Browse Recent Book Reviews

Ever since Linda Nochlin published her groundbreaking article questioning “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (ArtNews [January 1971]: 22–39), scholars have sought to understand and to change the sociocultural forces that shaped an all-male history of art. One of the first steps in that process was to recover from obscurity the lives and art of creative women, an aspect of feminist scholarship that continues with the publication of Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875–1900. While never entirely lost from sight, Wheeler’s place in art history has not previously been so well defined… Full Review

Few in antiquity or Byzantium would have questioned that angels have power. Portraying that power, however, posed a special challenge for Byzantines. In a world where both language and image were bound up in materiality, angels captured all that could and could not be said of God. If Christ was understood to be the Word of God made flesh, then there might be license for making pictures of Christ, at least in his earthly guise. But what exactly were angels? More than human, yet known for fleeting visitations in human form; like God, but created by God. Both “subtle” in… Full Review

The word “frame” possesses an interesting history. Originally from the Old English framian, the word meant “to benefit, make progress”; in Middle English its meaning as framen was extended to include “construct.” From there it assumed the noun form that art historians know but do not necessarily consider with the same care as the painting that rests inside its borders. Eli Wilner reverses this trend. In The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame, he has gathered together scholars, curators, and framers to outline a new field of collecting and study. As Wilner writes in his introduction… Full Review

The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme Savante Art and Culture in the Eighteenth Century: New Dimensions and Multiple Perspectives gathers ten essays on topics that will surely interest a broad readership, treating subjects ranging from portraiture to artists politics. Collected by Elise Goodman, the essays represent the multiplicity of artistic, social, theoretical, and political voices at work in eighteenth-century art circles. Equally commendable is the variety, not only of subjects under scrutiny, but also of the books geographical focus, which includes the expected work on France, England, and Italy, as well as on Spain and Ireland.… Full Review

This ambitious catalogue takes on two traditions in American historical scholarship that are seldom reconciled in a satisfactory way. On the one hand, historians have What connection was there between the spirituality of the Hudson River artists long described the second quarter of the nineteenth century as the contentious, expansive age of Andrew Jackson and P. T. Barnum, characterized by a widening market economy, the advent of universal white male suffrage, the beginnings of industrialization, and the resulting realignment of classes that demoted an earlier landed aristocracy to usher in the "era of the common man," all accompanied by growing… Full Review

The first Jubilee of the Roman Catholic Church was proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII on February 22, 1300, granting absolution from sin to all those who visited Rome's holy shrines. It was not planned long in advance, but rather represented the pope's enthusiastic response to the vastly increased throngs of pilgrims who had come to the Eternal City to mark the beginning of a new century. Little did Boniface know what he was starting! Timed to coincide with the 2000 Jubilee celebrations in Rome, this engaging and profusely illustrated book adopts the conceit of following a hypothetical female pilgrim through… Full Review

In this volume, Catherine Karkov examines the textual linkages and visual stratagems that unify Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 11, an anthology including the Old English verse Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. Karkov presents the imagery of Junius 11 in the context of eleventh-century learning and proposes a new and more sophisticated understanding of the relationship of text and image, where the images' performance as a commentary on the text depends on the audience's access to a "complex and highly learned intertextuality" (6). In doing so she raises the level of discourse both for Junius… Full Review

The late Craig Owens began his 1979 review of Robert Smithson's collected writings[1] with a gloss on a passage from the artist's "A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art," which, Owens noted, fell "precisely at the center" (on page 67 of 133) of the first section of Smithson's book. Owens's conceit not only acknowledges the centrality of language in Smithson's work, but the way in which the essay itself both figures and performs the decentering effects of the "eruption of language into the field of the visual arts." The fact that James Meyer's discussion of Donald Judd's essay… Full Review

Reflections of Early China: Décor, Pictographs, and Pictorial Inscriptions by Xiaoneng Yang is an ambitious study that attempts to define the relationship between "pictorial" writing and pictorial imagery from early China, which is characterized as the late Neolithic through early Western Zhou periods, ca. 3000–1000 B.C.E. The author's primary interest in this book is neither art-historical nor aesthetic, but rather historical and epigraphic. His main goal is to identify the significance of zu hui, or clan signs, that are inscribed into Shang and early Western Zhou bronzes. To Yang these "signs," sometimes in the image of animals, body parts… Full Review

Néstor García Canclini's book Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, originally published in Spanish by Grijalbo in 1995, is an important contribution to the contemporary debate on citizenship from the vantage point of Latin America. This English-language version, translated by George Yúdice, presents timely arguments for reevaluating the increasing influence of consumption in the definition of cultural policies. García Canclini argues that multiculturalism, the empowerment of civil society and the expansion of culture industries and global markets go hand in hand with the weakening of the role played by nation-states in defining symbolic references for social belonging. Local… Full Review