27 November 2006 | Americas, Modern, Museums
From the Houston Chronicle: “Emily Ballew Neff, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is shaking up the art world with her new exhibit, The Modern West. In it, she shows that the American West influenced artists not usually considered Western — a group that includes, most controversially, Jackson [...]
25 October 2006 | Modern, Museums
“Ten years ago, when I spoke of a Girodet exhibition project, everyone confused him with Géricault,” said Sylvaine Bellenger, who organized “Girodet, Romantic Rebel.” Last week, the survey was in Montreal for the last stop on its tour. Today, the bizarrerie for which David’s student was once penalized now works in his favor. The Montreal [...]
19 October 2006 | Books, Modern, Museums
Goya’s Caprichos are currently on view in Milan’s Galleria Bellinzona (through Oct. 28). Three hundred copies of the 80-part series of etchings and aquatints were printed in February 1799. At CAA Reviews, Tara Zanardi recently reviewed Andrew Schulz’s book, Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body. She credits Schulz with showing the significance of the [...]
18 October 2006 | Modern
Paul Cézanne, whom Picasso called “the father of us all,” died one hundred years ago next week. Deutschland radio interviews two art historians, Robert Kudielka and Gottfried Boehm, on his significance for modern painting. Boehm discusses Cézanne’s investigations into the logic of visual perception itself (as opposed to that of the objects we perceive), and [...]
4 October 2006 | Modern
A conversation with leading Colombian art critic Eduardo Serrano appears in L’Humanité. He names the mid-twentieth century as the moment when Colombian art started to “singularize and acquire a certain personality.” He nominates Botero, Andrès de Santa Maria, Alejandro Obregon, Enrique Graù, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, and Edgar Negret for the artistic canon of Colombia, “a [...]
4 October 2006 | Modern, Museums
Alfred Barr’s torpedo (illustration here) continues to make waves. El Pais asks Serge Guilbaut for thoughts on MoMA’s future, in the wake of William Rubin’s death. He calls for democracy, debate, and dialogue. Also in El Pais, Ángela Molina reviews “Doppler Effect,” the 48-room permanent installation at the Tate Modern directed by Vicente Todolí, within [...]
3 October 2006 | Modern, Museums
Arno Breker, the sculptor known for having been highly honored by Hitler, is the subject of a recent, controversial solo exhibition, the first such. An interview with curator Rudolf Conrades is in Die Welt. Conrades had the idea upon learning that Breker was also esteemed by Jean Cocteau, who commissioned his gravestone from Breker. The [...]
3 October 2006 | Modern
One hundred years ago, a 30-year-old Paula Modersohn-Becker painted what may be the first female nude self-portrait, writes Rainer Stamm, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, at a moment when she was in Paris, having resolved to leave her husband Otto in favor of her career. Though Picasso, Schiele and Kokoschka were currently all going topless in [...]
2 October 2006 | Journals, Medieval, Modern
A recent issue of Perspective (2006-1) featured a debate on “Meyer Schapiro and Roman Sculpture, Questions of Non-Reception in France” that covered diverse terrain. Enrico Castelnuovo, Roland Recht and Robert A. Maxwell tried to articulate his legacy for medieval art history, the relationship between his medieval and modern writings, and the reasons for his poor [...]
29 September 2006 | Modern
Hubert Damisch is “lightfooted and refreshingly sharp-tongued” in his study of Delacroix’s “intimate diary,” in which Damisch asks how painters perceived the arrival of photography, writes Christine Tauber (German edition; French edition). The painter was interested in how sense impressions could be properly remembered, given the inadequacy of verbal expression to communicate them. Could photography [...]
5 September 2006 | Modern
We take belated notice of the death of Delacroix scholar Lee Johnson, reported here in the Times of London: “He produced several monographs, exhibitions and dozens of articles, most of which can be seen in retrospect as stages in the formation of his formidable catalogue raisonné of Delacroix’s work which appeared in seven volumes between [...]
31 August 2006 | Books, Modern
Earlier this month, the Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed a crop of (relatively) recent Dada books: the blockbuster exhibition catalogue, Amelia Jones’ Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Tom Sandqvist’s Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, and The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Dawn Ades. “It is ironic that [...]
25 August 2006 | Modern, Museums
Manet who? Three nicely illustrated articles in La Tribune de l’Art demonstrate there was much more to the art of the French 19th century than a few rebel geniuses. Phillip Dennis Cate surveys (in English) “Sculpture by Carpeaux, Dalou and Carriès” at The Petit Palais, Thierry Cazaux “Pierre Loti: Phantoms of the Orient” at the [...]
22 August 2006 | Books, Modern
Christoph Lüthy reviews Bodo Vischer’s new book on Goya’s still lifes, The Eye of Nature. Only ten of these remain; made from 1810 to 1812, most found their way via Paris to the wider world, thanks to the late 19th-century French intoxication with Spain. Vischer argues that the paintings somehow look back at the viewer, [...]
10 August 2006 | Crime, Modern
From The Age (Australia): “The National Gallery of Victoria has rejected claims that a $25 million Vincent Van Gogh painting it has lent to an exhibition in Scotland is a fake. Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper quoted a number of experts who doubt the authenticity of the painting, known as either Portrait of a Man or [...]
18 July 2006 | Modern, Museums
Picasso has taken Madrid for the third time, writes Gérard Dupuy. In 1936, the Republican government made him honorary director of the Louvre; in 1981, Guernica settled there; and now he straddles the Prado and the Reina Sofia in the blockbuster exhibition Picasso: Tradition and Avant-Garde. Their rich holdings allow for poignant juxtapositions, such as [...]
14 July 2006 | Journals, Modern
The latest Yale French Studies considers the affection of the surrealists for the “many ‘others’ outside of the official group with whom they shared their passions: Marxists, visual artists, filmmakers, psychiatrists and ethnographers.” In his essay, Jonathan P. Eburne considers “the ties between surrealism’s politics and the problem of terrorist violence,” jumping off from an [...]
12 July 2006 | Modern, Museums
In the land of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, the synaesthetic trailblazer of pure abstraction gets a thorough look at decades-long last. At the Tate Modern, Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction shows 74 works. Picking up ten years after the artist’s 1895 epiphany in front of a Monet haystack, the show climaxes around 1914, before [...]
The latest Art Bulletin includes eight reviews of the recently published textbook, Art Since 1900, by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh. Several of the reviewers find that the book is possibly too advanced for undergraduates. Many of them also suggest that the Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh have created a new, [...]
22 June 2006 | Conservation, Modern
From The Independent: “The sweeping panorama of foreboding skies and the bustling life of Brighton’s grand seafront is a tour de force that took John Constable months of careful refining. Yet after he had finished, Britain’s greatest landscape painter stood back, admired his work, and took a knife to it. New research has revealed for [...]
