20 November 2007 | Ancient, Books
In the most recent issue of Mouseion (VI:2), Kelly Olson reviews John R. Clarke’s Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C. – A.D. 315: When I first received this book for review, I admit I was quite skeptical. Could we really identify “ordinary” Romans? Could one [...]
19 November 2007 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the most recent issue (40:5) of the provocative art-science journal Leonardo (Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology), Jan Baetens reviews Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, edited by Patricia Johnson: This collection of essays is great reading … [it] opens new ground for the [...]
9 November 2007 | Books, Modern
Lea Vergine’s 1997 exhibition catalogue Trash, Quando i rifiuti diventano arte has been translated into English, as When Trash Becomes Art: TRASH rubbish mongo. It considers the use of trash by a wide variety of artists from Picasso, Tatlin and Marinetti to Mimmo Rotella, Louise Nevelson and Christian Boltanski. Vergine writes: … why did the [...]
6 November 2007 | Books, Modern, Teaching
In CAA Reviews, Juliet Bellow has published an essay, “Surveying the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’: A Review of Art-History Textbooks in the Field,” that evaluates the following texts: 19th-Century Art by Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson (2005); 19th Century European Painting: David to Cézanne by Lorenz Eitner (2002); Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History by Stephen [...]
30 October 2007 | Books, Theory
In the Spring 2007 issue of Biography, Udi E. Greenberg writes on biographies of Walter Benjamin: Since it is Benjamin’s eccentric personality and the figure of Benjamin himself, not just his thoughts and ideas, which stand at the center of [academia's] attention, it is hardly surprising that his private life has given birth to a [...]
29 October 2007 | Ancient, Books
If you don’t specialize in the art of the Ancient Near East, but need to teach it in surveys, you know how hard it is to find good general histories of the period. In a recent issue of East and West (55:1-4), Nicola Laneri reviews Marc van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near [...]
16 October 2007 | Books
In the Spring-Summer 2007 issue of Studies in the Decorative Arts, Bernard Jacqué reviews Christine Velut’s book Décors de papier: Production, commerce et usages des papiers peints à Paris, 1750-1820: A book about wallpaper that is not a general history retailing old clichés is always an event, given that studies on this type of decoration [...]
15 October 2007 | Books
Reviewing Michael Levey’s book Sir Thomas Lawrence in the latest British Art Journal (VII, 3), David Platzer writes that Levey is undoubtedly our most distinguished and accessible living writer on art … A man of generous and wide sympathies, he is fiercely opinionated and rarely if ever lukewarm in his likes and dislikes … Moreover, [...]
Also reviewed in the April 2007 Art History is The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture by Annemarie Schimmel. Gregory Minnisale writes: Professor Annemarie Schimmel passed away in Bonn, Germany, on 26 January 2003 at the age of eighty. One of the world’s foremost experts on Islamic culture, history and thought, her [...]
9 October 2007 | Books, Theory
Opening the latest Art History (April 2007), we see that their book reviews are no longer edited by the inimitable Liz James, yet they seem to be every bit as excellent this issue under new editor Cordelia Warr. (If only the section were larger, and the books reviewed closer to their publication date.) In this [...]
4 October 2007 | Books, Modern
In September 2007 Burlington Magazine, James Beechey reviews Elizabeth Cowling’s Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose: … this is a wholly engrossing book … Penrose’s private notes … reveal him at his sharpest and most sensitive: his insights into individual works are generally acute … As a tale of courtly love, as [...]
28 September 2007 | Books, Modern
Here we are, half a century or so after contemporary artists began appropriating, tearing and re-assembling street posters, still without solid answers to the questions of who did what when, of who affected whom how. Who tore first? Was it décollage if you didn’t call it décollage? Does it matter? Are these artists incommensurable? Skira [...]
26 September 2007 | Books, Modern
The top Independent Publisher Book Award in the fine arts category went to the first two volumes of the four-tome Eva Hesse, Catalog Raisonne. They were edited by Renate Petzinger and Barry Rosen, with Annette Spohn and Jörg Daur.
11 September 2007 | Books
Some might call it a bold move. The CAA’s online reviews journal has appointed an editor with, it would appear, little experience writing and reviewing full-length academic books. Oakley has curated shows, reviewed them, performed other museum work, taught university classes, and published scholarship. Of course, caa.reviews is not just book reviews — it also [...]
10 September 2007 | Books
It’s never too late to review an academic book. In the September 2007 Art Bulletin, Reindert L. Falkenburg considers Klaus Krüger’s 2001 Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien: It offers an intensely insightful analysis of a series of works of art that, despite the forcefulness [...]
11 June 2007 | Books
In the most recent issue of Revue André Malraux Review (v. 34), Michel Lantelme reviews a 2006 essay collection edited by Jeanyves Guérin and Julien Dieudonné. Its goal, Lantelme writes, is to “rehabilitate Malraux’s art writings”: Knowing he would be read the wrong way, Malraux himself underscored that ‘La Métamorphose des dieux is in no [...]
In the January 2007 Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Jeffrey Weidman reviews the recently released 7th edition of Janson, titled Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition, placing it within the context of “the lineage of English-language art history surveys in America.” The editor of the new edition, Sarah Touborg, abandoned “the stylistic/formalist approach, which had [...]
In CAA Reviews, Larry Silver writes that Rainer Kahsnitz’s new book, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria, and South Tirol, is “perhaps one of the most beautiful books ever produced.” Published by Getty, it is “a translation of the 2005 Hirmer edition, with the usual high production values of that Munich art [...]
In the most recent Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (n. 98), Véronique Goudinoux reviews Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art by Charles Harrison: “Can we agree that the question of sexual difference has played a role in the development of modern art since Manet, and if so, what role? … This [...]
In the most recent Colonial Latin American Review (15:2), Jeanette Favrot Peterson reviews Gabriela Siracusano’s recent book El Poder de los colores. De lo material a lo simbólico en las prácticas culturales andinas, Siglos XVI-XVIII: “[This] is a groundbreaking book that bridges the divide between science and art, conservation and aesthetics, or between praxis and [...]
