Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Shana Klein
California Studies in Food and Culture. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 264 pp.; 45 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780520296398)
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
August 31, 2022
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Adrián Gorelik
Trans. Natalia Majluf. Pittsburgh: Latin American Research Commons, 2022. 478 pp.; 100 b/w ills. Paper $30.00 (9781951634223)
Adrián Gorelik’s La grilla y el parque: Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires first appeared in print nearly a quarter century ago, in 1998, but the persistence of Eurocentricity within the disciplines of art and architectural history have delayed its translation and, thus far, limited its reach to primarily Latin Americanist circles. Now, thanks to the translation efforts of Natalia Majluf, it is available in English in paperback and as a free e-book from Latin American Research Commons (LARC). The Grid and the Park: Public Space and Urban Culture in Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 is the first… Full Review
August 26, 2022
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Marie Tanner
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018. 236 pp.; 77 color ills.; 71 b/w ills. Cloth €110.00 (9781909400276)
This ambitious and at times quite astonishing book aims at a radical new interpretation of the six poesie that Titian, at the height of his powers and fame, prepared for Philip II from approximately 1553–62. The six paintings of the cycle present narratives of the mythological gods, with a focus on the interaction between gods and mortals. The book is divided into three separate sections. Part I sets out the goals and background of the commission, emphasizing the dynastic ambitions of Charles V and how this is developed in earlier Habsburg imagery. Part II contains individual chapters on each of… Full Review
August 24, 2022
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Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka, and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick, eds.
Exh. cat. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022. 284 pp.; 111 color ills.; 15 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9783775752145)
Various sites, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, February 18–May 8, 2022
Author’s note: I do not italicize words in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (the Hawaiian language) for two reasons: doing so perpetuates the “otherness” of Indigenous languages that were nearly rendered extinct as a result of colonialism—including ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, which was effectively banned in 1896—but also because Hawaiian and English are both official languages in the State of Hawai‘i. Hardly innocuous nomenclature, “Pacific Century” suggests a multifocal battle waged across overlapping fronts, from geopolitics to economics, ideology to culture. The phrase evokes competing sentiments, some celebratory and others apprehensive, themselves indicative of the tension between place-based exhibition making and global art spectacle. Such… Full Review
August 19, 2022
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Deborah Kahn
Turnhout, Belgium and London: Brepols and Harvey Miller, 2020. 272 pp.; 200 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth €125.00 (9781912554362)
The subject of Deborah Kahn’s probing book is the way in which narration in eleventh-century France manifested social and political power in Christian kingdoms—in particular, the outward display of a saint’s life in figurative stone sculpture on one church’s exterior. The outstanding contribution of this book is its close reading of the vita of an obscure saint, Eusice, written by Letaldus of Micy (fl. ca. 990s–1020s) and printed here in Appendix I (with full transcription and facing English translation by Steven Burges with Bailey Benson). Kahn interprets the sculpted figural reliefs at Selles-sur-Cher through saintly visions and striking anti-Jewish characterizations… Full Review
August 17, 2022
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Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia, February 6–April 8, 2018
In the introduction to The Pencil of Nature (1844), British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot tells the origin story of “photogenic drawing.” While honeymooning, he attempted to sketch Lake Como with the aid of a camera lucida. But his “faithless pencil” left only traces of the refracted landscape; the marks were “melancholy to behold.” As if updating Pliny’s tale of art originating with the tracing of a lover’s shadow, Talbot resolved to fix nature’s phantasmagoric images. In 1841, he patented the calotype, the first paper-based chemical photographic process. Unlike its popular French competitor, the metal-based daguerreotype, the calotype process… Full Review
August 12, 2022
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Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, January 28–August 7, 2022
In The Power of Maps (1992), cartographer Denis Wood writes, “The world we take for granted—the real world—is made like this, out of the accumulated thought and labor of the past. It is presented to us on the platter of the map, presented, that is, made present, so that whatever invisible, unattainable, erasable past or future can become part of our living . . . now . . . here” (7). This accumulation of the past made relevant to those in the present is examined in Maya Lin’s current exhibition at Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA).  … Full Review
August 8, 2022
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Alessia Frassani, ed.
Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021. 280 pp. Cloth €118.00 (9789004467453)
A growing body of scholarship on Indigenous visual culture of colonial Latin America has come about since the Columbus Quincentenary. Much of it calls attention to the active participation of Indigenous artists, patrons, and other marginalized groups in the production and consumption of objects and images. Significantly, it challenges earlier scholarship in the field, much of which advanced the problematic idea that the European conquest of the Americas was successful in eradicating key aspects of Indigenous ideology, cosmology, and artistic practices. The eleven scholarly essays that comprise Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas contribute to this critical… Full Review
July 20, 2022
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Sylvia Houghteling
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 280 pp.; 162 color ills. Hardcover $65.00 (978069121578)
In early modern South Asia the sale of cloth was the second highest financial generator in the economic market. As a commodity it was prized across the world. Moreover, it was an important status symbol, connecting the far flung outposts of the Mughal Empire (1526–1858). It is therefore surprising that a history of South Asian textiles from this pivotal period has never been written before now. Fortunately, what Sylvia Houghteling presents in The Art of Cloth in Mughal India is more than a straightforward narrative. Rather, it maps a history of a specific art form while offering a multilayered methodological… Full Review
July 15, 2022
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David Hemsoll
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. 352 pp.; 250 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300225761)
Can we uncover the intention of the artist? With Emulating Antiquity: Renaissance Buildings from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, David Hemsoll has written a detailed new volume that proposes a definitively positive answer within the domain of Renaissance architecture in Florence and Rome. His interest lies primarily in one aspect of the architecture of the period: its relationship to the antique prototypes that provided source material for many works. He posits, with infectious optimism, that a close reading of the full oeuvres of the five architects under consideration will permit “a full and detailed account . . . of how and… Full Review
July 13, 2022
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Mary Weismantel
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 288 pp.; 66 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9781477323212)
The visual culture of sex is a fundamental tool for studying sexuality among ancient societies. The study of sexuality is, in fact, also the study of social structure as it relates to the culture, history, and ideology of a society. The sexualized image is a primary source equal to text or oral tradition, and it should be analyzed carefully. Studying sexuality can reveal social features that could not be otherwise revealed, as demonstrated in the Barbara L. Voss and Robert A. Schmidt-edited volume Archaeologies of Sexualities (2000). Mary Weismantel’s Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots shows readers both… Full Review
July 8, 2022
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Barbara Johns
University of Washington Press, 2021. 192 pp.; 156 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780998911236)
Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, WA, October 21, 2021–February 20, 2022
For many accomplished Japanese Americans in the aftermath of World War II incarceration, public visibility was a vexed proposition at best, and professional success meant dwelling somewhere in the shadows between celebration and forgetting. In the case of the influential Seattle-based painter Kenjiro Nomura (1896–1956), whose career had cycled between obscurity and national recognition even before the war, this ambiguous status has persisted through at least two or three posthumous efforts to establish his significance. Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist’s Journey, a fine recent exhibition and companion volume from the Cascadia Art Museum, may finally do so. … Full Review
July 6, 2022
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Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, December 10, 2021–March 20, 2022
Defining the art of a region in the twenty-first century is a thorny and onerous task. Like many professionals in the age of telecommuting, gig work, and academic precarity, artists relocate often. Similarly, influences stem from far and wide, making the old art historical distinctions of style as defined by geographical proximity difficult to apply in this day and age. The Regional, an exhibition jointly organized by Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) and Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, attempts to provide a snapshot of the art of today in the American Midwest. The museum directors’… Full Review
June 28, 2022
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Andreas Beyer, et al.
Exh. cat. Basel: Foundation Beyeler, 2021. 400 pp.; 300 color ills. Cloth CHF72.00 (9783775746571)
In the latter part of 2021, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel mounted the most important retrospective exhibition on Goya in recent decades. Curated by Martin Schwander—who is also the editor of the catalog—and developed by Isabela Mora and Sam Keller in collaboration with the Prado Museum, it gathered 181 Goya works, including seventy-seven paintings, fifty-three prints, and fifty-one drawings. It was a unique opportunity for those able to attend the fully booked exhibition, since many of the works have rarely been shown outside of Spain, and many come from private collections. This is the first retrospective exhibition of Goya’s work… Full Review
June 24, 2022
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Kristoffer Neville
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. 256 pp.; 15 color ills.; 65 b/w ills.; 82 ills. Cloth $89.95 (9780271082257)
In the opening pages of his recent survey of early modern Scandinavian art and architecture, Kristoffer Neville argues that “the Danish and Swedish courts were fully integrated in Central European culture and played leading roles in the larger region from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century” (6). Rather than emphasize the uniqueness of Scandinavian artistic production in this period, Neville’s project is to excavate an often overlooked unity between closely related territories that have undergone an artificial separation in the writing of German, Danish, and Swedish national art histories. By revealing the impact of the Scandinavian monarchies in the German-speaking… Full Review
June 21, 2022
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