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

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William Breazeale and Victoria Sancho Lobis
Exh. cat. San Diego: University of San Diego, 2013. 47 pp.; 23 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Paper (9780976085461)
Exhibition schedule: Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, October 20, 2013–January 26, 2014; Robert and Karen Hoehn Family Galleries, University of San Diego, San Diego, February 21–May 25, 2014
Toward the end of their introduction to the catalogue that accompanied Passion and Virtuosity: Hendrik Goltzius and the Art of Engraving, curators William Breazeale and Victoria Sancho Lobis quote what is certainly the single most incisive sentence in the whole of the Goltzius literature, first framed in Karel van Mander’s 1604 Het Schilder-Boek: “All these things . . . prove that Goltzius is a rare Proteus or Vertumnus in art, because he can transform himself to all forms of working methods” (9). With the Passion and Virtuosity exhibition and catalogue Breazeale and Sancho Lobis aim to illuminate “all… Full Review
February 5, 2015
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Carol S. Eliel
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Prestel, 2014. 64 pp.; 65 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9783791353852)
Exhibition schedule: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, March 30–June 29, 2014; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, September 26, 2014–January 4, 2015
Helen Pashgian’s environmental installation Untitled (2012–13), recently displayed in the Art of the Americas Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), consists of a row of twelve, eight-foot-high double columns at roughly ten-foot intervals. Fabricated from thin sheets of molded colorless acrylic with a uniform matte finish, the columns glow peacefully in the dark, black-walled gallery. Upon entering, the visitor needs a moment of adjustment, both for the eyes and the mind. The first impression is one of gentle perplexity: why are these columns arranged in a row and what are the glimmering and gleaming light phenomena… Full Review
January 22, 2015
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UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum
Los Angeles:
Exhibition schedule: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, January 25–May 18, 2014
“Parisiennes . . . form an aristocracy among the women of the world,” states the writer and fashion enthusiast Octave Uzanne in the introduction to his 1894 book, La Femme à Paris, nos contemporaines ([The Women of Paris: Our Contemporaries] Paris: Ancienne maison Quantin, 1894, 5; my translation). In this volume, Uzanne assembled a feminine taxonomy describing the city’s residents, ranging from “great ladies” to the working classes. A conservative aesthete who entreated the modern bourgeoisie to revive eighteenth-century aristocratic graces, Uzanne articulated prevailing cultural anxieties about women, who had gained some freedoms by the 1880s and… Full Review
January 15, 2015
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Exhibition schedule: Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, April 4–August 11, 2014
Any time you have a chance to see a photography exhibition drawn from the collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, take it. These shows are few and far between: the last one opened eight years ago, when curator Gloria Williams Sander acknowledged the full idiosyncratic range of the department with her remarkable exhibition, The Collectible Moment (2006–7). Even a small glimpse of the collection affords the rare chance for a trip to the 1960s and 1970s, the moment just before big business gripped Los Angeles culture by the throat. It was a time when the contemporary mandate for… Full Review
January 8, 2015
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Hyunsoo Woo, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 352 pp. Paper $45.00 (9780300204124)
Exhibition schedule; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, March 2–May 26, 2014; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, June 29–September 28, 2014; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 30, 2014–January 11, 2015
In the spring of 2014, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910. There was great anticipation for this major exhibition of Korean art as it followed two others the previous year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Silla: Korea’s Golden Kingdom, 2013–14) and at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (In Grand Style: Celebrations in Korean Art During the Joseon Dynasty, 2013–14). Treasures from Korea will travel from Philadelphia, first to Los Angeles, and then Houston, yet problems of transportation and sensibility to light mean… Full Review
January 8, 2015
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Sabine Breitwieser, Laura Hoptman, Michael Darling, Jeffrey Grove, and Lisa Lee
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013. 334 pp.; 320 ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780870708862)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 23, 2013–March 10, 2014; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, April 12–August 3, 2014; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, September 14, 2014–January 4, 2015
Isa Genzken: Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) is a visually cacophonous experience. Located on the second-floor galleries, the show takes up most of the surface space (save for a small room of Alexander Calder’s geometrically shaped mobiles just steps from the elevator). The exhibition greets viewers with massive, brightly painted blue walls that separate to reveal two opposing doorways cut by an interior hallway: the right side is a black wall with white didactic text; the left is a yellow wall inset by a large-scale reproduction of a photograph of the American comedian, pantomime, and 1930s… Full Review
January 2, 2015
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Sabine Breitwieser, Laura Hoptman, Michael Darling, Jeffrey Grove, and Lisa Lee
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013. 334 pp.; 320 ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780870708862)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 23, 2013–March 10, 2014; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, April 12–August 3, 2014; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, September 14, 2014–January 4, 2015
Curated by Sabine Breitwieser, Michael Darling, Jeffrey Grove, and Laura Hoptman, Isa Genzken: Retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States to showcase the work of this formally innovative and ethically provocative German artist. The show spans a broad range of Genzken’s material practices—among them steel and concrete sculpture, easel (spray) painting, x-ray, assemblage, and video—and representational concerns, from high-tech precision formalism to the impact of consumer culture in an era rife with war and terror. The curators unify Genzken’s diverse oeuvre by inviting the viewer to perceive it through the… Full Review
January 2, 2015
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Olaf Peters, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Prestel, 2014. 320 pp.; 140 color ills.; 180 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783791353678)
Exhibition schedule: Neue Galerie, New York, March 13–September 1, 2014
Nazi officials confiscated more than twenty-one thousand works of art from German public collections during the infamous “degenerate art” action of 1937–39. Nearly six hundred of these stolen works appeared in the hastily organized propaganda exhibition, Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), which opened in Munich on July 19, 1937. The exhibition drew an estimated two million visitors to the cramped and shabby galleries of the Munich Archaeological Institute, and it traveled, in modified form, to eleven cities throughout Germany and Austria between 1937 and 1941. Nearly eight decades later, the Nazi attack on modern art continues to draw crowds. In a… Full Review
December 17, 2014
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Hilliard T. Goldfarb, ed.
Exh. cat. Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2013. 240 pp.; 200 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300197921)
Exhibition schedule: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, October 12, 2013–January 19, 2014; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, February 15–May 11, 2014 (under the title Venice: The Golden Age of Art and Music)
Splendore a Venezia: Art and Music from the Renaissance to Baroque in Venice at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts included 120 works of art, music manuscripts, and musical instruments as a means to explore the connections between music and art in the Serenissima between 1488 and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. Curator Hilliard T. Goldfarb states the premise of the exhibition in the catalogue: “the remarkable interface of these forms of artistic expression that rose to such extraordinary and influential creative heights during the period . . . have not been previously explored in a single… Full Review
December 17, 2014
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Timothy Anglin Burgard, Steven A. Nash, and Emma Acker
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2013. 256 pp.; 200 color ills.; 15 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300190786)
Exhibition schedule: de Young Museum, San Francisco, June 22–September 29, 2013; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, October 26, 2013–February16, 2014
Exhibition schedule: College of Marin Fine Arts Gallery, Kentfield, CA, September 30–November 14, 2013; Natalie and James Thompson Gallery, San Jose State University, San Jose, April 15–May 17, 2014; Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, DC, November 8–December 14, 2014; Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, June 6–August 23, 2015; Montana Museum of Art and Culture, University of Montana, Missoula, September 24–December 12, 2015
Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1922, Richard Diebenkorn grew up in San Francisco, and went on to attend Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. After serving in the Marines between 1943 and 1945, Diebenkorn returned to the Bay Area and enrolled for a semester on the GI Bill at the San Francisco Art Institute (then the California School of Fine Arts) where he would become an instructor from 1947 to 1950, while living in Sausalito. After a few years elsewhere, by 1953 Diebenkorn, his wife, Phyllis, and their children arrived in Berkeley. Perhaps because of this biography as… Full Review
December 17, 2014
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