Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Lynne Warren
Exh. cat. Chicago and New Haven: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in association with Yale University Press, 2011. 136 pp.; 75 color ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780300172386)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, January 29–May 29, 2011
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, January 29–May 29, 2011
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 traditional retrospective. Though the exhibition included works from over forty-five years of Nutt’s painting career, providing viewers with an overview of the more diversely… Full Review
December 22, 2011
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Caroline Hancock, Franck Gautherot, and Seung-Duk Kim, eds.
Exh. cat. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2009. 480 pp.; 356 ills. Cloth $60.00 (9782840663584)
Exhibition schedule: Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, June 20–October 4, 2009; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, November 4, 2009–January 24, 2010; Le Consortium, Dijon, France, April 2–June 20, 2010; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, October 1, 2010–January 9, 2011; New Museum, New York, February 9, 2011–June 19, 2011
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 reasons for Benglis’s absence. It is a prime example of her “fallen paintings,” the vast “spills” of pigmented latex for which Benglis is best known… Full Review
December 1, 2011
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Martina Bagnoli, Holger A. Klein, C. Griffith Mann, and James Robinson, eds.
Exh. cat. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2010. 278 pp.; 300 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300168273)
Exhibition schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art, October 17, 2010–January 27, 2011; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, February 13–May 15, 2011; British Museum, London, June 23–October 9, 2011
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 panel on his pedestal introduced him as the reliquary bust of St. Baudime, who, according to legend, was sent to Gaul by St. Peter… Full Review
November 23, 2011
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Cassandra Albinson, Peter Funnell, and Lucy Peltz, eds.
Exh. cat. New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art, National Portrait Gallery, London, and Yale University Press, 2011. 280 pp.; 160 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (9780300167184)
Exhibition schedule: National Portrait Gallery, London, October 21, 2010–January 23, 2011; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, February 24–June 5, 2011
“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 explorer of human psychology—one who is keenly attentive to the interplay of surface and depth, social mask and private self. Even Lawrence’s most public statements… Full Review
November 17, 2011
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Judith B. Hecker
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011. 96 pp.; 72 color ills. Paper $29.95 (9780870707568)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 23–August 29, 2011
Lynne Cooney
Exh. cat. Boston and Balgowan, South Africa: Boston University School of Visual Arts and Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers, 2011. 100 pp.; 59 color ills. Paper $25.00 (0977720136)
Three Artists at the Caversham Press: Deborah Bell, Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge. Exhibition schedule: Boston University Art Gallery, February 8–March 27, 2011; South Africa: Artists, Prints, Community: Twenty-five Years at the Caversham Press. Exhibition schedule: 808 Gallery, Boston University, February 8–March 27, 2011
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 the majority of the population has until recently been provided with a “bantu” education, certain processes, such as linocut, have provided an inexpensive vehicle for… Full Review
November 3, 2011
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Desmond Shawe-Taylor
Exh. cat. London: Royal Collection Publications, 2009. 191 pp.; 157 color ills.; 14 b/w ills. Paper $30.00 (9781905686070)
Exhibition schedule: Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, March 27–September 20, 2008; Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, October 30, 2009–February 14, 2010
Sir Philip Sassoon organized the first exhibition of the English conversation piece in 1930. Describing this type of painting as “a representation of two or more persons in a state of dramatic or psychological relation to each other,” Sassoon displayed over 150 eighteenth-century pictures in his own house. Following Sassoon’s identification of the genre, books and exhibitions about the conversation piece appeared steadily between the 1930s and 1980s. More recently, studies on the emergence of the modern consumer society and the bourgeois public sphere have renewed interest in the picture type because of its depictions of fine material possessions and… Full Review
October 21, 2011
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Sandra S. Phillips, ed.
San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press, 2010. 256 pp.; 230 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300163438)
Exhibition schedule: Tate Modern, London, May 28–October 3, 2010; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 30, 2010–April 17, 2011; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, May 21–September 11, 2011
Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 began by turning a spotlight on its viewers. A robotic beam shone from above, following its subjects across the first floor atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through a series of improvised tests: small circles, long strides. Its operators were invisible because they were absent. Anonymous spectators selected targets remotely using their own computers and a streaming feed. ACCESS (2003) by Marie Sester turned the museum’s most open space into an eerily gentle panopticon: a place where one feels watched but cannot confirm the feeling or identify the… Full Review
September 15, 2011
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Maryan W. Ainsworth, ed.
Exh. cat. New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2010. 496 pp.; 337 color ills.; 116 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (9780300166576)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 5, 2010–January 17, 2011; National Gallery, London, February 23–May 30, 2011 (in a reduced version as Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance)
This seminal exhibition, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before traveling to the National Gallery, London, was the first devoted to Jan Gossart in the United States and the first major monographic exhibition anywhere since 1965. The accompanying catalogue, which serves as a catalogue raisonné of the entire oeuvre, re-shapes the contours of this important early sixteenth-century artist and illuminates key questions about his working habits, patronage, and the themes and functions of his art. The exhaustive catalogue entries are prefaced by eight richly informative essays devoted to Gossart’s historical and cultural milieu, his work as an architectural… Full Review
September 1, 2011
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Kenneth E. Silver
Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2010. 200 pp.; 155 color ills. Paper $40.00 (9780892074051)
Exhibition schedule: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 1, 2010–January 9, 2011
It is customary to think of European art between the First and Second World Wars in the plural—as defined by competing forms of abstraction, divergent realisms, and assorted returns to tradition. The principal goal of Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 was to assert an underlying unity to the period between the Armistice of 1918 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The chaos and mechanized destruction of World War I, the exhibition and its catalogue affirmed, generated a yearning for the timeless stability embodied by classical art. This provoked a widespread rejection of the formal innovations… Full Review
September 1, 2011
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The opening of the new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, was one of the major—if not the major—museum events in the United States in 2010. Accompanied by a tidal wave of publicity at the regional and national levels, the new wing expands the museum’s previous display space by over one-third; it showcases art from both South and North America, offering a more expansive definition of “America” than has been standard in museum collections; and it includes works of art ranging from 500 BCE (an Olmec mask) to the twenty-first century (“By the… Full Review
August 25, 2011
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