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

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Wolfram Koeppe
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. 304 pp.; 262 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300185027)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. October 30, 2012–January 27, 2013
Once in a while an exhibition comes along that achieves many things. It illuminates past and present, and does so by creating a viewing experience both beautiful and instructive. All the better when such an exhibition also brightens up a blind spot in the history of art. The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens achieved this. Curated by Wolfram Koeppe, Maria Kellen French Curator of European Decorative Arts, the show was a monographic investigation of father-and-son furniture makers Abraham (1711–1793) and David Roentgen (1743–1807), whose workshop in the German town… Full Review
June 6, 2013
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Elizabeth W. Easton, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven, Amsterdam, Washington, DC, and Indianapolis: Yale University Press in association with Van Gogh Museum, Phillips Collection, and Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2011. 248 pp.; 285 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300172362)
Exhibition schedule: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, October 14, 2011–January 8, 2012; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 4–May 6, 2012; Indianapolis Museum of Art, June 8–September 2, 2012
The development of photography over the course of the nineteenth century was a development of vision. For the first time, a person, via a mechanical device, could transcribe reality, freeze it, as it were, into an external, two-dimensional image. Thus, rather than providing an objective recording of reality, photography presented viewers with a new way of seeing reality. The manner in which artists utilized this new vision is the subject of Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard, an exhibition curated by Elizabeth W. Easton, Edwin Becker, Eliza Rathbone, and Ellen W. Lee. It features an impressive array of… Full Review
May 23, 2013
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Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels
Exh. cat. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2012. 604 pp.; 179 color ills.; 362 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (9780300177381)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 11, 2012–February 2, 2013; Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, March 23–June 3, 2013; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 29–September 29, 2013; Brooklyn Museum, November 8, 2013–February 2, 2014
The complicated relationship between war and photography is the subject of a massive exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Entitled War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, the exhibition includes more than 500 objects (pared down from over 2,000 initially under consideration) that range from photographs and photographic equipment to books, magazines, and albums. Produced by more than 280 photographers from 28 nations, the exhibition covers wars that occurred over six continents, beginning with the Mexican-American War in 1846 and culminating with the 2011 civil war in Libya. Yet, rather than organize this extensive material chronologically… Full Review
May 9, 2013
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Michael Knight and Joseph Z. Chang, eds.
Exh. cat. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2012. 351 pp.; 125 color ills. Paper $35.00 (9780939117642)
Exhibition schedule: Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, October 5, 2012–January 13, 2013; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 13–August 3, 2014
Chinese characters have assumed a position of supreme cultural power and authority within traditional Chinese society since their creation more than five thousand years ago, and calligraphy, the art of writing characters, is among the most ancient, venerated, and lasting Chinese art forms. Today, every child in China practices calligraphy in public schools or with private tutors. In public parks, retirees dip giant brushes (sometimes even mops) into water and write calligraphy on the ground as a means of physical exercise as well as art practice. Bookstores feature a large selection of guidebooks on calligraphy, most of them reproductions of… Full Review
April 25, 2013
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Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 15–November 4, 2012
Some sweet day, a three-week program presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the fall of 2012, featured six dance performances by contemporary choreographers, as well as interstitial installations and lively discussion sessions. (Select performances and the three response sessions streamed live on MoMA’s website. Archival videos of the performances will be made available online at a future date.) Presented in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, a challenging gallery site, the programming for Some sweet day prompted questions often triggered by performance exhibitions: How should dancers, actors, or musicians navigate the shift from black-box theaters to white-cube galleries? Can… Full Review
April 19, 2013
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C. D. Dickerson III, Anthony Sigel, and Ian Wardropper
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. 432 pp.; 437 color ills.; 35 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300185003)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 3, 2012–January 6, 2013; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, February 3–May 5, 2013
Bernini: Sculpting in Clay argues for the centrality of modeling in clay to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s total conception of sculpture (also reviewed here in caa.reviews), ranging from the placement of one or more bodies and their limbs in space, down to the treatment of folds of drapery, locks of hair, and the articulation of the elasticity of flesh—regardless of whether the intended sculptures were to be cast in bronze, carved from marble or travertine, or modeled in stucco. Bernini sought to match both the suppleness and tensile strength of his clay models, which he could, in the words of… Full Review
April 17, 2013
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College Art Association, 2013.
Exhibition schedule: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA, April 15, 2012–February 4, 2013
In his beloved book Invisible Cities (1972), fable writer Italo Calvino invents short conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan and descriptions of cities recounted by the Italian from his travels. Ten artists from across the globe have loosely translated this charming conceit in an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), curated by the museum’s Susan Cross. As with Calvino, the artists that Cross selected have reimagined cities of various scales and materials as places of growth, death, pleasure, desire, decay, and memory. To cite Calvino: “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains… Full Review
April 11, 2013
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William Wegman, Kevin Salatino, Padgett Powell, and Diana Tuite
Exh. cat. Munich and Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Prestel, 2012. 176 pp.; 220 color ills. Cloth $34.95 (9783791352275)
Exhibition schedule: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, July 13–October 21, 2012
Upon first entering the exhibition William Wegman: Hello Nature, a viewer’s eye is drawn to the title wall, which features a large-scale reproduction of a family gathered around a campfire beside a lake. The addition of paint enhances the scene so that the feet of a boy appear to grow roots, and foliage stretches the treetops toward the ceiling. For those most familiar with Wegman’s photographs of his beloved Weimaraner dogs, the introductory image is a revelation. While best known as a video artist and photographer, Wegman is also a prolific painter and draftsman, and the title wall anticipates… Full Review
April 5, 2013
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Exhibition schedule: Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, September 9, 2012–May 26, 2013
The exhibition Feminist and . . . has a provocatively short title, whose first word has been defined many ways since it was adopted from France in the late nineteenth century. How might six women artists of different generations, national origins, and ethnicities interpret the term now? The curator was Hilary Robinson, who was a professor of art theory and criticism at Carnegie Mellon University until January of this year, when she became Dean of Art and Design at Middlesex University. She has frequently written about gender issues in the visual arts. There is no catalogue. What is “feminism”… Full Review
March 28, 2013
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Lisa M. Binder, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Museum for African Art, 2010. 170 pp.; 115 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780945802563)
Exhibition schedule: Royal Ontario Museum, Ontario, Canada, October 2, 2010–January 2, 2011; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley, MA, March 30–June 26, 2011; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, September 25, 2011–January 22, 2012; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, March 18–July 29, 2012; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, September 9–December 30, 2012; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI, February 2–May 5, 2013
In 2008, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) commissioned El Anatsui’s large-scale metal wall hanging titled Rain Has No Father? The sculpture utilizes the artist’s signature bottle cap method that has recently helped him attract international attention. Anatsui’s wall hangings are constructed from thousands of used liquor bottle caps, flattened and woven together to create luminous tapestries as magnificent in their formal appeal as they are rich in cultural and historical allusion, and since its acquisition, Rain Has No Father? has become a well-publicized highlight of DAM’s permanent collection. However, somewhat controversially, the work hangs in the museum’s African gallery alongside… Full Review
March 21, 2013
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