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Given the relative difficulty of transporting a collection of such extraordinary breadth and national importance, it is not surprising that the last American exhibition of Polish art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took place close to thirty years ago. While readers may be familiar with its fairly limited catalogue, as well as important later texts such as Jan Bialostocki's The Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's recent Court, Cloister and City: The Art of Central Europe, 1450-1800, few publications in English have specifically addressed the topic of the Polish baroque. The organizers of… Full Review

The evaluation of more or less heroic artists is still standard practice in studies of seventeenth-century French art. Consider, for example, the colloquium on Pierre Mignard at the Louvre in 1995, and the Georges de La Tour exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris from 1997-98. This focus on individual "masters" is, of course, hardly unusual in the discipline of art history. It seems, however, that many specialists of early modern French visual culture have not only remained dedicated to such an approach, but they have also paid regular homage to one artist in particular, namely Nicolas Poussin. … Full Review

Mark Jarzombek's The Psychologizing of Modernity is in many respects a timely book. Drawing upon an impressive range of readings undertaken in 1994 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Jarzombek brings together parts of several of his earlier writings for the journal Assemblage, most significantly his 1994 essay, "De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Woelfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism." What is new is that the earlier question of "how would I write a history of the theory of aesthetic experientialism" is now transposed into the (Woelfflinean) ambition to write a "Prolegomenon to Critical Historiography." It is… Full Review

Calvin Kendall has a wonderful topic, the verse inscriptions that decorate a large number of Romanesque church portals. While I sometimes disagree sharply with Kendall's treatment of his material, he gets full marks for paying attention to it in the first place; it is an embarrassment to art history that such an important and literally obvious topic was first studied monographically by a professor of English. And, whatever disagreements one may have with Kendall's method and conclusions, the long appendix to his book, which meticulously transcribes and translates all of the inscriptions known to him, is a crucial corpus of… Full Review

LA is a hard city to get in focus. Many American and non-American immigrants thought of it as an ideal destination. But much of the local literature is devoted to the natural disasters--earthquakes and fires--and to stories of crime. Because it is a new, very rich city without well-established cultural traditions--and because it is the center of the film industry and a place dependent on massive water imports--LA can seem a highly artificial city. Perhaps that is why this landscape inspires such powerful myths. McClung's beautifully produced, well-illustrated book presents a wealth of information about the city in… Full Review

As an English professor, I rarely have the pleasure of reviewing visually stunning books, so my assessment of this book as lovely to look at does not rest on the basis of much comparison. The three essays that form the text, the plentiful (and lush) illustrations, and the lengthy chronology of Siddons's life contained in this volume make up a fascinating picture of Siddons's career and its alchemy with eighteenth-century portraiture. Siddons's stage roles are only one factor in what the authors--Asleson, Shearer West, Shelley Bennett, and Mark Leonard--discuss as the production of Siddons's image as star and cultural icon… Full Review

Foucault once stated that the 20th century would one day be called Deleuzian, citing Gilles Deleuze's profound ability to theorize radical change on the ontological level, beyond the restricting epistemological logic of hierarchic, organic thought that has dominated philosophical and semiotic discourse since the Enlightenment. Although Deleuze's groundbreaking work with Felix Guattari--specifically Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus--and such terms as "rhizomatics," "deterritorialization," the "body-without-organs," and the "war machine" have become increasingly common buzzwords in recent critical attempts to rethink the ideology of the image, the French philosopher has been significantly ignored by feminists, particularly in comparison to Freudian and… Full Review

Mesoamerican Architecture as Cultural Symbol is one of the latest in a series of recent works on architecture in ancient Middle America. Jeff Kowalski's volume joins The Code of Kings: The Language of Seven Sacred Maya Temples and Tombs, by Linda Schele and Peter Mathews (Scribner, 1998), and Stephen Houston's edited volumes Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture (Dumbarton Oaks, 1999), and Royal Courts of the Maya (with Takeshi Inomata, Westview Press, 2000). But unlike these volumes, which focus only on the Maya, Mesoamerican Architecture as Cultural Symbol addresses architecture as a carrier of cultural meaning in most… Full Review

More than twenty years have passed since scholars Carol Duncan, Brian O'Doherty, and Alan Wallach published their groundbreaking critical analyses of art museums and their display strategies. These incisive essays launched a wave of vehement institutional critiques that effectively pitted critically informed academic concerns against contemporary museum practices. Two of the more recent additions to the fray--Mary Anne Staniszewski's The Power of Display and the Open University's Contemporary Cultures of Display, edited by Emma Barker--indicate that with the passage of time, the field has not only remained vigilant, but also matured considerably. The Museum of Modern Art… Full Review

The fall issue of Aesthetics, the newsletter of the American Society for Aesthetics, brought an article by Saul Fisher called "Analytic Philosophy of Architecture: A Course." Quickly the introductory discussion proceeded to the question: "Why the Philosophy of Architecture?" That question was narrowed: "Why an Analytic Philosophy of Architecture?" Architects in recent years have of course shown quite an extraordinary interest in philosophy. But the analytic philosopher of architecture apparently cannot count on such interest. And yet, the author insisted, professional architects "should take note of what analytic philosophers are saying." Should they? Professor Fisher's answer: "The price of… Full Review