CAA News Today
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — May 26, 2017
Sarah R. Cohen reads On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court by Erin Griffey. In this “meticulously researched” and “densely detailed” volume, the author argues that “early modern sovereigns, especially powerful woman such as Queen Henrietta Maria of England, projected their authority through the specific and calculated allure of their material luxuries.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Paisid Aramphongphan reviews Wade Guyton’s One Month Ago, an artist’s book featuring the transposed contents of a Tumblr blog consisting “mainly of photographs of a variety of gay kink scenes.” The reviewer is “inclined to read the book as Guyton’s rebuke to the line of criticism that positions him as basking in the limelight without making a difference in the privileged art world of abstract paintings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Ellis Dullaart discusses Confronting the Golden Age: Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting, 1680–1750 by Junko Aono. The author aims “to investigate how artists working in the waning light of the Golden Age dealt with the illustrious artistic past,” and the book “delivers important insights” and “has the potential to revive interest in and appreciation for a long-neglected period in Dutch art history.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Betsy Fahlman examines the exhibition catalogue A Place in the Sun: The Southwest Paintings of Walter Ufer and E. Martin Hennings, edited by Thomas Brent Smith. Meticulously researched and “handsomely produced,” the volume “accomplishes the authors’ intention to restore these figures as artists of exceptional talent who were engaged with the significant art and historical issues of the day.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by michaelh — May 19, 2017
Ralph Lieberman reads Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade by Rachel Cohen, “part of a Yale series of biographies entitled Jewish Lives.” In this “clear, concise, and gracefully written retelling of” Berenson’s life, the author “deals well with his contradictory attitudes and conversions from Judaism, but it is difficult to determine from her text exactly what she thinks his Jewishness meant to him.” Read the full review on caa.reviews.
Mark White discusses Jason Weems’s Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest. Weems “provides an engaging and thoughtful analysis of how the elevated vantage point helped to create the modern Midwestern landscape and, in turn, informed the region’s identity.” Through case studies, he “explores how the aerial, synoptic view of the prairie fostered changes in the perception of that landscape.” Read the full review on caa.reviews.
Gwendolyn Owns reviews the exhibition catalogue The Idea of the North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris. Organized by the Hammer Museum, the show “attempts to bring this star of Canadian art to the attention of a U.S. audience,” and “the beautifully produced catalogue . . . provides an in-depth examination of one brief period in the artist’s career” and “is a worthy addition to the literature on him.” Read the full review on caa.reviews.
John Klein reviews Matisse in the Barnes Foundation, edited by Yve-Alain Bois. The volume reproduces and catalogues “every one of the Barnes Foundation’s fifty-nine artworks by Matisse” and “goes further,” providing correspondence, “three intellectually stimulating thematic essays,” and a “wealth of historical, biographical, artistic, and historiographic information derived from scrupulous research.” Read the full review on caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by michaelh — May 12, 2017
John Hawley reviews Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece at the Morgan Library and Museum. The show provided “a rare opportunity to engage with Rembrandt’s painted Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629) and the three surviving preparatory drawings associated with it.” Despite some “flaws in conception and execution,” the exhibition offered a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for visitors.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Laura Roulet visits Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) (2015), a site-specific installation created by Allora & Calzadilla and commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation. Set in a remote cave in Puerto Rico, the project “is a post-colonial inversion and commentary on the complicated state of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations” and “a way of putting Puerto Rico on the map for serious international art travelers.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Eric Kramer reads The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876 by Elizabeth Milroy. An “authoritative and compelling portrait of how a city’s actual landscape fabric has been fashioned through a process of negotiating and representing a dominant idea about landscape’s place in American culture,” the volume builds “a more nuanced and positive image of how cities and landscapes coexist.”
Through a generous grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art in 2014, CAA provided financial support for the publication of Elizabeth Murray’s The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Maxime Durocher dicusses Zeynep Yürekli’s Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age. “Combining a study of hagiographical texts with an advanced analysis of the sixteenth-century architectural transformation of two Anatolian shrines,” the author “provides an insightful study” that “contributes to the revival of Sufi studies.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — May 05, 2017
Frederick M. Asher reads Image Problems: The Origin and Development of the Buddha’s Image in Early South Asia by Robert DeCaroli. The author “provides some remarkable insights into the conception and production of images, both Buddhist and Brahmanical, in enormously impressive ways.” The volume is an “important work, one that should shape our thinking and teaching about early South Asian images.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Marie Frank reviews The Art and Architecture of C. F. A. Voysey: English Pioneer Modernist Architect and Designer by David Cole and C. F. A. Voysey: Arts and Crafts Designer by Karen Livingstone. “Both books are handsomely produced” and “draw extensively on archival and museum collections,” making “significant contributions” to the study of Voysey, whose “resistance to easy classification may in part help explain the remarkable staying power of his work.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — April 28, 2017
Alise Tifentale reviews Anri Sala: Answer Me, an exhibition and catalogue organized by the New Museum. As the Albanian artist’s “first comprehensive survey exhibition in the United States,” the show primarily features video and sound works and “introduces Sala’s artistic strategies that often are aimed at multisensory confusion and a questioning of temporal and spatial coherence.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Nikolas Drosos reads Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, an edited collection of fifteen essays. Focusing on “the institutional structures that underpin architectural practice, theoretical discourse and its dissemination, as well as architecture’s relationship to its publics and to mass media,” the volume “reflects a greater tendency in scholarship to focus less on individual buildings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Christiana Maranci discusses Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm by Patricia Blessing. The author “emphasizes the local circumstances in which the monuments were produced” and “argues that the lack of centralized control in Anatolia led … to a diverse and dynamic tradition best understood on its own terms.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
William Sharpe examines Hélène Valance’s Nuits américaines: L’art du nocturne aux États-Unis, 1890–1917. This “much-needed history” shows “how image makers reacted to the ways in which the American night was lit, exploited, and commercialized from the turn of the twentieth-century until the U.S. entry into World War I,” often in relation to “aesthetic, racial, imperial, and economic interests.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — April 21, 2017
Evelyn Staudinger reviews Arts of the Medieval Cathedrals: Studies on Architecture, Stained Glass and Sculpture in Honor of Anne Prache, edited by Kathleen Nolan and Dany Sandron. The essays “honor the Sorbonne professor’s rich contributions to medieval art and architecture.” Covering a wide variety of topics, “the editors and authors have done a fine job celebrating Prache’s great intellectual acumen, diplomatic gifts, and warmth as a human being, while leaving behind erudite ‘memories’ and a wealth of new ideas.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Jessica Basciano examines Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879 by Martin Bressani. Viollet-le-Duc is “the nineteenth-century French architect, restorer, and theorist whose numerous and diverse activities continue to enthrall and perplex historians.” Although the “book’s complex arguments could be made clearer by offering more straightforward exposition,” “Bressani’s intellectual biography stands out in the landscape of Viollet-le-Duc studies because it offers a unified narrative based on the distinctive premise that the architect was motivated consistently by a form of pathological mourning.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Anne Monahan reads Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power by Susan E. Cahan. Framing her review with a discussion of recent police shootings of unarmed African American males and subsequent artists’ responses, Monahan presents Cahan’s “finely grained history of the New York art establishment’s attempts circa 1970 to reckon with African American representation.” Utilizing “close readings of archival documents, interviews, and secondary sources,” Cahan shows how demands by activists “conditioned the museums’ exhibition and hiring practices for decades thereafter.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — April 14, 2017
Ryan Donovan Purcell reviews Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965 by Barbara Miller Lane and Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia by James A. Jacobs. These two studies “examine the development of suburban communities through the lens of architectural history, and yield fresh insight into the origins of ubiquitous suburban housing forms.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Thijs Weststeijn reads Moving Pictures: Intra-European Trade in Images, 16th–18th Centuries, edited by Neil De Marchi and Sophie Raux, and European within Reach: Netherlandish Travellers on the Grant Tour and Beyond (1585–1750) by Gerrit Verhoeven. The two books “happily complement each other in mapping different dimensions of early modern artistic exchange, mostly from the Low Countries to Italy.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Amanda V. Gannaway examines Vernon James Knight Jr.’s Iconographic Method in New World Prehistory. Addressing a “lack of methodological rigor” in the study of the ancient Americas, the author “proposes a method for iconographic analysis.” The book is “novel not by reinvention but by taking on the daunting task of bringing relevant literature from two disciplines into dialogue with each other.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Francesco Freddolini discusses Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy, edited by Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio. The collection of ten essays marks “an important addition to the growing field of studies on the mobility and materiality of sculpture,” focusing on the “process, techniques, and technologies” that shed “light on the many decisions made by sculptors during their creative process.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Join the caa.reviews Council of Field Editors
posted by CAA — April 12, 2017
caa.reviews invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join its Council of Field Editors, which commissions reviews within an area of expertise or geographic region, for a term ending June 30, 2020. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to reviewing books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts.
The journal seeks field editors for books in the following subject areas: digital humanities; Early Modern Iberian and Colonial Latin American Art; nineteenth-century art; and Early Modern and Southern European Art. The journal also seeks a field editor for exhibitions in the Northeast. Candidates may be artists, art or design historians, critics, curators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required.
Working with the caa.reviews editor-in-chief, the editorial board, and CAA’s staff editor, each field editor selects content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and reviews manuscripts for publication. Field editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in their fields of expertise, and field editors for exhibitions should be aware of current and upcoming exhibitions (and other related projects) in their geographic regions. The Council of Field Editors meets annually at the CAA Annual Conference. Field editors must pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not currently serve on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: caa.reviews Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Deidre Thompson, CAA publications assistant. Deadline: May 1, 2017.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — March 31, 2017
Stephanie S. Dickey reads Facts and Feelings: Retracing Emotions of Artists, 1600–1800, edited by Hannelore Magnus and Katlijne Van der Stighelen. The book’s goal “is not to gauge the expression of emotion in art, but instead to plumb the emotions of artists themselves.” Interestingly, “the visual record is mostly avoided in favor of documentary sources that find artists in emotionally charged situations.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Eric Palazzo discusses Jeffrey F. Hamburger’s Script as Image, “a deeply engaging book, or rather a lengthy essay, on the ‘double page’ in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.” The author starts “by exploring the possibility of considering writing as an image,” and “his approach focuses on a new exploration of the common nature of the written word and image” in visual culture. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Arthur J. DiFuria reviews Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination by Stephanie Porras. The “well-written, beautifully produced book” brings “a supremely important aspect of Bruegel’s art” to light, offering “a carefully considered take on his notion of the Netherlandish past” and portraying him “as an erudite artist who formulated a Netherlandish antiquarian vernacular.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
John P. Bowles examines the exhibition Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, curated by Pamela McClusky and Erika Dalya Massoquoi. The show and catalogue question “how African cultural traditions circulate and influence global contemporary art,” arguing that “the artists of ‘global Africa’ have begun to address this issue, changing how we understand African art.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.Laura Weigert Reviews Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid
posted by CAA — March 27, 2017
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Work/Travail/Arbeid, performed by Rosas at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, February 26–March 6, 2016 (choreography © Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker; photograph © Laura Weigert)
caa.reviews is pleased to announce the publication of a new multimedia reviews project on the Scalar platform: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid by Laura Weigert. Weigert’s review of Work/Travail/Arbeid’s ten-day performance at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris from February 26 to March 6, 2016, is the starting point for this project, which also includes a conversation between De Keersmaeker and Weigert. The project features media explorations of the performances of Work/Travail/Arbeid at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels and Tate Modern in London. The site will present additional media following Work/Travail/Arbeid performances at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from March 29 through April 2, 2017.