23 February 2010 | Books, Contemporary
Oxford University Press recently mailed us a new essay collection by critic David Levi Strauss, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual. Strauss has remained relatively little known despite plaudits from Arthur Danto, John Berger, Dave Hickey, and others. Perhaps Oxford will change things (his previous collections were published by Autonomedia and Aperture). This [...]
29 January 2010 | Americas, Books, Modern
In CAA Reviews, Kate Morris considers Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 by Bill Anthes: [Anthes] asserts that, though the study focuses on American Indian painting in the immediate postwar period, his is “not merely a recovery project with the goal of adding a few neglected figures to the canon of American modernism.” Rather, he [...]
4 January 2010 | Books, Theory
Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor have recently published a new edited volume Rediscovering Aesthetics that brings together prominent international voices from art history, philosophy, and artistic practice to discuss the current role of aesthetics within and across their disciplines. Following a period in which theories and histories of art, art criticism, and artistic [...]
17 December 2009 | Books, Modern
From The Economist For all the books written about artists’ muses and patrons, relatively few explore the role of mentors, perhaps because the presence of a teacher threatens to deprive the artist of his or her status as a self-made genius. In “Tom and Jack”, Henry Adams, a professor of American art at Case Western [...]
26 October 2009 | Books, Teaching
Also in caa.reviews, David A. Levine considers Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies edited by Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia La Follette, and Andrea Pappas. A collection of essays by authors of diverse academic backgrounds, the book … should prove useful to teachers just starting out as well as to veterans eager to [...]
26 October 2009 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terry Smith considers David Carrier’s 2008 book A World Art History and Its Objects: “Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” … [Carrier] sets out to ask if such a world history is [...]
16 October 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
According to Christiane Tauber, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer‘s new biography of Caravaggio successfully portrays the artist as more strategic and professional, and less scandalous and out-of-control, than previously thought.
12 October 2009 | Books, Modern
Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) and Yve-Alain Bois’s Painting as Model (1991) have just received Portuguese translations. A reviewer for the Brazilian newspaper Estadao takes them to be representative of two opposing views of American modernism.
28 May 2009 | Books
Thames & Hudson managing director Jamie Camplin writes in The Art Newspaper: Is there a crisis in art book publishing? … The challenges are real and substantial, but they are only obliquely connected with the economic downturn … The first is the obvious one of reaching consumers. The growth in public interest in art during [...]
28 May 2009 | Books, Contemporary, Photography
In caa.reviews, Matthew Biro considers a new book by Michael Fried: Two related projects are combined in Michael Fried’s well-observed, conceptually ambitious, and beautifully written new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. First, the text presents a formal and theoretical justification of tableau photography since the late 1970s … Second, Fried puts [...]
27 May 2009 | Books, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Susan Donahue Kuretsky considers Christopher S. Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art: Wood’s study attempts in part to redress limitations in traditional formulations of the Renaissance (familiarly defined in relationship to Italy) as a myth of rebirth, repetition, and revival of classical antiquity in art following a dark period of [...]
14 May 2009 | Books
In Art in America (which finally went online a couple months ago), Sarah Hromack reviews Manon — a Person: Part photo essay, [it] presents a comprehensive survey of a career that began during the 1960′s in Zurich, where the Berne-born Rosmarie Küng (her given name) began a modeling stint that soon segued into experiments in [...]
Sociologist Michèle Lamont’s new book is How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. She “observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length.” She shows how “judging quality isn’t robotically rational; it’s emotional, cognitive, and social too,” particularly when academics serving on multi-disciplinary panels are forced to evaluate [...]
1 May 2009 | Books, Conferences
Due out this month from Yale UP: Dialogues in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century, proceedings of a 2005 symposium held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. to celebrate the twenty-fifth birthday of its Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. The center’s dean, Elizabeth Cropper, [...]
27 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Collaboration, among artists as well as between artists and audiences, has interested numerous artists and art historians in recent years. In the February 2006 Artforum article, “Social Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Claire Bishop wrote: Artists are increasingly judged by their working process—the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration … There [...]
24 April 2009 | Books, Photography
In Slate, Barron H. Lerner reviews Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880-1930: The photographs in the remarkable new book Dissection shocked me, even though I spent a year in anatomy class during medical school. Dissection includes dozens of images of late-19th- and early-20th-century medical students posing, often in comedic manners, [...]
22 April 2009 | Books, Conservation
We belatedly note the 2007 translation by conservator Helen Glanville of Alessandro Conti’s History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art (which Conti first published in Italian in 1973 at the age of 26 or 27, then re-issued in an expanded and revised edition in 1988). In her introduction, Glanville writes: There never [...]
15 April 2009 | Books
The Times of London excerpts a new book, The Lost Mona Lisa: Picasso and poet Appollinaire were prime suspects when Leonardo da Vinci’s best known painting was stolen from the Louvre … In the seven years from 1905 to 1911, the genesis story of modern art was being written. Pablo Picasso was its genius; Guillaume [...]
15 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Dave Hickey’s indispensable essay collection The Invisible Dragon is finally back in print. From the press release: The Invisible Dragon, originally published in 1993, is often regarded as art critic Dave Hickey’s seminal work. Hailed by artists, the book made a forceful case for beauty in a time when the notion was completely dismissed by [...]
14 April 2009 | Books
We recently discovered the annual Bookfinder.com Report, which exists to “track demand trends for a wide range of out-print titles.” Examining the last report, in the category of “Arts and Music,” the third-most-searched-for book was a work of art history, Paul Smith’s Dutch Flower Painting, 1600-1720. Last we searched, the cheapest available copy on Amazon.com [...]
