Recently Published Reviews

In the penultimate paragraph of my Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the Art of Agostino Brunias (Manchester University Press, 2018), I admitted—with no small degree of shame—that not until I came to the very end of the project did it ever even occur to me to ask, “What did the brown and black women working in Sir William Young’s plantation home see in Brunias’s canvases?” (233). Jennifer Van Horn’s Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery makes such questions the very focus of its inquiry. In doing so, this important book at once advocates for and models a critical recentering… Full Review

Susan Taylor-Leduc begins with a question that readers in the field of eighteenth-century studies may have already wondered: why another book dedicated to Marie-Antoinette (12)? Taylor-Leduc answers by sidestepping overworked themes in the rococo queen’s world: explorations of Marie-Antoinette’s biography, examinations of garden aesthetics, and correlations between royal patronage and contemporary politics. Instead, she creates an interdisciplinary framework that unites garden history with spatial, anthropological, and cultural memory studies to reassess Marie-Antoinette’s pivotal role in defining the French picturesque garden style at the Petit Trianon. Moreover, Taylor-Leduc traces the lasting effects of the queen’s garden legacy across three generations of… Full Review

Abstract Expressionism still holds a mythic power over art historians, curators, and museum directors as the most “American” style of painting. Critics, notably Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, enshrined the movement’s artists and their canvases covered in pours and drips as expressions of personal freedom and a peculiarly American subjectivity. Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1945–1975 provides a welcome disruption. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb are present in the catalog texts and didactic labels, but none of their works hang on the walls. Action/Abstraction Redefined is the first in-depth presentation of how contemporary Native artists intersected with Abstract… Full Review

Few early modern European ruling dynasties generate such fascination as the Spanish Habsburgs. In particular, the figures of Charles V and Philip II are well-known as monarchs who understood how architecture could be employed to propagate an image of empire and did so by patronizing such works as El Escorial, the Alcázar de Toledo, the Alcázar de Madrid, and Charles’s palace at La Alhambra, while Philip reimagined Madrid as the empire’s capital city. Turning away from these figures, in Jesús Escobar’s new book, Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy, the author focuses on the period from 1620 to… Full Review

As the twenty-first century progresses, imperial ties continue to loosen, but not without controversy and protest: the recent coronation of Charles III, for example, was greeted with enthusiasm by many—but not all—of his British subjects, and around Britain’s former imperial territories has prompted critical reflection on the legacies of British governance, including invasion, violence, slavery, and many other cultural practices and institutions now more universally recognized as exploitative and oppressive. The proposal that loyal subjects everywhere pledge their allegiance out loud to the King was greeted with particular astonishment, although some welcomed this as a participatory and inclusive new… Full Review

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music is “the first exhibition devoted to the role of music in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988),” and situates his origin story in lockstep with the explosion of cultural creativity that was happening around (and through) him in 1970s and 1980s New York. After an overview of the artist as a music lover, collector, and maker, the curators lay out the exhibition’s framework, stating in a wall text that “the extent to which Basquiat’s use of music reveals his engagement with the legacy of the African diaspora and the… Full Review

Brigitte Buettner explores the cultural significance of gemstones in the European Middle Ages in her brilliant and eagerly anticipated book The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture. Medieval inventories of people’s belongings demonstrate that the majority of the net worth of elite individuals often was tied up in gold and silver plate and in jewelry set with sumptuous rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls. The inherent value of these objects tempted owners throughout the centuries to melt them down whenever a financial crisis arose, so only a small percentage of goldsmiths’ gem-laden masterpieces that once existed… Full Review

In the last five years, Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) has received increased attention in terms of exhibitions and scholarly publications, as well as a resurgence of interest in her work in the art market. In 2019–20, the Museo del Prado hosted the exhibition A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana and this year, the National Gallery of Ireland will unveil Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker. Both shows are accompanied by substantial exhibition catalogs; in addition, a handful of articles and volumes have been devoted to Lavinia Fontana, including Un apice erotico di Lavinia Fontana by Enrico… Full Review

With the rise of the early modern maritime trade, seashells became marine objects of curiosity and desire across regions. Conch and nautilus shells appeared in Dutch still life paintings among sumptuous exotic objects, were finely carved to become ornamental drinking cups in southern China, and entered European cabinets of curiosity as specimens, curios, and mounted pieces of art. How can we comprehend the multivalent thingness of shells as they straddle and cross the boundaries of nature and culture, material objects and visual representations, Europe and China, land and sea? What are their values and significance in early modern Eurasian visual… Full Review

Robert Slifkin’s Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work investigates Hare’s documentary photography, charting his initial interest in and eventual disengagement from the medium, and his combat with those in the upper echelons of the photographic world. Taken during the 1960s and 1970s, Hare’s subjects, white- and blue-collar workers, were Hare’s colleagues, or those he encountered in several cross-country journeys. Slifkin organizes his meditations thematically, in short essayistic chapters, following Hare’s relationship to family, gender relations, employment, postwar documentary photography, and art institutions. Ultimately these are explorations of Hare’s sense of self, or “authority” as Slifkin articulates it. Some… Full Review

Not since Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monuments in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Freeman Murray’s germinal text Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Press of Murray Brothers, 1916) has a scholar so adeptly and rigorously tackled the relationships between race, enslavement, and sculpture as does Caitlin Beach in Sculpture at the End of Slavery. The book’s table of contents gives early indication of the geographically expansive and historically rich terrain through which Beach navigates. Each chapter is anchored by the work of a singular artist, which the… Full Review

In 2020, the flooding Yangtze River covered the feet of the giant Buddha statue at Leshan, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. As a local proverb warns, “When the Great Buddha washes his feet, the world is in chaos.” In 2022, drought revealed three Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) Buddha statues on an island in the Yangtze located within Chongqing municipality, also in southwest China. These examples underscore the timeliness—indeed, the urgency—of Sonya S. Lee’s Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan. Lee takes up the question of how Buddhist art has survived in Sichuan’s humid, rainy environments from the Tang dynasty… Full Review

The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture, edited by Anna Sokolina, is a welcome addition to the understanding of the varied contributions women practitioners have made to the built environment, particularly across the twentieth century. She has drawn together a collection of essays, twenty-nine in all, that showcase women’s individual contributions to architecture in different ways, from speculative projects to developer-builders. The essays are grouped into five sections in chronological sequence. The first encompassing the preindustrial age to the early 1900s, with the four sections that follow spanning the twentieth century. Most of the chapters utilize biography as the… Full Review

Although the study of premodern art history often relies on fragmentary evidence, the absent object remains curiously understudied—acknowledged but rarely examined as a critical component to the shape of art history itself. When the object of study is gone—inaccessible through deliberate destruction or the events of time—the art historian must confront this loss doubly: as evidence and as absence. The collection of essays in the compact and provocative book, Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were, not only addresses this art historical problem as its central line of inquiry but it also reveals how, as editors Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler suggest, that ‘‘attending… Full Review

In Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, the first monograph devoted to the artist, activist, and MoMA curator, Sarah Louise Cowan focuses on Howardena Pindell’s paintings and collages made between the late 1960s and early 1980s, underscoring her forays into sculpture and video along the way. In doing so, Cowan traces the artist’s ambivalent exploration of modernist form. Teasing out Pindell’s alignment with and strategic revisions of all-over painting, the grid and surface treatments, Cowan ultimately unspools modernist grammar from the narrow, yet nevertheless dominant history of midcentury abstraction developed within mostly white male artistic enclaves. In turn, modernism as a… Full Review