Review Roundup

This week... The consensus on the new Turner show is that there's just too much Turner; Howard Halle likes Louise Bourgeois at the Gugg; Ken Johnson is unconvinced by the crowd-sourced photo show at the Brooklyn (it seems crowds like photos that look like something from a glossy magazine); and Ariella Budick accuses Anish Kapour of literal naval gazing (his sculptures, she writes, are like belly buttons); and Rachel Campbell-Johnston compares the experience of a Cy Tombley show to an archaeological site.

J. M. W. Turner at the Met (-Sept. 21)

"...a beast of a show. With nearly 150 works in oil and watercolor spanning more than half a century, it will either win you over or wear you out. Or it will alternate, gallery by gallery, or wall by wall, as the art swings between overblown and moving, inspired and mechanical. ... His paintings of storms at sea or Alpine plunges are early examples of the natural sublime; his squalls of paint presage the Romantics, the Realists, the Impressionists and even the Abstract Expressionists. ... 'The Houses of Parliament on Fire' might almost have been painted by Monet with a little input from Philip Guston. ... This show may be wearying because there is something imperious and impersonal about the sheer force of Turner’s ambition. It is almost as if his drive to capture nature or history in motion was so intense that it didn’t leave room for anyone else, including the viewer. Maybe that’s why despite all his hard work and even the majesty of his vision, you can emerge from this exhibition impressed but oddly untouched, even chilled." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"Against all expectations, the first J.M.W. Turner survey to reach New York in 40 years has landed with a thud. ...is astonishing for all the wrong reasons. Incredibly, this most dependable of cultural institutions seems to have miscalculated the deadening impact of laying out 140 similar paintings and drawings with little variation or context. The show serves up a Johnny One-Note whose brilliance was undermined by an aversion to experiment." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"...when he really hits it, as he does frequently after 1830 — it's as if the heavens have opened up and the artist, equal mixtures of Apollo and Dionysus, were a romantic messenger from the gods, a bringer of light. ....Turner is a visionary, a romantic, and an expressionist — more romantic than any of his contemporaries, including Delacroix. For Turner, the world of things is a mere carrier or a conduit for that which is sublime, ephemeral, and spiritual. His vision is sweeping and grand. He dissolves the world into scintillating, misty fragments, all of which get caught up in the stormy whirlwind of his art. ...the show can be a little repetitive, if not tedious. It is important to pick and choose from the vast amount of work on the walls. Walking through the show is a bit like being spun from picture to picture by tornadoes of color, and riding crest after crest on a restless sea, which can tend after a while to cause motion sickness. ... In Turner, it is when he lets go so completely, breaking up form to the point of nearly pure light, pure movement, and formlessness — when he both submerges us in the world and holds the world at a blinding distance — that he is most convincing. It is when we forget the subject of his paintings that we get closest to the subject of his art." -Lance Esplund/NY Sun

"Turner 'thought' in watercolor and scraped and manipulated it wet-into-wet, resulting in unmatched fluidity and depth — as the spectacular series of nine, nighttime 'Burning of the Houses of Parliament' (1837) makes clear. Although his oils of hills, bridges and mandatory canals of Venice may first appear museum-ish and staid, their brilliant or roiling skies take on lives of their own." -Jeff Weinstein/Metro

"What makes Turner so compelling a painter is his ability to make the tension between the realistic surface and all that is churning beneath it so palpable to the viewer." -Howard Kissel/NY Daily News


Framing a Century: Master Photographers at the Met (-Sept. 1)

"...the premise of this trim, instructive survey has all the excitement of an intro-level art-history course. But step into the galleries and look around: every picture is astonishing, and the curator Malcolm Daniel’s choices are sure and sophisticated. Combining famous and little-known images, each carefully annotated grouping doesn’t attempt to sum up a career; rather, it suggests the broader scope of the artist’s range." -Vince Aletti/New Yorker

"...the exhibition reveals photography as a litmus test for social transformation. Many of these photographers used technological innovations—such as the shift from paper to glass negatives, which allowed for crystalline clarity of detail across vast distances—to mirror broader changes in society. ... offers a rare perspective on the transformations (and growing pains) of an infant medium through its first hundred years. ... While one might quibble with this exhibition as an essay in canon formation, its panoramic view also provides a sense of how the photographer's role in society has shifted." -Leslie Camhi/Village Voice


Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21)

"For people of my generation, who spent much of their childhoods clambering over jungle gyms inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes, his architecture embodies the values of an era when it was still possible to believe that society was gliding steadily toward a better future. ... But Fuller, of course, was more than that. His deep conviction was that environmentally sensitive, technologically innovative design could save the world. One of this show’s strengths is that it allows us to recognize how that vision was shaped by cold war militarism as well as personal idealism. It offers a poignant contrast to the ethos of our era, when the technology of war borders on a science-fiction fantasy, yet we no longer seem able to put it to other, constructive uses." -Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYTimes

"If Fuller saw himself as a verb it may be because his life was dominated more by activity than artifact. He truly found himself in his presentations and lectures, from his first talks to a handful of people in Greenwich Village salons to the vast college audiences he drew in his old age. His real skills were 'synergistic,' all right, but it was the synergy of networking, propaganda and performance. ... The most meaningful artifact in the show may be the mirrored bust of Bucky by Isamu Noguchi. ... The mirrored surface suggests the nature of Fuller's appeal: Everyone saw something of themselves in Fuller. His ideas mirrored their ideals, his designs reflected their dreams. Fuller was born of a family with deep roots in New England. His ancestors included Margaret Fuller, who co-founded The Dial with Emerson. He became a latter-day off-shoot of the Transcendalists, a modern-day Thoreau who planned simple life in a soybean silo instead of a cabin, and his architecture carried the mystic overtones of Orson Fowler's octagon house movement of the same period." -Core Jr./Core77


Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (-Aug. 10)

"If you could capture it in a manageable form, would the collective judgment of all visitors to a major art museum be better than that of the people with Ph.D.’s, the curators or, heaven forbid, the professional critics? ... The results are inconclusive, at best, and the exhibition itself is not very interesting to look at, but the issues it raises are fascinating. ... What you see is an array of competent, traditional, magazine-style photography — mostly cityscapes, riverscapes and portraits. ... What if you favor exhibitions designed to appeal not to crowds but mainly to discerning, well-informed individuals? What if you go to museums to learn from experts who have devoted long, deep and careful study to certain subjects? What if one of the things you value most in contemporary art is its resistance to mainstream taste, its willingness to forgo popularity in pursuit of ideas and experiences that few have already had? ... The best you can say for 'Click!' is that it’s a good conversation starter." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


P.F. One (Public Farm One) by WORK Architecture Company (P.S.1 Ninth Annual Architecture-Program Winner)

"...evoking the look of an environmentally sound magic carpet that's landing squarely in the P.S.1 courtyard. Constructed as a honeycomb of large cardboard tubes, the top surface of the asymmetrical, V-shaped plane is a working farm, blooming with a variety of vegetables and plants... ... Form meets function in the supportive columns as well, offering cell-phone-charging stations, pockets of herbs, and those twisty scopes that allow you to spy on people without them knowing. The plants will be harvested and sold at an accompanying farmers' market during the parties. ...while that flying carpet looks great, it doesn't provide that much shade; this year's parties are going to be motherfucking hot." -Annie Fischer/Village Voice


Louise Borgeois at the Guggenheim (-Sept. 12)

"...one gets the impression of a guarded artist more interested in grandeur than in sharing. She is, in other words, one of the boys, which is why major institutions like the Guggenheim love her. ...a triumph... It’s certainly a relief after the strum und din of Cai Gou-Qiang’s flying cars: I’d gotten so used to being hit over the head whenever I walked into the Gugg, it took me a moment to adjust to what’s basically a good old-fashioned survey. ... Eschewing and embracing the social conventions of her time, she chose her life while also accepting that it was chosen for her. And her art suggests the same mix of retrograde and cutting-edge." -Howard Halle/TONY


Paul McCarthy at the Whitney (-Oct. 12)

"A note to the media: There will be no ketchup or chocolate syrup involved in Paul McCarthy’s latest show at the Whitney. It will be devoid of condiments of all kinds. Also, there will be no Santa butt plugs, mechanical pigs or tree-humping animatronic figures. The artist will not wear a bulbous clown nose, portray a psychotic father or introduce any items into orifices, real or simulated. The only violence will be metaphorical and oblique, and the only human bodies will be the viewers’ own, reflected in various mirrors. ...clearly trying for something deeper... To McCarthy, the kinetic rooms he’s built for the Whitney echo both the Minimalist cube and the interior of the human skull." -Howard Halle/TONY


Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe at the Met (-Sept. 21)

"Now, in what has to be a labor of love and curatorial masochism, the museum has mounted the oddly charming... Tables, flagons, chalices, busts, clocks, and perfume burners, all fashioned from stone, make up the riotous polychrome feast of this latest show. ...the charm of pietre dure consists in the conflict and collusion between that almost superhuman control and the essential fortuity of the materials in question." -James Gardner/NY Sun


The Declaration of Independence at the New York Public Library (Aug. 2)

"...once again, the New York Public Library has placed on display its copy in Thomas Jefferson's hand of the Declaration of Independence. ... Of the few copies he made, the library's is one of only two known intact copies. It is thus an autograph manuscript of astonishing historical value. Extremely fragile, it can be exhibited only for very brief periods and under very carefully controlled lighting conditions." -Francis Morrone/NY Sun


Radiance From the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru at the Met (-Sept. 1)

"As Darwin wrote, brightly colored feathers give certain species of birds an evolutionary advantage. Ancient Peruvians adapted such plumage for their own purposes, adorning ritual objects and personal accessories with startling yellows, reds, greens and blues. ...one of the few New York museum exhibitions ever to focus on this little-known art form. Organized by a senior research associate, Heidi King, it supplements the Met’s rarely displayed holdings of featherwork with examples borrowed from public and private collections, including those of the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. It’s the kind of specialized yet accessible show that only the Met can pull off." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Great British Watercolors From the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven) (-Aug. 17)

"...more than 80 watercolors by English artists from the 18th through 19th centuries in a beautiful new show... The works are arranged more or less chronologically to show the evolution of British watercolor painting from mid-18th-century topographical landscapes to a more widespread application and growing sophistication in the 19th century. The depth, diversity and quality of the exhibits are astonishing. Mr. Mellon not only bought widely, he clearly bought the very best of what he could find. ...inevitably it is Turner who steals this exhibition, for he was such an astonishing artistic talent..." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Nineteenth Century American Paintings of the Hudson Highlands at Boscobel (Garrison, NY) (-Oct. 1)

"...a selection of 19th-century American paintings that reflect some of the same meandering beauty that surrounds the estate... The arrangement of the works by themes, along with a map of the area, helps viewers make these connections, enabling them to compare and contrast different views of the same place or subject. It also highlights how much the landscape has changed. ...a little treasure." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Claimed by the Sea: Long Island Shipwrecks at the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities Gallery (Cold Spring Harbor, NY) (-Jan. 2009)

"The show focuses on 11 disasters, chosen largely because the society owns or could borrow artworks and artifacts that bring their dramas graphically to life..." -Aileen Jacobson/NYTimes


Anish Kapoor at the ICA (Boston) (-Sept. 7)

"...14 beguiling sculptures... Kapoor often works on an architectural scale and with theatrical verve to create urban spectacles. Most people experience his art one piece at a time, and the ICA offers a rare chance to stroll through a 30-year career. ...the visceral is everywhere in Kapoor's art. His sculptures express themselves in the visual language of birth, sex and death. They brood over the body's skin, delve into cavities, and cast fleeting insights on the gloomy crannies of the mind. ... Most of Kapoor's recent work is either mirrored or a deep sanguinary red, or both. The first surface invokes the art historical motif of womanly vanity, the second is linked to the traditional colour of Indian bridal dresses. This strain of femininity leads him to some disconcerting images. ...In their lofty, stylised sensuality, the sculptures are obviously sexual, though in ways that a woman artist might choose just as much as a man. ... Kapoor's oeuvre could be divided into two kinds: innies and outies. He has harnessed both to a rhetoric of the sublime, yet in the end what really preoccupies him is the way the artist manipulates his art. After spending some time with all these reflective craters and shiny swellings, it occurs to me that Kapoor is the author of a body of anatomical work that refers obsessively back to itself, and so is guilty of the most literal kind of navel-gazing. His strategy is not crudely confessional but illusionistic. He has a magician's toolkit, full of distorting mirrors and secret compartments, that convincingly simulates profundity but in fact offers only varying degrees of shallowness." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times


Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape at the Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA) (-Spring 2008)

"...a show dealing with environmental themes... If they are inclined toward political activism, it is the kind of activism that understands the difference between the artistic arena and the political arena and is prepared to act in both. If they are inclined toward lyrical responses to nature, they indulge these responses with their eyes wide open to the real plight of the environment today." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Modern Love at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.) (-Sept. 21)

"...culled from almost 250 donated to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in the past decade by ... local husband-and-wife collectors... ...it's not just any female body, it seems, that fascinates today's female artists, but my body. ... it tells us something about the Podestas and their tastes." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post


Power and Glory: Court Arts of China's Ming Dynasty at the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) (-Sept. 21)

"This grand show surveys the imperial arts of the Ming era - 1368 to 1644 - a dynastic reign distinguished by relative peace and in its later centuries, by religious eclecticism, expanding literacy (especially among women) and transoceanic trade." -Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle


Cy Twombly at the Tate Modern (-Sept. 14)

"He's known as the bloke who does blotches and scribbles - not a particularly sophisticated way of putting it, but as a description it's not bad. ...his fundamental search for an artistic language that could reconcile the brash new surfaces of American Abstract Expressionism with the layered traditions of European art history. He is trying to rediscover the relevance of drawing in a world that had erased the graphic line, and find a role for the old gods amid a modernity that had forgotten all about myth. ... Twombly is not a painter who wants simply to be explained. You unearth him. It is a gradual, almost physical process. And a show of his work should be treated like an archaeological site. You uncover his canvases like fragments of pottery; you blow at the dust of ideas, stare at shards of half-missing puzzles with half-remembered meanings. ... Mark and emptiness, pattern and disruption, movement and stasis, growth and decay all meet and mingle on his canvases. ... Twombly is a profound poet. This show left me convinced." -Rachel Campbell-Johnston/Times of London


Perrault at the Pompidou (Paris) (-Sept. 22)

"...exemplary in its design and layout... ...spatially organised by screening devices which use two versions of Perrault’s trademark fine gold and silver metal meshes. ... The entrance space, a techno- souk of chain-link ceiling drapes, presents Perault’s most famous project, The Bibliothèque National. ...contains, possibly the most beautiful architectural models I have ever seen. ... The models are sublime and the public were photographing everything in obvious enjoyment. I felt however that there was little beyond these maquettes that delighted." -Gerrard O’Carroll/BD


Goya in Times of War at the Prado (Madrid) (-July 13)

"It’s much too big an exhibition, like so many shows. But then, an excess of Goya is not exactly an unbearable prospect. ... That is the genius of Goya, not just to give equal weight to drawings and prints and paintings, to public and private pictures, but also to move so effortlessly between cruelty and love. The human condition was never whole, Goya made clear. It splintered into fragments, refused order. Society verged on chaos, then inevitably succumbed. An artist bears witness, unflinchingly. This is the Goya we identify with in the 'Caprichos' and the 'Disasters,' the laconic Goya who speaks to the cynic in us; but there was also the Goya who painted those portraits and landscapes of such surpassing grace and dignity — quiet pictures that found redemption in exceptional people and places. The Romantic Goya, who prompts comparison to Goethe." -Michael Kimmelman/NYTimes