Browse Recent Book Reviews

A picture of flickering bamboo leaves in a slick Shanghai magazine is carefully inscribed in Chinese characters as a “painting album” (huaben) and is impressed with an artist’s seal—not of a brush-and-ink painter, but of the photographer of the plant. A short story features a narrator who spots an earthen mound from a train window and imagines an Egyptian-style mummy of a royal concubine entombed within emerging to haunt the streets of Shanghai. A painting entitled Ruci Shanghai (Such is Shanghai) shows the city to be a montage of transparent, ghostly visages and body parts: eyebrows, lips, and… Full Review

“The most important thing is to have an impact on people,” said Kaywin Feldman to the Washington Post’s Peggy McGlone for an article in January 2019 about her historic appointment as the first female director of the august National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In an era of political upheaval, climate change, demographic shifts, technological takeover, and economic uncertainty, forward-thinking museum leaders like Feldman are reconsidering what counts as success. Numbers of visitors, members, acquisitions, square feet, exhibitions, programs, publications, and social media followers have limited significance unless a museum is working intentionally to make a meaningful impact… Full Review

In 1967, the first pages of the publication La Raza were printed in the basement of the Church of the Epiphany, in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, under the encouragement of Father John Luce, an Episcopalian priest who supported the Chicano Civil Rights Movement (also known as El Movimiento). Over the next ten years and the course of four dozen issues, the newspaper chronicled El Movimiento, expanding into a magazine in the process. By 1977, conflict, political repression, and exhaustion had caused the movement to wane, and La Raza ceased publication. Throughout that time, an archive of nearly twenty-five thousand… Full Review

To say that arts of the Qajar dynasty (r. 1779–1925) are, without a doubt, en vogue in recent exhibition circuits is not an overstatement. In the last few years alone, one could see any number of shows featuring these Iranian imperial arts, ranging from The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past (NYU’s Institute for Study of the Ancient World, New York), Qajar Women: Images of Women in 19th-Century Iran (Museum of Islamic Art, Doha), and The Prince and the Shah: Royal Portraits from Qajar Iran (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC) to the… Full Review

Milette Gaifman’s The Art of Libation in Classical Athens focuses on the ritual practice of offering liquids, commonly depicted on Athenian vases. Depictions of Greek animal sacrifice have been the focus of several research projects, broaching the topic from the textual and pictorial sources. The less prominent libation rituals have been approached in the study of visual culture only for specific cases, e.g., deities offering libations. With her study, Gaifman aims to “explore . . . the visual potency” (4) of libation scenes by focusing on the rich material of fifth-century BCE Athens, especially on painted vases. The understanding of… Full Review

Can sex be a muse, a creative stimulus for art? This question forms the basis of James Grantham Turner’s evocative Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity, a book that examines the erotic revolution that swept across the Italian art world between 1500 and 1563. The leaders of this movement are a group of well-known artists, writers, and patrons who sought pleasure in variety, delighted in matters of the flesh, and broke traditional boundaries for the sake of novelty. Rather than the loyal bonds of marriage, this book is dedicated to the exciting thrill of concupiscent love or sexual desire… Full Review

The British Library is home to one of the world’s most important collections of manuscripts from Southeast Asia. Buddhism Illuminated focuses on the library’s holdings from the Buddhist traditions of mainland Southeast Asia, particularly in the area that is today Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. The book presents nearly two hundred high-quality reproductions from this deep and varied collection and describes Buddhist teachings, values, and practices in the region. This book is a significant landmark in Southeast Asian Buddhist manuscript studies. Its reproductions make it an essential reference source for scholars and, with its plain-spoken text, a rich and engaging overview… Full Review

Fakes, pastiches, deceptive restorations, and outright forgeries have been a persistent problem in the study of art and antiquities since the Renaissance. Understandably, few museums are willing to release the number of such false pieces in their collections, but conservative estimates have long suggested 40 percent of works in museums are not what they claim to be. However, recent investigation at San Francisco’s Mexican Museum, for example, have shown some institutions—and some collections within them—have significantly higher statistics. While the average museumgoer may give little thought to the authenticity of what is on view, the polluting influence of fraudulent… Full Review

From the middle of the eighteenth century through the 1830s, the brick row house became one of the most common urban building forms in the British Atlantic world. Artisan builders erected thousands of these rows of classically proportioned and ornamented town houses in the new streets, squares, and crescents of expanding cities as well as in smaller market and port towns in Great Britain, Ireland, and America. Built for a speculative market, town houses with broad frontages and elaborate ornamental details were designed to attract an elite aristocratic and gentry clientele. Dwellings of narrower widths and fewer embellishments were constructed… Full Review

In 2016, the Metropolitan Museum of Art marked the centennial of its Department of Prints (later the Department of Prints and Photographs and today the Department of Drawings and Prints) with an exhibition and publication celebrating the museum’s first two print curators, William M. Ivins (1881–1961) and A. Hyatt Mayor (1901–1980). Familiar to print specialists for their respective authorship of the seminal studies Prints and Visual Communication (1953) and Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures (1971), Ivins and Mayor spent a combined fifty years developing the Met’s initial print holdings of a few thousand works into a… Full Review