A second edition has just been published of Donald Preziosi’s The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, which first appeared in 1998. The new edition compensates for its slightly slimmer profile with more densely packed type. The price has risen from $18.95 (in 1998) to $27.95. The sections on “Modernity and its Discontents” and [...]
We belatedly take note of a post by Gary Schwartz: … a research institute in Paris and Houston, Texas, known as The Image of the Black in Western Art … was put in place by the oil millionaire Dominique de Menil (1908-97), a formidable figure in 20th-century patronage of minority politics as well as art. [...]
7 April 2009 | Books
From the recently published book Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks, edited by Daniel Esterman: Barcelona, 21 July 1927 … I know that after 1000 monographs have exhausted a million details, their blurred image will make a fine picture for the few people who are taken by such things. May they be [...]
In the March 2009 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Elisa de Halleux reviews Georges Didi-Huberman’s new essay collection L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels: Didi-Huberman takes representations of the body and the flesh as a means to dwell on the spectator’s intimate relationship with the image, and to describe the nature of [...]
In the March/April ’09 ArtAsiaPacific, Don J. Cohn reviews three recent books: … Melissa Chiu, museum director at Asia Society in New York, and the author/editor of several catalogs for exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art (herein Chicona, AAP’s, not Chiu’s, neologism), has written a brief, intimidatingly titled book that offers an elementary “paint by the [...]
1 April 2009 | Books
Also in the February 2009 Burlington Magazine, Richard Ormond reviews Diana Donald’s Picturing Animals in Britain: Diana Donald has written a challenging and densely argued book … to bring animals “centre stage in historical research,” and establish the boundaries of a new discipline. She is an evangelist of her subject and of the animal kingdom [...]
31 March 2009 | Books
In the February 2009 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Xander van Eck considers recent publications from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum on their Dutch collections: Both catalogues are excellent academic publications … The surprisingly different approaches to the two publications make one wonder what kind of information belongs in a catalogue: simply the [...]
18 March 2009 | Asia, Books, Museums
In caa.reviews, Donald F. McCallum writes on a recent collaboration by Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit: The exhibition Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan and its accompanying catalogue constitute a landmark in the study of Japanese art. The paintings displayed at the Japan Society Gallery were of both high quality and significance, and the [...]
17 February 2009 | Books, Theory
It’s the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and numerous authors are publishing books that review and extend his work, including philosopher Denis Dutton, who has written The Art Instinct. In Bookforum historian Rochelle Gurstein writes: Denis Dutton is a man with a mission: Against cultural anthropologists, art historians, critics, and aestheticians who have advanced the [...]
4 February 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
We belatedly take note of Annick Lemoine’s Nicolas Régnier winning the latest book prize of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires. The Art Tribune‘s Didier Rykner writes: … a remarkable monographic study, both erudite and pleasantly readable, which is the fruit of many long years of research and of a very subtle knowledge of the period. [...]
2 February 2009 | Books, Modern, Teaching
Victoria Laurie of The Australian writes about Art & Today, a new survey by Eleanor Heartney of contemporary art from the last three decades, which is organized not by chronology, country, medium, style, or “ism”: “One of the big changes I would say in the past 25 years is that art is much less about [...]
29 January 2009 | Books, Modern
In The American Scientist, a physicist reviews Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, edited by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber: Although Einstein denied a connection between music and his modes of thinking about science, he did claim that his thought patterns were highly [...]
28 January 2009 | Books, Theory
“We Germanocentrists tend to fetishize the untranslatability of Kulturwissenschaft. But we have our reasons,” writes Michael P. Steinberg in his recent review of Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History by Karen Lang and Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion by Philippe-Alain Michaud: Its practice engages cultural history, analysis, and [...]
26 January 2009 | Books
In the New Statesman, Marina Warner explains why Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Barthes’ Mythologies are “the books that changed my life”: Hobby Horse is an exuberant book – exuberant with a certain solemnity, like a very large man executing eightsome reels with great seriousness but wonderfully light feet all the same. There, [...]
22 January 2009 | Books, Theory
Georges Didi-Huberman (winner of this year’s CAA award for lifetime achievement in art writing) has just published a new book, Quand les images prennent position. André Gunthert writes: In a world where images are proliferating in every way, and where their use-values so often leave us disoriented — [shuttling] between the most vulgar propaganda and [...]
19 December 2008 | Books
In caa.reviews, Susan P. Casteras reviews Jason Edwards’s Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater and Burne-Jones and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting: [They] exemplify newer methodological approaches in Victorian art, a blend of the intertextual and historical, and each superbly succeeds in diverse ways. Edwards’s book challenges [...]
23 September 2008 | Africa, Books
In the Autumn 2008 issue of African Arts, anthropologist Joseph Nevadomsky reviews Art, Performance, and Ritual in Benin City by Charles Gore: Gore’s book signals a change of direction in Benin Studies. It chips at the ossifications that had become the boundary markers of Benin research. John Piction, in his blurb, call Gore’s book “the [...]
18 September 2008 | Books, Theory
In caa.reviews, Keith Moxey considers the anthology Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science edited by Lorraine Daston: Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. [...]
12 September 2008 | Books
In the September 2008 Art Bulletin, Aruna D’Souza reviews Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s book The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture. In her conclusion D’Souza writes: Ultimately, this book approaches–even if it chooses not to address head-on–what is perhaps the most urgent cultural question of our moment: How does art [...]
The Art Newspaper writes up three new books on Harald Szeeman: “It is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the 20th century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions,” states—rather provocatively—the introduction to Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology. A concomitant phenomenon is the emergence of [...]
