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Yuka Kadoi (ed.): Arthur Upham Pope and a New Survey of Persian Art. (Studies in Persian Cultural History.) xxiv, 417 pp. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016. €146. ISBN 978 90 04 30990 6.
Kadoi's edited volume, which gauges the impact of American Orientalist Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969) on the fields of Iranian art, architecture and archaeology, joins an ever-expanding literature on the historiography of Islamic art and architecture. Previous studies of Pope's wide-ranging projects, inside and outside Iran, have similarly measured their effects on the emergence, formation and development of the interlinked fields of art, architecture and archaeology through their different contexts – in the field, the academy, the museum – and means of dissemination – various forms of publication and exhibition – as well as their modes and points of intersection with the realms of commerce and politics (see the essays by Barry D. Wood, Kishwar Rizvi, and Talinn Grigor in Kadoi's introductory bibliography, pp. 10–12). Such studies added necessary critical perspectives to earlier publications that gathered materials on Pope's biography, as well as that of Phyllis Ackerman, Pope's crucial partner in professional and personal life (Jay Gluck and Noël Siver (eds), Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope & Phyllis Ackerman (Ashiya, Japan, and Costa Mesa, CA: SoPA and Mazda Publishers, 1996). Pope was hailed the “P.T. Barnum of Islamic art” by Stuart Cary Welch († 2008) and styled a “fancy operator at some complicated edge between scholarship, dealing and collecting” by Oleg Grabar († 2011) (p. 4). Whatever one thinks about Pope's...