30 April 2008 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the May 2008 issue of Art in America, Sue Taylor writes on recent histories of the erotic image. She dives into scandal straight away, of the scholarly kind: In his 1987 Secret Museum, a lively and polemical history of pornography, Walter Kendrick shows how Western culture is still riven by a debate begun in [...]
18 April 2008 | Books
What’s new with tradition? The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), “an active network of individuals and institutions dedicated to the creation of human and harmonious buildings and places which respect local traditions … [it] brings together those who design, make, maintain, study or enjoy traditional building, architecture and places.” The proceedings [...]
Die Welt notes that Alfred Weidinger’s new catalogue raisonné of Gustav Klimt’s paintings (which was selected as the best art book of the year by Frank Whitford in The Times of London and by Tom Rosenthal in The Independent) has come under attack from fellow Klimt scholar Otmar Rychlik.
11 April 2008 | Books
In Die Welt, Alexander Gauland defends Sedlmayr’s 1948 book Verlust der Mitte (Loss of the Center) from charges leveled recently by Rolf Schneider. Gauland argues that the book isn’t Nazi, it’s just conservative. (For more on Sedlmayr, we recommend the 2000 Vienna School Reader edited by Christopher S. Wood.)
3 April 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In the February 2008 issue of The Burlington Magazine, Xander van Eck reviews Eric Jan Sluijter’s Rembrandt and the Female Nude: … the scope of [Rembrandt's] genius was such that it still yields genuinely new research, providing that valid questions are asked. Eric Jan Sluijter has done just that in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, [...]
24 March 2008 | Books
Should you happen to find it difficult staying awake at CAA one year, you might try gathering tips at the booth of art publisher Abbeville. At one recent conference, they passed the time writing “a story incorporating every single title on display.” Read it at their new blog, the Abbeville Manual of Style, which “discusses [...]
10 March 2008 | Books, Teaching
Phaidon is not the only book publisher with a new mega-survey out. Thames & Hudson has recently published Mirror of the World: A New History of Art by Julian Bell: I see art history as a frame within which world history, in all its breadth, is continually reflected back at us — rather than as [...]
7 March 2008 | Books
Frick curator Colin B. Bailey writes in the February 2008 issue of The Art Newspaper: The publication–some 25 years in the making–of the two-volume catalogue raisonné of over 1,100 French ornament and architectural drawings at Waddesdon Manor is a publishing event of the first order … In keeping with Waddesdon’s admirable commitment to publishing its [...]
19 February 2008 | Ancient, Awards, Books
The new Art Book Award, awarded by The Art Book and the Association of Art Historians (both in the UK), “aims to promote and acknowledge the best in art publishing by honouring the contributions and collaboration of the many different people involved.” Its first award has just gone to Antinous: the Face of the Antique [...]
4 February 2008 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terri Weissman considers Stephen F. Eisenman’s new book, The Abu Ghraib Effect: The 2004 appearance of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, which showed in horrific detail U.S. soldiers violating the human rights of supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist and Iraqi insurgency suspects … failed to instigate radical political change in the United States … [...]
1 February 2008 | Books, Teaching
Artist and writer Morgan Meis reviews the new Phaidon megasurvey 30,000 Years of Art: The story of human creativity across time and space: … [I] imagine a group of art historians sitting around a table with a sixth or seventh bottle of wine giggling to each other like schoolgirls. “Take that, art theorists! We give [...]
18 January 2008 | Books
Hol Art Books is a new publisher with an interesting idea: [We] will allow anyone to suggest titles, form professional-level publishing groups, peer review one another’s work, and collaboratively develop their title to ultimately be published as a Hol book … Hol takes care of printing, marketing and distributing every book, but we turn the [...]
8 January 2008 | Ancient, Books
A recent issue of the South African Archaeological Bulletin (62:185) includes a lively exchange of letters. We can’t do them justice here; nonetheless, some excerpts: J.D. Lewis-Williams writes: With attacks in (remarkably) two successive issues of the South African Archaeological Bulletin Anne Solomon has raised the boredom rating of her current dispute about San rock [...]
13 December 2007 | Books, Modern
In the Summer 2007 issue of the Slavic and East European Journal, Douglas Greenfield reviews Maria Gough’s The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, while Vlad Strukov reviews Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Greenfield writes: In her closely argued, challenging study, Maria Gough proposes to read Moscow Constructivism [...]
10 December 2007 | Books, Photography
Writing in Le Monde des livres, Michel Guerrin recently panned the new 620-page survey L’Art de la photographie, edited by André Gunthert and Michel Poivert. The editors respond: Michel Guerrin has published … a methodical assassination of L’Art de la photographie. Everything gets it. From the “chilling” price to the deceitful cover. “Grand masters” are [...]
7 December 2007 | Books, Modern
Hans-Peter Riese reviews Andrei Nakov’s new four-volume study Kasimir Malewicz le peintre absolu: … On the other hand, [this book,] the result of Nakov’s decades-long research, can scarcely be overrated, and it finally moves this artist … to his rightful place among 20th-century artists, which is indisputably alongside Picasso, Kandinsky and Mondrian. In addition, Nakov [...]
5 December 2007 | Books, Theory
Jacques Ranciere’s essay collection Le destin des images has been translated into English, as The Future of the Image. In the title essay, he writes: … Does not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constitutes the labour of art? … What is being spoken about, and what precisely are we being [...]
3 December 2007 | Books, Theory
Published recently, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery, “assesses the work of those thinkers (including artists) who have had a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art since the 1960s.” David Carrier writes on Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville on Michael Fried, Mignon Nixon on Melanie Klein, Alex Potts on [...]
30 November 2007 | Books, Theory
In CAA Reviews, Peg Brand considers Alexander Nehamas’ new book Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art: This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s [...]
28 November 2007 | Books
Alexandra Mangel recently reviewed for Deutschlandradio art historian Alessandro Nova‘s “Das Buch des Windes” (“The Book of Winds”), an historical survey of the visual depiction of wind: … a convincing combination of excitingly told history and basic course in method. This results essentially from his clever choice of subject: Because the wind itself is invisible, [...]
