MixedArtNewsTruer words may never have been written about Stettheimer, who, despite being an integral part of the New York art scene during the first half of the 20th century, doesn’t rank anymore among that era’s most famous artists ... If anything, Bloemink’s biography goes to show that Stettheimer may have been more well-connected than most artists of the era ... There’s also the issue of Stettheimer’s class, which is more often than not dealt with uncritically ... It can be difficult to square Stettheimer’s progressivism with how much her privilege protected her ... Perhaps Stettheimer would have accepted all this credit, some of it undue; perhaps not. There’s a tendency to ascribe unsubstantiated views to Stettheimer, and Bloemink sticks to the facts of Stettheimer’s life and art.
Barnaby Phillips
PositiveArt NewsThe story Phillips tells is one we’ve heard before ... But rarely have books like Loot focused so in-depth on the perspectives of Africans. As Loot makes clear, whether in the form of Nollywood films or oral histories handed down across generations, Nigerians have had a lot to say about the Benin Bronzes ... [a] stylish tome ... One of Phillips’s few missteps comes early on, when he makes the mistake of...centering Europe, opening [a] section in 1486 with the first contact between Benin and Portuguese explorers. But Phillips quickly recovers by doing something most writers have not: he paints a touching portrait of the kingdom and the people who inhabited it ... It is easy to lapse into ire while writing of these events. Phillips does not. He attempts as much as possible to remain a neutral interlocutor ... In one thrilling stretch, Phillips attempts to plumb the psychologies of Europeans who still own Benin Bronzes ... Gradually, however, Europeans are releasing their grasp on the Benin Bronzes—and it’s possible that a book like Loot could offer some readers the context needed to get behind Phillips’s cause.
