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

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Alison Luchs
Exh. cat. Washington, DC and New Haven: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in association with Yale University Press, 2009. 160 pp.; 62 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300156676)
Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, July 4–November 1, 2009
Renaissance art historians conventionally work in terms of types. Artistic production to a large extent can be thought of in terms of basic forms or categories—portrait, altarpiece, devotional image, etc.—customized according to the requirements of patrons. The artistic culture of Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century saw the production of many objects that frustrate that approach by being insistently sui generis. Among them are a pair of marble reliefs: one signed by the sculptor/architect Tullio Lombardo around 1495, presently in the Ca’d’Oro in Venice, and another, clearly by the same artist, in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in… Full Review
April 7, 2010
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Debra Bricker Balken
Exh. cat. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2009. 168 pp.; 139 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780300134100)
Exhibition schedule: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, June 7– September 7, 2009
Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence, a major exhibition at the Clark Art Institute curated by Debra Bricker Balken, began with an intriguing juxtaposition. Opposite the introductory text, one found Arthur Dove’s Moon (1935) mounted side by side with Georgia O’Keeffe’s last and most abstract Jack-in-the-Pulpit, VI (1930). These paintings show the two artists working in distinct styles within the modernist arc of nature abstraction. Yet the show’s organizing premise, that Dove profoundly affected O’Keeffe’s early artistic development, was here counterbalanced by a conversation. We saw the two in dialogue at mid-career, hardly referencing the deep Depression at the door, exploring… Full Review
April 7, 2010
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Katherine Baetjer, ed.
Exh. cat. New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2009. 176 pp.; 75 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780300155075)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 22–November 29, 2009
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is ideally suited for an exhibition devoted to the theme of “Watteau, Music, and Theater” because two of Watteau’s most incisive treatments of these themes reside in its collection: the solitary singer Mezzetin (ca. 1718–20) and the tragic-comic French Comedians (ca. 1720–21). Both works also display Watteau’s ineffable fusion of performance and humanity, artifice and nature, and gestures both rote and heartfelt. The exhibition, rich in drawings as well as paintings loaned from a wide variety of institutions and private collections, allowed viewers to ponder the artist’s compelling transformation of music and theater into an… Full Review
March 24, 2010
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Exhibition schedule: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago: September 20–December 13, 2009
Given its location in Chicago, the Renaissance Society was the perfect venue for Allan Sekula’s Polonia and Other Fables, forty photographs and accompanying texts three years in the making. The exhibition represented a joint commission between the Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw. Polonia refers to Poles living outside their country, and Chicago is host to the largest population outside of Warsaw. For centuries, Poland has been dominated by other nations, by the church, and, as this exhibition showed, by the interests of Western multi-national corporations and the U.S. military-industrial complex. Polish identity perennially… Full Review
March 10, 2010
Ronda Kasl, ed.
Exh. cat. Indianapolis and New Haven: Indianapolis Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2009. 400 pp.; 125 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300154719)
Exhibition schedule: Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, October 11, 2009–January 3, 2010
Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World defied conventional boundaries of what constitutes “Spanish” art. It was a refreshingly intelligent exhibition, and ideally will set new standards for how the field is studied. It presented the imagery of Catholicism as a common denominator of Spanish identity in Old World and New. The stunning selection of objects was presented in six thematic sections to remind viewers of their original raison d’être: “In Defense of Images,” “True Likeness,” “Moving Images,” “With the Eyes of the Soul,” “Visualizing Sanctity,” and “Living with Images.” Ronda Kasl, Senior Curator of Painting… Full Review
March 9, 2010
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Exhibition schedule: Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 29–March 10, 2010
BEFORE I’ve decided on the odd but I think appropriate approach of starting to write about Tino Sehgal before seeing the exhibition because so much discussion and disclosure has taken place about it, a lot of it on web-based networking sites such as Facebook and art sites such as Artnet, and most of it in reaction to Sehgal's efforts to control "the situation" and his brand. This discourse is part of the total experience of a project that for some is important, even transformative of the nature of art, precisely insofar as it produces discussion, not in and of… Full Review
March 3, 2010
Janice Katz, ed.
Exh. cat. Chicago and St. Louis: Art Institute of Chicago and Saint Louis Art Museum, 2009. 216 pp.; 145 color ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780300119480)
Exhibition schedule: Art Institute of Chicago, June 26, 2009–September 27, 2009; Saint Louis Art Museum, October 18, 2009–January 1, 2010
The Art Institute of Chicago and Saint Louis Art Museum recently organized a visually rich exhibition featuring thirty-two Japanese folding-screen compositions from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Sporting a different title at each location, the exhibition brought together the best of both collections and smartly used the diverse works to present a multi-faceted introduction to the folding screen. The two museums fashioned surprisingly different viewing experiences. With illustrated, bilingual gallery texts, detailed individual labels, and a looping video on a contemporary work that periodically sent classical bugaku music reverberating throughout its high-ceilinged galleries, the Art Institute offered abundant… Full Review
March 3, 2010
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Exhibition schedule: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, September 26, 2009–February 21, 2010
Childhood often conjures images of an idyllic time of innocence and bliss. Although captivating to the popular imagination, such visions are by no means timeless or universal, and perhaps nothing more than nostalgic conceit. This is where the curators of Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood, April Watson and Jane Aspinwall, intervened by assembling a variety of photographic images of children, dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Of the forty-four photographers represented, most were American, save for Brits Lewis Carroll and Cecil Beaton, the German photographer August Sander, the Italian-born Frederick Sommer and Jocelyn Lee, and the Japanese… Full Review
March 3, 2010
Peter Parshall
Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, 2009. 192 pp.; 86 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781848220218)
Exhibition schedule: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, April 5–June 28, 2009; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, October 1, 2009–January 18, 2010; Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, February 11–June 10, 2010
Thought-provoking and intriguing, The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900, seen by this reviewer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, is the kind of exhibition museums should organize more often. It is primarily a works-on-paper show, featuring around one hundred prints, three drawings, four illustrated books, and ten sculptures. Including objects made during the last half of the nineteenth century, this display presents a broad range of artists: the French Rodolphe Bresdin, the Belgian James Ensor, the Swedish Anders Zorn, and the German Käthe Kollwitz to name only a few. Although this show proves… Full Review
February 3, 2010
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Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas
Exh. cat. New York and São Paulo: Museum of Modern Art and Cosac Naify, 2009. 200 pp.; 220 color ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780870707506)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 5–June 15, 2009
This dual retrospective of Mira Schendel (Brazilian, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988) and Léon Ferrari (Argentine, b. 1920) was without a doubt a major contribution to the expanding canon of experimental art from the sixties. Spanning Schendel’s career from the late 1950s through the late 1980s and Ferrari’s production from the late 1950s through 2007, the two hundred pieces in a variety of media, but predominantly on paper, assembled in the exhibition and exquisitely installed by MoMA curator Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas pleased non-specialized audiences as well as connoisseurs. Upon entering the Renne de Harnoncourt galleries of the museum, viewers could see a… Full Review
December 16, 2009
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