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“The pope plieth in an old palace of the bishops of this city [Orvieto], ruinous and decayed. . . . The place may well be called Urbs Vetus. No one would give it any other name. Cannot tell how the Pope should be described as at liberty here, where hunger, scarcity, bad lodgings, and ill air keep him as much confined as he was in Castel Angel. His Holiness could not deny to Master Gregory that captivity at Rome was better than liberty here.” (107) This description of the papal residence in Orvieto written by Henry VIII’s representatives to… Full Review

In Japanese Export Lacquer, 1580–1850, Oliver Impey and Christiaan Jörg quote English collector William Beckford writing in April of 1781, “I fear I shall never be . . . good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, [and] collecting old Japan” (296). Beckford’s idea of “collecting old Japan” is a reflection of the importance that the black-lacquer and gilt-decorated furnishings, caskets, and assorted decorative objects made for the European market came to occupy by the mid-eighteenth century. That the collection of these objects should command a place in this short list of a gentleman’s… Full Review

This is an admirable example of a type of book that is becoming an endangered species: the illuminated manuscript monograph. As one would expect from such a book, it covers everything about the superbly decorated Christina Psalter (Copenhagen, The Royal Library, GKS 1606, 4˚)—from date, provenance, and textual and visual analyses to patronage and interpretations for the intended reader. Although scholars have discussed various aspects of the manuscript in isolation, Vidas’s book is the first comprehensive account and will now become the definitive study. The first descriptive chapter intricately weaves together text and image. Beginning with the flyleaves, Vidas… Full Review

It is delightful to see the first exhibition in the West devoted to the prolific, yet relatively under-studied Meiji artist Yôshû Chikanobu (1838–1893). To date, Chikanobu has been overshadowed by the popular artists of the time, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892), Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900), and Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915). Although Chikanobu’s works are often discussed in books and journals, there has been no monograph or exhibition devoted to him in Japan or in the West; thus both the exhibition and accompanying catalogue are significant contributions to the study of Chikanobu’s work and to Meiji prints in general. The exhibition opened in… Full Review

In an interview conducted by curator Jennifer Gross with the contemporary abstract painter Robert Mangold in August of 2004, the artist openly acknowledged his relative unfamiliarity with the Société Anonyme, the progressive, independent art organization that Katherine Dreier (1877–1952) and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) founded in 1920. Under the aegis of the Société, Duchamp and Dreier assembled a remarkable collection of modern art, donating the bulk of the holdings to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941 (http://artgallery.yale.edu/socanon). As a student at Yale during the mid-fifties and early-sixties, Mangold recalled that he had “seen individual works” at the art gallery… Full Review

Abstraction is ailing. Ever since Clement Greenberg stopped making the rounds and writing reviews, its health has been on one long, slow decline. Yet as Mark Cheetham insists in his most recent book, this patient simply refuses to die. Cheetham, professor of art history and director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto, introduces us to a robust cache of artists (and there are, as he well admits, many more among their ranks), who for the last forty years have insisted on making this presumably terminal pictorial mode their chief idiom. Abstract Art Against Autonomy… Full Review

The questions David James asks in The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geographies of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles begin with a simple problem of space: what is the difference between Los Angeles and Hollywood? Hollywood was once lured to Los Angeles by terrain that could simulate everything from deserts to the Orient, but, as James argues, Los Angeles now tries to create itself in the image of Hollywood. One symptom of this suppression of local geography is that “LA film” has become completely synonymous with “Hollywood film” in the popular imagination. James’s project both continues and revises… Full Review

In the context of today’s increasingly global art world, Midori Yoshimoto’s excellent and timely study, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, fills a lacuna in the history of Japanese art in the West as well as in the history of the avant-garde more generally. Into Performance offers fascinating insight into the period between the Zen appropriations of Western artists in the 1950s and the identity art that reigned in the 1980s and 1990s, now so frequently subsumed under the more neutral (or, as some argue, neutralizing) rubric of globalism. The five Japanese women artists who are the… Full Review

In 1968, the Mono-ha artist Sekine Nobuo dug a perfectly cylindrical hole, 2.7 meters in depth and 2.2 meters in diameter, in a park in Kobe. Next to it, he placed an earthen column of identical dimensions, giving the impression of a simple transfer of matter, a sculpture plucked from the earth. Presenting earth as earth, this work was intended as a negation of the artist’s privileged role as creator, as a critique of the art market, and as a questioning of the modernist art object. This and other works of its generation constituted an attack on modernism that was… Full Review

Enthusiasts for the remarkable work of Joseph Michael Gandy—visionary, perspectivist to Sir John Soane, romantic evoker of the sublime—have been a small but indomitable band. This is the book for which we have been waiting many years. Since the 1970s, Brian Lukacher has been researching the work of Gandy—ferreting out unknown pictures, discovering the anatomy of a life and oeuvre. He knows more than anyone else is ever likely to know about his remarkable and scintillating subject. In short this publication could not be more welcome. Gandy (1771–1843) is in many ways a bit of a sad case. He… Full Review