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No eighteenth-century British artist had an output as wide-ranging and as versatile as William Kent (1685–1748). He worked for court, country, and city; his style encompassed the Palladian and the Gothic. Painting, sculpture, architecture, interior decoration, furniture, metalwork, book illustration, theater design, costume, and landscape gardening—he turned his hand to them all. His genius lay not in one form of artistic production, but rather in the way he combined them. He is credited as the first Englishman to design complete interiors, with pictures, furniture, and upholstery integrated into single coherent schemes (John Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors, New Haven: Paul… Full Review

When I hear the name of the American artist Marsden Hartley, I think of two paintings, Portrait of a German Officer (1914) and Adelard the Drowned, Master of the “Phantom” (ca. 1938–39). As Jonathan Weinberg has noted, both convey desire in the context of death (Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, 114–40). In the first, Hartley veils that desire, and its companion grief, in a compressed mass of military regalia, although the sheer weight of the forms and the black background… Full Review

One could argue that no contemporary topic has more urgency and complexity than that of the interaction between humans and the natural environment. Whether considering contemporary political policy or theories of geologic time, the question of how this moment in human history will come to terms with its existence in the larger world, literally and figuratively, is prominent across academic disciplines and various media discourses. Time, Space & Matter: Five Installations Exploring Natural Phenomena, curated by Betty Ann Brown at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, enters into this discussion, according to the introductory text for the exhibition, by… Full Review

The sumptuous, emotional, and multi-layered painterly work of Tony Greene (1955–1990)—featuring found images, text, and decorative elements in objects both large and small—is experiencing something of a moment right now. The artist received a room of his own within two major exhibitions in 2014: the Whitney Biennial and Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, with the former curated by artists Catherine Opie and Richard Hawkins and the latter by ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries curator David Frantz. In addition to his presence in these group exhibitions, Greene was the subject of… Full Review

With a decade of solo exhibitions devoted to the work of nineteenth-century photographers Édouard Baldus (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), Gustave Le Gray (Bibliothèque nationale de France and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), and Roger Fenton (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), French and American museums succeeded in demonstrating that a focus on individual oeuvre, rather than period style, lent some much needed scholarly substance to the early history of photography. Given his significance to the medium’s history, it is a mystery as to why a similarly ambitious monograph on Charles Marville (1813–1879) had not been published until now. Curator Sarah… Full Review

No matter what the relationship between art and medicine, I would rather keep it on the aesthetic plain. . . . Why don’t you show your paintings and the thesis in a medical hospital —Betty Parsons, letter to Forrest Bess, 1958 Female patron: The paintings up there are amazing! Male patron: Did you look at the stuff in the middle? Female patron: No. Male patron: Super weird. —exchange in Berkeley Art Museum gift shop, September 2014 Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, the latest retrospective of Forrest Bess’s (1911–1977) work, is one animal on the… Full Review

As signaled by its title, visitors to the exhibition The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux learned that the artist (1827–1875) had many: an obsession for art at a young age; an enthusiasm for portraiture; a desire for major government-sponsored commissions; and fervor for work. His was also a life full of passions unrealized, as he died from pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-eight. Yet Carpeaux’s impact on nineteenth-century sculpture was significant. His works fill museums and streets in Paris and in his birthplace of Valenciennes, and he influenced a younger generation of sculptors, including Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin. … Full Review

“While George Seurat was the founder of the Neo-Impressionist movement, he was not the first to create portraits in the style”: so announces an initial wall text for Face to Face: The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886–1904 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, curated by Ellen W. Lee and Jane Block. These words accompany a line of four portraits (one by Vincent van Gogh, two by Albert Dubois-Pillets, and one by Achille Laugé), which in turn reveal exciting curatorial minds at work—Face to Face is not yet another exhibition with an object list recycling famous works by famous names. Despite Paul… Full Review

The Art of Video Games exhibition raises an intriguing question: How should a curator go about making the argument that a medium long associated with mass culture deserves to be taken seriously as an art form? Considering the possible approaches to such a situation, we can look to precedents—cinema provides an obvious analogue. Cinema’s initial tentative steps into the space of the museum during the first half of the twentieth century were governed by a conservative philosophy of curatorial selectivity: early exhibitions were often limited to a small group of exemplary works that seemed appropriately highbrow, appropriately challenging, and, importantly… Full Review

It is fitting that the first major retrospective of John Altoon’s work takes place in his hometown, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), since the show’s assembly necessitated considerable sleuthing by curator Carol S. Eliel, often with the aid of Altoon’s Los Angeles-based contemporaries. John Altoon, a compact show featuring eighteen works on canvas and fifty on paper or board, fills five galleries of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum and offers the first comprehensive look at the artist’s prolific oeuvre, or what remains of it (Altoon destroyed much of what he made during the short period… Full Review