects into the aesthetic and conceptual discourses of Modernism.

One of the most impressive aspects of the catalog is the way in which it is positioned to appeal to a spectrum of readers. For scholars of Man Ray or Modernist Primitivism it is required reading, offering exciting new research into little-explored aspects of these fields. For students of these topics or those with casual interest, Grossman provides concise contextual histories near the beginnings of most chapters which serve to ground the reader in the topic at hand. Several sidebars serve to illuminate aspects of the project not directly explored in the text proper, such as Charles Sheeler’s photographic album of the John Quinn collection, and Man Ray’s cover image for Henry Crowder’s book Henri Music which featured a photomontage of African objects. A “Concordance of African Objects” follows main text, providing substantial context on the African objects themselves and adding yet another dimension to the catalog.

The catalog is organized thematically and largely chronologically, with the first two chapters discussing the relationships between American modernism and African art, and the context for Man Ray’s interest in “primitivism” in his early career. In the following chapters, specific episodes of Man Ray’s work involving African art are discussed in detail. Underlying much of Grossman’s analysis is the contention that the production of meaning in Man Ray’s photographs is based more on their context than any other factor. Given that Man Ray’s work was visible in such a variety of contexts, and to a variety of audiences, this important point is often absent in analyses of his photographs, as Grossman points out.

In her final chapter, Grossman discusses several of Man Ray’s fashion photographs that contain African objects. Here she makes a compelling case for Man Ray’s work as a vital link between the Modernist Primitivism of the avant-garde and trends in fashion and illustration that make use of African art. Others have noted that this final chapter is perhaps less resolved than the others, and may seem a surprising choice with which to end the catalog[1]. I however tend to agree with some that Grossman’s last chapter effectively opens up the topic to further investigation either by Grossman or another scholar.[2]

• Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance; the Complete Works (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010)

• Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphne S. Barbour, and Shelley G. Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2010)

• Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010)

First up: Imagining the Past in France. If you are feeling sentimental about the fate of the book, in this age of bookstore bankruptcies, digital competition, and limited attention-spans, then take heart. This catalogue will whisk you to an era when the book mattered greatly to its public and received the attentions of top artists. In her introductory essay, Morrison paints a touching portrait of those craftsmen, who struggled to adapt the religious illuminated manuscript to the secular topics increasingly prized by their customers. At first, they amusingly tried to cram complex narratives into drop-caps (“historiated initials”). This had worked with well-known Bible scenes, which can indicated synecdochally, but good luck with the War between Antiochus and Ptolemy.

Four excellent thematic essays follow Morrison’s, then a long series of detailed object entries. I most enjoyed Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s essay, which asks why the aristocratic public demanded secular histories in this moment. She identifies various ideological ends to which history was put, but also finds ways in which books slipped out from underneath and even subverted those ends:

The French aristocracy, no longer able to impose its needs and concerns in the governance of the realm, contributed to the dominant ideology itw own defeated discourse, achieving on a literary level the success that eluded it on the political … It is, perhaps, one of the finer ironies in the history of medieval historiography that the original quest involved in the French aristocracy’s romancing of the past should issue, ultimately, not in an idyll of a lost age but in a new vision of the French nation.

The catalogue is copiously illustrated in color, but the image quality being only average, its greatest strength is its prose, which breaks scholarly ground and addresses the general reader. It is particularly strong on the issue of word-image interaction, which seems increasingly relevant in our age that mixes the two so promiscuously, on- and offline.

[See also this review (pdf) by Mark Cruse, and critic Christopher Knight's review of the exhibition.]

While the artworld revolution of the 1980s was momentous, the impact of Aboriginal art should not be overestimated … [In the 1990s] Aboriginal art occupied about 10 per cent of Australian art world discourse when it probably accounts for nearly 50 per cent of production, be this measured in dollar value or number of artists … Andrew Sayers’s Australian art (2001) was the first survey to give Aboriginal art a significant place … [I]ts place in the larger artworld is less certain. Australia, like other places distant from the larger artworld centres, was well positioned to anticipate the radical shifts that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century. However, this new landscape is only slowly dawning on the old centres of Paris and New York. Take the massive scholarly project, Art Since 1900 (2004) … [At the end] the authors make a devastating confession: namely the obsolescence of the previous 700-odd pages. The critical methodologies they employed no longer work, as the Eurocentric world they were designed to access ‘has irretrievably disappeared.’ … [By contrast, Australian critics have found in Aboriginal art] a new way of conceiving and living with difference that is the matrix of today’s globalised world. Thus, these days, Aboriginal art is exhibited effortlessly with other contemporary art. This is the enduring legacy of Aboriginal contemporary art: it has invited us to enter a global world.

But instead I must devote the little time I have these days for the newsletter to this: I just discovered that the NRC revised its rankings back in April after discovering errors in its data. So, I should go back and revise the findings of my last post on this subject. Using my (admittedly arbitrary) method of average the NRC two rating systems, I get this revised ranking:

1 University of California-Berkeley
2 University of Chicago
3 Columbia University in the City of New York
4 Yale University
5 Princeton University
6 New York University
7 Harvard University
8 University of California-Los Angeles
9 Northwestern University
10 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
11 University of Texas at Austin
12 University of Pennsylvania
13 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
14 Duke University
15 Brown University
16 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
17 University of California-Santa Barbara
18 University of Southern California (*)
19 University of Wisconsin-Madison
20 City University of New York Grad. Center
21 University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Campus (*)
22 Stanford University
23 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (*)
24 University of Maryland College Park
25 Bryn Mawr College
26 Temple University
27 University of Delaware
28 Johns Hopkins University
29 Washington University in St. Louis (*)
30 Penn State University
31 Emory University
32 University of Washington
33 Rutgers the State University of New Jersey New Brunswick Campus
34 Indiana University at Bloomington
35 University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (*)
36 Case Western Reserve University
37 University of Kansas
38 University of Georgia
39 State University of New York at Stony Brook
40 Boston University
41 University of Iowa
42 University of Virginia
43 Ohio State University Main Campus
44 University of Missouri – Columbia
45 Cornell University
46 State University of New York at Binghamton
47 Florida State University
48 Virginia Commonwealth University
49 University of New Mexico Main Campus
50 University of Louisville

*: An asterisk indicates that the program scored the same as the one above it.