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

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Jodi Hauptman
Exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, 2005. 256 pp.; 142 color ills.; 160 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0870707027)
Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 30, 2005–January 23, 2006
The Museum of Modern Art’s Odilon Redon show was a quiet triumph. In addition to a much-needed and long-overdue consideration of a major figure within the history of French Symbolism, this intimate exhibition provided a welcome respite from the mall-like spaces of the rest of MoMA’s cavernous emporium of modern art The exhibition was made possible by the Ian Woodner Family Collection donation in 2000 of more than one hundred Redon works on paper and canvas, and its breadth reveals Ian Woodner’s deep commitment to Redon’s work, from the artist’s drawings and charcoal noirs to his illustrated books and later… Full Review
October 10, 2006
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Xavier F. Salomon
The Frick Collection, 2006. 56 pp.; 32 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Paper (0912114312)
Frick Collection, New York City, April 11–July 16, 2006
Paolo Veronese is in the news these days, enjoying the spotlight in two recent monographic exhibitions. Last year’s Veronese: Gods, Heroes, and Allegories, the Museo Correr in Venice, treated a wide array of the artist’s mythological works. Now, Veronese’s Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice at the Frick Collection, a more focused exhibit curated by Xavier Salomon, gathers together all five of the large allegorical canvases by the artist that have come to rest on US soil. These shows mark something of a renaissance for Veronese, which complements the current profusion of exhibits on Venetian topics: from… Full Review
August 2, 2006
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Mark Coatzee and Laura Edward Heon
Miami and North Adams: MASS MoCA, 2006. 143 pp.; 27 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Cloth (0971634149)
MASS MoCA, March 19, 2005–March 31, 2006; SITE Santa Fe, April 21–June 19, 2006; Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington DC, September 5–October 29, 2006; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, February 16–June 3, 2007; Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, June 23–September 30, 2007
Leipzig is the new Berlin—at least that is what I have been told. Rents are still what Berlin rents used to be, after reunification but before the government arrived. Many artists have already moved their Berlin or Cologne studios to Leipzig. It is like Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain circa 1995, a combination of advanced, though scenic, urban decay pierced through with startling additions like high-tech (West) German mass transit or gleaming new bakeries and department stores. There is a developed Leipzig scene—the spreading waves of (West German-style) gentrification that includes clubs, restaurants, and of course, art galleries Another sign of… Full Review
August 1, 2006
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Exhibition schedule: Istanbul, Turkey, September 16–October 30, 2005
The 9th International Istanbul Biennial, distributed across seven sites (Deniz Palace Apartments, Garanti Building, Antrepo No. 5, Tobacco Warehouse, Bilsar Building, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and the Garibaldi Building) used the city of Istanbul as not only its host but its principal theme. Visitors walked to and from each site, guided by the Italian Gruppo A12’s fuchsia paint on the venues’ façades and windows, occasionally getting lost in the streets of the Beyoğlu district. Rather than finding such wanderings a burden, visitors enjoyed the treats and surprises wherein they were routinely rewarded with the discovery of buildings that would… Full Review
July 25, 2006
Exhibition Schedule: Tate Britain, London, February 4–May 7, 2006
With In Search of Perfect Harmony, a recent exhibition in the Art Now cycle at Tate Britain, British artist Jamie Shovlin cements his recent work’s affinity to what Hal Foster has described as the “archival impulse” prevalent in contemporary artistic production. The three works that comprised Shovlin’s exhibition all take root in the kind of idiosyncratic probing into a history, philosophy, or experience that Foster sees as the foundation of the “archival impulse.” While Foster’s descriptive moniker for this kind of work reminds us that such gestures have already become common practice in contemporary art, Shovlin’s… Full Review
July 19, 2006
Orange County Museum, June 4–October 2, 2005; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, December 4–February 26, 2006; Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, March 15–June 4, 2006
Comprised of one wonderful work after another, Villa America: American Modern, 1900–1950 makes a strong impression. Beyond presenting many excellent works, the exhibition illuminates the visual dialogue concerning style and theme undertaken between and among U.S. artists during the first half of the twentieth century, a particularly exciting period in U.S. art history. With its illuminating juxtapositions of works and its many self-portraits, Villa America brings to life the excitement and energy that percolated within the U.S. art world during this now rather distant era. The exhibition presents for the first time selections from the private collection of Myron Kunin… Full Review
June 28, 2006
Phillip Dennis Cate, ed.
The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 2005. 240 pp.; 410 color ills. Paper $45.00 (1976903016)
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, October 23, 2005–March 12, 2006
The two titles of this exhibition curated by Phillip Dennis Cate are in many respects contradictory. The subtitle, Sculpture in Paris from Daumier to Rodin, is utterly banal and could apply to any of the dozens of exhibitions mounted in the past thirty years on the sculpture of the second half of the nineteenth century: an assemblage of masterworks, of famous names, of marbles and bronzes. But the main title, Breaking the Mold, announces an entirely different agenda: It recalls the moment when, at the end of the bronze-founding process, the clay form that surrounds the poured metal… Full Review
June 27, 2006
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Yevgenia Petrova, ed.
St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, State Russian Museum, 2005. 152 pp.; 155 color ills.; 9 b/w ills. Cloth (0967845130)
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE, June 4–September 14, 2005; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN, October 8–December 31, 2005; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, February 25–June 11, 2006
The exhibition Mir Iskusstva: Russia’s Age of Elegance at the Princeton University Art Museum coincides with several recent exhibitions on aspects of Russian art, mostly contemporary, that have been inspired by last year’s big Russia! show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The Princeton exhibition stands out, however, as a crucially important addition to the Guggenheim blockbuster, because it represents a major historic epoch in Russian art and culture that was almost overlooked by the organizers of the Guggenheim show. Mir Iskusstva, or World of Art, was not only the name of a group of artists formed around a periodical with… Full Review
June 8, 2006
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Paola Antonelli
Museum of Modern Art, 2005. 216 pp.; 325 color ills. Paper (0870705806)
Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 16, 2005–January 2, 2006
SAFE: Design Takes on Risk managed to organize an unwieldy set of objects ranging from respirators for firemen, giant foil bags for temporary housing, manhole covers, and even disposable sheets for prostitutes who have to make beds on the fly. While curators Paola Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini divided the exhibition into categories, it was the theme of safety and security, real or imagined, that unified the exhibition. The central problem the exhibition addresses is the difficulty in sorting out phantasms from real threats. Contending that most ”safety items” are ignored entirely or lie outside the realm of everyday attention—for… Full Review
June 8, 2006
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To Delight the Eye is a charming exhibition of six major paintings and twenty-four drawings donated to the Fogg Art Museum by the Harvard alumnus Charles E. Dunlap (1889–1966). The exhibition, mounted by Alvin L. Clark, Jr., the Jeffery E. Horvitz Research Curator in the Department of Drawings at the Fogg, focuses primarily on artworks produced during the reigns of Louis XV (r. 1715–74) and his successor, Louis XVI (r. 1774–93), but extends into the nineteenth century with drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Clark has authored an accompanying brochure (Harvard University Art Museums Gallery Series, no. 48, 2005) that summarizes the… Full Review
June 1, 2006