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

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Exhibition schedule: Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, Norwich, England, July 8–August 9, 2006
EAST International, the open-submission exhibition that takes place annually in and around Norwich School of Art and Design, displayed its well-earned self-confidence in 2006, when programming material boasted that, “The trust of artists in the democratic structure of an open exhibition has enabled EAST to become an annual challenge to the expertise of the contemporary art establishment. Not a bad achievement for a small art school gallery in a provincial city.” Perhaps to find this challenge we should look to such galleries in such cities detached from London’s monolithic art establishment (Norwich is in the historic capital of the… Full Review
January 25, 2007
Bruno Chenique and Sylvie Ramond, eds.
Exh. cat. Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2007. 240 pp.; 173 color ills.; 38 b/w ills. Paper €35.00 (2754100989)
Exhibition schedule: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, April 21–July 31, 2006
Wall texts and labels in museum exhibitions, often written in bland and impersonal prose, tend to obscure the voice of the curator. The exhibition Géricault: La Folie d’un Monde provides a glorious exception to the rule. Bruno Chenique, an independent scholar and author of numerous publications about Théodore Géricault, develops his thesis not only in the exhibition’s catalogue (which is often the venue reserved for more theoretical art history in the present museum climate) but also, refreshingly, in the thought-provoking, witty, and at times caustic wall texts, brochure, and audio guide commentary. As with any great curatorial eye, Chenique makes… Full Review
January 24, 2007
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Thomas Crow, Branden W. Joseph, Paul Schimmel, and Charles Stuckey
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005. 317 pp.; 170 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Paper $45.00 (0914357921)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 20, 2005–April 2, 2006; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, May 21–September 11, 2006; Musée national d’arte moderne, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, October 25, 2006–January 21, 2007; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February 17–May 6, 2007
One of the first objects encountered upon entering Robert Rauschenberg: Combines at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was Satellite (1955). This modestly scaled Combine is composed of a sundry collection of materials including a pair of dirty cream-colored socks, two dainty discolored doilies, a strip of worn paisley sheet, sections of cardboard, paint-soaked comic strip broadsheets, and dripping, sensual passages of red, yellow, white, and blue oil paint. This mess of elements is topped off by a swaggering, taxidermied chicken caked in thick oil, who struts defiantly across the paint-encrusted upper ledge of the picture, his downward… Full Review
January 18, 2007
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Macau Museum of Art
Exh. cat. Macau: Macau Museum of Art, 2006. 422 pp.; 300 color ills. MOP750.00 (9993754943)
Exhibition schedule: Macau Museum of Art, Macau, August 9–November 19, 2006
The Palace Museum, Beijing, the Shanghai Museum, and the Macau Museum of Art have collaborated again to produce a compelling exhibition. The present show follows earlier exhibits on Ba Da Shan Ren with Shi Tao (2004) and one dedicated solely to Dong Qichang (2005). The Macau Museum of Art is one of the premiere locations for exhibitions of art in south China and is the only museum devoted to art in Macau. The present show is under the direction of Chan Hou Seng, the museum’s curator of Chinese paintings and calligraphy. The magnificent artwork of Ming dynasty artists Xu… Full Review
January 11, 2007
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Charles Beddington
Exh. cat. New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art and Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2006. 220 pp.; 120 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (0300119690)
Exhibition schedule: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, October 19–December 31, 2006; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, January 24–April 15, 2007
Visitors entering Canaletto in England at the Yale Center for British Art are confronted with two large canvases reunited for the first time in a century: a 1745–46 view of the Molo in Venice on Ascension Day (cat. 54, presumably painted in Venice), and a view of the Thames below Westminster on Lord Mayor’s Day a year or so later (cat. 23, painted in London). It is an instructive comparison that sets up the themes of style, subject matter, and patronage explored by this exhibition. The Venetian view features all of the mature vedutista’s familiar hallmarks, with its frontal… Full Review
January 2, 2007
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Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Exh. cat. Seoul: Designhouse Co. in association with Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2006. 650 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Paper won25.00 (8970419373)
Exhibition Schedule: Designhouse Co. and Gwanju Biennale Foundation, 2006. Biennale Exhibition Hall, Jungoei Park, Gwangju, Korea, September 8–November 11, 2006
A sense of curatorial rigor pervaded many of the compact exhibition spaces of this year’s biennale in Gwangju, a major city in southern Korea known for its rich cultural past and for the May 1980 democratic movement. For its sixth installment, this leading art biennale in East Asia adopted a self-conscious mode of re-examining its raison d’être and selected as its main theme an idea that had in fact existed all along: Asia. Such an inquiry was timely, as the stake to distinguish oneself from others has never been higher for each of the proliferating biennales in Asia—from Singapore to… Full Review
December 14, 2006
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George Saliba and Linda Komaroff
Ed Catherine Hess Getty Trust Publications, 2004. 184 pp.; 61 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. Paper $39.95 (089236758X)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC: July 18, 2004–February 6, 2005; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth: April 3, 2005–September 4, 2005; Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo: October 22, 2005–December 11, 2005; Millennium Galleries, Sheffield: January 14, 2006–April 16, 2006
The past three years have provided an opportunity to see two exquisite and thought-provoking exhibitions of Islamic art and the art that influenced or responded to the brilliant creations of Islamic artists. These exhibitions, The Arts of Fire and Palace and Mosque, offered visitors a rare opportunity to see a wide variety of luxury items in an exhibition context designed to educate viewers about the formal characteristics of Islamic art and the dynamic environment in which these objects were produced. Furthermore, both exhibitions were accompanied by well-written and lavishly illustrated catalogues that supported the agendas behind the selection of… Full Review
November 15, 2006
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David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden
National Gallery of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2006. 352 pp.; 162 color ills.; 31 b/w ills. Cloth (0300116772)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 18–September 17, 2006; Kunsthistoriches Museum Wein, Vienna, October 17, 2006–January 7, 2007
The National Gallery’s beautifully installed exhibition of Venetian painting from the first three decades of the Cinquecento has now come down, though it is soon to reappear—with a few works replaced by others of equal magnitude—at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In both Washington and Vienna the show is comprised of fifty-one paintings, of which at least a third could be described as famous masterworks from one of the richest eras of European art. Many of the works have been cleaned in recent years, and several works appear for the first time after their return from the conservator’s lab. The… Full Review
November 15, 2006
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Jonathan Brown and Susan Grace Galassi
Exh. cat. The Frick Collection and Yale University Press, 2006. 224 pp.; 120 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0300117671)
Frick Collection, New York, February 22–May 14, 2006
In a letter to his son Javier, written on Christmas Eve 1824, Francisco Goya mused, “Maybe I shall live to be 99 years of age, like Titian.” As it turned out, Goya would die slightly more than three years later at the age of 82, after four years of self-imposed exile in Bordeaux. But as Goya’s Last Works amply demonstrated, during these final years he created remarkable works of art in a range of genres and media that signal both continuity and change at the end of his long career. This was the third exhibition the Frick… Full Review
November 14, 2006
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Claire Stoullig and Félicité Isabelle Bleeke
Trans Charles Penwarden and Toby Alleyne-Gee; intro Anne Poulet Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2006. 119 pp.; many color ills. Cloth
The Frick Collection, New York, NY, June 13–September 17, 2006
Amid the symphonic blockbusters regularly staged in the large museums of New York City, the special exhibitions mounted at the Frick Collection in three quiet, elegant rooms on the lower level of the museum offer visitors a welcome dose of chamber music. Striking in this regard was the summertime exhibition of works by the eighteenth-century Genevan artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, whose spare but penetrating portraits, character studies, and still lifes filled the Frick’s small space with a Mozartian blend of lightness and piercing exactitude. Liotard is perhaps best known today for his pastel figures redolent of genre painting, such as La… Full Review
October 25, 2006
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