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Historians of American art routinely tease out stylistic and thematic qualities that identify Americanness in the art they study. The Art Institute of Chicago offers seven essays that explore the 1930s as a decade of diversity, when debates and struggles over style and content made their way onto local stages and into federal work projects. The contributors unfurl complexities of the moment: competing politics and aesthetic philosophies, underdogs and power structures, disparate sources, iconography, intentions. In addition, they reveal many "uniquely American" artworks originally endorsed as inheritors of European traditions. The title's "fall" refers to economic circumstances--the stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression. Artistic directions expressed the nation's social, economic, and historical realities and multiple ideological identities. One essay examines figurative painting of the misshapen, ill-fortuned, and chaotic in American society, here understood as having affinities with Daumier, Goya, and burgeoning popular culture. Another argues that modernist art was defended as a crucial barometer of advances in US society. The author rightly foregrounds the clearly articulated writings of Stuart Davis, who deemed abstract art an agent influencing contemporary life. Produced for an international exhibition, this significant volume considers issues that resonate for contemporary scholars and public alike.

The aphorism "Don't judge a book by its cover" does not apply to this offering from the British Library. The beautifully designed cover and intricately folded dust jacket serve as the opening curtain for the opulent offering within, which is a history of decorated papers. Full-page illustrations of decorated papers are interspersed with commentary offering historical details and supplemented by current research in the field. Marks (curator of bookbindings, British Library, UK) discusses the papers in categories--e.g., "Hand-Marbled Papers," "Brocade Papers," "Block-Printed papers--exploring the technical and stylistic evolution of decoration and offering unique historical and socioeconomic context for each category. Images are accompanied by captions that include context, process, materials, and subject. Though promoted as a "sourcebook for designers," this volume is also a perfect resource for historians and preservation staff engaged in research. The book includes a moderate notes section, a glossary, suggestions for further reading and research, and a small but effective index. Invaluable for anyone interested in design, art history, history, material culture, or fine arts.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Beardsley (1872-98) created a vast number of images during his short life; he died of tuberculosis at age 26. A master of line and black-and-white contrasts, he produced work that could be decorative, biting, and provocative. Numerous books treated Beardsley's career, but this deeply researched catalogue raisonne is the most comprehensive assessment of Beardsley's art available. Zatlin (English, Morehouse College) explores Beardsley's relationship to Pre-Raphaelitism, Whistlerian aesthetics, French graphic art, and art nouveau while stressing the significance of late-Victorian attitudes toward sex and the allure of Japanese prints, subjects she has written on with authority--seeBeardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal(CH, Sep'98, 36-0114). Zatlin's approach is masterly, and the approximately 1,100 entries include provenance, scholarly references, and her own expert analyses. The excellent illustrations are grouped in "suites" (e.g.,Salome, Lysistrata, theSavoy) introduced with short essays. Zatlin gives preference to original drawings rather than published versions, so absent is the "wondrous" cover of the literary periodicalTheYellow Book. Including a full bibliography, a list of technical terms and exhibitions, and a section on Beardsley fakes, this splendid catalogue, though not devised for sustained reading, can be consulted with ease and pleasure. An indispensable resource for scholars and Beardsley enthusiasts alike.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

This is the catalogue of an exhibition designed to lay to rest Giorgio Vasari's famous dictum that Venetian artists had to conceal under the charm of coloring a lack of knowledge of how to draw. Whistler (Western art, Ashmolean Museum, UK) brings together drawings from the collections of the Ashmolean and Christ Church in Oxford and the Uffizi in Florence. Noteworthy is the range of techniques on display: soft focus studies after sculpture by Tintoretto, lively brainstorming pen sketches by Veronese and others, loose figural studies by Titian and Tintoretto, and the highly individual pen-and-wash drawings of the Tiepolo family. The Venetian affinity for landscape views is demonstrated in drawings by Campagnola, Marco Ricci, and Canaletto, and there is a startlingly grand garden view by Francesco Guardi. Entries are arranged chronologically by date of execution, beginning in the 15th century with works attributed to Giovanni Bellini and ending in the 18th century with finished drawings by Giandomenico Tiepolo. Included is an essay on the wide use of etching in Venice for both reproductive prints and illustrations in printed books. A welcome celebration of the much-neglected subject of Venetiandisegno.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Focused on the period 1515-70, this beautiful two-volume set is the latest installment in a distinguished series, "Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in France." The first volume comprises a concise introduction to French Renaissance illuminated manuscripts; 55 splendid color plates, 270 figures, and 33 comparative illustrations; and biographies of the artists and scribes who made the manuscripts, many of whom are known from documents although rarely connected to an extant book. The second volume is a scholarly catalogue of 100 manuscripts, each entry treating the manuscript's binding, collation, miniatures, text decoration, frames and borders, script, and provenance, and each also including a descriptive historical essay, discussion of the earlier scholarly literature treating the manuscript, and its history of exhibition. The mansucripts included were luxury items produced when printed books were already common, and the author rightly observes that they "enshrine" their texts in magnificence. Most were produced in Paris, many for the king or courtiers. Roughly a third of the manuscripts are private devotional books of hours, and many secular books illustrate history, poetry, or romance. This is a required resource for anyone studying or interested in French Renaissance art.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

This splendid book is the catalogue of the exhibitionSotatsu: Making Waves, on view at the Sackler Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. (through January 31, 2016). The editors, Lippit and Ulak, have chosen an impressive group of specialists for the included essays (Furuta Ryo, Nakamachi Keiko, Noguchi Takeshi, Okudaira Shunroku, and Ota Aya), which focus on Sotatsu's career: his beginnings as a painter of fans, his relationship with the calligrapher Koetsu (which produced breathtakingly beautiful scrolls), the origins of the artist's seal grass and flower paintings, and the iconography of the dynamic, large-scale screens that characterize his major work for illustrious Edo patrons. A final chapter focuses on the artist's influence in the 20th century. The magnificent screenWaves at Matsushima, painted early in 1600 and acquired in 1906 by Charles Lang Freer, is one of the highlights of the exhibition. The catalogue, with four double fold-out pages of the large-scale screens, rich with color and meticulously documented, is the state-of-the-art research on Sotatsu. With an exhaustive bibliography and an invaluable glossary, this book is essential for scholars, students, and connoisseurs of Japanese art.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

This is a beautifully written, finely illustrated chronicle of the visual representation of US technology during the second half of the 19th century (1850s-80s). According to Schulman (Illinois State Univ.), these were important decades because, as she writes in her introduction, they "saw the rapid expansion of rail and telegraph networks," the rise of corporations, and the evolution of "mechanized production." Such developments were brought into public consciousness through articles and wood engravings reproduced and published in two new publications:Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (first published in 1855) andHarper's Weekly (started in 1857). Wood engraving was favored for illustration because it reproduced with great accuracy the shadowed interiors of factories and complex machinery such as the Corliss engine, which was exhibited to great acclaim and awe at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. As Schulman demonstrates, these illustrations and paintings such as John Ferguson Weir'sForging the Shaft(1874-77, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) offered the public "a wide-ranging engagement with the question of technological systems in the nineteenth-century United States."Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students.

There is no shortage of biographies of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), but this ambitious life aims to be definitive. The first installment of a projected two-part study (with the broad titleJ. M. W. Turner: A Life in Art), the present volume considers Turner's long career through 1815. Shanes already has significant books and articles about Turner to his credit, and here he skillfully exploits the fruits of his considerable research and also draws on the wealth of recent Turner scholarship. The results are impressive. Shanes provides a methodical discussion of Turner's humble beginnings at his father's London barbershop and of his training and the recognition of his prodigious talent at the Royal Academy, where he gained early membership, lectured, and exhibited regularly. The artist's attention to cultivating influential patrons and his savvy business sense made him very wealthy; Shanes is especially good at revealing particulars of Turner's investments (and he alludes to money derived from Caribbean slavery). Analyses of individual paintings are consistently thought provoking, if not always compelling. The engaging narrative benefits from an abundance of superb color illustrations skillfully interspersed with the well-documented text. Additional material is available online. Cost notwithstanding, this biography, when complete, may be the one to have.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.