Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The Art Institute of Chicago and Saint Louis Art Museum recently organized a visually rich exhibition featuring thirty-two Japanese folding-screen compositions from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Sporting a different title at each location, the exhibition brought together the best of both collections and smartly used the diverse works to present a multi-faceted introduction to the folding screen. The two museums fashioned surprisingly different viewing experiences. With illustrated, bilingual gallery texts, detailed individual labels, and a looping video on a contemporary work that periodically sent classical bugaku music reverberating throughout its high-ceilinged galleries, the Art Institute offered abundant… Full Review

Childhood often conjures images of an idyllic time of innocence and bliss. Although captivating to the popular imagination, such visions are by no means timeless or universal, and perhaps nothing more than nostalgic conceit. This is where the curators of Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood, April Watson and Jane Aspinwall, intervened by assembling a variety of photographic images of children, dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Of the forty-four photographers represented, most were American, save for Brits Lewis Carroll and Cecil Beaton, the German photographer August Sander, the Italian-born Frederick Sommer and Jocelyn Lee, and the Japanese… Full Review

Thought-provoking and intriguing, The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900, seen by this reviewer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, is the kind of exhibition museums should organize more often. It is primarily a works-on-paper show, featuring around one hundred prints, three drawings, four illustrated books, and ten sculptures. Including objects made during the last half of the nineteenth century, this display presents a broad range of artists: the French Rodolphe Bresdin, the Belgian James Ensor, the Swedish Anders Zorn, and the German Käthe Kollwitz to name only a few. Although this show proves… Full Review

This dual retrospective of Mira Schendel (Brazilian, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988) and Léon Ferrari (Argentine, b. 1920) was without a doubt a major contribution to the expanding canon of experimental art from the sixties. Spanning Schendel’s career from the late 1950s through the late 1980s and Ferrari’s production from the late 1950s through 2007, the two hundred pieces in a variety of media, but predominantly on paper, assembled in the exhibition and exquisitely installed by MoMA curator Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas pleased non-specialized audiences as well as connoisseurs. Upon entering the Renne de Harnoncourt galleries of the museum, viewers could see a… Full Review

With two independent exhibitions in 2008 devoted to the Baroque portrait bust—Heads on Shoulders: Portrait Busts in the Low Countries, 1600–1800, at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; and Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Canada—the genre of early modern portrait sculpture celebrated an unparalleled year. There has never been a specialized exhibition of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s portrait busts. For logistical and economic reasons, shows featuring early modern European sculpture, let alone portrait busts, are rare. Even more exceptional is their exhibition in… Full Review

The Eight and American Modernisms was the latest exhibition that sought to find some kind of unifying thread to bind together eight artists—Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan—whose formal association lasted roughly a year and whose art has bedeviled the efforts of art historians to assess the importance of their contribution, collectively or as individuals. When the artists banded together in 1908 to exhibit their paintings at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, they were linked more by friendship than by any overarching stylistic or aesthetic program. Some… Full Review

The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain, which can only be seen at the National Gallery of Art, offers an excellent sequel to a series of recent exhibitions on Spanish themes, including the wonderful El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, which was on view last year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Nasher Museum at Duke University (click here for review). But whereas that exhibition attempted to provide a comprehensive overview of Spanish artistic accomplishments during the early seventeenth century, The Art of Power… Full Review

The Prints of Jacob Lawrence, 1963–2000, showcased eighty-one prints by the master African American artist in a crowd-pleasing exhibition that provided a platform for one of the lesser-known parts of Lawrence’s extensive oeuvre. The screenprints, lithographs, etchings, drypoints, and single woodcut displayed in the show represented almost the entirety of Lawrence’s output as a printmaker and were brought together courtesy of the DC Moore Gallery in New York for this show at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. While the images, most of which are large and colorful in the artist’s trademark graphic figurative style, are filled with the… Full Review

The critical reception of Martin Kippenberger's work is indiscernible from that of his persona. Kippenberger died of cancer in 1997 at the age of forty-four. But his myth lives on, carefully perpetuated by his peers and by a cohort of assistants who were involved in not only the production of his work but also the production of its meaning, and faithfully disseminated in the circulation systems that Kippenberger's work addressed or that became at times the work itself. (His reintegration of self-designed promotional material for exhibitions, like posters and announcement cards, into an ongoing output signals the importance he ascribed… Full Review

Bruce Nauman’s masterful Topological Gardens, which was the United States entry in the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale de Venezia, not surprisingly won the Golden Lion Award for best national pavilion. Breaking from most previous U.S. exhibitions at the biennale, Nauman’s amounts to a not-so-mini-survey and is spread, also uncharacteristically, over three venues—the United States Pavilion in the Giardini, the Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, and the Università Ca’ Foscari, the latter two being the sites, respectively, of Days and Giorni, a pair of new sound installations. Also at Ca' Foscari is Untitled (1970/2009), a videotaped re-interpretation… Full Review