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The record prices that works by James Tissot have fetched at auction, as well as the appeal of his subjects to a general public, might well have turned contemporary critical attention away from an artist who, after all, no longer needs to be rediscovered (consider especially the writings of Michael Wentworth). Tissot’s immediate facility would seem to render critical analysis superfluous, analysis certainly less nimble than the artist’s brush. But with a taste for paradox, not the least of the devices available to aesthetic studies, the challenge has been taken up and—it has to be conceded straightaway—with a certain pertinence.… Full Review

In her preface, Mary Garrard declares that she wants her book to serve as an exemplary methodological model. She seeks to provide a new mode of connoisseurship, one that includes not only a thorough analysis of the formal elements within a given work of art, but also a detailed discussion of the social, psychological, gender-specific, and iconographic elements particular to the artist studied. In this volume, her latest contribution to Artemisia Gentileschi scholarship, Garrard has accomplished just that. The methodological mélange she employs results in a work that both engages the reader from beginning to end and thoroughly delivers what… Full Review

As a student in the 1980s, studying for qualifying exams in Islamic art history, I was so desperate to read the first edition of this title in the Pelican History of Art series that I ordered a copy from England months before it was available in the United States. At that time, there were few comprehensive surveys of Islamic art and architecture, and even those reflected a conservative, formalist vision of the subject. The Oleg Grabar and Richard Ettinghausen volume of 1987 conformed to the Pelican guidelines of that era: a firmly chronological narrative with black-and-white… Full Review

Margarita Tupitsyn’s book, Malevich and Film, and the accompanying exhibition set forth an ambitious, revisionist narrative. Malevich and Film tells anew the story of the Russian painter’s iconic work, Black Square, first conceived as a backdrop for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun in 1913, and provocatively installed at the conjunction of two walls and the ceiling in the exhibition 0.10 in St. Petersburg in December 1915. Kasimir Malevich (1878–1935) placed great importance on this work—a quadrangle of black paint set on a ground of white, forming a composition eighty centimeters square—and he remade it in varying… Full Review

Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context includes four essays presented at the conference “The Japanese Buddhist Icon in Its Monastic Context,” held at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in March 1994, that represent new trends in scholarship in both Buddhist studies and art history. In his insightful introduction, “Prolegomenon to the Study of Japanese Buddhist Icons,” Robert H. Sharf argues that although extant physical and textual evidence suggests that images played a key role in East Asian Buddhist belief and practice, our understanding of the function of images in the Buddhist context is still unsatisfactory. In his brief historiography… Full Review

Alexander Nemerov states at the outset of The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 that he aims to interpret yet enhance the “strangeness” of Raphaelle’s pictures. He succeeds beautifully. Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825), an American artist who painted ordinary foodstuffs with a descriptive intensity worthy of Gustave Flaubert, continues to fascinate long after the reader has closed this book’s cover. Reading Raphaelle through a trifurcated lens of Freudian psychoanalysis, late Enlightenment social theory, and early American social history, Nemerov explores the “uncanniness” of Raphaelle’s still lifes and argues that their subject was, however improbably, “both the pleasures and… Full Review

The past few years have witnessed the publication of several major studies that reframed the history of early American modernism and the Alfred Stieglitz circle, most notably Celeste Connor’s Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Wanda M. Corn’s The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and Sarah Greenough’s Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company/Bulfinch Press, 2000). These books share similar themes and concerns: they all investigate the Stieglitz artists after Gallery… Full Review

The Cecil name is firmly tied to the political history of early modern England. As sequential advisers to Elizabeth I and Lord Treasurers under Elizabeth and James I, respectively, William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and his son, Robert (First Earl Salisbury), have been defined by their governmental policies and decision-making. Seldom have we heard about Cecilian activity that transcended the boundaries of Crown politics. Little has been said of William and Robert’s shared proclivities for building or their mutual passion for gardens, Burghley’s advocacy of economic innovation, or Salisbury’s cultivation of new musical techniques. By focusing strictly on the political lives… Full Review

Martha Sandweiss is not an art historian, and her ambitious new book is not a work of art history. Nonetheless, art historians interested in nineteenth-century photography in the United States should get their hands on a copy, because for them this book is not merely important but indispensable. The historian Sandweiss has written a cultural history of how, between the 1840s and the 1890s, photography and the American West came to be entwined. Her primary concern is with the history of this nexus within public discourse, and consequently she attends mainly to photographic productions of public note,… Full Review

David Ryan opens his introduction to Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters with the inquiry, “How do we connect the contemporary condition of abstract painting with its history?” (Ryan 1). He sees the question as necessarily posing two further ones: What do we mean by abstraction? And how do we construct history? Talking Painting sets out to explore these issues by juxtaposing Ryan’s interviews of twelve abstract painters with each artist’s choice of a critical text about his or her own work. The essays are primarily reprinted from journals and catalogues, and the interviews took place mainly between… Full Review