Recently Published Reviews

When riding Line 1 of the Paris Metro you might encounter the Louvre-Rivoli station. As you exit the train you come face-to-face with antique statuary displayed in niches along the dimly lit platform. In the shadowy commotion of mass transit you may even notice the Venus de Milo stir to life among the crowd of Parisians and tourists. This contact between ancient sculpture (in fact, copies of works housed in the Louvre that were installed in the Metro in 1968) and that quintessence of modern life—taking the subway—has rich precedents, traced by Sarah Betzer in Animating the Antique: Sculptural Encounter… Full Review

Lucy Bradnock’s No More Masterpieces: Modern Art after Artaud offers a reassessment of Artaud’s reception among artists in the United States (and particularly artists who could be grouped within the American avant-garde). Looking at the period when his work was introduced to the English-speaking world in the 1950s and tracing its circulation through informal networks and official publications, Bradnock deftly demonstrates the challenges, limitations, and opportunities of Artaud’s emergence in the United States. The result is a well-researched and highly readable reconsideration of his legacy and influence there. Artaud’s texts—often opaque and contradictory—offer fertile ground for artists, who can interpret… Full Review

The past two years have seen a comic turn in African American visual culture. From Jean Lee Cole’s exploration of the earliest forms of Black humor in the final chapter of How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895–1920 (2020) to Danielle Fuentes Morgan’s analysis of contemporary Black comedy as a vehicle to expose and critique racial hierarchies in Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and to Richard J. Powell’s comprehensive examination of Black satire as a language of resistance in Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), there has… Full Review

A 1938 draft of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland opens with Abbott’s Brooklyn Bridge: Water and Dock Streets, Brooklyn. The steel construction of the Brooklyn Bridge spans the image, forming a stark contrast to the old brick warehouse in the foreground. The disruptive horizontality of waterfront construction partially obscures the verticality of New York’s skyscrapers in the background. If skyscrapers and construction are emblematic of the march of progress, the image’s layers and obfuscations suggest that change is not so linear. Instead, Abbott compresses the past, present, and future within the flat planes of the… Full Review

Carefully rendered wash drawings in a variety of hues, prints enhanced by gouache and watercolor—the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw a progressive expansion of polychromy in architectural representations and are analyzed by Basile Baudez in Inessential Colors. Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe. Throughout his extensively illustrated work the author interrogates this phenomenon, which initially served to bring clarity to a building’s design and later engaged in a visual language intended to captivate the viewer. The field of study is vast, from Italy to the Netherlands, Great Britain to France, by way of Russia, Spain, or Germany. The author… Full Review

How do we tell the stories of domestic violence? Most domestic violence happens behind closed doors, as does most advocacy to assist survivors. Artist Carmen Winant’s installation brings documentation of abuse and advocacy together through a reconsideration of photographs, newspaper clippings, guidebooks, and other ephemera culled from the archives of Philadelphia-based organization Women in Transition and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. On the first floor of the installation are several collages. In one, Moon faces Demons (2022), Winant presents a group of sixteen photographs, each centered on a faded piece of construction paper then adhered together with blue tape… Full Review

Land art is back in the limelight. On September 2, 2022, Michael Heizer publicly unveiled his colossal City (1970–2022), which comprises a mile-and-a-half-long by half-mile-wide installation of mounds and depressions made of dirt, rock, and concrete in the Nevada desert. In recent contemporary art scholarship, many have looked to histories of Land art or earthworks from the late 1960s and 1970s to think through our current environmental crises and Heizer’s City seems remarkably timed for this discussion. How informed or invested were first-generation Land artists, particularly in the American West, in ecological issues? To what degree did their monumental or… Full Review

Light and vision have been considered central to the experience of Western modernity, from the rhetoric of illumination in the European Enlightenment to visual technologies that produced new subjectivities, public and private spaces, and modes of surveillance and control. Niharika Dinkar’s Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India not only probes the ideology and materiality of light in modern empire building, but also turns to the shadows—the dark, mysterious, and uncivilized colony that “the empire of light and reason” (1) sought to illuminate and inscribe. Drawing upon a broad range of representational practices engendered by new visual… Full Review

In There Is No Soundtrack, Ming-Yuen S. Ma contends that contemporary media art challenges understandings of image and sound that privilege visuality. This visual bias, according to Ma, appears in art history, art criticism, media theory, and more broadly throughout the humanities. Even in the field of film and media studies, which has produced dedicated treatments of cinematic sound, “visual hegemony” and “ocularcentrism” persist (2, 5). Ma offers a corrective in his series of analyses that emphasize the aural dimension of artworks by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid), Tanya Tagaq, Chris Marker, Trinh T. Minh-ha… Full Review

The most influential publications in early modern image theory over the last thirty years have either positioned the work of art as imagining its own completion by a beholder or described the actual responses of the beholder in front of a work. John Shearman’s Only Connect . . .  Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (1992) was an attempt to study period notions of spectatorship and the human imagination in order to reveal artistic “messages” embedded in Italian Renaissance paintings. David Freedberg’s The Power of Images (1989) looked beyond the confines of “high art,” untangling the psychological and… Full Review

This wonderful book provides a thoroughly researched and lavishly illustrated introduction to a set of illuminated world chronicle manuscripts made in Bavaria and Austria in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The texts transmitted through these manuscripts are generally compilations from a variety of sources, including the world chronicles of Rudolf von Ems and Jans der Enikel, the Christherre-Chronik, and others, often brought together in a compilation traditionally attributed to “Heinrich von München” (although this name refers more to a textual tradition than to an actual individual) along with a great variety of other material. Author Nina Rowe adroitly… Full Review

Rebecca Peabody’s Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race is the first monograph solely about Kara Walker’s work since Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw’s Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (2004). To be sure, a dizzying amount of literature exists about Kara Walker and her creative output in book chapters, journal articles, and exhibition catalogs. With this in mind, Peabody’s sustained and thematic reading of Walker’s work is welcome, vital, and necessary because she introduces new ways of understanding Walker’s work by focusing on her literary influences. Peabody’s title is apt because Walker’s stories do consume the… Full Review

Didi-Huberman and the Image by Chari Larsson is the first book-length study in English of the work of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, with a focus on his theories about images. Given the fact that Didi-Huberman has written over fifty books in a career spanning four decades and that he is one of the most well-known French theorists of images, such a study is long overdue. In French, German, and Spanish art history and visual studies, Didi-Huberman’s work is an established reference point, awarded with prestigious accolades such as the Adorno Prize. That his work has never received… Full Review

Out of Breath is a critical study of the significance and politics of breathing, guided throughout by explorations of breath and air in contemporary art. A slender book of just ninety-six pages, written in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is as much an essay about the political implications of humanity’s dependence on a shared substrate of air, and air’s implication in global injustice and violence, as a study of art history or criticism. But by the same token, it is also an incisive example of how contemporary art can lend itself to being treated as theory or as… Full Review

The title of Shana Klein’s book, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion, promises a great deal. Each part of the title could be a book in and of itself, and as the author writes “traverses many different disciplines and subject areas” In some ways, this volume succeeds and in other ways falls short. As American painted depictions of fruit ostensibly serve as the primary focus, there are too few illustrations and little in-depth discussion of these pictures. Selecting paintings of five different fruits to illustrate American expansion and… Full Review