Browse Recent Book Reviews

The Hudson River School painter Asher B. Durand makes a bold declaration at the end of Susan Rather’s The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era. Admiring European pictures during a tour abroad, Durand nonetheless hungers for “a sight of the signboards in the streets of New York” (242). He would have relished the stunning cover of Rather’s book, which reproduces five jaunty top hats from a nineteenth-century hatters’ signboard. This detail is an apt metaphor for The American School, which follows the careers of five painters (and a cast… Full Review

Piecing together a decade-long friendship via artworks, letters, photographs, critical reviews, interviews, and exhibition history, Kirsten Swenson’s Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York adds new scholarship to an already well-documented friendship. This book itself is an outgrowth of the 2014 exhibition organized by the Blanton Museum of Art, Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, but Swenson’s linear reading of their friendship, begun when they were both near the start of their careers, reveals that their art was transformed as much by the times as by each other. Since much of the information in … Full Review

What is Neo-Ancestralism? The phrase invokes heritage and cultural memory, but it also hints at a romanticization of the past. Demetrius L. Eudell tackles this concern in his foreword to SoulStirrers: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse, arguing that the turn to the past of the artists documented in the book does not reflect the desire for an impossible return, but rather an interest in the “dynamic invention of new cultural forms” that have emerged from Africa by way of the horrors of the Middle Passage (xii). Over the course of SoulStirrers, H. Ike Okafor-Newsum carefully nuances the… Full Review

Because of its large size relative to a human body, a building can only be known from partial encounters: the view of a particular facade, the transition from exterior to interior when crossing the threshold, the sensation of being inside one of many rooms. The mind must assemble these fragments into a multidimensional panorama to understand the structure as a whole. Even so, aspects remain unknown: the appearance of the roof from above, the thickness of a wall, the view from a clerestory window. An architectural model represents a building at a reduced scale. Because of the new dimensional… Full Review

Joseph Leo Koerner is a verbal virtuoso, a master of alluring alliteration. Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life is spangled with melodious word combinations like “devil dangles,” “seeming secrets,” “farthest fringe,” “hellish hill,” “sylph-like soul,” “shunning the sun,” “spiders spin,” and “rafters of the ruined hut.” Indeed, the title, with its catchy pairings of Bosch and Bruegel, enemy and everyday, already employs this stylistic device, signaling the wordplay within. This is a timely book. The date of publication, 2016, was the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Jheronimus Bosch. The year 2019 will be the… Full Review

In 2015 a book of edited conference papers appeared that could have a widespread and profound impact on both architectural practice and education. Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design is a persuasive introduction to research in brain science and its application to environmental design that stems from the founding of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (AANFA) in 2003, an outgrowth of the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows research program. Juhani Pallasmaa, a Finnish architect and teacher well known for his work on multiple sensory awareness and architecture as a craft, is… Full Review

Hygge is hot. According to the New York Times (December 24, 2016) and the Guardian (October 18, November 22, December 16, 2016), the Danish concept, which translates roughly to coziness, is the lifestyle trend of the moment. Hygge is so popular that it made the Oxford Dictionary’s shortlist for 2016 “word of the year.” A number of recent books outline the concept, explain its history, and instruct on how to develop it in your own home. Hygge-dedicated websites sell blankets, candles, and other comfy accoutrements designed to cultivate comfortable conviviality. It is hardly the first time a Danish lifestyle… Full Review

In Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture, Carolyn E. Tate eschews the well-trodden path of the iconography of rulership to reveal the central role of the unborn, women, gestation, birth, and regeneration in the art and ideation of the Formative-period peoples of Mesoamerica. Based on this imagery, specifically its fidelity to embryo and fetus representations, she argues that empirical observation played a prominent role in Formative-period epistemologies of gender and creation. While regeneration and renewal have long been recognized, other major themes in Mesoamerican art such as women, children, and related issues have often been overlooked or minimized. Tate addresses these… Full Review

Frances Gage’s Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art investigates the medical rationales for collecting art that are scattered throughout a well-known treatise by Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), Pope Urban VIII’s physician. Mancini’s medical thought was retardataire in the era of the Lincei, but his artistic connoisseurship was innovative. Thanks to Gage’s book, Mancini can now be appreciated for adding painters to Sandra Cavallo’s categories of “artisans of the body.” Following an introduction, biographical notes, and a chapter indicating the confluence of medicine and art in seicento Rome’s visual culture, three chapters… Full Review

Meant to serve as a pedagogical tool to “stimulate comparative contemplation about broad and basic issues in the history of art” (1), A Companion to Chinese Art, edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, is a collection of twenty-five essays by some of the leading scholars of Chinese art history, history, and literature. It adopts a thematic structure, devoting five essays to each of five general topics commonly taught within art-historical surveys—production and distribution, representation and reality, theories and terms, objects and persons, and word and image. The volume brings a much-needed interdisciplinary update to older scholarship… Full Review