19 June 2006 | Modern, Museums
Abattoirs, spittle, ancient medallions and big toes feature, as expected, in “Undercover Surrealism,” the Hayward Gallery’s tribute to Georges Bataille. Most reviewers note that the erstwhile publisher of Documents is now accorded the place of honor long reserved for Andre Breton. Read reviews by Bryan Appleyard, Laura Cumming (“fetishes, voodoo dolls, two-faced African gods, wax [...]
19 June 2006 | Modern
Color, rhythm, and symbolism are the foci of Lorenz Dittmann’s new Cézanne study. Reviewer Christian Lenz praises the author’s precision and the refinement of his formal analysis. Lenz even pays him a somewhat double-edged complement: the book, like Cézanne’s painting, rewards laborious effort with a payoff of great lucidity.
From the L.A. Times: “In 1959, Mark Rothko proclaimed, ‘I hate and distrust all art historians, experts and critics. They are a bunch of parasites, feeding on the body of art. Their work not only is useless, it is misleading. They can say nothing worth listening to about art or the artist, aside from personal [...]
The V&A’s summer show of modernism in design, organized by Christopher Wilk (PDF bio), looks back at the “new world” of 1914-1939. Dominic Bradbury credits the show with integrating such things as Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet costume designs, but finds that modernist architecture has been “treated rather shabbily.” Deyan Sudjic notes that Wilk unashamedly puts [...]
Is anyone writing good art history for a popular audience? Ross King lately had a go at Paris in the 1860s, comparing Manet and Meissonier in The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism. Charles Darwent, in The Independent, finds it a “brilliant book… a good read, and good history,” and [...]
15 May 2006 | Modern
In the catalogue to the Getty Museum exhibition Courbet and the Modern Landscape, Mary Morton writes that “despite the fact that landscape constitutes more than two-thirds of his oeuvre, Courbet’s landscape painting has yet to achieve a stable position in the scholarly canon. This is due to several factors, from the difficulty of dating the [...]
12 May 2006 | Americas, Modern
The National Gallery’s Sheeler exhibition features a catalogue by Charles Brock. While “exhibitions have been devoted respectively to his photographs, paintings, and drawings, the relationships across media in his work have been relatively neglected. The root cause of this [is that] Sheeler and his dealer, Edith Halpert, consciously emphasized the distinctions between his painting and [...]
In the catalogue to the current Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900, “the first serious, full-scale examination of the subject of animals in art [and] the first to incorporate scientific materials and concepts,” featuring “not only paintings, sculptures, and photographs, but also natural history displays, zoos, taxidermy, and book illustration,” [...]
27 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
In the Guardian (via Arts Journal), we read that “Stockholm’s Moderna Museet recently asked the government for 50m kronor (£3.7m) to buy new works, exclusively by female artists, to redress the gender imbalance in its collection. ‘When it comes to masterpieces,’ Lars Nittve, the museum’s director, argued in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter last week, [...]
In Frieze, Kodwo Eshun reviews Cosmopolitan Modernisms, edited by Kobena Mercer, “the first volume in a new series titled ‘Annotating Art’s Histories’. In his acutely incisive introduction Mercer notes the unintended consequences of visual culture’s ‘tendency to roam across the cultural sphere at large’. Such swaggering interdisciplinarity, he points out, inadvertently ends up reinforcing existing [...]
26 April 2006 | Modern
From the Jerusalem Post: “For decades now, ever since an international revival of interest in the paintings and life of Mexico’s Frida Kahlo, art historians and critics, including this writer, have been writing that Frida’s photographer father was Jewish, possibly of Hungarian origin. A new book devoted to Guillermo Kahlo and his photography reveals that [...]
24 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
“The most feline artist in in the history of art,” Toulouse-Lautrec’s lesser-known Montmartre contemporary Théophile Steinlen gets a 120-work show in Madrid which argues for the importance of his immersion in the voyeuristic and proletarian currents of modernity. The catalog includes a translation of Werner Hofmann’s classic article “Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso” (see College [...]
The project on Franco-German art relations led by Thomas Gaehtgens continues to bear fruit. First, Alexandre Kostka and François Lucberts edited a volume covering 1870-1945 that reached two surprising conclusions: that textual discourse played the most important role in shaping the reception of art during this period (Marc Schalenberg, H-Arthist), and that the German art [...]
19 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
From Artinfo.com: “It’s the newest acquisition of the Clark Art Institute, an oil painting by Eugene Delacroix dating to the late 1820s that until now has never been publicly displayed … Since the artist’s death in 1863, it has been in the private collection of a single family that bought it at auction … Museum [...]
18 April 2006 | Modern
Regarding the figure of Aline Charigot in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (part of the “The Renoir Returns: A Celebration of Masterworks” show at the recently reopened Philips Collection), Glenn McNatt of the Baltimore Sun writes: “It doesn’t take an art historian … to recognize instantly that Aline Charigot was a hottie.”
The Juvenal of painting, James Gillray (Tate; NYPL) had no qualms about rendering the prime minister as a snub-nosed broomstick. In her new book on the artist, Claudia Oberstebrink argues that the poetics of Gillray’s caricature depended on the overinflation of the sublime into the mock-sublime and the dismantling of the heroic into mock-heroic. For [...]
11 April 2006 | Modern
Horst Bredekamp’s latest study in Bildwissenschaft analyzes Darwin’s sketches and concludes that the scientist thought more in terms of a coral of life than a tree of life (Wilhelm Trapp, Die Zeit). Corals had since antiquity represented the signature of the artist Nature. Darwin saw in them an alternative to the struggle of each kind [...]
10 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
As ArtsJournal notes, the Observer has an interesting article on the V&A’s new modernism show: “Modernism absorbs a lot of body blows these days, and one UK critic recently claimed that the art movement was responsible for ‘more human misery than anything else in history.’ Hyperbole aside, though, was modernism really a bad thing? ‘The [...]
6 April 2006 | Architecture, Modern
Wolfgang Pehnt’s history of German architecture from the 1901 Darmstadt exhibition through the recent rebuilding of the Berlin Olympic Stadium is an old-fashioned, magisterial great-buildings survey, subtle and comprehensive — so find Dieter Bartetzko in the FAZ and Gert Kähler in the Süddeutsche. Jürgen Tietz (see NZZ and H-Soz-u-Kult) notes that Pehnt also manages to [...]
