The Art Bulletin

December 2009, Volume XCI, Number 4

Articles

"Their Cortés and Our Cortés": Spanish Colonialism and Aztec
Representation MICHAEL SCHREFFLER

407

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spaniards attempted
to describe the practice of Aztec painting through the lens of
European art theory. Their rhetoric and iconography, which constructed
a distorted view of painting in Aztec Mexico, potentially tell us less
about that practice than it does about the anxieties and expectations
of those who produced those texts and images. As scholars have
suggested, the art of painting may have provided a site for contact
and compatibility between Aztecs and Spaniards. However, it was also a
topos that gave apt form to early modern conceptualizations of
historiographic practice and cultural difference.

Imaging Childhood in Eighteenth-Century France: Greuze's Little Girl
with a Dog EMMA BARKER

426

During the artist's lifetime, A Child Playing with a Dog was one
of Jean-Baptiste Greuze's most admired and best-known works. The
painting represents the physical, instinctual nature of the child in a
manner unprecedented in French art. The image of childhood that it
offers has close parallels in the scientific and medical discourse of
the later eighteenth century. Like many contemporary commentators,
Greuze evokes not simply the innocence of children but also their
vulnerability, above all, that of little girls. He thereby implicates
the viewer in the child's fate, both for good and ill.

Art History and the Politics of Empire: Rethinkng the Vienna School
MATTHEW RAMPLEY

446

The standard narrative of the Vienna school of art history has
cast its authors as cosmopolitan, progressive, and aesthetically
liberal. Few have focused on the interrelation of the Vienna school
and the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary. An exploration of the
school's engagement with the Hapsburg Empire's cosmopolitan ideology
of "unity in diversity" reveals that Vienna school writings reproduce
long-standing hierarchies in which Slav and Romanian art and culture
were either dismissed or regarded as backward. Contrary to commonly
held views of the Vienna school as progressive, its cosmopolitanism
frequently propounded an imperialist outlook comparable to colonial
attitudes elsewhere in Europe.

Selling the Artist: Advertising, Art, and Audience in
Nineteenth-Century Shanghai ROBERTA WUE

463

Art advertisements found in the classifieds section of the
Shanghai newspaper Shenbao offer rich documentation of the
nineteenth-century Shanghai art world's producers, products, and
prices; they are also highly revealing of the changing relationship
between artist and audience in the late Qing era. The examination of a
selection of advertisements promoting works by artists ranging from
the celebrated, such as Ren Bonian (1840-1895), to the completely
obscure reveals how Shanghai artists positioned themselves in the
marketplace, cultivated a public image, pitched their works, and
negotiated their relationship with a large and anonymous urban audience.

The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture
of Hip-Hop KRISTA THOMPSON

481

Contemporary visual expressions of hip-hop have popularized
approaches to visibility among black youth. These practices emphasize
the effect of being seen and being represented, especially the optical
effects of light and shiny reflection. Studio artists Kehinde Wiley
and Luis Gispert draw on these representational strategies of hip-hop
to refashion art history, bringing the painterly techniques that
created optical illusion in late Renaissance and Baroque painting
especially to the surface in their work. They also use hip-hop's
visual language to highlight the surface aesthetics of race, the
hypervisibility of blackness in contemporary consumer culture, and the
blinding limits of visuality.

Reviews

Thomas P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at
the Tudor Court GUY DELMARCEL

506

Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of
Civilization WENDY BELLION

508

Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin, Diplomatic Tours in the
Gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV; Laurence Chatel de Brancion,
Carmontelle's Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment
MEREDITH MARTIN

511

K. Michael Hays and Dana A. Miller, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with
the Universe, exh. cat.

JONATHAN MASSEY

515

Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the
Arts after Cage MICHELLE KUO

518

James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our
Ancient Heritage IRENE J. WINTER

522

Reviews Online

527

Index to Volume XCI, 2009

528

Recent Books in the Arts listings are now available online within
caa.reviews <http://www.caareviews.org/>

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