Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

Taylor's innovative and important book is really two volumes in one. In the first half Taylor (emer., Portland State Univ.) offers her analysis of Grant Wood's paintings and biography, doing a particularly good job of exploring the artist's emotional life using Freudian theory. Her writing is clear and a joy to read. Taylor devotes chapters to Wood's family life, his experience of fear and desire, his sexuality, and his landscapes. She provides numerous close readings of his paintings, teasing out possible hidden symbolic meanings. The analysis is supported by illustrations in color, including rarely seen work in private collections, such as a female nude painted inside a liquor cabinet titled The Evil of Drink (1937) and a defaced painting titled Sultry Night (1938). Taylor undertook extensive archival research and synthesized recent scholarship. The second half of the book is Wood's previously unpublished autobiography Return from Bohemia, which Wood wrote in 1935 in collaboration with his secretary Park Rinard. Given that primary documentation of Wood's life has been scant, this volume will prove a valuable resource.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

The Art Institute of Chicago has an outstanding collection of drawings, and 110 of the northern baroque sheets are presented in this solidly researched catalogue of a 2019-20 exhibition. Eight essays, intelligently organized by topic, examine the drawings' varied functions, meanings, and materials, with comparative illustrations. This topical approach gives each sheet a narrative and a historical context. Included are prototypes for a painting or print, biblical and historical subjects, figure models, independent landscapes, and northern artists in Italy. An essay on papermaking and watermarks explains the intricacies of production and importation of the supports. Technical examination reveals exact pigments and processes in a watercolor by Hendric Averkamp, and reinforces the artist's interest in evoking a cold atmosphere. A welcome glossary includes new technologies for analyzing works on paper. A list of illustrations would also have been welcome. Rubens and Rembrandt, and their workshops, are highlighted, but less-familiar artists (e.g., Denys Calvaert, Cornelis van Poelenburch, Jan de Bray) are represented with beautiful examples. This elegantly designed volume makes complex imagery and artifacts accessible to a broad audience.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

In this in-depth study of the writings of Paul Gauguin, Goddard (art history, Univ. of St. Andrews, Scotland) builds off her earlier work--in particular, her essay "'Following the Moon': Gauguin's Writing and the Myth of the 'Primitive,'" which was published in the exhibition catalogue Gauguin: Maker of Myth, ed. by Belinda Thomson (CH, Jun'11, 48-5492). That earlier essay focused on Gauguin's unorthodox, intentionally artless, literary strategies as a critique of the staid academic styles of art writing of his time. Savage Tales is significant as the first full-length study of a wide range of the artist's writings--including travel writing, journalism, and art criticism--and how those writings relate not only to Gauguin's visual art but also to his position within French colonial culture and his desire to project an identity as a primitive. Goddard substantiates her thesis in a thoughtful and probing, interleaved analysis of both text and image, and she is liberal in using illustrations throughout. This juxtaposition helps the reader see and understand the high degree to which Gauguin's visual and literary works are formally and rhetorically linked. The back matter includes endnotes and a list of the primary source documents consulted.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Strong published his first book, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, in 1963, four years after he became assistant keeper of London's National Portrait Gallery and four years before he was named director of the National Portrait Gallery--a position he held until 1973, when he became director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, stepping down from that post in 1987. Strong went on to publish dozens more books. But even given the numerous books and articles attesting to his expertise, one might nonetheless wonder if the art world needs another title from Strong on Elizabethan portraiture. The evidence of this volume--beautifully illustrated and richly informed by recent scholarship--supplies an emphatic affirmation. Opening with two chapters on early depictions of Elizabeth I and concluding with a chapter on The Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I (c. 1600), the book also addresses portraits of the gentry, the emblematic tradition, chivalry, and melancholia. The penultimate chapter offers a useful account of four collectors of the Elizabethan period: Robert Dudley, John Lumley, Elizabeth Talbot (Bess of Hardwick), and Henry Lee. The Elizabethan Image is an informative and lively introduction to dozens of extraordinary paintings and their reception from the 18th century to the 21st.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-88), one of the most important artists of the early Italian Renaissance, has not always enjoyed the spotlight. This impressive volume and the 2019-20 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (Washington) it catalogues reevaluate Verrocchio to find his deserved place as an unusually inventive artist who made profound contributions to the history of art. Editor Butterfield (independent scholar and Verrocchio expert) served as guest curator of the exhibition, which was originally conceived by the late Eleonora Luciano (a curator at the National Gallery). The catalogue reveals Verrocchio as experimental and innovative and a natural inspiration for a genius such as Leonardo da Vinci, his star pupil. Essays by leading scholars contextualize the artist in passionate tones. The 51 catalogue entries, moreover, demonstrate the value of collaborative study for exploring meaningful new avenues of research. Entries include not only paintings and sculptures but also drawings and new works cautiously considered for attribution. Unusually informative in areas of style, technique, and scientific analysis, the entries reveal an artist who creatively explored these same fields. With excellent reproductions and full scholarly apparatus, this volume sets a new standard for Verrocchio studies.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.