Smith, Olga, and Andrew Patrizio, eds. Methods for Ecocritical Art History. Manchester University Press, 2026.
The book cover shows weeds on a Paris street, a photograph by artist Jean-Luc Moulène, whose work is the subject of Olga Smith’s case study in this volume. Smith, who is one of the editors, engages with the status of the weed as a plant out of place, a threat, or an intruder. With that, she presents an apt analogy – like a weed, the ecocritical method exceeds the limits of its allocated wider fields of environmental studies. I open my review with this analogy because one could imagine the twenty-three individual essays in this book as weeds – escaped seeds from a cultivated mother plant, or, in this case, from each author’s specialist domains, growing in a new territory: ecocritical art history. They could be seen as a threat or annoyance by some, but as the editors show, they represent urgently needed new methods. Inspired by workshops organized by Patrizio and Smith in 2021 and 2022, the volume aims to identify methodological tools for art historians interested in environmental interrelations. It includes six sections: Space, Time, Bodies, Matter, Beings, and Communities, and each is introduced with a simple, jargon-free overview and a syllabus of key readings. This book is among the first to review ecocritical art historical literature, guiding students and educators to understand its basics.
In the introduction to the first chapter of this book, the editors warn that art history has largely ignored Indigenous philosophies and worldviews. They also state that one aim of ecocritical art history is to expand art history to become more globally inclusive. The focus of this volume is amplified by the editors’ mention of Ursula K. Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism, which entails ethical responsibility toward all ecosystems, not just those we inhabit. In the second chapter, the editors point out the problematic art-historical periodization systems inherited from Wölfflin and Riegl. They highlight the ideological and colonial context of such periodization and list scholars who discuss the incommensurability of Western chronologies and time systems in other-than-Western cultures. Sugata Ray, in his essay, advances a proposition for art history. Inspired by Ananda Cohen-Aponte, he suggests that art history should be equally alert to Indigenous worldviews, the vitalism of more-than-human actants and actors, and all the other ways of being in otherness, marginalized by colonialism, capitalism, and the global circulation of different objects. In many of the book’s essays, authors draw on the work of Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, highlighting the importance of including Indigenous studies in ecocritical art history.
The relationship between ecocriticism and art history is complex, and this book discusses it extensively. The editors see ecocritical art history as a new approach within the discipline, not just another turn. In an era of many theoretical turns, I found this refreshing. They highlight that art history skills are vital to understanding the current ecological crisis, which is closely linked to visuality. Hence, skills such as close looking, contextualization, and attention are crucial to reclaiming the visual ecologically. Case in point are essays that place art historical tools at the center of their ecocritical analysis. An example in the volume is Chinese art historian De-nin D. Lee’s use of art historical tools to compare two artworks in different media, places, and cultures. One shows harmony between humans and Earth, and the other shows humans as unaware of geological forces – such a comparison would be considered unsuitable in conventional art history. This approach is similar to that used by Sarah Gould in her essay. She mentions Mieke Bal’s term preposterous art history as a form of anachronism that looks to interpretative potentials that arise when artworks are displaced from their temporal context. Mark A. Cheetham also compares two dissimilar images for an ecocritical approach to aspects of weather: one by the largely forgotten inventor George Merryweather and another by J. M. W. Turner. Ecological disasters are partly the result of human activities of the past, something that natural sciences have demonstrated through clear evidence of human impact on the environment. Extending ecological concern to art history means examining visual representations of human relations to nature and other species in a non-linear way, which can broaden our understanding of their interconnectedness. Artworks are visual traces of diverse human (dis)connections with different environments and species, and at the same time, they are part of the environment as much as they are a human creation.
The volume is interdisciplinary with a posthumanist focus. Each chapter presents a case study, but two themes consistently emerge: the importance of art history within ecocriticism and the subtle yet compelling necessity for Indigenous knowledge and cultures to enrich and challenge art history. Regarding the use of art history in this context, Marsha Meskimmon, in “Trans-Scalar Ecologies: Planetary Feminist Storytelling with Art,” makes a strong claim that decolonial, ecocritical feminist methods of writing with art cannot help but be disobedient to canonical art history. She further argues that canonical art history participates in a monocultural, anthropocentric, and heteropatriarchal legacy of European colonial conquest and imperial domination. In a similar vein, Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart discuss the possibilities of an anti-extractive art history. They conclude that ecocritical art history must work to undo what artists and historians have considered “business as usual”: history is not a resource to be mined but an opportunity to find and restore absent voices. Gould, in the previously-mentioned essay, makes a similar concluding point – that the role of art should be both a document of historical environmental conditions and an active participant in them.
Art history has been slow to adopt ecocritical methods. In his contribution to the volume, titled “Ecocriticism at the Edges,” James Nisbet examines the relation between visual studies and art history, placing ecocritical art history within academia. He correctly states that despite certain fears, visual studies hasn’t overtaken art history since the 1990s, nor has art history rejected visual studies’ methods. In the spirit of interdisciplinary work, he even states that it is hard to imagine a nuanced art-historical study written today that does not incorporate ecological concerns in some way.
With that, I circle back to the first sentence of the volume, where the editors urge art history to adopt ecocritical methods. While introductions and syllabi aim to educate, the essays vary widely. Readers likely will choose thematic sections over reading the whole book. Some essays, like Greg M. Thomas’ and Jessica L. Horton’s contributions, serve as clear models. Danielle B. Joyner’s essay offers a great example of how to think ecocritically in medieval times. Early ecocritical writing in art history focused predominantly on landscape. Through new approaches, Rachael Z. DeLue and Allison K. Young write about landscapes. DeLue writes about different ways of seeing the concept of landscape, which only occurs in relationship with humans, and tries to reimagine it as a form that exceeds the human point of view. She concludes her essay with a call for radical empathy to reshape our relationship with the Earth. Similarly, Young discusses South African artists’ practices that represent landscape materially, emphasizing their reciprocal relationship with nature and gestures of mourning, healing, and imaginative regeneration. My favorite essay, by Nina Amstutz, calls for exploring art history beyond anthropocentric views and embracing multispecies studies. It analyzes diverse bowerbird works to show creative expression is present in many species, not just humans.
Many essays offer insightful case studies, though some read more like thought experiments and may overreach. Still, they can inspire ecocritical thinking. Because this volume is partly for educational use, a glossary at the end would be helpful. It includes over a dozen ecocritical terms like angloseen, geoaesthetics, planetary ecologies, and material ecocriticism. Although these are mostly explained in the essays, including a glossary would benefit students.
Returning to the weeds analogy introduced at the beginning of this review, these essays grow in the sometimes inhospitable and troubled terrain of art history. They provide careful observation and analysis of artworks while remaining aware of their ecological and environmental contexts. The ecological crises our world faces demand urgent action, and I believe it is fitting to end this review with a call to embrace radical empathy and imaginative regeneration. This book offers a pathway for students and scholars who wish to adopt ecocritical methods in their work toward reclaiming the visual ecologically.
*Cover Image: Front cover of the book.
[Cover Image Description: Book cover featuring the title, Methods for Ecocritical Art History, in white and yellow, followed by the names of the editors. The background is a gray pavement with a small green weed growing from a crack.]
Edited by Teja Šosterič, reviewed by Simone Edgar Holmes.
