Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Bernini pittore, the title of the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s painterly practice as well as of the accompanying catalogue, is a provocative reconstruction of this lesser-known aspect of the Baroque artist’s multidisciplinary career. Conceived and curated by Tomaso Montanari for the recently restored Palazzo Barberini in Rome, the comprehensive exhibit and catalogue offer a new monograph on Bernini’s painting under a purposely familiar title. Montanari’s version of “Bernini pittore” is preceded by two catalogue raissonnée of the same name: Luigi Grassi’s pioneering monograph, Bernini pittore (Rome: Danesi, 1945), and the recent book by Francesco Petrucci, Bernini pittore: dal disegno al “maraviglioso composto” (Rome: Ugo Bozzi, 2006). While Petrucci’s subtitle indicates a more expansive, multimedia development from Grassi’s fundamental work, Montanari’s repetitive tag strives for originary status. Indeed, like a palimpsest, the installation and catalogue seek to repaint the current image of Bernini as painter, applying atop the old a fresh portrait of the artist. Attribution is the project of Bernini pittore. In this essential respect, Montanari’s endeavour necessarily differs little from those of his predecessors, all of whom have been forced to grapple with the almost complete absence of documentary evidence securing the authorship, let alone the...

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, curated by Okwui Enwezor, explores a variety of ways in which contemporary artists appropriate, investigate, and reconfigure archival materials and structures. It focuses on photography and film while at the same time conducting, as Enwezor argues in his catalogue essay, “critical transactions” against “the exactitude of the photographic trace” (11). The term “archive” is thus meant to suggest not the literal image of a dusty file cabinet full of old documents but, following Michel Foucault’s influential The Archaeology of Knowledge (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan, London: Routledge, 1972), a regulatory discursive system, a set of a priori historical rules that determine the conditions of possibility for statements, i.e., what can be said and seen in specific formations of knowledge. The use of the phrase “archive fever” in the exhibition title references Jacques Derrida’s book of the same name in which he analyzes “the science of the archive” as a system of laws through which statements acquire their privileged evidentiary status (Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In the context of the exhibition, the archive marks an inherent...

I kept the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) title photograph of Joseph Cornell at work as the main wallpaper on my cell phone for over a month. It is a wonderful and unexpected image: a forty-four-year-old Cornell leans over an uncluttered worktable, where the empty shell of a large box and a few art supplies are neatly laid out. The lean frame of the artist forms a silhouette of dark hair and clothing against a white paper backdrop. It looks totally staged—somewhere between a cooking demo and a magic act. Perhaps it was the jolt of seeing a different Cornell, one that counters the photograph of the elderly artist, such as the iconic image used as frontispiece for the catalogue of the last Cornell retrospective twenty-six years ago in which an elderly Cornell sits in a lawn chair in the backyard of his house on Utopia Parkway. SFMOMA opens its show with a photograph that captures Cornell the maker, and it is a fitting emblem for Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination. The vita contempletiva has been revisioned by Lynda Hartigan in her retrospective as the vita activa. As viewers and readers of this exhibit and its major catalogue,...

Pompeo Batoni (Lucca 1708–Rome 1787) was one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most famous artists, lionized by popes, princes, and connoisseurs who saw his poetic and technically dazzling art as the acme of Italian painting and wore a path to his studio in one of Rome’s most fashionable districts. That simple fact bears stating, given how far Batoni’s star would sink among later generations; Sir Joshua Reynolds’s prediction that the artist would soon fall into near oblivion seems justified by the sale of a distinguished painting in 1928 for just £2. Few of his pictures were on view to the general public in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Britain, while those papering its stately homes remained the preserve of cognoscenti. To the extent that Batoni was remembered it was for his Grand Tour portraits, suave images of British milordi that have occasioned more gossip than analysis, rather than the secular and sacred compositions on which he staked his reputation. Over the past half century that injustice has been redressed by a dedicated team of scholars including Isa Belli Barsali, Anthony M. Clark, Edgar Peters Bowron, Christopher Johns,[1] and now Peter Björn Kerber, who have gradually given Batoni the attention he deserves. Museums have followed...

“. . . this slumber of forgetfulness will not last forever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past.” (Petrarch, Africa, IX, 453–7, quoted by Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Westview Press, 1960, 10) Petrarch’s concluding words to his epic poem Africa are equally applicable to Ghiberti studies. Long under the dark shadows of Richard Krautheimer and John Pope-Hennessy, Lorenzo Ghiberti and his magnificent Gates of Paradise from the Florentine Baptistery are finally being seen in a new light with fresh eyes. Free of corrosive deposits and later varnishes, the gilded bronze doors now appear much as they did at their installation in 1452, allowing us to witness Ghiberti’s breathtaking skill as a metallurgist, sculptor, storyteller, and goldsmith and to share the astonishment of Renaissance viewers like Michelangelo Buonarroti and Giorgio Vasari, who claimed them to be “the most beautiful work which has ever been seen in the world, whether ancient or modern” (quoted in the catalogue, 38). The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece, organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in collaboration with the Opera di Santa Maria del...

Claiming Space is a small, carefully curated exhibition with a big heart and ambitious agenda. It makes a compelling argument that feminist artists working in the late sixties into the early eighties had an enormous role in defining and expanding what constitutes feminist culture, and that any history of the period—social, political, cultural, or art historical—is woefully incomplete if these artists are not fully integrated into these stories. The history of this period and the art of the nineties simply does not make sense otherwise. There are nineteen artists represented in the exhibition, including major works by Judith Bernstein, Judy Chicago, Betsy Damon, Mary Beth Edelson, Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, Yolanda Lopez, Howardina Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, May Stevens, and Hannah Wilke. Sandra Orgel Crooker, Nancy Fried, Valerie Jaudon, Jane Kaufman, Joyce Kozloff, and Cynthia Mailman round out the roster of artists represented in Claiming Space. Viewers are invited to think about the “space” curators Norma Broude and Mary Garrard are claiming for feminism in several layered ways: first, a place at the table; then in the histories and in the ongoing discourse. The heroic scale of many of the objects in the exhibition is yet...

Guest-curator Jeffrey Spier’s Picturing the Bible at the Kimbell Art Museum is the first major exhibition of early Christian art in the United States since the Metropolitan Museum’s The Age of Spirituality in 1977. Where that was a vast installation, responding to the panoramic sweep of what had then only barely begun to be called Late Antiquity, Picturing the Bible is compact and select, focused specifically upon the modes of Christian visual expression and asking much of each object displayed. It is an exhibition of exceptional visual and intellectual elegance. Its governing insight, conveyed in its title, is most fully explicated in its early sections, and it is here that the exhibition is at its best. It opens with a selection of the photographs taken by Carlo Tabanelli between 1897 and 1903 of catacomb images over-painted in color, beginning with the theme of Jonah. Tabanelli's photographs were made for Josef Wilpert’s magisterial Roma sotterranea: Le pitture delle catacombe romane (Rome: Desclée, Lefebvre, 1903), the first comprehensive publication of the paintings in the Roman catacombs. The imagery of Jonah has been explored exhaustively as a story, an illustrated funerary prayer, or an appropriation of classical iconography (see, above all, Eduard Stommel,...

A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, though occupying only four rooms at the Menil Collection in Houston, is an intense, richly complex and subtly disturbing exhibition. The curator in Houston, Franklin Sirmans, has helped create a fluid, dynamic exhibition space that highlights the extraordinary diversity of Nauman’s production from 1964–69 and establishes key themes and paths of development, while leaving many connections open-ended and available for viewers to pursue for themselves. Drawings, sculptures, photographs, video/film, and sound installations are all placed within the same spaces, and highly visceral, body pieces mix with the intellectual play of word-game works. As a result, the exhibition is wonderfully changeable, allowing for very different experiences in successive viewings. One actually hears the exhibition before seeing it. Initially identifiable only on the level of noise, the show is present the moment the door of the normally hushed Menil is opened. As one enters the corridor leading to the galleries, the noise becomes louder and also more varied. Muffled voices, breathing, and a mechanical whine separate themselves from other still-unidentifiable sounds. Walking down this hallway in the Menil, an institution so much shaped by Surrealism, begins to take on the quality of...

Even for the Metropolitan Museum of Art it was impossible to duplicate the revelatory experience and concomitant visitor record of Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, the 2002 precursor of the present show and the first major U.S. exhibition on the topic in twenty-five years. Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor comes just five years later and simply could not be marketed as the same kind of novelty. Yet the faithful, returning museumgoer is rewarded with experiences of rare beauty, historical insight, and displays of astonishing technical virtuosity that are at least equal to those in the Renaissance show. Impeccably chosen and displayed, forty-five tapestries, almost all from larger sets, easily span the walls of the large galleries; chronologically, as well, they cover the entire seventeenth century and beyond. The examples on view date between 1585 and 1725 and were manufactured in a number of different European weaving centers. The first object on display instantly establishes the central historical event that would shape tapestry production for the next century: a fairly primitive but effective print by Frans Hogenberg, illustrating the Sack of Antwerp on 4 November 1576 by the notoriously brutal Spanish troops. Religious intolerance and the ruthless...

As interventions within contemporary art’s ongoing male and Western hegemonies, two recent, groundbreaking shows of global women artists, Global Feminisms and Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture, were timely. After seeing Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum last spring, I was equally thrilled to see it remixed at the Davis Museum in the fall—thrilled because the show is needed, because it is exciting to discover new artistic responses to age-old problems, and because it is still regrettably rare to see feminist concerns addressed overtly in art. The Davis version of the show was truncated, which allowed for greater space and attention to the works it did include, even if it left out some of my favorites, like Lee Bul’s evocative sculpture Ein Hungerkünstler (2004) and Boryana Rossa’s wonderfully funny video of two women screaming in scratched rhythms, Celebrating the Next Twinkling (1999), which appears on the catalogue cover. The show is groundbreaking as the first major exhibition of its kind—a global spectrum of contemporary artwork (all created since 1990) made by women and thematically related to issues central to feminism, broadly defined (thus the plural of “feminisms” in the title). While not every work achieved the...