I'm back, but still playing catch up. Still a week behind in NYTimes, and I need to post reviews from London and a whole slew of stuff from the new Brooklyn Rail. Coming up, I'm planning a quick roundup up of the shows I saw while in Amsterdam in Istanbul. And, if I can get to it, some thoughts on the now-closed Turner show at the Met and Dali at MoMA. Review of the Week goes to Lance Esplund at the New York Sun who did an awesome job pulling apart the new Giorgio Morandi show at the Met.
Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at the Museum of Modern Art (-Jan. 5)
"...at issue is the distraught ambition of a late-blooming, fragile man, seen in efforts to express the character of the world at sundown and after dark. Early tonal platitudes give way to forced imitations of Millet and other misfires. (“The Stevedores in Arles” anticipates nothing so much as strip-mall paintings on velvet.) Van Gogh did the improbable, winning by trying too hard—banging into limits that disintegrated, as profound inventions of linear rhythm and color harmony transfigured dicey motifs. The delirious “Starry Night” and the hellish “Night Café” attain serenity in their realization, cruising at an altitude of talent beyond imagining." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker
"Small and quirky, it is an anti-blockbuster. Instead of the usual are-we-done-yet marathon followed with ordeal by gift shop, it quietly displays 23 paintings, 9 drawings and several letters by van Gogh in six intimate galleries. The final gallery features a dense display of books that he read, most open to poems about the night. ... Van Gogh discovered new colors everywhere, especially at night. Peripatetically, briefly yet fulsomely, this show explores his special relationship with darkness. It provides a view of the tenderness, urgency and brilliance at the core of his art, as well as the openness to nature that set it aflame. ... Unable to see clearly, he painted what he saw, ultimately pitting his colors against one another as if they were antagonists in a visual drama. He egged on their clashes with exaggerated daubs of paint, bringing backgrounds forward and giving each inch of canvas its own sense of life." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes
"...a small, peculiar, disjointed show, drawing together masterpieces and obscurities to justify the thesis of its curator, Joachim Pissarro, about the effect of night and its manifestations on van Gogh’s praxis. ... What makes this show worth seeing and almost justifies Pissarro’s pedantic arrangements is one painting, Starry Night over the Rhône (1888, Musee D’Orsay). This is painting of perfect symmetry. The stars burst like firecrackers into bright, evenly spaced pinwheels, as their light divides the waters in rays of equal spatial ratios to each other." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet
"The tragedy of Van Gogh’s death looms large in a tiny but immensely moving exhibition... ...pays tribute to the artist’s twilight rhapsodies, to the solace he found in stars, and to the sway of his nocturnal muse. ... Van Gogh identified with his hungry subjects and equated their toil with his own. He turned away from the 19th century’s romance with the rustic and the picturesque, moving presciently closer in spirit to Walker Evans... ... In 1889, a year before he shot himself in a wheat field outside Paris, he painted a giddy scene of the afterlife, a night sky alive with incandescent whorls. Seen here, after so much mournful exaltation, 'The Starry Night' becomes an even more blazing, exhilarating leap towards a sky that seems so bright, so near at hand." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
"...compact yet wide-ranging, hitting many of the artist's obsessions, from peasants to gaslights. Among the 23 paintings in the show, about five are perfect, gorgeously idiosyncratic hymns to color and form. There are another handful of head-turners and some typical theme-exhibition filler. The show doesn't all cohere conceptually, but in front of so many great paintings that barely matters. ... Van Gogh fancied himself a populist painter for a time, depicting the virtues of earthier types who also labored past dark. 'The Potato Eaters'' (1885) is his biggest and most famous picture in this vein -- he spent months on studies for it. The bulbous noses of the women huddled around a lamp-lit table and the easy sentiment feel ham-handed. Thankfully, he moved on from such sentimental scenes to continue his pursuit of sublime landscapes." -Carly Berwick/Bloomberg
"...focused gem of a show... Intelligently curated by Joachim Pissarro - great-grandson of the impressionist painter Camille..." -Barbara Hoffman/NY Post
"... a very clever repackaging of a handful of iconic Van Goghs." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger
"The show's stated subject, van Gogh's interest in nocturnal scenes, is a little less compelling than the curators at MoMA and at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (their collaborators on this exhibition) seem to believe. And for a show consecrated to the night, a surprising number of sun-filled landscapes are on view. But none of this really matters — we must always welcome any opportunity to re-examine the works of van Gogh." -James Gardner/NY Sun
After Nature at the New Museum (closed)
"While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It’s not a movement—movements are more sure of themselves. It’s a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship. It’s a shift from theatricality to actual drama, from art about selling art to an art that’s serious and ironic at the same time, eager for audiences but not slick and accessorized. Some of it is really good; some already looks like neo-Romantic dreck. ... a somber, serious, cerebral show. Maybe excessively so. ...so tightly scripted and grounded in humanistic liberalism that individual pieces begin to read less as artworks than as text. Everything becomes subservient to the narrative. ... As complex, thoughtful, and inventive as 'After Nature' is, it lacks paradox. Nevertheless, it’s thrilling to see an excellent curator at a New York museum boldly tackle a large themed survey—to identify a trend, and not be trendy." -Jerry Saltz/NYMag.
"...a group exhibition that deserves to be seen - even if the experience calls for a stiff drink straight after. The display could have been tighter, the selection process more ruthless. But in seriousness and ambition, 'After Nature' sets a standard to which most museum shows and themed biennials don't even bother to aspire. Drawing together an array of celebrated contemporaries, outsider artists, and historical figures, the show indulges a mood of keening, rapturous, post-apocalyptic despair and, for the most part, does it intelligently." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
"After Nature , a panoply of apocalyptic visions at the New Museum, left me depressed for hours. Even as I walked through the gleaming plate glass doors into a splendid summer evening, with the sun slanting low across SoHo and the buzz of young hipsters schmoozing at outdoor cafes, I couldn't shake the feeling of imminent collapse. ... the exhibition imagines that doom is already upon us and its artists treat the present as dead, mummified history. The show is an elegy for a time of disaster - our time, that is, haunted by the laboured breath of industry's victims, pockmarked and scabbed with toxic sores. The show is infused with poetic melancholy, and though its art-world preciousness can irritate, it also disturbs, disorients, and hectors. ... After Nature resembles Pixar robo-blockbuster Wall-E , but lacks the humour, the romance and the snatches of Hello, Dolly. In its doggedly gloomy way, the exhibit browbeats the viewer into a state of hopelessness so complete as to be bizarrely sublime." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Dec. 14)
"In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: 'Stay fit the Morandi way!' ... It’s as if he had set out, time and again, to nail down the whatness of his objects but couldn’t get beyond the preliminary matter of their whereness. ... Morandi fumbled, thrillingly, amid the ruins of mental concepts of space. He reversed the thrust of his beloved early-Renaissance inventors of perspective. ... He is a painter’s painter, because to look at his work is to re-create it, feeling in your wrist and fingers the sequence of strokes, each a stab of decision which discovers a new problem. Color works hard in Morandi. His hues tend toward muddy pastels, always warm. He employs an unabridged dictionary of browns. ... The experience of his work is unsharable even, in a way, with oneself, like a word remembered but not remembered, on the tip of the tongue." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker
"Aspirants to the role of painter-as-poet are many. Giorgio Morandi was the real thing. ...the first of its size in the United States, with nearly a hundred still lifes and a dozen landscapes, is something that anyone in love with painting and its very specific poetry will want to see. ... Morandi’s still lifes are beautiful, but with a distinctive kind of beauty: subterranean, germinating, the beauty of roots, seeds, relics, of things lost, then recovered, and soon to be lost again. ... Despite their small size and plain components — bottles, jars, boxes, bowls, seashells — the paintings are emotionally audacious. This isn’t because of what they say outright about desire or fear, but because of what they don’t say; because they are so evidently shaped by self-restraint, and the passions that produced it." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
"Giorgio Morandi painted the same rows of bottles for 40 years. Well, maybe they weren’t exactly the same bottles, and here and there he did throw in a vase, a pitcher or an urn, but seen through the scrim of his implacably earth-toned palette, the vessels in his hundreds of paintings look more or less interchangeable. ...the man was a monomaniac, and his obsessions have a way of arousing the few and irritating the many, including myself. ... It’s hard to imagine anyone sobbing before a Morandi, except perhaps out of boredom. His affectless paintings deliberately tamp down passion and reduce the buzz to a bare minimum. One senses, deep beneath the calm, impenetrable surfaces of his pictures, a revulsion toward the unpredictability of existence. ... The best part of the Met’s vast yet oppressive retrospective is leaving it. " -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
"...Morandi’s evanescent still lifes, modest though they are, capture the same essence of this culture—reflecting not only the influence of modern painters like Giorgio de Chirico (as well as Cézanne and Corot), but also such masters of the Quattrocento as Masaccio, Paolo Ucello and Piero della Francesca. ... Some of the earliest works on display—such as Still Life with Ball and Still Life, both from 1918—are a weird amalgam of Pintura Metafisica and Precisionism, as if somehow Charles Sheeler’s chocolate got into De Chirico’s peanut butter. But soon enough, Morandi’s subjects would become subsumed by the fog of reverie. ... Time and timelessness, and how light traces both, are arguably Morandi’s great themes, which late in his career were pushed to near-abstraction." -Howard Halle/TONY
"...absolutely out-of-this-world... ...synthesized an array of disparate approaches, creating pictures mysterious, unique, and wholly modern. ... Morandi was influenced by the rich, close range of browns, creams, and grays, as well as the weird spatial shifts, of early Cubist still lifes: the soulful dislocation of the Metaphysical cityscapes of de Chirico, the humble-yet-miraculous means of Chardin, the geometric precision of Piero, and the parched, sun-drenched ruins of classical antiquity. Morandi looked back, through the landscapes of Cézanne and Corot, to the frescos of Giotto, Masaccio, and Pompeii. He combined all of these influences, stirring them, bringing them to a simmer, creating monumental works built up out of subtlety upon subtlety. ... His forms feel discovered or unearthed, as if they were the bones, souls, or vestiges of things — as if they were emissaries for everyday objects. They appear to have all been carved out of the same quivering, clay-like material. Wood is not wood; glass is not glass; seashell, ceramic, fruit, and flower are not those things. They exist somewhere amongst all of these substances — a material unique to Morandi. ... It could be said that he neutralizes the world — that he denatures nature. Focusing on universal relationships, Morandi generalizes his forms into something akin to chess pieces. ... Overlapping objects, as if familial, are born of one another. They feel surprised by their shapes and they entwine like lovers. Objects appear to shift in their skins — as if surfaces were uncomfortable and could be shed. At times, the neck of a bottle or a vase rides its body like a child on his parent's shoulders. And straddled by long horizon lines, forms can feel submerged, as if struggling at the surface for air. In these small, humble paintings, it is as if Morandi were presenting us with the secret of life or inwardness of forms — as if those forms had turned their backs on us or were disrobing, laying themselves bare." -Lance Esplund/NY Sun
"Painting can be just as much an art of subtraction as sculpture, Morandi tells us. Keep your head down and your eye on the bottles. They aren't symbols or puzzles -- they are art itself, and damned difficult, too." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger
"If there is such a thing as Zen painting, the work of the Italian Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) may be the essence of it. ... There is an extremely interesting series of paintings of flowers, including one from 1924, where the delicate blossoms seem almost evanescent. It is as if Morandi has found the point, presumably in the fourth dimension, where matter becomes abstract." -Howard Kissel/Daily News
America and the Tintype at the International Center of Photography (-Jan. 4)
"In photography’s family tree the daguerreotype is the genteel aunt and the tintype the itinerant cousin. Both 19th-century techniques involved the exposure of a metal plate to light and produced a unique, reversed image, but their applications differed widely. A daguerreotype portrait was a formal (and expensive) affair; tintype tents and studios, meanwhile, functioned almost like the photo booths of today. ...some 200 examples of this democratic form of image making from the museum’s collection. Most of the artists, and subjects, are unidentified. These works form a group portrait of Americans, mostly working and middle class, struggling to adapt to the rapidly shifting social and economic conditions during the four decades after the Civil War. ... So what if subject matter triumphs over technique — in the tintype, the American subject as we know it comes into being." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimesRirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings at the Drawing Center (-Nov. 6)
"...ambitious. It is made up of some 200 small, highly detailed graphite drawings of political protests and demonstrations from around the world. Most of the images have the on-the-spot look of reportage. And all were derived from news photographs printed in The International Herald Tribune in 2007-8. ...none of the drawings are from his hand. All were commissioned by him from young artists in Thailand, some of whom were his students. ... he is redistributing world news through art and specifically through drawing, a medium that, in an aggressive marketing push during the past few years, has been heavily promoted as the sine qua non of 'real' art. Here, symbolically at least, 'real' art meets real world, and 'genius' resides in many anonymous hands." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
"As one scans this extensive body of collective effort, however, one inevitably tries to make sense both of the project and its results. First, there is a limited range of drawing styles, which tends to be competent enough but generally stilted, illustrative, and a bit nerdish. ... As David Rieff observes in his catalog essay, it adds to the pathos of these drawings that many of the executants will have participated in the protests they are limning (a significant proportion of the photographs relate to Thai events). ... The somewhat pitiful, feeble, folkloristic nature of the cottage industry draftsmanship, and the bland sameness rather than quirky individuality this produces, turn the indexing of protest into a model of the very globalization against which many of the protesters were reacting." -David Cohen/NY Sun
"...my first impression of the exhibition of drawings of demonstrations by Tiravanija’s students and paid Thai help wasn’t bad to begin with. Mostly I wondered whether the collection of works on paper was meant to demonstrate the sameness of expression within activist movements. Later, the idea that the exhibition itself had became a voice of protest became my subject matter on my blog, which, while arguably correct, isn’t in and of itself that interesting." -Paddy Johnson/L Magazine
Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors at the Morgan Library & Museum (-Jan. 4)
"...compact, elegant exhibition... we don’t learn too much more about the reasons for Babar’s appeal. We simply feel it, and then have to make sense of it. Speculation is restrained and simple demonstration preferred, an approach in keeping with Jean’s spare, precise narrative and laconic illustration, in which diverging lines of dots become tears, angled eyebrows signal anger and the varied curves of an elephant’s trunk evoke an inner life. ...draws on the collection of Babar material the Morgan acquired in 2004 as a partial gift from Laurent and his two brothers. ... The saga is not an 'unconscious instance of the French colonial imagination,' [Adam] Gopnik writes [in the catalog], “it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination.”" -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes
"Once upon a time, a woman who belonged to an illustrious French publishing family was trying to get her two young sons to sleep. ... One gallery is devoted to the father's work, another to the son's. In each of the rooms, pages from the published books are displayed next to earlier drafts and sketches, highlighting each man's painstaking editorial and artistic process. " -Ann Levin/Associated Press
"The initial story line has earned predictable scowls from pecksniffs alert to signs of colonial paternalism. ... The Morgan's exhibition is timed to coincide with publication of the latest in the series, Laurent's 'Babar's U.S.A.,' a disappointing sequel." -Maureen Mullarkey/NY Sun
"Yet those who would burn 'Babar' miss the true subject of the books. The de Brunhoffs’ saga is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination. ... Far more than an allegory of colonialism, the 'Babar' books are a fable of the difficulties of a bourgeois life." -Adam Gopnik/New Yorker
Brooklyn Children’s Museum
"Now that nearly every museum is also a children’s museum — now that nearly every museum has programs that strive to lure the young — what do we seek from a museum that really is a children’s museum? And not just any children’s museum, but the venerable Brooklyn Children’s Museum, reopening this weekend after spending nearly $70 million on reconstruction, rethinking and redesign? ... But exuberance could be felt here. So could surprise. And if this spirit were combined with a playful approach to knowledge, what else might be possible? ... But after a while the visitor is left stranded in appreciation. There is not much that is daring, and too much that is dutiful." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes
Lee Krasner: Little Image Paintings, 1946-1950 at Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center (East Hampton) (-Oct. 31)
"...wonderful exhibition... Within a few months of taking up residence in the country, she made her first all-over abstractions, which she later referred to as the 'Little Image' series for reasons that are not clear; the artist never explained it. ... Krasner’s early abstractions are pure joy. Spontaneous and emotional — hallmarks of good Expressionist painting — their richly patterned, impasto surfaces recall mosaics or stained-glass windows. Other paintings possess a calligraphic complexity, with a density of hieroglyphic forms, while still others suggest sensitivity to the beach environment, in particular to the changing effects of sunlight." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes
"Viewing these tightly constructed, densely painted gems in such intimate surroundings -- where Krasner lived not only with Pollock from 1945 until his death in 1956, but on her own afterward -- immediately supersedes the indifferent impression created by museum displays (including the 1999 traveling retrospective curated by Robert Hobbs) that customarily give pride of place to her much larger, later canvases. Those usually include too many wan wannabe Pollocks, perpetuating the common wisdom that Krasner was overwhelmed and overly influenced by her more celebrated partner." -Lee Rosenbaum/WSJ
"Mostly these small paintings are impressive for their unique vision and vitality, works that were distinctly Krasner’s own in both substance and iconography..." -Robert G. Edelman/ArtNet
Street Art Street Life: From the 1950s to Now at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (-Jan. 25)
"The bulk of the work is photography. Some of the pictures are snazzy: Jamel Shabazz’s color portraits of sidewalk supermodels from the 1980s; photomontages by Fatimah Tuggar that transport New York to Africa and vice versa. But most are black and white and made on the fly. They belong to a genre known as street photography. ... With its immaculate, almost exaggeratedly stripped-down installation, the show is clearly intended not to recreate the feel of art on the street, but to record the fact of it. History, not buzz, is the subject. ... The show would have benefited from a more adventurous choice of artists and work; most of what’s here is straight from the canon. But the basic approach, serious, even somber, seems right for right now, a time when the streets of New York are being transformed by high-speed gentrification and art, market minded, is staying indoors." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
"...casts a wide net, aspiring as it does to account for a variety of practices that differently engage the life of the street, often but not always in New York. In practice, this means candid photographs of pedestrians who are not engaged consciously or unconsciously in any sort of artistic act. But it also seeks to account for art that is actually carried out on the street. Because these are two very different propositions, the show lacks a certain focus." -James Gardner/NY Sun
Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)
"The assembled works soar across the long career of one of history’s most naturally gifted painters, whose achievement lies in his synthesis of the disparate strands of almost a millennium of Chinese painting. Wang’s seemingly effortless perfection brings Mozart to mind. Both were young prodigies who were prolific, at ease in many different styles, with, it seems, never a note or brush stroke out of place. ... There was even art criticism, some of it recorded in on-the-spot assessments (including poetry) on pieces of paper, called colophons, attached to the very scrolls they referred to. Several are displayed here, a few with translations, and they create a palpable sense of artists in conversation with one another and the past. ... This show leaves notions of original, copy and originality in a jumble that invites much sifting. It highlights the way artists always strive to equal the greatness of the past, but also to improve upon it, and their faith, as the postmodernist Richard Prince has implied, that making it again makes it new. It also suggests that the desire for newness is something inherent in all people, not just citizens of the West." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes
"...scholarly and art-historically rich show... Looking back and forth between the first and second halves of the exhibition, I could sense artistic influence and lineage, as if I were witnessing organic or familial qualities among grandparents, great-grandparents, parents, and children, spanning across centuries. ... In the best of Wang's landscapes, forms are not described but, rather, seemingly conjured into being. His landscapes read like poetic flashes. Somewhere among form, reflection, and shadow, his mountains, rivers, clouds, and trees are felt not as objects, but as pressures, memories, and essences." -Lance Esplund/NY Sun
Aaron Douglas: African-American Modernist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (-Nov. 30)
"...a singular mix of Afro-centric allegory and Modernist abstraction. His major works feature semitransparent silhouettes of black people in heroic poses representing struggle and triumph mystically overlaid by concentric, circular bands of light. Rendered in muted colors, they project visionary romanticism in a suave, Art Deco-like style. ... The Douglas exhibition’s main attraction is a series of four near-mural-scale paintings made in 1934 for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the site of the Schomburg Center. Painted in Douglas’s signature style of subtly colored shades of gray with silhouetted figures suffused by radiating bands of light, 'Aspects of Negro Life,' a Works Progress Administration commission, depicts rousingly theatrical visions of four chapters in the history of African-Americans." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes
New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky at the Museum of Modern Art (-Jan. 5)
"This time around there are only two photographers, and they come from opposite ends of the discipline, making it difficult to judge them by the same scale. Josephine Meckseper, a German-born, CalArts-trained artist in her 40s, makes sleek-looking installations that mix photography and film — often scenes of political protest — with consumer objects. The South African Mikhael Subotzky, who at 26 is the youngest photographer to have been invited to join the Magnum Group, explores his country’s prison system in vivid color and unflinching detail. ... If Ms. Meckseper finds glossy, consumerist fantasy infiltrating our political conscience, Mr. Subotzky reminds us that some communities don’t yet have the luxury of fretting about the commodification of dissent." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm Leaf Tradition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-March 22)
"Fleeing monks carried at least some palm-leaf books — portability was a decisive factor here — to monasteries in Tibet and Nepal, where they remained until recent times. Few if any of the Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts now in museums were actually found in India." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
J.M.W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (closed)
"The Turner at the Met is a bear of a show—165 items, mostly oils and watercolors, with a few prints—and the other patrons on the day of my perambulation staggered from the final chamber into the gift shop's welcoming arms as if after a tussle in a cave. Turner cannot be dismissed, but he cannot quite be embraced, either. ... The paintings, as the decades and the exhibition rooms unfold, fluctuate; moods of elemental daring alternate with oppressively academic productions. Turner's uncouth ambition included eclectically outdoing other painters at their game. ... The human population in Turner's large canvases is rarely more than a footnote, a spatter of colored jelly beans at the base of a mountain or a metropolis. He stood aside from the distinguished British tradition of portrait-painting... ... Turner didn't see human beings as worth much in the balance of things... ... Turner in fact did not go blind; it was the sardonic critics, instead, who were blind, blind to the obstinately questing quality in Turner that showed other artists a way to the future, where what were scoffingly called 'pictures of nothing' were pictures of the truth." -John Updike/New York Review of Books
"The pinched, at times resentful response of several influential critics to the J.M.W. Turner exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, due to close in just over a week, hints at a new kind of negative sensibility in the art world: a suspicion of undisguised ambition, an impatience with virtuosity, and a dread of the full-blown sublime. It may also betray unrealistic expectations about an artist who has long been celebrated as a progenitor of modern art, but who was, it turns out, a man of his time: an unapologetic peddler of myth, anecdote, and allegory - a throw-it-all-in kind of guy - right to the end of his life. ... But, wanting to see Turner as an embryonic version of modern abstract artists, we mistake his late paintings' real nature. Far from being empty and incident-free, these evanescent images happen to comment on everything from Britain's immigration policy to the whaling industry, post-Napoleonic politics, Old Testament tales, classical myths, and the sheer, salty heroism of ordinary people making a living from the sea. They ask a lot of the modern viewer." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
"Few can resist JMW Turner's swirling vortices and surreal luminosity, the rawness, the terror and the infrequent bouts of quiet grace. The Met's sprawling, revelatory exhibition of Turner's work - half on loan from the Tate, the rest from a scattering of other museums - gives the term 'blockbuster' a good name. It delights in the painter's splendid contradictions. He was, all at once, a feverish romantic and diligent student of the old masters; a realist transcribing the landscape's minutiae and an expressionist translating perceptions into poetry; a lover of ageless pastoral beauty and a celebrant of modernity; a man of his time and a harbinger of modernism. ...a more intricate Turner: a moralist, historian, symbolist, reporter, romantic, poet and even priest of the sun." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
Louise Bourgeois at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (-Sept. 28)
"...the Guggenheim Museum's Bourgeois retrospective in New York, impressive in so many ways, nonetheless demonstrates real weaknesses in her oeuvre. They are worth acknowledging, not least because Bourgeois has been lionized by younger generations of artists, who take her example as a validation of their own tendencies toward narcissistic self-revelation. ... I came out of the show hugely stimulated but strangely unsatisfied. Too many of the early works look arbitrary and imprecise; too many of the later ones are overburdened with metaphor and symbol. In between are works that are simply histrionic. ... Did Bourgeois's theatrical impulses get the better of her as she became famous and entered her energetic late phase? I think so." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling at the Museum of Modern Art (-Oct. 20)
"How many more suburban mini-estates do we really need? How many more can we bear? ... The show is fascinating, at least as much for a historical survey as for a review of the latest innovations. ... But I confess to one serious misgiving about the show. In a world whose population is exploding, whose natural environment is threatened and whose resources are diminishing (including especially the resources which have supported cheap transportation of all forms), it would seem to me that if a modern museum's show about architecture is focused almost entirely on free-standing private dwelling units, regardless of all the sexy bits about computer design, pre- or modularly-fabricated structures, and revolutionary ecological breakthroughs, it is at least half-dead in the water already and unlikely to be remembered as a landmark achievement by any future generation." -James Wagner
Paul McCarthy at the Whitney Museum (-Oct. 12)
"Each sculpture causes the kind of uncomfortable physical imbalance a 10-year-old boy is likely to respond positively to (and did), which isn't to say it lacks a sophisticated message. Certainly, the malleability of suburban architectural and decorative references suggests an evolving psychological hardship moving just beneath its brittle façade." -Paddy Johnson/L Magazine
Art and Empire: Treasures From Assyria in the British Museum at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) (-Jan. 4)
"For the rest of this year the Museum of Fine Arts will be the custodian of one of the most exquisite and evocative objects in all of art history. It is a small ivory carving of a lioness mauling a young man. ... Almost everything else in this show is about subordination and control. But this ivory plaque is more subtle and ambivalent. It has something frighteningly intimate about it, suggesting a sensuous unity of man and beast even as the one is in the process of being devoured by the other. ... This show, from the holdings of the British Museum, comes to Boston after a world tour that has lasted (with brief interruptions) more than a decade." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
"The highlights of the exhibit come about halfway through in a series of gory, heart-pounding battle scenes. These carvings show Assyrians archers, behind tall shields, assaulting a citadel and scaling the walls on ladders. A wheeled siege engine with giant spears or battering rams climbs a hill to smash the fortress. In another relief, Assyrian archers chase three men into a tree-lined river. One man has been shot in the back. The other two cling to animal skins that they have inflated so they might float down the river toward the shelter of a castle. ... People seem to be types rather than individuals. They move about landscapes like players on a gameboard rather than back into space. They vary in size depending on their importance rather than their location. And nearly the only women to be seen are among defeated enemies." -Greg Cook/Boston Phoenix
Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, 1871-1958 at the McMullen Museum of Art (Boston) (-Dec. 7)
"...chronologically follows Rouault's progression as he develops his unique realist style, one that is ultimately rooted in a Christian context. ... Depicting the fallibility in human judgment, as well as discerning semblances from realities, quickly became Rouault's central artistic themes, strongly influenced by his symbolist training and realist origins. ... fauvist, a symbolist, an expressionist, a romantic, a religious realist - Rouault's many masques are unveiled at the McMullen this fall." -Leon Ratz/BC Heights
Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly and Homer and Sargent from the Clark at the The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Mass.) (-Oct. 19)
"The Clark Art Institute, with its pastoral setting and big, metropolitan aspirations, is paying tribute to the wizardry of understatement. It has just inaugurated a refined and quietly thrilling new architectural addition on a verdant slope of the Berkshires and, at the same time, has placed on display a group of contemplative but subtly seductive landscapes. Art and nature gently harmonise in the design of the new building, which frames its picturesque surroundings. Meanwhile, the Clark's big show Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly brings together painters who suggest rather than dictate, whose sensuality wafts towards mysticism." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
"The Homer and Sargent pictures in the new galleries are a foil for 'Like Breath on Glass,' a seductive array of gentle, subtle images mostly by James McNeill Whistler and George Inness, as well as William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, Edward Steichen, and others, in an exhibit the curator Marc Simpson aptly dubs 'painting softly.' ... Small enough to absorb in one sitting, and best enjoyed at a leisurely pace, this perfectly hung selection submerges the viewer in the sumptuous, mystical, and magical world observed and recorded by these minor masters 100 years ago." -Nicholas Wapshott/NY Sun
"...small group of landscape painters, including George Inness and James McNeill Whistler, moved away from hard-edged realism, instead filling their canvases with luminous, hazy depictions that captured the mood or spiritual essence of a place. ... George Inness, whose Hudson Valley and Berkshire scenes are prized among museums and collectors today, railed against much of the landscape painting of his time, especially its tendency to ignore 'the reality of the unseen.'" -Ned Sullivan/The Daily Green
"...reveals a style that had considerable impact on painting, but was buried by history. While it takes some time to glean through the information to ascertain its relevance, the exhibit never dulls for a minute." -Tim Kane/Times-Union (Albany)
Martin Kippenberger: Problem Perspective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) (-Jan. 5)
"A wicked sculpture at the entrance to the retrospective exhibition of Martin Kippenberger's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art crystallizes the manic tone that made the German-born Conceptual artist such an influential force, beginning in the 1980s. Then, in the show's first gallery, a thoroughly flat-footed installation also demonstrates what made his work so maddeningly uneven. ...sprawling, 250-work show gives a welcome overview, warts and all. ... Kippenberger's work is an art in conversation with other artists, which makes for a bracing dialogue. ... Kippenberger's modest drawings made on simple sheets of hotel stationery are his most sustained body of work, representing the disconnected nomadism of contemporary art-life in myriad ways -- poignant, perverse, matter-of-fact and daydreamy." -Christopher Knight/LA Times
Martin Kersels: Heavyweight Champion at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (-Dec. 13)
"Kersels' sculptures don't look like robots, conventionally conceived by Hollywood and less predictably so in the scientific engineering lab. But in the final analysis, the products of this artist's studio often recall eccentric androids, which perform actions that make us wonder how programmed our own social brains might be -- that we're humanoids as much as humans. It's a sobering thought, which Kersels presents with sweetness and disarming wit. ...concise survey..." -Christopher Knight/LA Times
Francis Alÿs: Fabiola at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)
"The installation consists of 307 pictures of St. Fabiola, a 4th century Roman noblewoman who, under the influence of St. Jerome, renounced her worldly wealth and became a Christian ascetic. Having grievously sinned by remarrying before the death of her first husband -- a reputed wife-beater whom she divorced -- Fabiola had a lot of atoning to do, according to the tenets of her church. ... The pictures on view were found over the last decade or more in thrift shops, flea markets and antique stores in Europe, the United States and Mexico, where the Belgian-born Alÿs lives. Some are signed, many are not, and most appear to be the work of amateurs. They're devotional pictures painted by the faithful or, in the case of some jewelry and a few souvenirs, no doubt commercially produced. All are based on the same long-lost work by the once-fashionable, now largely forgettable French academic painter, Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905). ... The catalog from New York's Dia Art Foundation, where the show was organized, makes appropriate reference to L.A. artist Jim Shaw's celebrated collection of strange but earnest thrift store paintings, which made a splash nearly 20 years ago." -Christopher Knight/LA Times
"...wonderful exhibition... Within a few months of taking up residence in the country, she made her first all-over abstractions, which she later referred to as the 'Little Image' series for reasons that are not clear; the artist never explained it. ... Krasner’s early abstractions are pure joy. Spontaneous and emotional — hallmarks of good Expressionist painting — their richly patterned, impasto surfaces recall mosaics or stained-glass windows. Other paintings possess a calligraphic complexity, with a density of hieroglyphic forms, while still others suggest sensitivity to the beach environment, in particular to the changing effects of sunlight." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes
"Viewing these tightly constructed, densely painted gems in such intimate surroundings -- where Krasner lived not only with Pollock from 1945 until his death in 1956, but on her own afterward -- immediately supersedes the indifferent impression created by museum displays (including the 1999 traveling retrospective curated by Robert Hobbs) that customarily give pride of place to her much larger, later canvases. Those usually include too many wan wannabe Pollocks, perpetuating the common wisdom that Krasner was overwhelmed and overly influenced by her more celebrated partner." -Lee Rosenbaum/WSJ
"Mostly these small paintings are impressive for their unique vision and vitality, works that were distinctly Krasner’s own in both substance and iconography..." -Robert G. Edelman/ArtNet
Street Art Street Life: From the 1950s to Now at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (-Jan. 25)
"The bulk of the work is photography. Some of the pictures are snazzy: Jamel Shabazz’s color portraits of sidewalk supermodels from the 1980s; photomontages by Fatimah Tuggar that transport New York to Africa and vice versa. But most are black and white and made on the fly. They belong to a genre known as street photography. ... With its immaculate, almost exaggeratedly stripped-down installation, the show is clearly intended not to recreate the feel of art on the street, but to record the fact of it. History, not buzz, is the subject. ... The show would have benefited from a more adventurous choice of artists and work; most of what’s here is straight from the canon. But the basic approach, serious, even somber, seems right for right now, a time when the streets of New York are being transformed by high-speed gentrification and art, market minded, is staying indoors." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
"...casts a wide net, aspiring as it does to account for a variety of practices that differently engage the life of the street, often but not always in New York. In practice, this means candid photographs of pedestrians who are not engaged consciously or unconsciously in any sort of artistic act. But it also seeks to account for art that is actually carried out on the street. Because these are two very different propositions, the show lacks a certain focus." -James Gardner/NY Sun
Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)
"The assembled works soar across the long career of one of history’s most naturally gifted painters, whose achievement lies in his synthesis of the disparate strands of almost a millennium of Chinese painting. Wang’s seemingly effortless perfection brings Mozart to mind. Both were young prodigies who were prolific, at ease in many different styles, with, it seems, never a note or brush stroke out of place. ... There was even art criticism, some of it recorded in on-the-spot assessments (including poetry) on pieces of paper, called colophons, attached to the very scrolls they referred to. Several are displayed here, a few with translations, and they create a palpable sense of artists in conversation with one another and the past. ... This show leaves notions of original, copy and originality in a jumble that invites much sifting. It highlights the way artists always strive to equal the greatness of the past, but also to improve upon it, and their faith, as the postmodernist Richard Prince has implied, that making it again makes it new. It also suggests that the desire for newness is something inherent in all people, not just citizens of the West." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes
"...scholarly and art-historically rich show... Looking back and forth between the first and second halves of the exhibition, I could sense artistic influence and lineage, as if I were witnessing organic or familial qualities among grandparents, great-grandparents, parents, and children, spanning across centuries. ... In the best of Wang's landscapes, forms are not described but, rather, seemingly conjured into being. His landscapes read like poetic flashes. Somewhere among form, reflection, and shadow, his mountains, rivers, clouds, and trees are felt not as objects, but as pressures, memories, and essences." -Lance Esplund/NY Sun
Aaron Douglas: African-American Modernist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (-Nov. 30)
"...a singular mix of Afro-centric allegory and Modernist abstraction. His major works feature semitransparent silhouettes of black people in heroic poses representing struggle and triumph mystically overlaid by concentric, circular bands of light. Rendered in muted colors, they project visionary romanticism in a suave, Art Deco-like style. ... The Douglas exhibition’s main attraction is a series of four near-mural-scale paintings made in 1934 for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the site of the Schomburg Center. Painted in Douglas’s signature style of subtly colored shades of gray with silhouetted figures suffused by radiating bands of light, 'Aspects of Negro Life,' a Works Progress Administration commission, depicts rousingly theatrical visions of four chapters in the history of African-Americans." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes
New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky at the Museum of Modern Art (-Jan. 5)
"This time around there are only two photographers, and they come from opposite ends of the discipline, making it difficult to judge them by the same scale. Josephine Meckseper, a German-born, CalArts-trained artist in her 40s, makes sleek-looking installations that mix photography and film — often scenes of political protest — with consumer objects. The South African Mikhael Subotzky, who at 26 is the youngest photographer to have been invited to join the Magnum Group, explores his country’s prison system in vivid color and unflinching detail. ... If Ms. Meckseper finds glossy, consumerist fantasy infiltrating our political conscience, Mr. Subotzky reminds us that some communities don’t yet have the luxury of fretting about the commodification of dissent." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm Leaf Tradition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-March 22)
"Fleeing monks carried at least some palm-leaf books — portability was a decisive factor here — to monasteries in Tibet and Nepal, where they remained until recent times. Few if any of the Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts now in museums were actually found in India." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
J.M.W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (closed)
"The Turner at the Met is a bear of a show—165 items, mostly oils and watercolors, with a few prints—and the other patrons on the day of my perambulation staggered from the final chamber into the gift shop's welcoming arms as if after a tussle in a cave. Turner cannot be dismissed, but he cannot quite be embraced, either. ... The paintings, as the decades and the exhibition rooms unfold, fluctuate; moods of elemental daring alternate with oppressively academic productions. Turner's uncouth ambition included eclectically outdoing other painters at their game. ... The human population in Turner's large canvases is rarely more than a footnote, a spatter of colored jelly beans at the base of a mountain or a metropolis. He stood aside from the distinguished British tradition of portrait-painting... ... Turner didn't see human beings as worth much in the balance of things... ... Turner in fact did not go blind; it was the sardonic critics, instead, who were blind, blind to the obstinately questing quality in Turner that showed other artists a way to the future, where what were scoffingly called 'pictures of nothing' were pictures of the truth." -John Updike/New York Review of Books
"The pinched, at times resentful response of several influential critics to the J.M.W. Turner exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, due to close in just over a week, hints at a new kind of negative sensibility in the art world: a suspicion of undisguised ambition, an impatience with virtuosity, and a dread of the full-blown sublime. It may also betray unrealistic expectations about an artist who has long been celebrated as a progenitor of modern art, but who was, it turns out, a man of his time: an unapologetic peddler of myth, anecdote, and allegory - a throw-it-all-in kind of guy - right to the end of his life. ... But, wanting to see Turner as an embryonic version of modern abstract artists, we mistake his late paintings' real nature. Far from being empty and incident-free, these evanescent images happen to comment on everything from Britain's immigration policy to the whaling industry, post-Napoleonic politics, Old Testament tales, classical myths, and the sheer, salty heroism of ordinary people making a living from the sea. They ask a lot of the modern viewer." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
"Few can resist JMW Turner's swirling vortices and surreal luminosity, the rawness, the terror and the infrequent bouts of quiet grace. The Met's sprawling, revelatory exhibition of Turner's work - half on loan from the Tate, the rest from a scattering of other museums - gives the term 'blockbuster' a good name. It delights in the painter's splendid contradictions. He was, all at once, a feverish romantic and diligent student of the old masters; a realist transcribing the landscape's minutiae and an expressionist translating perceptions into poetry; a lover of ageless pastoral beauty and a celebrant of modernity; a man of his time and a harbinger of modernism. ...a more intricate Turner: a moralist, historian, symbolist, reporter, romantic, poet and even priest of the sun." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
Louise Bourgeois at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (-Sept. 28)
Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling at the Museum of Modern Art (-Oct. 20)
"How many more suburban mini-estates do we really need? How many more can we bear? ... The show is fascinating, at least as much for a historical survey as for a review of the latest innovations. ... But I confess to one serious misgiving about the show. In a world whose population is exploding, whose natural environment is threatened and whose resources are diminishing (including especially the resources which have supported cheap transportation of all forms), it would seem to me that if a modern museum's show about architecture is focused almost entirely on free-standing private dwelling units, regardless of all the sexy bits about computer design, pre- or modularly-fabricated structures, and revolutionary ecological breakthroughs, it is at least half-dead in the water already and unlikely to be remembered as a landmark achievement by any future generation." -James Wagner
Paul McCarthy at the Whitney Museum (-Oct. 12)
"Each sculpture causes the kind of uncomfortable physical imbalance a 10-year-old boy is likely to respond positively to (and did), which isn't to say it lacks a sophisticated message. Certainly, the malleability of suburban architectural and decorative references suggests an evolving psychological hardship moving just beneath its brittle façade." -Paddy Johnson/L Magazine
Art and Empire: Treasures From Assyria in the British Museum at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) (-Jan. 4)
"For the rest of this year the Museum of Fine Arts will be the custodian of one of the most exquisite and evocative objects in all of art history. It is a small ivory carving of a lioness mauling a young man. ... Almost everything else in this show is about subordination and control. But this ivory plaque is more subtle and ambivalent. It has something frighteningly intimate about it, suggesting a sensuous unity of man and beast even as the one is in the process of being devoured by the other. ... This show, from the holdings of the British Museum, comes to Boston after a world tour that has lasted (with brief interruptions) more than a decade." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
"The highlights of the exhibit come about halfway through in a series of gory, heart-pounding battle scenes. These carvings show Assyrians archers, behind tall shields, assaulting a citadel and scaling the walls on ladders. A wheeled siege engine with giant spears or battering rams climbs a hill to smash the fortress. In another relief, Assyrian archers chase three men into a tree-lined river. One man has been shot in the back. The other two cling to animal skins that they have inflated so they might float down the river toward the shelter of a castle. ... People seem to be types rather than individuals. They move about landscapes like players on a gameboard rather than back into space. They vary in size depending on their importance rather than their location. And nearly the only women to be seen are among defeated enemies." -Greg Cook/Boston Phoenix
Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, 1871-1958 at the McMullen Museum of Art (Boston) (-Dec. 7)
"Georges Rouault was a modernist misfit. He was a figurative artist during a period that saw abstract art gain the ascendancy. He was a religious artist at a time when almost all advanced art was avowedly secular. And he dealt in allegory during an era that came to see allegory as, in Jorge Luis Borges's bald judgment, 'an aesthetic mistake.' ... There is more ugliness in his oeuvre than beauty, more soul-cramping constriction than liberating expansion. But I came out of this show convinced by the authenticity of his vision, and moved both by his tenacity and his genuine originality." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
"...chronologically follows Rouault's progression as he develops his unique realist style, one that is ultimately rooted in a Christian context. ... Depicting the fallibility in human judgment, as well as discerning semblances from realities, quickly became Rouault's central artistic themes, strongly influenced by his symbolist training and realist origins. ... fauvist, a symbolist, an expressionist, a romantic, a religious realist - Rouault's many masques are unveiled at the McMullen this fall." -Leon Ratz/BC Heights
Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly and Homer and Sargent from the Clark at the The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Mass.) (-Oct. 19)
"The Clark Art Institute, with its pastoral setting and big, metropolitan aspirations, is paying tribute to the wizardry of understatement. It has just inaugurated a refined and quietly thrilling new architectural addition on a verdant slope of the Berkshires and, at the same time, has placed on display a group of contemplative but subtly seductive landscapes. Art and nature gently harmonise in the design of the new building, which frames its picturesque surroundings. Meanwhile, the Clark's big show Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly brings together painters who suggest rather than dictate, whose sensuality wafts towards mysticism." -Ariella Budick/Financial Times
"The Homer and Sargent pictures in the new galleries are a foil for 'Like Breath on Glass,' a seductive array of gentle, subtle images mostly by James McNeill Whistler and George Inness, as well as William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, Edward Steichen, and others, in an exhibit the curator Marc Simpson aptly dubs 'painting softly.' ... Small enough to absorb in one sitting, and best enjoyed at a leisurely pace, this perfectly hung selection submerges the viewer in the sumptuous, mystical, and magical world observed and recorded by these minor masters 100 years ago." -Nicholas Wapshott/NY Sun
"...small group of landscape painters, including George Inness and James McNeill Whistler, moved away from hard-edged realism, instead filling their canvases with luminous, hazy depictions that captured the mood or spiritual essence of a place. ... George Inness, whose Hudson Valley and Berkshire scenes are prized among museums and collectors today, railed against much of the landscape painting of his time, especially its tendency to ignore 'the reality of the unseen.'" -Ned Sullivan/The Daily Green
"...reveals a style that had considerable impact on painting, but was buried by history. While it takes some time to glean through the information to ascertain its relevance, the exhibit never dulls for a minute." -Tim Kane/Times-Union (Albany)
Martin Kippenberger: Problem Perspective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) (-Jan. 5)
"A wicked sculpture at the entrance to the retrospective exhibition of Martin Kippenberger's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art crystallizes the manic tone that made the German-born Conceptual artist such an influential force, beginning in the 1980s. Then, in the show's first gallery, a thoroughly flat-footed installation also demonstrates what made his work so maddeningly uneven. ...sprawling, 250-work show gives a welcome overview, warts and all. ... Kippenberger's work is an art in conversation with other artists, which makes for a bracing dialogue. ... Kippenberger's modest drawings made on simple sheets of hotel stationery are his most sustained body of work, representing the disconnected nomadism of contemporary art-life in myriad ways -- poignant, perverse, matter-of-fact and daydreamy." -Christopher Knight/LA Times
Martin Kersels: Heavyweight Champion at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (-Dec. 13)
"Kersels' sculptures don't look like robots, conventionally conceived by Hollywood and less predictably so in the scientific engineering lab. But in the final analysis, the products of this artist's studio often recall eccentric androids, which perform actions that make us wonder how programmed our own social brains might be -- that we're humanoids as much as humans. It's a sobering thought, which Kersels presents with sweetness and disarming wit. ...concise survey..." -Christopher Knight/LA Times
Francis Alÿs: Fabiola at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)
"The installation consists of 307 pictures of St. Fabiola, a 4th century Roman noblewoman who, under the influence of St. Jerome, renounced her worldly wealth and became a Christian ascetic. Having grievously sinned by remarrying before the death of her first husband -- a reputed wife-beater whom she divorced -- Fabiola had a lot of atoning to do, according to the tenets of her church. ... The pictures on view were found over the last decade or more in thrift shops, flea markets and antique stores in Europe, the United States and Mexico, where the Belgian-born Alÿs lives. Some are signed, many are not, and most appear to be the work of amateurs. They're devotional pictures painted by the faithful or, in the case of some jewelry and a few souvenirs, no doubt commercially produced. All are based on the same long-lost work by the once-fashionable, now largely forgettable French academic painter, Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905). ... The catalog from New York's Dia Art Foundation, where the show was organized, makes appropriate reference to L.A. artist Jim Shaw's celebrated collection of strange but earnest thrift store paintings, which made a splash nearly 20 years ago." -Christopher Knight/LA Times
