1 September 2011 | Books, Career
New books by favorite authors are piling up on my desk — Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art by Mieke Bal, Florence & Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science by Hans Belting, Queer Beauty and A General Theory of Visual Culture by the prolific Whitney Davis, The Passionate Triangle by Rebecca Zorach, [...]
3 August 2011 | Books, Medieval, Renaissance
Three new books on medieval and Renaissance Venice and Florence caught my attention recently. Most significantly: Blake de Maria’s Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice. The famous social stability of the multicultural Republic of Venice he calls partly a myth and credits partly to its “ethos of mediocritas, a state dictum [...]
7 June 2011 | Books, Career, Renaissance
When I learned of John T. Spike’s Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine after it was published last year, I immediately thought of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s 2008 book Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, and Ross King’s Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling of 2003. While I admit that much of the publishing world remains obscure to [...]
A quick preface: I managed somehow to post regularly for five years straight, but over the last few months I truly got in over my head — between finishing my PhD (I am done, and after just 14 years!), writing two long articles and taking a delicious sabbatical at the MacDowell Colony to work on [...]
18 April 2011 | Americas, Books, Contemporary
In her new book “Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art,” Katy Siegel examines artists’ “preoccupations with issues of race, mass culture, the individual, suburbia, apocalypse, and nuclear destruction” — noting that “while a leading textbook like Art Since 1900, for instance, assumes that the most important art is American or European, those [...]
29 March 2011 | Books, Medieval
I apologize for having posted little lately, but I return with a book to strongly recommend: “The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France,” by Stephen Perkinson. I come to this book a bit late — it was published in 2009, but my review copy went to the wrong address, [...]
13 March 2011 | Books, Career, Journals
The rise of peer-reviewed, online journals dealing with art history and visual culture, and not associated with an academic publisher, is an interesting development. Traditionally an academic press, complete with editorial board and a peer-review process, has lent a certain cache and reliability to the items it publishes, though this varies of course. These editorial functions [...]
I recently received three striking publications that consider the intersection of word and image from a French perspective. My personal favorite is Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. Don’t let the cover’s drab reproduction of a Henri Cueco painting fool you — this book crackles visually, lavishly reproducing the fascinating French artists [...]
24 February 2011 | Books, Career, Journals
Those of you still recovering from a marathon four days of conference-going earlier this month may wince at the notion of “100 Years of the College Art Association,” but in the hands of Susan Ball, it’s an appealing subject. She has just published a fine volume she edited on CAA’s history, “The Eye, The Hand, [...]
2 February 2011 | Asia, Awards, Books
Women collectors are the subject of several recent publications including the Morey Award nominee Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China by Hui-shu Lee, who notes that “studies of imperial involvement in the arts in China have scanted the role of women.” This is the first art history book I’ve read that opens with [...]
28 January 2011 | Books, Renaissance
Among the new books I’ve received lately are two on Renaissance art written by distinguished scholars of literature: Michelangelo: A Life on Paper by Leonard Barkan and Blessed and Beautiful by Robert Kiely. I once took a graduate course on the Renaissance revival of antiquity with Barkan, a talented teacher who had us read classic [...]
24 January 2011 | Awards, Books, Modern
In an age of immersive video games, 3-D television, and “reality adventures,” a re-evaulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk seems apt. Nominated for The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, Modernism after Wagner by Juliet Koss is a “critical history of Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” or “total work of art,” from the mid-nineteenth-century to the 1930s. It [...]
A new initiative from Mellon is supporting the publication of emerging scholars’ first illustrated art history texts. Designed to streamline procedures and reduce costs for first-time authors, the program will encourage collaboration amongst four presses – Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, and The University of Washington – to publish 40 books throughout [...]
19 January 2011 | Asia, Awards, Books
Having reviewed the nominees (1,2,3) for the Alfred Barr, Jr., Award for museum catalogues, I move on now to The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, which “honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2009, and August 31, 2010.” The shortlist: Molly Emma Aitken, The Intelligence [...]
14 January 2011 | Americas, Books
Does the traditional encyclopedia — printed on paper, written and edited exclusively by experts — still have a role to play in the age of Wikipedia? The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, just published in five hefty volumes, has enormous strengths. It builds on the excellent Grove Encyclopedia of Art (1996), revising and supplementing its [...]
11 January 2011 | Asia, Awards, Books, Museums
On to the third and final nominee for the Alfred Barr, Jr., Award: The exhibition catalogue Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in Twentieth-Century China, edited by Xiaoneng Yang, is another doorstop of a volume, 450 pages on heavy paper, on which feature a variety of gorgeous and painstakingly assembled illustrations. “All [...]
6 January 2011 | Awards, Books, Museums
CAA announced its twelve Awards for Distinction, including one for Kantha, saying that the book constitutes a model of how to make a catalogue about specific collections that far outreaches the task of honoring the collectors in question. Offering acute insights into an important region and an understudied medium, Kantha not only celebrates a lively [...]
5 January 2011 | Asia, Books, Museums
The College Art Association today announces the winner of the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for best exhibition catalogue. I’m in the midst of reviewing the shortlist, selected this year by: Anna Chave, Graduate Center, CUNY (chair) Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art Virginia Fields, LACMA Erica Hirshler, MFA Boston Anne Woollett, J. Paul Getty [...]
22 December 2010 | Books, Conservation
A new book put out by the Harvard Art Museum explores the Fogg’s role as the first museum to have a scientifically based research department – conceived by Edward Waldo Forbes, director from 1909 to 1944, as a “laboratory for the fine arts”. Forbes was heavily influenced by John Ruskin, and his arguments for the [...]
21 December 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Museums
The College Art Association has announced the shortlist for this year’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for museum scholarship: Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds., Mrs. Delany and Her Circle Darielle Mason, ed., Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum [...]
