At Tate Modern through May 17, Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism has received several interested reviews.
5 May 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum attended the press preview for Pictures Generation, “the Metropolitan Museum’s much discussed, uncharacteristically risk-taking theme show.” The preview was convened by Douglas Eklund, the Met’s associate curator for photography, but she found herself more interested in the thoughts of Douglas Crimp, also in attendance, whose 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space “provided the [...]
30 April 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
Contra Vasari, Perugino and Florence weren’t the sole significant influences on the young Raphael. The artist’s father, Giovanni Santi, as well the Montefeltro court, had a positive impact too; so argues an exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. The exhibition presents research partly based on documents from the Santi family bottega newly uncovered in [...]
29 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Taipei Times interviews Pompidou chief curator Didier Ottinger about Arcadie, his exhibition of modern art whose “main theme investigates Arcadia, a region in central Greece that has taken on mythological resonance as a utopian land of abundance. Each of the exhibit¡on’s 10 sub-themes addresses a detail of The Arcadian Shepherds by Renaissance painter Nicolas [...]
26 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Seventy of van Gogh’s landscapes from the late 1880s are on view through September in Basel’s Kunstmuseum, in an exhibition billing itself as “the most important European art event in 2009″ and expecting a half-million visitors…
25 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Wrestling with the towering yet ambiguous figure of Rodin, sculptors tried for a newly austere, concise synthesis in the years leading up to the Great War — the subject of a thoughtful exhibition by Catherine Chevillot at the Musée d’Orsay. Reviews are by Philippe Dagen in Le Monde (“Picasso is missing…Lehmbruck is the leading figure”), [...]
23 April 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
For a few years in the 1620s, Utrecht (among other places) saw the flourishing of painting in the manner of Caravaggio. The Utrecht Caravaggisti, including Hendrick Terbruggen, Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, who used the style for scenes of earthy Dutch tavern life, are the subject of a show organized by Jochen Sander [...]
20 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Pierre Bonnard’s late interiors, recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, attracted a number of approving reviews…
19 April 2009 | Medieval, Museums
At the Guardian, Jonathan Jones encounters Konrad Witz’s 15th-century Saint Christopher in Basel, and offers an appreciation: Witz must surely be responding imaginatively to the inward-looking religious movements of the later middle ages, finding a visual equivalent for new mysticisms that stressed the soul’s quest for God. The poetic solitude of this painting is as [...]
17 April 2009 | Museums
In the November 2008 Third Text (pp. 794-96), Amna Malik reviews the Tate Britain exhibition “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting”: The return to orientalism as a curatorial strategy at Tate Britain appears somewhat puzzling, if not completely insensitive … Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, seems all the more pressing now, after [...]
15 April 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
On view in Arezzo: “The Della Robbia Family: The Dialogue Among the Arts In the Renaissance.” Three generations of the family were known for raising the status of glazed terracotta to a par with painting and sculpture; Alberti credited patriarch Luca with “inventing” the technique. The show has been reviewed by Goffredo Silvestri (“The most [...]
13 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Tate Britain has reconstructed William Blake’s famously unheralded 1809 exhibition (it attracted only one review and no sales). Laura Cumming in the Observer is struck by Blake’s aesthetic: Here are the streaming bodies – word made flesh – the long robes, loose hair, thunderclaps and starbursts. Here are the weightless figures in their graphic [...]
18 March 2009 | Asia, Books, Museums
In caa.reviews, Donald F. McCallum writes on a recent collaboration by Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit: The exhibition Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan and its accompanying catalogue constitute a landmark in the study of Japanese art. The paintings displayed at the Japan Society Gallery were of both high quality and significance, and the [...]
27 January 2009 | Museums
From the Boston Globe: Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. The move shocked local arts leaders and drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and [...]
16 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum writes: What’s that new addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s old masters galleries, catty-cornered with the museum’s iconic Vermeer, “Woman with a Water Pitcher”? Let’s approach for a closer look: Vermeer, “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” Private Collection … Until Sotheby’s had reported (in advance of the 2004 sale) the favorable findings of [...]
12 January 2009 | Museums
In an article on the Rijksmuseum’s recent dalliance with Damien Hirst, art historian Gary Schwartz writes: If Hirst exploits violence and Koons sex, Lucas Cranach went after them both in combination. Cranach has gotten into the best collections and museums in the world with paintings of the suicide of the rape victim Lucretia. He wasn’t [...]
21 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
From Bloomberg News critic Jorg von Uthmann: Why do people become painters? In two out of three cases, suspected the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, to overcompensate for a congenital sight defect. That’s hard to prove. Yet there is no doubt that Claude Monet had serious eye problems in the last two decades of his life. The [...]
13 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
It’s caviar for modern art skeptics: Tate Modern hung Rothkos on their side and it made so little difference that barely anyone noticed. The truth of the matter is a bit more complex. From The Times of London: Curators of the blockbuster Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern in London have displayed two of the artist’s [...]
16 October 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From Smithsonian: … despite his artistic stature, Bernini is only now receiving his first major American exhibition—at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (through October 26) and then at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009). One explanation for the oversight is obvious, says Catherine Hess, associate curator [...]
10 October 2008 | Museums
Vanity Fair has excerpted a new book Mona Lisa in Camelot, by Margaret Leslie Davis. When France agreed in 1962 to lend the Mona Lisa to America, art officials on both shores opposed the idea: The treatment and care of old-master paintings was [National Gallery of Art director John] Walker’s specialty, and he believed extremely [...]
