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

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Dana Miller, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012. 320 pp.; 267 color ills.; 36 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (97803000182651)
Exhibition schedule: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 3, 2012–February 3, 2013; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 29–June 2, 2013
It is tempting to consider this expansive and stunning retrospective as a two-artist exhibition. The first major examination of Jay DeFeo’s career since Constance Lewallen organized an extensive survey of the artist’s work for the Moore College of Art in 1996, Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective contains over 170 paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, and examples of jewelry and sculpture, all made by the artist over the span of almost four decades. But the DeFeo of 1952 to 1966 was one person and one kind of artist, and the DeFeo from 1970 to the time of her death at the age of… Full Review
March 14, 2013
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Marian Bisanz-Prakken
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012. 304 pp.; 225 color ills. Cloth $49.95 (9781606061114)
Exhibition schedule: Albertina Museum, Vienna, March 14–June 10, 2012 (with the title Gustav Klimt: The Drawings); J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, July 3–September 23, 2012
Halfway through the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line, viewers craned their necks back to take in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901–02). The monumental painting was reproduced some twenty feet off the ground in the museum’s lofty galleries. The installation approximated the original 1902 display in the Viennese Secession Building where Klimt and his collaborators paid homage to the composer. As one scans the work, gaunt, floating genii on the first wall give way to severe, cowering gorgons on the center panel and an enormous primate glowering dumbly out of a pile of auburn hair… Full Review
March 14, 2013
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Eva Respini
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. 264 pp.; 153 color ills.; 102 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780870708121)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 26–June 11, 2012; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, July 14–October 8, 2012; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, November 10, 2012–February 17, 2013; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, March 17–June 9, 2013
Asa Berger’s book An Anatomy of Humor divides comedy into four general functional categories: language, logic, identity, and action (Asa Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993, 6). He then further breaks the collective identity into fourteen individual types of humor that deal with character: before/after, burlesque, caricature, eccentricity, embarrassment, exposure, grotesque, imitation, impersonation, mimicry, parody, scale, stereotype, and unmasking (7). To walk through the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), curated by the Museum… Full Review
February 22, 2013
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Exhibition Schedule: Rockwell Museum of Western Art, Corning, NY, June 8–October 14, 2012
Jason Cytacki’s visually compelling cowboy paintings, on view at the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, New York, have appeal for diverse audiences: lovers of art of the American West, classic Western movie buffs, and those fascinated with Americana. The exhibition, Enduring Legend, Fragile Myth: Cowboy Paintings by Jason Cytacki, is comprised of twenty-two paintings in three related series, which are intermingled in one gallery. The first series—the toy series—is from Cytacki’s MFA thesis, and consists of six large paintings, which are based on photographs of dioramas that feature toy cowboys placed in suburban neighborhoods. The… Full Review
February 8, 2013
Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, eds.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2011. 240 pp.; 227 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780895511454)
Exhibition schedule: Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, October 16, 2011–February 26, 2012
C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, eds.
Exh. cat. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011. 432 pp.; 267 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783775730037)
Exhibition schedule: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, September 4–December 4, 2011; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, February 4–July 29, 2012
Two recent exhibitions, Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fowler Museum, and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), complicate and extend previous scholarship on the Chicano art movement, focusing in particular on the theme of artistic collectives. While previous analyses of the group Asco (such as C. Ondine Chavoya’s essay “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderberg, ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 189–208) emphasize the fact… Full Review
February 8, 2013
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Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon
Exh. cat. Los Angeles and New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in association with Prestel, 2012. 264 pp.; 270 color ills.; 197 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783791351940)
Exhibition schedule: Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, May 27–August 20, 2012; Haus der Kunst, Munich, October 12, 2012–January 20, 2013
Anyone who approaches Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), expecting to encounter the familiar collection of lush, awe-inspiring photographs of monumental Earthworks remotely situated in the American Southwest (concomitant with the usual array of drawings, models, and videos documenting these iconic projects) finds instead a hugely informative and compelling exhibition that considerably broadens her or his conception of this tendency that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organized by Phillip Kaiser, MOCA's senior curator, who has since left Los Angeles to become director… Full Review
January 10, 2013
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John Elderfield, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011. 504 pp.; 628 ills. Paper $55.00 (9780870707988)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012
Although Willem de Kooning has been a central figure in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) canon for over sixty years, he has never fit comfortably into the story of modern art it has advanced. Accordingly, in de Kooning: A Retrospective, MoMA presents de Kooning as a difficult artist whose work has long been misunderstood. Organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, the retrospective offers a new interpretation that aims to challenge many of the generally accepted ideas about de Kooning's life and work, from his initial critical reception to the significance of his controversial… Full Review
January 10, 2013
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Lynn Federle Orr and Stephen Calloway, eds.
Exh. cat. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2012. 288 pp.; 235 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781851776948)
Exhibition schedule: Victoria and Albert Museum, April 2–July 17, 2011; Musée d’Orsay, September 12, 2011–January 15, 2012; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, February 18–June 17, 2012
Guy Cogeval, Yves Badetz, Stephen Calloway, and Lynn Federle Orr
Exh. cat. Paris: Skira Flammarion and Musée d’Orsay, 2011. 224 pp.; 165 ills. Cloth €60.00 (97802081266643)
Exhibition schedule: Musée d’Orsay, September 12, 2011–January 15, 2012
The three museums that hosted The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900 appeared to be staging three different exhibitions. Curators Stephen Calloway at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Yves Badetz at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris championed the late blooming “decadent” aspect of the Aesthetic Movement that the Victorians derided, contending that it was the definitive expression of an aesthetic disposition. Calloway’s curatorial selections and catalogue essays highlighted sensuous works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and Aubrey Beardsley, among others. Unlike Badetz, however, he recreated period rooms and crowded the V&A’s exhibition galleries with… Full Review
December 19, 2012
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Phillip Prodger
Exh. cat. London and Salem, MA: Merrell Publishers in association with Peabody Essex Museum, 2011. 160 pp.; 100 ills. Cloth $39.95 (9781858945576)
Exhibition schedule: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, June 11–December 4, 2011; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, February 11–May 20, 2012; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor, July 14–October 14, 2012
Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism is an intimate exhibition. Circumscribed in both scale and subject, it is in turn satisfying and disturbing for the keyhole access and insights it offers into the life and art of two of European Surrealism’s notable American exponents during their brief, fecund, and often tempestuous creative partnership and love affair. Man Ray and Lee Miller were together in Paris from 1929 to 1932, three short years. But like a pebble that life casually skipped on the water, this particular time and place instigated ripples and reverberations for both protagonists and, this exhibition… Full Review
December 14, 2012
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Isabel Schulz, ed.
Exh. cat. Houston and New Haven: Menil Collection in association with Yale University Press, 2010. 176 pp.; 129 color ills.; 14 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300166118)
Exhibition schedule: Menil Collection, Houston, October 22, 2010–January 30, 2011; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, March 26–June 26, 2011; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, August 3–November 27, 2011
Gathering close to eighty assemblages, collages, lithographs, reliefs, and sculptures made between 1918 and 1947, as well as a partial replica of the Merzbau installation, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is the first large-scale retrospective in the United States of Schwitters’s work since John Elderfeld’s 1985 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Here at the Berkeley Art Museum, where I saw it, it is also the first big retrospective of his work to reach the West Coast. Isabel Schulz, coeditor of Schwitters’s catalogue raisonné, curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive, and executive director of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung at… Full Review
December 12, 2012
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