It is unusual to find a work on African art that actually deals with art history – the evolution of visual forms over time and their relationship to meaning. Monica Blackmun Visonà's book accomplishes this with devotion and skill. She provides students and researchers with a vivid picture of her own research, explaining both its constraints and its accomplishments. Her book will be useful in courses on methodology that include a section on non-Western research, since the first two chapters take on luminaries such as Gombrich and Grabar and also seek to define the various current approaches to the understanding of African art: archaeology, linguistics, history, anthropology, and visual studies.

Visonà shows her strengths with an eye-opening discussion of an architectural postcard from the colonial era and the carved post and figures found in it. Her discussion of this card leads into an exploration of the existence and meaning of carved poles in Lagoon art and their presence in a First World War monument built at Dimbokro to honor the riflemen from the lands between the N'Zi and Comoe rivers who had died ‘pour la France’. One of the virtues of this book is that the author brings so many of the discussions up to the present by tracing the evolution of ‘traditional’ forms in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. This provides us with a marvelous sense of history. Its importance is particularly evident in the chapter entitled ‘Lagoon Artists in a Global Context’ in which Visonà forcefully shows the reader how an uninformed interpretation of a life-size female figure by the Lagoon artist, Emile Guebehi, results in a completely misleading display of the piece at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College. In this book, the reader glimpses how the art market operates, for when Guebehi's nude woman is deprived of its unwarranted ‘theoretical’ and ‘postcolonial’ discourse, its value plummets. The fact that Visonà has provided precious, African documentation for what will eventually become a major landmark of Lagoon art carries (as yet) no weight. On this art historical territory Visonà does a wonderful job.

And yet, within this elegant discussion of the changes set in motion by the evangelist William Wade Harris and the efforts of Catholics to document Akye culture and introduce Catholicism, one longs to hear the voice of those who participated in these events. Harrists are not in short supply, and it might have been possible to make both the changes in Lagoon culture and the understanding of its arts more immediate to the reader through a judicious use of first hand statements. It is here that Visonà's lack of a local language intervenes, placing her always in the position of the erudite observer rather than imaginatively conveying the spoken words of her sources. Here I would not fault Visonà, so much as our own art historical training which excludes the imagination, while obsessively making sure that the researcher has carried out each task ‘correctly’ and with due attention to the accepted ‘ethical’ standards of our discipline. This may make for politically correct research at the expense of deep content and emotion – the actual subject of all successful art. In Visonà's discussion of divinatory objects, for example, one finds a traditional art historical discussion of aesthetics with named artists – the ‘Master of the Rounded Volumes’, but a less satisfactory explanation of these sculptures' ability to negotiate with the other world.

Wyatt McGaffey has written movingly of the interchange between ritual object and human ruler, and the situations in Kongo where if necessary one could replace the other and those lower in the social hierarchy obeyed both indiscriminately. Visonà's chapter on Age-Set festivals contains a photograph she took of two war captains seated on mortars in the Akye region. The two men are adorned with huge fiber collars covered with a thick crust of blood, effectively transforming them into ritual objects and fusing ritual object and person. One longs for a commentary that would note this fusion of object and human and explain why this was necessary for battle, whether spiritual or material. In Kongo art, ritual object and human are separate but interchangeable; here the men wearing a shroud of sacrificial blood seem to go far towards fusing the two genres. What drives this meshing of categories? The text is silent. Given the difficulties Visonà describes in being permitted to see the war captains, her silence is understandable. Nevertheless, this is a significant conceptual issue that invites analysis. Perhaps we shouldn't try to understand these enigmatic figures, but I would like to. At the end of the day, one craves something beyond what this sincerely written and well thought out book can provide.

Nevertheless Constructing African Art Histories will be a useful text for teaching, and will appeal to collectors of Lagoon art. In terms of preparation for the field, a survey of the pre-existing work on Lagoon people, and the effects of colonization on the area, it is probable that Visonà's work cannot be bettered.