Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Humanities — Art & Architecture — Fine Arts

Artemisia Gentileschi is today one of the better-known painters of the Italian Baroque, thanks to a flourishing of scholarship precipitated by Mary Garrard's seminal monograph Artemisia Gentileschi (1989).  Yet much of the knowledge of the artist and her works stems from the first half of her career in Rome and Florence, when she painted in a vigorous manner derived from that of the Baroque master, Caravaggio.  Locker (Portland State Univ.) in this beautifully illustrated study aptly turns readers' attention to the "largely dismissed" paintings of Gentileschi's later periods in Venice and Naples and successfully argues for their place in solidifying the artist's achievements.  In doing so, Locker sheds new light on Gentileschi's affiliation with literary and other intellectual circles in those cities, thereby demonstrating that artistic intelligence could be gained in ways other than a formal education.  He also reveals that Gentileschi did not go unrecognized until recent times, as has generally been thought, but in fact was widely appreciated by 18th-century writers.  Although Locker's discourse is aimed at a scholarly audience, his study significantly deepens understanding of this fascinating artist and is an important contribution to the field. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

This delightful and convenient volume contributes to an overlooked area of study, being a rich and readable introduction to Venetian art and architecture during its most vital centuries.  The well-respected author achieves an admirable balance between history and art history, as well as between detail and sweep, writing text that readers of various levels of expertise will find engaging.  Beautifully illustrated and attractively designed, this thoughtful and informative, never bombastic chronicle leads to a balanced conclusion, an essay on the importance of Venetian patronage to the accomplishments of its artists.  The organization is chronological, with the first half devoted to the 15th century (e.g., churches, tombs, freestanding sculpture, altarpieces, confraternities, palaces, non-narrative devotional paintings, narrative devotional paintings, and portraitsmale and female) and 16th century (similarly arranged according to civic function, and within that, by artist).  The treatment of villas of the Veneto includes predecessors of Palladio.  Time lines, glossary, bibliography, and index assist readers of various levels of preparation and curiosity (though there is no pretense to full scholarly apparatus).  A valuable contribution and a model piece of art historical synthesis, the text is as well written as the project is deftly conceived.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Created during the last decade of Matisses life (1941-54), his cut-out papers represented both an outburst of creative energy and an adaptation to the artists restricted physical mobility that precluded the strenuous exertion of easel painting.  With the help of assistants, the artist used gouache-painted sheets of paper in a wide range of colors, which he then cut in multiple shapes, and had pinned in varied compositions on the walls of his studio.  The works life-affirming vitality and color reveal the artists continued drive to explore and experiment.  The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London collaborated on an exhibition of these cut-outs following the conservation ofThe Swimming Pool, created in 1952 and reinstalled after a 20-year absence from public view.  The beautifully produced catalog of this exhibition includes essays that explore Matisses innovative process, brought to life by photographs of the artist with his assistants at work in his studio as well as a generous and representative selection of high-quality color reproductions of significant milestones from a decade of cut-out projects.  Essential for art studio, history, and conservation collections. Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

Giovanni Bellini's painting ofSt. Francis in the Desert,Frick Collection, New York, dated here circa 1476-78, is the perfect subject for a detailed monograph.  An undisputed masterpiece, it is problematic in terms of subject matter, date, technique, and collecting history.  The title was given to it by a 16th-century connoisseur and turns out to be remarkably correct.  Francis has found refuge in a secluded site some distance from the citya kind of desertmeditating on Christ's Passion, bringing Christ's wounds into his own body.  Known as the stigmatization, the event was a defining one for Franciscanism.  Bellini's depiction, as explicated by the authors, involves a complex intermingling of ecstasy and sorrow.  New information is provided on manifold aspects of Venetian Renaissance painting, from patronage to paint application.  An exceptional feature is the detailed technical examination of the panel, including an analysis of the underdrawing, alterations, and the sophisticated use of the oil medium.  With its superb color plates, illuminating close-ups of painting surface, elegantly written essays, and impeccable notes, the book is a model of how to explore an outstanding work of art, demonstrated here with resounding success.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

The Tate Modern's new catalogue on Kazimir Malevich should definitely be purchased by colleges and universities, as well as lending libraries with audiences interested in modern art history.  It is a well-crafted study in the traditional monographic sense, featuring surprisingly detailed chronologies, groundbreaking new research, and exquisite reproductions of rarely featured works by Malevich.  Including several essays by major Malevich scholars, the volume is essential reading for scholars of 20th century aestheticsbut it is also the perfect companion to undergraduate research forays.  The catalogue emerged as a companion to a much-publicized Tate exhibition that garnered attention for curatorial feats such as a partial restaging of the celebrated 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915.  As a centennial exhibition honoring the emergence of the avant-garde movement suprematism 100 years ago, the Tate show and catalogue are appropriately monumental in ambition.  The fresh research here fundamentally alters the field of Malevich studies.Summing Up: Essential. Students of all levels and above.

Addressing the reconceptualization of space in 17th-century Europe and its attendant global consequences, this collection of 37 essays seems at times as vast as the reformulation it aims to explain: namely the shift from a universe understood as finite to one conceived as continuous and homogenousan unlimited recession to be mapped and analyzed mathematically.  Published on the heels of the 2014 eponymous exhibition, hosted by the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, the book brings together the work of art historians and curators, historians of science and technology, geographers, mathematicians, and theologians to consider 11 themes, ranging from cartographic innovations, maritime navigation, and commerce and globalization to military architecture and engineering, surveying instruments, and land reclamationtypically over and against new developments in the representation of landscapes.  Focusing on the Netherlands (Flanders and the United Provinces), the essays are highly accessible, usefully advancing new arguments while also introducing much larger areas of scholarship.  The bibliographic information is wonderful, and the illustrations are fascinating.  The book is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship that should benefit a wide range of readers, within and far beyond art history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through researchers.

A museum without a curator for works on paper puts on an exhibition of drawings, most of which are borrowed from regional private collections and many of which were acquired in the last decade or so.  From this seemingly unpromising venture comes a visual feast of a catalogue that is a joy to browse and read.  Chronologically, most of the 100-plus works belong to the 19th and early 20th centuries; geographically, the bulk of them are French; however, interesting Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, German, and British examples are included.  The works by well-known artists are often quite choice.  The entries are little jewels.  Exceedingly beautiful works represent many little-known artists, including Simeon Solomon, Albert Anker, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, Rudolf von Alt, François-Louis Français, François-Marius Granet, and Ernest Biéler.  Both the history of art and the history of collecting are well served by this exemplary catalogue, which both opens up and deepens readers' knowledge.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers.

In this smart, handsomely produced book, Freund (Texas Christian Univ.) adeptly explores the intersections of self-presentation, aesthetics, politics, and the market in revolutionary France.  The events of 1789 not only toppled the Bourbon monarchy but also necessitated a related transformationthe refashioning of subjects into citizens, with portraiture shouldering a disproportionate share of the representations role under the new regime.  Portraits were central because, in Freunds words, they addressed "how to make new people for the new France."  After an opening chapter that probes this basic demand in relation to aesthetic ideals of transparency and market conditions, the author provides a series of case studies structured thematically around five modes of revolutionary portraiture: depictions of members of the National Assembly (17891791), National Guard portraits (17891792), the constraints of the presence of women after the Terror (c. 1796), the use of nature in portraits from the late 1790s, and the role of family portraits between 1795 and 1801.  The books importance, however, extends well beyond the 1790s.  It is a model for thinking about politics and market forces together and ultimately contributes to what a modern sense of self entails.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty.

The prosperity of Amsterdam in the golden age developed from global mercantile pursuits, and fostered a thriving community of artists who produced history paintings for the walls of the private houses of art lovers and public buildings on subjects from the bible, literature, and ancient and modern events.  The levels of artistic productionfrom the top, middle, and lower segmentsreflect innovation, reputation, and quality in pricing.  In evaluating this material, Sluijter (Univ. of Amsterdam) incorporates archival records, theoretical concerns, and clusters of association through networks of neighborhood, patronage, and religion.  During his first 20 years in Amsterdam, Rembrandt was immensely ambitious and successful, as he created sensational, highly priced paintings.  Yet he had stiff competition from a number of artists, including his own pupils.  Many of these less familiar competitors are surprisingly good.  At all levels, artists seem to be looking over each others easels, appropriating and varying others inventions, or departing from them in order to present distinctive alternatives.  With Rembrandt, such reception seems particularly intense, as his competitors had to find ways of differentiating their art from his.  This richly illustrated study is essential for students of Dutch art and a methodological model for other areas.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire coined the name "orphism" in 1912 to describe the post-cubist and post-fauvist painting experiments being pursued in Paris by a number of his friends.  Most prominently, orphism referred to a pair of collaborating artists who also happened to be husband and wife, Robert and Sonia Delaunay.  Resisting Abstraction by Hughes emerges at the perfect junctureat a moment when new scholarly vigor is being exerted upon the question of pure abstraction or non-objective painting in France just before WW Ibut also at a time when abstraction itself appeals so strikingly to contemporary digitized and mediated lives on a number of levels.  Beyond that attraction, this book is one of the few available theoretical research studies on Robert Delaunay, which makes its acquisition all the more crucial.  The dearth of literature on the Delaunays is surprising, given their evident historical and aesthetic importance, and Hughes perhaps sought to rectify this with a manuscript that reads more like a series of intriguing essays than a plodding monograph or an archival exhibition catalogue.  In Hughes's ambitious and provocative lens, Robert Delaunay emerges as the missing link not just in the history of abstraction, but in the history of nearly all avant-gardes after orphism. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

This catalogue for a groundbreaking exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain is a substantial contribution to readers' understanding of art in Britain and a magnificent publication in its own right.  This is the sort of book Yale does very well, and its production values are excellent.  The illustrations, drawn from obscure and some familiar sources, are visually spectacular.  The cover image, a 7-foot-high majolica elephant, sets the tone of the book, indicating that this is no dry survey.  However, the full range of Victorian sculpture is represented, from portraits to mythological subjects, public statues to intimate cameos, and figures and animals in all manner of materials.  A chapter devoted to display is particularly rich, incorporating photographs, prints, and popular magazines.  There is even a coverlet with appliqué silhouettes of sculptures, suggesting the range of ways sculpture was experienced in Victorian Britain.  The final chapter, "Craft and Art," includes examples of the "New Sculpture"a magnificent climax to the book (and the exhibition) and a reminder of how vibrant British art was at the close of the 19th century.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals/practitioners.