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

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Richard Benefield, Lawrence Weschler, Sarah Howgate, and David Hockney
Exh. cat. New York and San Francisco: Del Monico Books and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2013. 228 pp.; 404 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9783791353340)
Exhibition schedule: de Young Museum, San Francisco, October 26, 2013–January 20, 2014
What is an exhibition for? What can it produce? In its earliest forms in the middle of the eighteenth century—the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the exhibiting societies of London—the exhibition was a collective affair, organized among artists: a form of self-assessment and public presentation mediating between a guild of merchant craftsmen and the unstable fractions within the public that might provide a market for those artists’ work. In this anxious context the emergence of the “solo” exhibition, as curator João Ribas has argued in recent lectures, risked the appearance of careerism, conceit, and self-interest (João… Full Review
September 24, 2014
Thumbnail
Emily Ballew Neff and Kaylin H. Weber
Exh. cat. Houston and New Haven: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in association with Yale University Press, 2014. 272 pp.; 238 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300196467)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 6, 2013–January 20, 2014
Not too many years ago, the story of American art as characterized in survey courses and other summary narratives was told in an apologetic tone. How could one make a case for the importance or singularity of a nation’s output before there was a nation and in the face of a European model then characterized as a teleological progression of ever-increasing artistic greatness? John Singleton Copley’s (1738–1815) story was frequently presented as the pinnacle of colonial uncertainty and inferiority. His output was cast as British art but lesser; the epistolary reviews from Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West of A… Full Review
August 28, 2014
Thumbnail
Carter E. Foster
Exh. cat. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2013. 256 pp.; 386 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300181494)
Exhibition schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 23–October 6, 2013; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, November 17, 2013–February 16, 2014; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, March 13–June 20, 2014
At the most superficial level, Edward Hopper’s paintings represent modern American life as a series of moments oscillating along a continuum between solitude and desolation via loneliness, isolation, and alienation and back again. As the drawings, paintings, prints, and ephemera included in Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) attest, those oscillations can generate a curious sense of longing that endures well after one departs the gallery spaces. The exhibition, a version of which opened at the Whitney Museum of Art in May 2013, features a small portion of the 2,500 drawings included in the… Full Review
August 21, 2014
Thumbnail
Matthew McLendon, Anne Collins Goodyear, Dan Cameron, and Matthew Ritchie
Exh. cat. New York and Sarasota: Scala Arts Publishers in association with John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2013. 144 pp.; 100 color ills. Paper (9781857598773)
Exhibition schedule: John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, January 31–May 4, 2014
Twenty-first-century media is marked by the rise of social networks and the concomitant tools to analyze and manipulate the data produced and transmitted through those networks. The work of R. Luke DuBois has emerged within this milieu, and his explorations of mass media and popular culture amid a world of unprecedented shared cultural production and exponentially proliferating data have provided a rich body of work over a relatively short period of time. In a span of just over a decade, DuBois has produced an abundant and varied oeuvre, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art has gathered that… Full Review
August 21, 2014
Thumbnail
Arne Glimcher, Richard Tuttle, and Richard Tobin
Exh. cat. Taos: Harwood Museum of Art, 2012. 68 pp.; 42 color ills.; 22 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780615572093)
Exhibition schedule: Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, February 25–Sunday, June 17, 2012; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, January 26–May 12, 2013 (under the title Agnes Martin: The New York–Taos Connection [1947–1957]); University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, September 13–December 14, 2013
Agnes Martin: Before the Grid offered a rare opportunity to examine a selection of Martin’s artwork made before the iconic grid paintings she began around 1960. Martin destroyed much of her early work; for her, only the grids successfully embodied the authorial detachment and holistic union of painterly elements she sought in her practice. Despite the obvious curatorial challenges caused by Martin’s acts of destruction, the exhibition’s organizers, Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman, presented a visually rich selection of approximately two dozen paintings and works on paper depicting standard modernist genres—a still life, landscapes, portraits, and Surrealist abstractions—as well as… Full Review
July 24, 2014
Thumbnail
James Cahill, Sarah Handler, and Julia M. White
Exh. cat. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2013. 126 pp.; 67 color ills. Cloth $49.50 (9780971939714)
Exhibition schedule: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, September 25–December 22, 2013
Beauty Revealed is the first exhibition dedicated to Chinese paintings of meiren (beautiful women), a subject that is as complex and fraught as the English translation. Consisting of twenty-eight paintings drawn from eleven private and institutional collections in the United States, Canada, and Europe, it explores a genre of painting that appeared during the late Ming and continued in the Qing dynasty (seventeenth-to-late eighteenth century). Organized by Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White, in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley, Professor Emeritus James Cahill, the exhibition occupies the larger galleries in the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum… Full Review
July 24, 2014
Thumbnail
Susan Davidson, Megan Fontanella, Brandon Taylor, and Jeffrey Warda
Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2013. 144 pp.; 124 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780892074976)
Exhibition schedule: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, May 26–September 8, 2013; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 27, 2013–January 5, 2014
Robert Motherwell: Early Collages gathered the artist’s most important works in that medium from 1943 through 1951. Expertly directed by Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim, New York, the exhibition included many pieces that had not been shown publicly for decades and demonstrated the pivotal role that collage played in Motherwell’s early career. The artist was unique among those of his generation in creating important collages throughout his life. The first impression yielded by the exhibition was Motherwell’s immediate and intense identification with the medium as well as his willingness to experiment in it. For instance, Joy… Full Review
July 17, 2014
Thumbnail
Emma Lavigne, ed.
Exh. cat. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2013. 256 pp.; 800 color ills. Cloth €39.00 (9782844266217)
Exhibition schedule: Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 25, 2013–January 6, 2014; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, April 11–July 13, 2014; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, November 23, 2014–March 8, 2015
Upon entering Pierre Huyghe’s extraordinary retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, curated by Emma Lavigne, the visitor encounters a tall, abstract, concrete sculpture covered with marks of time and material deterioration. The sculpture, titled Mère Anatolica 1, is not by Huyghe but by Parvine Curie, who produced it in 1975 as part of an event at the College Pierre de Coubertin de Chevreuse, a junior high school that Huyghe attended. Huyghe moved the sculpture from its outside location at the school into the enclosed south gallery of the Pompidou. In the background the visitor hears sound extracts from one day… Full Review
July 10, 2014
Thumbnail
Exhibition schedule: Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, January 25–May 12, 2013
A gray day is a good day to visit the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado. Against the museum’s cast concrete walls, natural lighting, and textured cement surfaces, Still’s paintings give off a luminous glow that recalls the artist’s own statement, “You can turn the lights out. The paintings will carry their own fire” (Clyfford Still, letter to Betty Freeman, December 14, 1960; Betty Freeman Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). As a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, Still’s influence has without question helped define the history of abstract painting. The exhibition Red, Yellow, Blue (and Black and White)… Full Review
July 10, 2014
Thumbnail
Mark P. McDonald
Exh. cat. London: British Museum and Lund Humphries, 2012. 320 pp.; 350 color ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780714126807)
Exhibition schedule: British Museum, London, September 20, 2012–January 6, 2013; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, March 20–June 16, 2013 (under the title Spanish Drawings from the British Museum: Renaissance to Goya); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, August 31–November 24, 2013; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, December 14, 2013–March 9, 2014
For more than fifty years, studies of Spanish art have disproved the myth that peninsular artists did not draw. While some Spaniards drew very little—most notably El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Diego Velázquez—others drew a great deal. Francisco de Goya, for example, was a remarkably prolific draftsman. Nevertheless, curators and historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to assume that the scarcity of Spanish drawings in European collections compared to those by Italian or Dutch Old Masters evinced a national dislike for draftsmanship or, worse yet, an essential Spanish passion that did not lend itself to disegno… Full Review
July 3, 2014
Thumbnail