Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Gaylord Torrence, ed.
New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2014. 320 pp. $65.00 (9780847844586)
Exhibition schedule: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, September 19, 2014–January 11, 2015; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 9–May 10, 2015
On the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a series of tipis situated alongside Claes Oldenburg and Coojse van Bruggen’s Shuttlecocks (1994) provides an intriguing glimpse of The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky, an exhibition curated by Gaylord Torrence, senior curator of American Indian Art at the museum. The juxtaposition between the tents and the sculpture draws attention to their design similarities while also suggesting that tipis have become objects of American kitsch, much like Oldenburg and Van Bruggen’s badminton birdie. Despite such associations, guests are invited to enter the conical structures to observe the unique… Full Review
October 15, 2015
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New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Brooklyn Museum , Brooklyn, December 12, 2014–July 12, 2015
Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time is a site-specific mural installation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Herstory Gallery, organized by Saisha M. Grayson, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. A multimedia artist known for articulating feminist and queer narratives that weave religious, mythological, and popular iconographies, Ganesh (b. 1975) was born and raised in a Hindu Indian family in Brooklyn and Queens. Her wide-ranging practice—which includes drawings, photographic digital collages, text-based works, and collaborations—draws from a vast array of canonical images and historical writings, both worshiped and vernacular, in the pursuit of an expansive and at times… Full Review
October 8, 2015
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Sonnet Stanfill, ed.
Exh. cat. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2014. 287 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9781851777761)
Exhibition schedule: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, April 5–July 27, 2014 (under the title The Glamour of Italian Fashion Since 1945); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, October 26, 2014–January 4, 2015; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, February 7–May 3, 2015; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, June 5–September 7, 2015
The appearance of lush dresses or a cute pair of kitten heels in a museum might strike the contemporary viewer as incongruous. But why is this? By now we have become accustomed to seeing design objects displayed cheek by jowl with the hidebound mediums of painting and sculpture. The intrepid museum visitor once had to seek out the designed object, which was relegated to discrete period rooms or wholly separate sections devoted to the so-called decorative arts. This separation, however, is no more. Indeed, as the recent reinstallation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of early twentieth-century modern art… Full Review
October 8, 2015
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Kenneth Lapatin, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014. 224 pp.; 98 color ills.; 21 b/w ills. Cloth (9781606064207)
Exhibition schedule: Getty Villa, Los Angeles, November 19, 2014–August 17, 2015; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, September 19, 2015–January 10, 2016; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, February 14–May 22, 2016; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, June 25–October 2, 2016
The Berthouville Treasure, discovered by a farmer in Normandy, France (ancient Gaul), in 1830, represents one of the largest and best-preserved collections of Roman silver to survive from the ancient world. The objects, most of which date to the second and third centuries CE, were found within the confines of a large sanctuary to the god Mercury, and functioned as votive objects. The treasure, on loan from the Département des Monnaies, médailles et antiques of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is on display as part of the exhibition Ancient Luxury and the Roman Silver Treasure from Berthouville at the Getty… Full Review
September 24, 2015
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Carol Solomon, Nadira Laggoune-Aklouche, Rachida Triki, and Farid Zahi
Exh. cat. Haverford: Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, 2014. 63 pp.; 19 ills. Paper $30.00 (9780615407968)
Exhibition schedule: Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, October 24–December 14, 2014
Billed as the “first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to contemporary art of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora,” Memory, Place, Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi Diaspora is the culmination of a year-long series of events and programs that took place during 2014 at Haverford College. Initiated by Visiting Associate Professor Carol Solomon, the program included an undergraduate curatorial praxis seminar (spring 2014), two Mellon-funded artists’ residencies (March 2014), an exhibition at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (fall 2014), and a fully illustrated catalogue. Solomon curated the two-month-long exhibition in collaboration with her seminar students, who… Full Review
September 17, 2015
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Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine, January 10–March 20, 2015
In K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood’s video installation New Report: Morning Edition (2005), viewers watch two female newscasters, Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), listlessly deliver news of their everyday lives. Dressed in all black, turtlenecks topped by berets, they sport the costume of revolutionaries: the Black Panthers, Patty Hearst, Che Guevara—Audrey Hepburn, in Funny Face. Otherwise covered up, one has exposed her breast, the other her crotch, to live-feed cameras. Monitors on either side of the central projection broadcast these feeds zoomed in and close-up. Neither salacious nor erotic, this full disclosure self-surveillance, this technological intimacy effectively… Full Review
August 27, 2015
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Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, August 30, 2014–January 31, 2015
“My name is Talky Tina . . . and I’m going to kill you.” In 1963, Morton Bartlett, a freelance commercial photographer based in Boston, carefully disassembled and packed up the dolls of children he had painstakingly made over the previous twenty-eight years. He wrapped these painted plaster creations in newspaper along with the assorted outfits and undergarments he had designed and tailored for them, interring everything in wooden crates in a locked cabinet in his home. There they remained, consigned to darkness for decades, together with numerous graphite drawings of children and hundreds of photographs of his creations staged… Full Review
August 20, 2015
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Dita Amory, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. 168 color ills.; 24 b/w ills.; 240 ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780300208108)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 19, 2014–March 15, 2015
Madame Cézanne was an unprecedented, likely once-in-a-lifetime exhibition that spotlighted Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his wife, Hortense Fiquet. Organized by Dita Amory, Acting Associate Curator in Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show sought to revise misconceptions, especially about the artist’s affection, or lack thereof, for his wife, and reinvigorate general and scholarly interest in this group of work. To that end, it presented twenty-four of the twenty-nine known portraits of Hortense and contextualized them with less formal graphite sketches, watercolors, and one of her few extant letters. In addition, an… Full Review
August 13, 2015
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Alejandro Vergara and Anne T. Woollett, eds.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles and Madrid: Getty Publications and Museo Nacional del Prado, 2014. 112 pp.; 88 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Paper $24.95 (9781606064306)
Exhibition schedule: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, March 25–June 29, 2014; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 14, 2014–January 11, 2015; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, February 15–May 10, 2015
Because the few grand tapestries of the early modern period that survive are frail and rarely exhibited, we forget that they were the most luxurious and prized of art forms among European elite, far costlier than painting or sculpture. So it is rare to encounter not one but four monumental Flemish tapestries in the remarkable exhibition Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The four belong to a series of twenty tapestries, known as The Triumph of the Eucharist, commissioned in the 1620s by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, Habsburg princess and Spanish… Full Review
August 6, 2015
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Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock
Exh. cat. Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2014. 212 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $55.00 (9781938922190)
Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, May 4–November 30, 2014
This exhibition and accompanying catalogue of Andrew Wyeth paintings illustrating views looking out of and through windows are the most recent examples of a sea change in scholarship on the artist. In 1977, Robert Rosenblum called Wyeth at once the most overrated and underrated artist of the twentieth century (cited in Henry Adams, “Wyeth’s World,” Smithsonian Magazine [June 2006]: 84–92). Wanda Corn has labeled the critical and academic hostility to Wyeth’s work throughout much of the second half of the twentieth century “the Wyeth curse.” In 2005, Anne Classen Knutson organized a session called “Rethinking Andrew Wyeth” at the College… Full Review
July 30, 2015
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