Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art has been many things to many people. Designed by Thomas Jeckyll as a dining room with leather walls and intricate shelving, and radically redecorated by James McNeill Whistler in 1876–77, it originally grew around Whistler’s Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–64) and showcased the blue-and-white Chinese porcelain of Whistler’s London patron Frederick Leyland. In 1904 it was purchased by Charles Lang Freer and installed in...

Curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, The American Style: The Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis was a delightful and instructive exhibition. In one ample room, divided by projecting vitrines and one partial transverse wall, they displayed paintings, drawings, prints, furniture, ceramics, glass, photographs, and even current wallpaper. Various forms of classical revival became widely acknowledged from the late 1870s onward as the best and truest American expression in architecture and domestic design. Albrecht...

Issues of high and low—fine art versus popular culture—ran rampant through Art in the Streets, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The first major U.S. museum exhibition devoted to exploring the history of graffiti and street art, it took any number of risks with regard to the challenges it posed to conventional notions of museum art. The exhibition succeeded in large measure and was at once raucous, thought provoking, and illuminating....

When describing the carved artworks of the Aboriginal people of the Arctic regions, the anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter once observed: “A distinctive mark of the traditional art is that many of the ivory carvings, generally of sea mammals, won’t stand up, but roll clumsily about. Each lacks a single, favored point of view, hence, a base. Indeed, they aren’t intended to be set in place and viewed, but rather to be worn or handled, turned...

Organized in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, The Great American Hall of Wonders at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) celebrated the United States as an exceptional nation. Spanning the entire nineteenth century, but primarily the transcontinental, expansionist period of 1826–1876, the exhibition represented the nation’s citizens in possession of unparalleled democratic liberties and socio-economic opportunities, as they utilized their technological and scientific ingenuity to harness an abundance of natural resources....

In an era when attention is fractured into multiple platforms and diffused by multiple media, the singularity of Jim Nutt’s artistic vision stands out: for twenty-plus years—as was made evident in a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago—Nutt has been deliberately and meticulously absorbed with painting the female face. Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character, as curator Lynne Warren clarified both in her selections and in the accompanying text, was not a...

The opening of Lynda Benglis at the New Museum marked a surprising milestone in the artist’s career: despite having been a fixture of the New York art world since her arrival from New Orleans in 1964, it was her first solo museum exhibition in New York. What took so long? The story behind Contraband (1968), installed in the New Museum’s glassed-in lobby gallery and the first piece encountered by visitors to the show, hints at...

A golden man clad in church vestments faced visitors as they entered Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe at the Walters Art Museum this spring. Refulgent against the deep blue walls of the entry room, the metallic statue extended his hands in a communicative gesture. His eyes of polished ivory and horn appeared to be alert, seeing. This was not an art installation so much as an interpersonal encounter. A text...

“How various he is!” Thomas Gainsborough’s tribute to Joshua Reynolds applies equally well to their successor in grand-manner portraiture. It is one of the signal achievements of Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance that it removes any lingering traces of the negative stereotype: Lawrence the slick, formulaic sycophant who prostituted his gifts in the service of a decadent Regency elite. In its place this wide-ranging exhibition and thoughtful catalogue substitute a dynamic, probing, and inventive...

Two recent exhibitions, one in Boston and the other in New York City, highlighted the central role that printmaking has played in South African art for the past half century and provided an exciting introduction to its varied achievements. In South Africa, where art has frequently served as a vehicle for protesting political oppression, printmaking has been valued for producing multiples that can be widely disseminated by resistance organizations. In addition, in a country where...