Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Pierrot and His World: Art, Theatricality, and the Marketplace in France, 1697–1945, Marika Takanishi Knowles investigates how art, theater, and commerce converge through a shared aesthetic of performance and surface display, enabling the negotiation of social identities. According to Knowles, a distinct dynamic emerges at the tail end of the seventeenth century, a “marketplace of theatricality as a form of social address” (2). The figure of Pierrot crystallizes this dynamic over the two and a half centuries covered by the book, a continuity all the more striking in this figure’s adaptability to shifting variables across time and historical… Full Review

Alice Tilche’s Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age is an anthropological study of museums and religious conversion movements as disciplinary techniques and resources that variously shape the lives of subjects amidst ongoing conditions of marginalization and dispossession in an Indigenously inhabited region in contemporary India. Drawn from research conducted over 2005–2017 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, home to approximately 8.9 million subjects who self-identify as Adivasi and/or Tribal, the book focuses on the Chhota Udaipur district, where Rathava Adivasis constitute the dominant Tribal community. Here, Tilche tracks how Indian discourses of Indigeneity articulated by non-Adivasi… Full Review

On the east choir screen of Bamberg Cathedral, sculpted pairs of men are framed by carved arches. Though their bodies twist and their garments whirl with heavy pleats, the pairs always manage to face each other. Identified as the apostles on the south side of the choir screen and their Old Testament forebears, the prophets, on the north side, these sculpted men seem to be locked in eternal conversations, suggested by both their hand gestures and their accompanying banderoles. Amongst these twenty-four figures, however, one pair is shown with gently parted lips, an additional detail to suggest they are speaking. … Full Review

Amber Musser’s Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined is a shadow without an originary object—a sourceless cacophony. Musser’s two previous monographs— Sensational Flesh (2014) and Sensual Excess (2018)—established her as a preeminent thinker of and against dialectics: in her oeuvre, she makes it clear how this structure of thinking moves relentlessly forward and also produces, in its movement, a linearization of logic and sense that conforms to (and ultimately produces) a liberal humanist version of subjectivity. Between Shadows and Noise builds on her previous studies both formally and argumentatively. The monograph investigates a series of works that… Full Review

In a world dominated by climate crisis, trees matter. Gregory Bryda’s The Trees of the Cross: Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany lends historical perspective to our understanding of trees and what they mean to humanity. With a focus on wood as artistic material and medium in late medieval Germany, Bryda explains the polyvalency of arboreal imagery, sharing with us its secret cross-referencing language. Reflecting on the recursive relationship between nature and the Church prior to the Reformation, the author investigates how it was mediated by the wood of the cross, both depicted and… Full Review

In the last chapter of her brilliant book Each One Another: The Self in Contemporary Art, Rachel Haidu quotes at length Yvonne Rainer’s description of her desire to “render the shards of her own life” and incorporate “the new content” of personal feelings, which the choreographer saw as no less than markers of the uniqueness of a human being, into her work beginning in the early 1970s. Rainer elaborates, “On the one hand, this mindset can be characterized as a refusal of narrative and fixed meanings and a distrust of the “telling” and shaping strategies of fiction and history… Full Review

Jerrilynn Dodds’s Visual Histories from Medieval Iberia: Arts and Ambivalence makes a significant contribution to the study of medieval Iberian artistic practices, offering a nuanced reassessment of visual culture in a transcultural context. The book’s primary objective is to explore the fluid artistic interactions between Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth to fourteenth centuries, rejecting rigid historiographical frameworks that impose artificial divisions between these groups. Instead, Dodds proposes an interpretive model grounded in ambivalence, recognizing the complex and often contradictory meanings embedded in artistic production that were simultaneously context-specific and enmeshed in global political and social… Full Review

As the title suggests, Is Art History? Selected Writings collects a representative array of academic articles, catalog essays, lectures, and reviews by the art historian Svetlana Alpers on a variety of topics well beyond her transformative contributions to the study of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Much to the credit of this edited collection, it compellingly demonstrates how her work on Dutch topics was part of a systematic reappraisal of art historical methodology with implications for early-modern painters from Diego Velázquez and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to Jean-Simeon Chardin, as well as modern and contemporary artists such as Bradley Walker Tomlin, Catherine Murphy… Full Review

The objects of Mesoamerican art history are often asked to carry a heavy burden. Having survived any number of inhospitable contexts—the iconoclasm that supported Spanish imperial expansion, imperfect archival preservation, conditions of exchange that left works vulnerable, and other troubles besides—artworks gain a new status in Mesoamerican art history as exemplars of tradition, interpreted as representatives that meaningfully stand in for entire classes of objects now lost simply because they are the works that are known to scholarship. But what if these objects are less emblematic than we think they are—or what if they are best suited to speak only… Full Review

The tension between Indigenous sovereignty and the US government’s propaganda machinery during the Cold War is at the heart of Jessica Horton’s Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War. Exploring how Indigenous artists engaged with the international exhibition circuit, Horton argues that displays of their work functioned as sites of both cultural erasure and subversion, wherein artists mobilized Indigenous epistemologies and iconographies to assert political and ecological sovereignty. By foregrounding the interrelation between Cold War aesthetic strategies and Indigenous diplomatic practices, Horton aligns with recent scholarship working to decolonize the art history of the Cold… Full Review