Recently Published Reviews

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour, was one of the most persistently pictured women of her time. During her career as official mistress of Louis XV of France (1745-64), artists such as François Boucher, François-Hubert Drouais, and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour represented her in a variety of contexts, from elegantly decorated interiors to lush garden bowers, and accompanied by a variety of objects, including books, prints, and musical instruments. In this book, Elise Goodman argues that a significant number of these portraits--five of a corpus of fifteen--were designed to portray Pompadour as a "femme savante," or "a woman of learning and… Full Review

This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue bring together for the first time in the United States a dazzling variety of Chinese rare books, rubbings and maps from the extensive holdings of the National Library of China, Beijing. This joint enterprise was organized by the National Library of China and the Queens Borough Public Library as part of an on-going effort to increase international professional cooperation and information exchange between these two institutions. While the quality and importance of the objects would easily argue for a major museum venue for this exhibition, the decision to use major public libraries was made… Full Review

James Meyer's Minimalism is a large, weighty book, filled with pictures, in between which are crammed immense amounts of information, ranging from snippets of commentary to exhaustive philosophical analyses. The middle section of this tripartite tome contains most of the illustrations, each of which is captioned with a Cliff's-Notes-like summary. Many are very insightful and precise, providing information on materials, size, scale, and proportions along with abbreviated, sometimes amusing, interpretations. The caption writer, identified as Catherine Caesar in the author's acknowledgements, relates an anecdote about a shipment, identified as "paper," of Robert Ryman's Classico paintings to Germany. When customs officials… Full Review

Ann Bermingham's eagerly awaited new book, Learning to Draw, is about much more than the development of drawing practices. As the subtitle, Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art, suggests, this is a wider history of the formation of the individual as a subject in (visual) culture. It analyzes the way drawing "resulted in an aestheticization of the self and the things of everyday life," a phenomenon that Bermingham sees as an important characteristic of the modern period (ix). This excellent book is difficult to fairly summarize and characterize for it is such an… Full Review

Writing on the Salon of 1755, the abbé de la Porte concluded his enthusiastic review of Jean-Baptiste Greuze with the phrase, "One would like to know him." (quoted in Munhall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 11). This comment is ambiguous, since, despite his longing to know Greuze, it was apparently clear to the abbé that the work and the man were not transparent reflections of each other. For modern audiences, such longing is puzzling: we think we know Greuze all too well. Even some of the most scholarly accounts have stressed his eccentricity and vanity, his penchant for painting pathetic adolescents and domestic… Full Review

There are, I'm sure, many people in the world who feel that no more can be said about Michelangelo and that, really, no more ought to be said. At the same time, there seems to be no limit to the number of people who simply want to look at his work--crowds are undiminished at the Sistine Chapel, and large-scale, lavishly-produced picture books continue to be made. In recent years, these books have been rather selective: the many variants of glorious restorations, the early work, and the sculpture. Therefore, a need did exist for a monographic volume, and William Wallace's book… Full Review

"Visuality" is to vision as sexuality is to sex; that is, visuality presents the discourse and particularized cultural habits of viewing art, layered upon the physiology of vision itself. This is a term that has been cropping up more frequently in art historical writing lately, e.g. Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton, 1998), but it has received little theorizing or application in multiple cultures prior to this volume. Its editor, Robert Nelson, will be known to the discipline from his own recent anthology of critical discourse, Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago, 1996; coedited with Richard… Full Review

This book is a free-flowing philosophical rumination about an art-form to which the author has been addicted since a child (as such he appears on the dust-jacket), and which he rightly considers to have been unfairly marginalized by art and cultural history (ignored for instance by CAA publications)--not to speak of philosophy and aesthetics. The book breathes a relaxed air, despite its rather daunting frame of scholarly reference, mitigated by a cozy reflex to begin each chapter with an autobiographical snippet. The book is loosely constructed and wanders casually among weighty philosophical truisms and concrete examples of comics, idiosyncratically chosen… Full Review

William Vaughan and Helen Weston are contributing editors to this volume in a recently launched series by Cambridge University Press, Masterpieces of Western Painting. Each volume in the series offers a group of essays on a single painting by specialists in the field representing different methodological perspectives. The objective is to provide a concise history and reassessment of paintings that belong to the Western canon. A volume of this nature devoted to David's Marat is timely since the field of David studies has undergone an intense period of revitalization over the past decade, launched by the 1989 David retrospective… Full Review

It is no coincidence that many of the new theorists of technology and telesis are based in California--ever on the edge of tomorrow, but also host to the primary commercial market for digital imagery: the movie industry. The hybrid members of the digerati can present different faces to the world depending on the venue: artist, theorist, computer scientist, professor, robotics engineer, program designer, or supplier. A hefty cadre of these transprofessionals work and think from the San Francisco Bay area, a McLuhan unit's distance away from the throbbing belly of the media beast, yet still proximate to vassal lords such… Full Review

In a 1905 history, Samuel Isham argued that American art was "in no way native to America but is European painting imported, or rather transplanted, to America . . . . There is no local tradition or influence." (Corn, 318) Countering this Eurocentric view (one still occasionally heard among those who dismiss American art before Abstract Expressionism), is an equally persistent belief in cultural exceptionalism. From the beginnings of cultural nationalism in the early nineteenth century, many have labored to construct a homegrown tradition, expressing the peculiar qualities of the nation's visual arts. Symptomatic of this effort was John McCoubrey… Full Review

This book is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition that opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and then traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. It documents 175 objects drawn from a variety of media. The catalogue is meant to be of interest to the general public who viewed the exhibition, as well as a useful reference for students of Chinese art history, complete with Chinese character lists and an extensive bibliography. The general editor of the book, Yang Xiaoneng, also is the curator of the exhibition. Yang's… Full Review

James Cooper believes in art. In his book, which amounts to a manifesto long on assertion and short on argument (as befits manifestoes), Cooper holds up the canvases of the Hudson River School as a standard for cultural renewal. His arch-principle is that the arts carry a culture's moral, spiritual, and aesthetic values such that as the arts go, so goes the culture. This idea operates in the book as a traditional American jeremiad that both critiques modern history and heralds the opportunity of rebirth. Cooper promotes what amounts to a form of cultural theurgy: If the arts are an… Full Review

This book forms part of the New Cambridge History of India's commendable effort to integrate art history into its historical concerns. It was preceded by three earlier volumes, Architecture of Mughal India (Catherine B. Asher), Mughal and Rajput Painting (Milo C. Beach), and Architecture and Art of Southern India by one of the authors of the present volume (George Michell). The volume amply fulfills the agenda of the Cambridge Histories laid down in the general Editor's Preface, namely not only to "record an existing state of knowledge" but also "to focus interest on research" and to provide "stimulus… Full Review

Power is a front-burner issue in the postmodernist age, and scholarship from the last two decades mirrors this preoccupation. From that standpoint this is a timely book. Karen Gerhart explains (144-145) that the first half of her title, The Eyes of Power, refers simultaneously to the act of looking at the trappings of power, the process of giving visual form to power, and the gaze of power that observes the observer--a melange of ideas perhaps inspired by Foucault's notion of surveillance. In The Eyes of Power, Gerhart eschews the time-honored artist-and-oeuvre model in favor of a… Full Review