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

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Peter Eleey, ed.
Exh. cat. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2009. 352 pp.; 139 color ills.; 53 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780935640939)
Exhibition schedule: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, April 24–September 27, 2009
I think the most beautiful thing about modern art is that it has built into its own potential the capacity for destroying itself —Robert Barry (1969) The Quick and the Dead is an exhibition that starts with a spur of a title. Branded beneath it in gold, a pair of triangles are carefully stacked tip-to-tip, one up, one down, in the shape of an hourglass, similar perhaps to a Möbius strip. It eventually becomes clear that this icon is something of a curatorial signature, for it not only conjures the categories of time and space that govern… Full Review
August 26, 2009
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Sheila Canby, ed.
Exh. cat. London: British Museum, 2009. 274 pp.; 240 color ills. Paper £25.00 (9780714124520)
Exhibition schedule: British Museum, London, February 19–June 14, 2009
Inna Vishnevskaya
Exh. cat. Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2009. 145 pp.; 111 color ills. Paper $29.95 (9780934686136)
Exhibition schedule: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC, May 9–September 13, 2009
It is unusual for major “Western” museums to host simultaneous exhibitions involving the arts of the Islamic world, and more unusual still for any such Islamic art exhibitions to cover similar regions and historical periods or concern related themes. While the overlap of the two shows on view in London and Washington may have resulted from a scheduling fluke, it perhaps also reflects the growing commitment of European and North American museums both to highlighting Muslim arts and cultures within their collection, exhibition, and education programs (also evident in the number of institutions from New York to Paris to Copenhagen… Full Review
August 19, 2009
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Philip Hewat-Jaboor and David Watkin, eds.
Exh. cat. New York and New Haven: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture and Yale University Press, 2008. 520 pp.; 420 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (9780300124163)
Exhibition schedule: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 21–July 21, 2008; Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, July 17–November 16, 2008
In the course of the eighteenth century, European artists, architects, travelers, and scholars broke from narrow Renaissance conventions and cast fresh eyes on the material and literary remains of classical antiquity. The repertoire of models available to designers and theorists was widened by the study and publication of ancient sites in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the Near East, while ancient authors such as Homer, Pausanias, Strabo, and Virgil were reevaluated through on-site comparisons of texts and landscapes. The discovery of previously marginal or underappreciated art forms such as Roman frescos and Greek vase painting resulted in a new understanding of… Full Review
August 18, 2009
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Exhibition schedule: Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY, May 17, 2008–ongoing
In October of 1977, eight months after the German painter Blinky Palermo’s death at the age of 33, his friend Imi Knoebel exhibited 24 Farben—für Blinky at the Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Cologne, Germany. Knoebel and Palermo met in the 1960s as students of Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and, like many of Beuys’s students, both went on to exhibit with Friedrich. Friedrich’s eventual patronage of both artists’ careers through the Dia Art Foundation beginning in the 1970s cemented their reputations in the United States and internationally, and, fittingly, Knoebel’s tribute to his friend is now on display for… Full Review
August 5, 2009
Scott Simon, Russell A. Porter, and John Paul Caponigro
Exh. cat. Salem: Peabody Essex Museum, 2008. 68 pp.; 59 color ills. Paper $14.95 (9780875772161)
Exhibition schedule: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, November 8, 2008–March 1, 2009
Exhibition schedule: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, June 28, 2008–June 7, 2009
Exhibition schedule: Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, March 14–June 21, 2009
Exhibition schedule: Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, March 14–June 21, 2009
With the International Polar Year (March 2007–March 2008) and centennial celebrations of the Robert E. Peary and Robert R. Scott expeditions, we are experiencing a new age of polar exploration. The Arctic and Antarctica are now at the center of global concerns about energy and the environment, with visual images—photographs of submersible vessels planting a Russian flag on the North Pole seabed and polar bears floating on ever decreasing ice floes—serving as powerful icons. Contemporary environmental and Native artists have also turned to this region, as documented in two recent exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Portland Museum… Full Review
July 29, 2009
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Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen, eds.
Exh. cat. New Haven and New York: Yale University Press in association with Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. 432 pp.; 232 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300136685)
Exhibition schedule: Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, October 8, 2007–January 13, 2008; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 12–May 11, 2008
Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions brought to New York City about forty paintings by Nicolas Poussin, along with a group of drawings by the artist and some of his contemporaries, for a superb exhibition devoted to an aspect of his work better known to specialists than the general public.[1] Beautifully paced and hung, the exhibition was large enough to do justice to the subject without being overwhelming. A group of mainly small paintings from Poussin’s early years in Rome filled the first two rooms, and introduced the theme with his first experiments and successes in landscape painting. The visitor could… Full Review
July 29, 2009
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Frederick Ilchman, ed.
Boston: MFA Publications, 2009. 315 pp.; 168 color ills. $40.00 (9780878467402)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 15–August 16, 2009; Musée du Louvre, Paris, September 14, 2009–January 4, 2010
Comparison stands as one of the central foundations of art history. Well before the Wolfllinian model of left and right slides dominated classroom lectures, writers such as Pliny the Elder told stories of comparison and its more worldly iteration, competition between artists. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of rivalry predominates aesthetic appraisals and theoretical discussions of Italian Renaissance art and artists, giving rise to a critical category referred to as the paragone, or comparison, in which different media, regions, and artists serve as counterpoints. Common dyads in the comparison include painting and sculpture, colore and disegno, Venice and Florence… Full Review
July 2, 2009
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Exhibition schedule: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, February 15, 2009–May 24, 2009
The Saint John's Bible: A Modern Vision through Medieval Methods treated its audience to a journey through a “Bible for the 21st century,” to quote an exhibition wall text. The project is the fruit of a decade-long collaboration undertaken by an international team of master calligraphers and a community of theologians and scholars from Saint John's University and Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. This exhibition was the first to place selected pages from the seven-volume Saint John’s Bible within the broader context of the book arts through time and across world cultures. The 22 bifolio openings displayed here, selected from… Full Review
July 2, 2009
Jimmie Durham
Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2009. 232 pp.; many color ills. Cloth £45.00 (9782759600847)
Exhibition Schedule: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, January 30–April 12, 2009
In making art, Jimmie Durham sometimes lets his materials do the sculpting. As Encore tranquillité (2008) reveals, the forces he unleashes from seemingly lifeless objects can be startling. The work features an enormous rock settled atop the smashed halves of a small, single-engine airplane. Originally displayed in an old Russian airfield outside of Berlin, it was relocated to the foyer on the second floor of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris as the centerpiece of Rejected Stones, a major exhibition of Durham’s “European” works from the past sixteen years. The piece also made an appearance on… Full Review
July 1, 2009
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Mark W. Scala, ed.
Exh. cat. Nashville: Frist Center for the Visual Arts in association with Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. 160 pp.; 74 color ills.; 4 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780826516220)
Exhibition schedule: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, January 23–May 10, 2009; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, June 20–September 13, 2009; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, October 23, 2009–January 3, 2010
In his introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Paint Made Flesh, curator Mark Scala writes that the show seeks to trace a history of “the depicted body as a metaphor for the relationship between self and society as it has changed throughout the decades following World War II” (1). It does so admirably, if incompletely, and without making the recalibrations to larger understandings of postwar painting that seem to be its latent promise. As such, it is an exhibition both wildly pleasurable and quietly frustrating, leaving viewers with the sense that the magnificent group of works is something… Full Review
June 16, 2009
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