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Hal Foster’s Prosthetic Gods is a Lacanian-driven contribution to art history and theory. The book does not address problems in the writing of art history, for example, why such writing is prone to monumentalizing artifacts or is crucial in canon formation. Instead, it uses theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to quarantine modern art and art history by taking the special interpretive codes of Freud, and then Lacan, and transferring them to a general code of interpretation. Prosthetic Gods historicizes art history through Lacanian theory. This strategy produces a circularity in which an object, an interpretation thereof, and institutional… Full Review

Manuals and instructional handbooks for artists have been in existence at least since Pliny the Elder’s discussion, in Book 35 of his Natural History, of the history of painting and its materials. Their numbers increased in the twentieth century, as shown by the volumes now in print and by the large number of instructional articles in “popular” artists’ magazines—as opposed to the academic or “serious” artists’ press, where there is either no instruction or, if I may say so, disdain for such a thing. As Leslie Carlyle points out in The Artist’s Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction… Full Review

Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity analyzes the logic and history of the modern metropolis through the eyes of its most faithful disciple and staunchest critic, the postwar noir film, especially its B variation, where “[t]he loss of public space, the homogenization of everyday life, the intensification of surveillance, and the eradication of older neighborhoods by urban renewal and redevelopment projects are seldom absent” (7). In the tradition of Siegfried Kracauer, Dimendberg is interested in the common, the everyday, and the epiphenomenal, expressions of mass culture that lend us insight into the unconscious logic of late-capitalist reason… Full Review

This book is a richly illustrated surrogate for actually visiting a monument that, since 1585, has occupied the heart of Vatican City yet has been off-limits for ordinary citizens, then and now. Who knew that the square tower rising at the terminus of the northern flank of the Belvedere Courtyard contained a well-thought-out program of frescoes covering the walls of the seven rooms of this triple-story papal retreat? With this handsome publication, we can take a virtual tour and file through the rooms to admire a sequence of epic narratives and monumental landscapes that celebrate the signal achievement of its… Full Review

Western readers will have come to know about mingei (folkcraft) theory through The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1972), the English potter Bernard Leach’s adaptation of a number of essays by his friend, the philosopher and crafts theorist Yanagi Soetsu, who is the principal subject of Yuko Kikuchi’s book. Or, if such readers happen to be potters themselves, they might have learned the basics of Japanese folkcraft theory from Leach’s own A Potter’s Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1940). What they will not have discovered is that Yanagi’s work is itself based on a hybridization… Full Review

“Adjusting to modern life in New York circa 1900 meant learning to see skeptically. To function successfully, even to survive, every inhabitant of the modern city, every target of competitive marketing, every participant in the new mass culture, every beneficiary of modern science and technology, every believer in spiritual realms had to process visual experiences with some measure of suspicion, caution, and guile” (1). These bold and intriguing lines open Michael Leja’s recently published book, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp. Exhaustively researched and brimming with original and brilliant interpretations, Leja’s book proposes a provocative… Full Review

For the best part of the twentieth century, the work of Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905) was not accessible to the Anglophone reader. We have particular reason to welcome this highly readable translation of his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts because this particular book was recommended by its original editors, Otto Pächt and Karl Maria Swoboda, as the best introduction to Riegl’s thought. They would have had good cause to know, as they were intimately involved in his first renaissance in Vienna in the 1920s. Earlier translations of Riegl’s writings—Das holländische Gruppenporträt (The Group Portraiture… Full Review

If there can be any consolation for the sad passing of John Shearman in August of 2003, it is the legacy of this magisterial book, which the author was able to see through to press before his death and which will continue to impact future scholarship for generations to come. Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602) succeeds Vincenzo Golzio’s venerable but outdated Raffaello nei documenti (Vatican City: Pontifica Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon, 1936), a book Shearman greatly admired (he confesses in his introduction [2] that while his own book was taking shape over several decades, he affectionately referred to… Full Review

In her first book, published in 1993, Marcia Kupfer drew attention to the underdiscussed frescoes of Romanesque central France, reading the images as a field within which political tensions were played out and through which social divisions were reinforced. In her second book, The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town, Kupfer returns to the same fertile ground but focuses still more acutely, concentrating on the wall paintings in the crypt of the collegiate parish church of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, in the diocese of Bourges. The result is a rewarding—but also difficult and speculative—work… Full Review

Mesopotamia, in particular Assyria and Babylon, occupies a foundational place in Western cultural identity derived from classical and biblical texts. Material traces, however, were scarce until large-scale excavations in what is now northern Iraq began in the mid-nineteenth century. In Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Frederick Bohrer examines the complex reception of ancient Mesopotamia through the lens of reception theory and postcolonialism. With the “discovery” and acquisition of monumental sculpture from sites such as Khorsabad, Nimrud, and Nineveh in the 1840s and their subsequent introduction to European audiences, a new engagement with the “ancient Orient”… Full Review