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

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The themes of parent-child relationships, migration, and colonialism resonate throughout the exhibition spaces of the two-pronged Venice Biennale, as well as in the national pavilions. Curated by María de Corral, the Experience of Art at the Giardini and the Italian Pavilion joins forces with Always a Little Further, curated by Rosa Martínez at the Arsenale, to engage visitors in an overall exhibition that cuts across several countries and time periods. Despite the often incongruous juxtapositions, viewers can self-curate a selection of works, making the overwhelming Biennale a more manageable exhibition. What follows is this reviewer’s attempt at lending some… Full Review
March 1, 2006
Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch
National Gallery of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 371 pp.; 177 color ills.; 53 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300113390)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 4–November 27, 2005; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, December 14, 2005–March 19, 2006
When Peter Parshall authored his standard work, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (with David Landau; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), critical readers noted one significant omission: the earliest century of woodcuts before the generation of Albrecht Dürer. Perhaps it was because those works offered stark outlines and relatively little interior modeling, though they frequently were also colored to enhance their naturalism. Now the missing link has been forged. Drawing from extraordinary holdings of this material in their respective museums, Parshall and Schoch provide the first real study of early woodcuts since Arthur Hind in 1935 (though Richard Field, who contributes… Full Review
February 17, 2006
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John House, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, and Jennifer Hardin
Exh. cat. St. Petersburg and Gent, Belgium: Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in association with Snoeck, 2005. 206 pp. $35.00 (9053495452)
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Fla., January 16–April 24, 2005; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, N.Y., May 27–September 4, 2005; Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts, Baltimore, Md., October 2–December 31, 2005
At first glance this exhibition seemed misnamed, since, far from focusing exclusively on Monet, it presented a diverse group of dozens of artists and image-makers including European and American painters, printmakers, and photographers, all of whom were fascinated by the River Thames. A catalogue entry by the exhibition organizer, Jennifer Hardin, chief curator at the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, explains that the original motivation for the exhibition was the museum’s own Monet, Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog (1903). Unlike this work, the majority of those shown in the exhibition were not Impressionist, and anyone expecting roomfuls of… Full Review
January 23, 2006
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Joachim Pissarro
Museum of Modern Art, 2005. 256 pp.; 92 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (0870701851)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 26–September 12, 2005; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 20, 2005–January 16, 2006; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, February 27–May 28, 2006
The Museum of Modern Art’s Cézanne & Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting is the latest in a spate of recent shows focused on the theme of collaboration between a pair of modern artists.[1] Yet even if the theme and subject it proposes to examine is not new, the body of work assembled and shown together for the first time in this retrospective overview of the nearly twenty-year period that Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro were in closest dialogue is undeniably impressive.[2] The three-room exhibition presents nearly one-hundred paintings and a few works on paper, all organized more or less chronologically. As… Full Review
January 16, 2006
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Pieter Biesboer
Waanders, 2004. 144 pp.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9040090068)
Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, November 27, 2004–April 4, 2005; Kunsthaus Zürich, April 22–August 22, 2005; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 18–December 31, 2005
It is perhaps not surprising that the exhibition of the still lifes of Pieter Claesz. at the National Gallery in Washington is the first monographic show devoted to this artist. As a friend commented on paging through the catalogue, “His works are rather all of a piece, aren’t they?” It is very likely that more than one curator has turned away from the idea of such a show out of concern that the public might find the work too much alike to sustain interest. It is undeniably true that Claesz. devoted most of his career to painting still lifes marked… Full Review
January 10, 2006
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Jean Frémon and Antoni Tàpies
Exh. cat. Klosterneuberg, Austria: Edition Sammlung Essl Privatstiftung, 2005.
Sammlung Essl: Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg, June 24, 2005–October 23, 2005
In this exhibition, Klosterneuburg’s Essl Collection—dedicated since 1995 to the dissemination of contemporary art—brings the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies and the Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer together for the first time, thereby creating a unique encounter between their respective oeuvres. Conceived by collector Karlheinz Essl, whose collection contains most of the ninety-plus works on display, the exhibition was curated by Jean Frémon, a co-director of Paris’s Galerie Lelong and a long-time follower of both artists’ careers The exhibition sets out to explore the echoes and convergences, not necessarily intentional, between the two artist’s oeuvres and their lives. Formal relationships and echoes… Full Review
December 16, 2005
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Jonathan Demme, ed.
Kaliko Press, 1998. 63 pp.; 43 color ills. Paper
Selden Rodman Gallery of Popular Arts of the Americas and the Caribbean, Ramapo College, Mahwah, N.J., February 8–March 18, 2005; Waterloo Center for the Arts, Waterloo, Iowa., June 10–August 29, 2005
Ever since the American artist DeWitt Peters started the Centre d’Art of Port-au-Prince in 1944, Haitian art has attracted major European and American artists and collectors. Decades after Haitian art admirer André Breton called the landscape of the tropics the landscape of Surrealism, generous art donors and collectors with connections to the Midwest have raised the commercial value of Haitian art while establishing three major regional collections—at Iowa’s Waterloo Center for the Arts and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Organized by the Ramapo College of New Jersey, the exhibition Odilon Pierre: Atis d’Ayiti allowed… Full Review
December 7, 2005
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Beacon: NY: Dia:Beacon, 2005.
Dia:Beacon, Beacon, N.Y., April 14–November 7, 2005
Agnes Martin and Jackson Pollock were both born in 1912, but Pollock had died by the time Martin moved from New Mexico to New York in 1957 to establish herself as a painter. Martin came at the behest of Betty Parsons, one of many women artists whom Parsons took under her wing as the fervor of Abstract Expressionism faded. Many of these women deferred their artistic careers until midlife, after families or more traditional careers—Martin herself was a teacher. Throughout her life, Martin maintained a principled independence as an artist, existing outside the politics and ideologies of the art world… Full Review
December 5, 2005
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Carl Brandon Strehlke, ed.
Exh. cat. University Park and Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 184 pp.; 65 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (0271025360)
November 20, 2004–February 13, 2005
The thematic core of this exhibition was built around two vastly different but compelling unofficial portraits, Pontormo’s Alessandro de’ Medici (1534–35) and Bronzino’s Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus (ca. 1537–39), each in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Augmented by about fifty works selected from American and European collections, the exhibition explored the contribution of these two masters to the development and transformation of portraiture during the tumultuous era that witnessed the replacement of Florentine republicanism with autocratic Medici rule. It also traced the artistic debt between two painters mutually bonded through both art and personal… Full Review
November 28, 2005
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