Reviews Roundup: Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at the MoMA

Installation view of Models (1994. Ink and chalk on paper. 100 drawings)

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at the MoMA (-Feb. 16)

"Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer. The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. ... The consistency of this show suggests an artist who settled too early into a style that needs further development. Stasis is disguised by shifting among various charged subjects that communicate gravity in shorthand. Ms. Dumas’s painting is only superficially painterly. The photographic infrastructure is usually too close to the surface, which makes it all look too easy. Worse, it makes subject matter paramount." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"The impressions are emotional. A Dumas retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Cornelia Butler, affected me slowly at first, then in a rush, overcoming a resistance I’ve had to Dumas’s fast and loose, insouciantly ugly pictures, almost all of which are based on photographs of corpses, torture victims, terrorists (Osama bin Laden looking crafty and sensual), pornographically posed nudes, gawky children, and endless anonymous, discontented faces. ... I became fascinated by the refusal of Dumas’s art to let me admire it, despite passages of whiplash drawing worthy of Edvard Munch and a quakingly tender way with incidental colors (pinks, creams, turquoise). The art historian Richard Shiff’s surprising comparison, in the show’s catalogue, of Dumas’s method with that of Willem de Kooning adds up. Like that great Dutchman, she draws in a manner opposed to drawing’s descriptive function, keeping her line loose and a-crackle, in gladiatorial combat with the subjects that occasion it. ... Her art rarely conveys feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work’s authority. She doesn’t give; she takes. This turns out to be a fair deal, which alerts us to our own untapped emotions. The experience of sheerly responding pleases." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"If the dead don’t look much different than the living here, it is because the departed have only one expression. Like Dumas’s haunting art, it is likely to remain in the mind long after the bearer is gone." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"A trademark Dumas canvas melds frigid existentialism with a heated, painterly passion. We’re repelled by its chill, captured by its glow—and end up caught in a Dumasian gravitational pull." -Kate Lowenstein/TONY

"Not since its obsession with Pavel Tchelitchev in the 1930s has the Museum of Modern Art exhibited, in depth, an artist of such irredeemable mediocrity as Marlene Dumas. The 150 pieces spread across two floors are so devoid of true color, pictorial skill, new ideas and pleasure of any kind, positive or negative, that I found myself, at the opening Wednesday night, desperately searching the crowd, whose faces, as on a bad acid trip, seemed joined to Dumas’ bulbous visages, for things of visual interest. ... The Dumas method is simple: She borrowed Francesco Clemente’s overused gouache technique and perved it up. Her subjects are burnished to dullness by her pathetic brush handling. There are some rear shots of masturbation, a blowzy self-portrait, the groups of schoolmates and bridesmaids, in which she throws in a freaky grin or stern look for variety." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"As you might expect of portraits without sitters, there is an internalized aspect to Dumas' work. This is an artist searching for icons of her own emotions, so she simplifies form, creating a rapid notational style for the figure itself. Pictures of the full body tend to be slapdash, and more about the body as a commodity or dead fact, but the faces get Dumas' full attention. She hangs no drapes before the windows to the soul." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger

"At MoMA, in galleries filled with painted bodies – dead, tortured or writhing in simulated ecstasy – I overheard one insider confide to another that he hoped the economic slump might sweep away all the glitter that has clung to the Dumas brand and reveal her as the great virtuoso she had always been. I was thinking along similar lines but came to a different conclusion. I imagine that once Dumas loses her quantifiable status, she will fade into the nether reaches of art history, a curiosity of the crazy boom years. ... Spread over two floors, the show tracks the non-development of an artist who discovered both her style and her subjects early on and then continued to plumb their shallows over ensuing decades. ... She covers some of the same terrain as Leon Golub, whose immense paintings of torturers, war criminals, and massacres argue that only a fine line of circumstance separates victim from perpetrator. Dumas gestures wispily in the same direction but she lack Golub’s rhetorical force. She is a mistress of the limp provocation and the mild shock." -Ariella Budick/FT

"So why does Marlene Dumas's painting, appropriated from this loaded image, feel inert and facile? Tiny splatters of blue-gray paint flatten any sense of the sagging weight of inanimate flesh, and the smudged background offers none of the documentary interest the police photographer's scribbled notations lend to the original. ... Part of the buzz around Dumas's work concerns her transformation of source photos into purely painterly forms that supposedly double back and blindside us with emotional content. But the fraught expanse that photographs create between viewer and grisly subject matter was strip-mined by Warhol for his 'Death and Disaster' series decades ago, and with more painterly aplomb." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice

"I mean, look at this ... It's like there's no paint on the canvas at all. There's so much restraint, and the details are all so beautiful. Just look at the nipples. The work is so careful. ... there's a lot of explicit stuff that I wouldn't have the nerve to do ... It's sexy and not vulgar ... Like Titian's nudes are very sexy, and Titian's drawings, you know? A lot of tits in your face. This goes to the edge of pornography." -Alex Katz via Andrew Goldstein/NY Mag.

"...we are witnessing the outcome of a vision that pushes into the edges that define what we should and should not see in a painting." -Sara Rose/AP

"Marlene Dumas' evocative and often provocative work, now on display at the Museum of Modern Art, is full of frightening beauty. These pictures by the South African native, now based in Amsterdam, bear brutal witness to news events and the contemporary condition." -Susan King/St. Petersburg Times

And the blogs!... Eyes Towards the Dove, James Mroy, Pink Pig NYC, Band of the Bes, Anaba, James Kalm. And, for good measure, a couple other much more timely roundups: Two Coats of Paint and Flavorwire.

Reviews Roundup

It's time again for another Reviews Roundup... This edition's Golden Pen Award goes to Jerry Saltz, not for sleeping at the Gugg, but for this perfect gem of a sentence about Giorgio Morandi: "His paintings are optical odes on metaphysical urns." Runners-up are Howard Halle for calling the "anyspacewhatever" show for what it is -- a circle jerk -- and Holland Cotter for his take on William Eggleston, which follows...

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Jan. 25)

"...combination joy ride, funeral march and bad-trip bender. Patches of it feel pretty tame now, but whole stretches still have the morning-after wooziness of three decades ago. ... Although Mr. Eggleston rejects the label of regional photographer, he was, at least initially, dealing with the complicated subject of a traditional Old South (he says the compositions in his early pictures were based on the design of the Confederate flag) meeting a speeded-up New South, which he tended to observe from a distance, shooting fast-food joints and drive-ins almost surreptitiously, as if from the dashboard of a car. ...there’s something truly creepy and deadly going on, as there is in much of Mr. Eggleston’s art. You might label it Southern Gothic; but whatever it is, it surfaces when a lot of his work is brought together. ... In many of these images color has the artificial flush of a mortician’s makeup job." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"You can always tell a William Eggleston photograph. It’s the one in color that hits you in the face and leaves you confused and happy, and perhaps convinces you that you don’t understand photography nearly as well as you thought you did. ...to be pummelled by eccentric beauty, and to wonder about it. ... His eye for epiphanies in the everyday raises suspicions that, without his aid, we miss more than we see of what falls within our gaze. ... He shoots like a shutterbug and executes like a painter. Synthetic gorgeousness iconizes pictures that flaunt the nonchalance of snapshots. ... I find it rewarding to think of Eggleston as a blues photographer. The extraordinary aesthetic discipline of his photographs shimmers with subliminal knowledge of the hell-bent—although, in a Southern vein, sardonically mannered... ... His great subject is the too-muchness of the real. He does regularly suppress one significant element of lived experience: time. His art re-proves Roland Barthes’s influential theory of the punctum—a Proustian quantum of lost time—as intrinsic to photography’s emotional power. The hour on Eggleston’s clock is always right now. Whatever is dated in his early subjects—car models, hairdos—barges into the present with a redolence of William Faulkner’s famous remark that the past isn’t only not dead, it isn’t even past." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"Eggleston is a poet of the downbeat and desultory. His vision begins and ends with the copious amount of booze and drugs he has consumed. ... Each of Eggleston’s down-and-out subjects is merely a mirror of the photographer’s own desperation. ... What sums up this show for me is one picture of some naked loser on a divan, his dick sticking out of his pubic bush, two muskets attached above him to the wall. This encapsulates the limits of Egglstons’s rancid vision, echoed in the abandoned objects, like bicycles and whiskey bottles, he cherishes with his lens." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"The show is big, jumbled and dimly lit. And it’s essential viewing -- a collection of national portraits that are also ground-shifting works of art. ... The result was the exposure of a national mood that had little to do with rah-rah jingoism. Images of old men in motel rooms, condiments on a takeout counter and plastic farm animals lined up on a car hood all capture a homegrown anomie -- a productive combination of laziness and restlessness. ... Avoiding conventions of beauty, Eggleston established new ones." -Carly Berwick/Bloomberg

"Looking at Eggleston's photos in the gorgeous, captivating new Whitney retrospective, there's just no disputing their aesthetic authority or their eerie power. ... The shower, the oven, the ketchup bottles and the pinball machines all capture the inadvertent, even perverse, poetry of the specific and the mundane. At the dark heart of Eggleston's enterprise lies a mixture of tenderness and contempt for the time and place he inherited and consummately claimed as his own: the American South in the latter half of the 20th century. ... He wasn't interested in social change, but in the loners, eccentrics and humdrum souls who turned strange and surreal through his viewfinder. ... The artist uncovers - or does he bestow? - the beatitude of the banal." -Ariella Budick/FT

"The scenes are familiar, almost homey, and the color is mesmerizing. ...there is a serenity, as if the world had literally stopped. Eggleston has a rare ability to create a space and his photos are a bubble of perfection where the subject exists in a space that seems built just for it. ... The new works are sleek images suited for the pages of a magazine and lack the scope and heart of his earlier works." -Associated Press


Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 at the Museum of Modern Art (-Jan. 12)

"The exhibition illustrates, step by step, exactly how Miró stalked and attacked painting — zapped its conventions, messed up its history, spoiled its market value — through 12 distinct groups of experimental works produced over a decade. If, in the end, painting survived, that’s neither here nor there. The story’s the thing. Crisp, clear and chronological, the show reads like a combination of espionage yarn and psychological thriller set out in a dozen page-turning chapters. ... not the blockbuster slog but the experience of one artist’s creative process and the experience of an exhibition as a form of thinking. Like reading a book, the process makes you part of the trip, not just a witness to it. ... Destroy the artist you think the world thinks you’re supposed to be, and you’ll start to find the artist you are." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"'I want to assassinate painting,' Joan Miró is reported to have said, in 1927. Four years later, the Catalan modern master elaborated, in an interview: 'I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.' (He is quoted, along similar lines, as having put the Cubists on notice: 'I will break their guitar.') Brave words, for a painter. ... With cultivated 'automatist' spontaneity, he worked on raw canvas, copper, and the recently invented Masonite; employed gross materials, including sand and tar; made thoroughly abstract pictures; and hatched funky varieties of collage and assemblage, whose influence would extend to Robert Rauschenberg. It’s not his fault—or is it?—that the show leaves an impression of being distant and dated, and strangely tame. ... nothing subverts an inevitable epithet for this artist—'poetic'—which seems to me equivocal. How is it a signal virtue for an art other than poetry to be poetic? (Is poetry better if it’s painterly, or photography if it’s cinematic?) Miró’s campaign against painting can seem an excuse for evading the rigors intrinsic to the medium." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"...Miró was always a painter’s painter and thus far more popular in the past than he is now. Whole bodies of work are surely passed by artistic progress to the point that even a Miró becomes relatively insignificant. Yet, there are pleasures on view at MoMA, however small and diffuse." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet


theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)

"There are non sequiturs to read, jokes to get, videos to watch, shoes to kick off, colored lights to see, recorded sounds to hear and, yes, the bed, part of a hotel room by the German artist Carsten Höller. For a price and with a reservation, up to two people can spend the night. (Like so many must-dos in New York, it is sold out.) Yet as you move up the museum’s great spiraling ramp, just about everything here sneaks up on you in some way, expands in pleasure and meaning and also starts overlapping and ricocheting with everything else. ... Emerging in the mid-1990s, the relational artists favored a more carefree approach that featured ephemeral situations, functional objects (often involving seating), architectural follies, amusing signage, elegant or arcane graphic design, performances, freebies (including food) and loosely planned group events. ... It is invigorating to see a high-profile New York museum submit to such an experimental form of institutional loosening up, and in its premier, signature space. It feels like change." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"I have always wanted to have sex in a museum. To me museums are ecstasy machines, places to experience rapture, and the real thing is the real thing. So I jumped at what seemed like an unbelievable chance to carry out my fantasy: an opportunity to spend the night with my wife on a rotating queen-size bed fitted out with satin sheets on the sixth ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. ... This cheekily titled outing is devoted to a clique of artists who reengineered art over the past fifteen years or so. They created the most influential stylistic strain to emerge in art since the early seventies. ... Unfortunately, Spector has removed most of the 'relational' parts of this art and left us with plain old aesthetics. Wan ones at that, since their work was never that visual. Viewers drift through this show barely stopping; the exhibition is so tame that it’s impossible to imagine anyone’s being challenged to rethink ideas about art exhibitions. ... Andrea Zittel, Andrea Fraser, Trisha Donnelly, Cosima von Bonin, and Vanessa Beecroft are all missing. Whether or not they belong strictly in the in-group, yet again we’ve got a show that’s 80 percent guys." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.

"Frank Lloyd Wright had a pretty decent imagination, but I doubt he could’ve envisioned his baby, the Guggenheim rotunda, being turned into the setting for a circle jerk. ... Known for collaborating with one another on various projects that take them to the far corners of the art world, they share an aesthetic of social engagement, and apparently, a knack for conflating mutual admiration with self-regard. Viewers can certainly be forgiven for wondering if the curators forgot to put up a show: The space looks half-empty, but it’s really just devoid of ideas. ... Accordingly, relational art has become a sort of political expression without the real politics that might upset the moneyed elites who support artists and art administrators." -Howard Halle/TONY


NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith at P.S. 1 (-Jan. 26)

"Somewhere between Pollock and Pop, new art developed an allergy to the word spiritual unless it was attached to ethnicity. It was O.K. to make altars in galleries if you were Mexican-American — in fact, you were sort of required to — but if you were plain old American, no. Yet on the fringes, where the most together thinking tends to take place, there was resistance to this bias. In the late 1960s the American poet Ishmael Reed coined the term Neo-HooDoo to describe an aesthetic that was devotional without being dogmatically religious, ritual-related without having prescribed forms, and rooted both outside and inside the Western mainstream. ... Mr. Reed’s concept, which riffed on African religious practices transmitted to the New World, embraced incantatory poetry, hypnotic popular music and art that was activist in an emotional, political and formal sense. Now it lends its name to a quiet, meditative, spare-to-the-point-of-thin-looking exhibition... There is little question that contemporary art is changing yet again, and in ways that have little directly to do with the current economic crisis. After several years of submersion in lightweight post-Pop painting, clever design and quip-driven soft politics, we seem to be ready for something with a little more depth, breadth and soul. I’m not saying NeoHooDoo is the answer; it’s not forceful enough to be an answering sort of show. But it asks old questions about unanswerables — who are we, who were we, where are we going, what can we be — in slightly new ways, and that’s a start." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Feb. 15)

"...fun, but not lots of fun. That’s no surprise. Calder’s early career as a darling of smart-set expatriates and eagerly condescending French Americanists in Jazz Age Paris has long since yellowed and cracked. (Does any self-respecting twenty-first-century child, of any age, genuinely enjoy the parlor whimsies of Calder’s 'Circus,' with its awful confidence of being irresistible?) But the show ends up strong, and this jolts. ... The exhibition’s teeming array of objects, pictures, and projected films shifts into overdrive midway, pivoting on a visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1930 that alerted Calder to the possibilities of abstraction. His penchant for strenuous insouciance became a genius for playful toil, investing modern forms with timeless dramas—implied when not actual—of gravity and motion." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"The best of Alexander Calder's early sculptures lie at the crossroads between gaudy inspiration and lofty aspiration. Aroused by the atmospheres of the circus, the nightclub and the boxing ring, Calder performed ever more daring avant-garde feats, leaping from conventional realism to experiments in space and line. ... Ideally, a gallery would be filled with a whole choir of moving sculptures, a crazed choreography of mechanical parts; instead, the Whitney offers a video loop showing the gizmos doing their simple acts in sequence, one by one, while the real sculptures sit disabled and mute. It's Calder without the juice." -Ariella Budick/FT


Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 at the Jewish Museum (March 12)

"... only partly about the beloved Russian Modernist painter Marc Chagall. Mainly it is a fascinating tale of two vanguard theater companies that flourished in Moscow for a few years following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. ...a big, walk-in scrapbook of a show presenting more than 200 pieces of art and ephemera including drawings, paintings, photographs, posters, sheet music, costumes and clips from vintage films." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Dec. 14)

"Giorgio Morandi’s paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style. Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they’re doing it? It must have vexed Morandi that, as art leapt forward in the twentieth century, he kept painting the same thing over and over. ... Wallace Stevens wrote of wanting 'to feel the same way over and over,' the desire for 'the river to go on flowing the same way.' That’s Morandi. Seemingly in violation of natural law, he stepped into the same river thousands of times. His paintings are optical odes on metaphysical urns. ... Morandi can seem like a conservative who sat out modernism. But like Bacon or Giacometti, he recast reality without going wholly abstract. Physically, the paintings are slow accretions of pigment and color. Painter Allison Katz has called them 'irritants that grow like pearls,' meaning, I think, that his work begins with small pictorial events that gather weight and become perfect things." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.

"Morandi worked in an allusive and increasingly reductive fashion, restricting not just his subject matter to cylinders and cubes, but also limiting his palette, often to near monochromes. ... Widely revered as a teacher as well as a painter, Morandi was disinterested in rendering anything in naturalistic detail. His pitchers, vases and boxes amount to gnomic silhouettes, not household goods, and their mysteries are as seductive as their tender imperfections." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg


The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 1)

"...an eclecticism that is as sublime as their task is ridiculous: to mine the 84,000 works acquired during de Montebello's tenure for just 300 that could adequately represent his character and vision. ... Their wildly unpredictable presentation, organized by dates of acquisition, looks like a glorified pawn shop in some galleries and a marvelous cabinet of curiosities in others. ... Philippe de Montebello picked his way through this mountain of stuff -- from paintings to swords, chalices, ball gowns and tapestries -- with sovereign ease and spectacular taste." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"...the show is a vast, thrilling and frankly overwhelming homage to the man and to the spirit of collaboration that elevates this great institution." -Ariella Budick/FT


Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone at the New Museum (-Jan. 26)

"...spunky, songful, subtly disciplined informality of the American abstract painter and ceramist (and also, recently, furniture-maker) Heilmann, sixty-eight, has provided low-profile joys in art since the late nineteen-sixties. Hers is the type of art you may cherish as a touchstone of your own private taste. ...art, not life style, fired her intense ambition. She was friends, early on, with Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. She moved to New York in 1968 to hang out with Donald Judd and Robert Smithson and other 'big boys' of minimalism and emerging post-minimalism, on the exclusive second floor of Max’s Kansas City. But she was not a social success. Choosing to paint got her scorned in those painting-allergic circles, though persisting with it made her tough. This grounding accounts for a subliminal sense of steely intelligence in works of ostensibly carefree spontaneity. There is a conjectural air to her enterprise." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker


Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (-Jan. 11)

"...this terrific, if chronologically confused, survey couldn’t have been better timed. From the earliest drawings and black-and-white photo-grids (in which the two, wearing their signature tweedy suits, stroll through the woods, drink in bars and strike desultory poses in empty rooms), to the vivid, stained-glass-like murals that mark their later work, the mood gyrates from elegiac to bleak to apocalyptic as the duo transforms the idiosyncrasies of British behavior into a metaphor for that calamity called the human condition. ... More than just making art, Gilbert & George see themselves as an artwork. One never appears without the other or without the matching outfits that semaphore the repression of British public schools and counting houses alike. Yet they channel the conservative nature of English culture as much as they caricature it." -Howard Halle/TONY


Art and China’s Revolution at the Asia Society (-Jan. 11)

"...the first show of its kind, and it tries hard to balance aesthetics with political history. As a timeline delineating a chronology of Chinese art helpfully shows, Soviet-influenced Socialist Realism replaced China’s traditional ink-and-brush-style painting virtually overnight. Posters and canvases were used to spread the word of party policies. Teapots, matchbooks, vases and statuettes were emblazoned with Mao’s face. ... In today’s China, it’s easy to find a contemporary artist appropriating revolutionary icons, but it’s nearly impossible to find works from the Cultural Revolution on display at state-run museums." -Barbara Pollack/TONY


second lives: remixing the ordinary at the Museum of Art and Design (-Feb. 14)

"There are 51 artists in the show, and many pieces to relish for more reasons than just trancelike seriality. But the inherent banality of what Mark E. Smith called 'the 3 R's'—repetition, repetition, repetition—has a leveling effect when repeated from piece to piece. Eventually everything seems exactly as dumb, unfortunately, as the dumbest piece. The work crowds the space awfully and starts to blare; though the curatorial thesis is perfectly neat and worthy, the show starts to feel very defensive." -Bones/Village Voice


Dark Dreams: The Prints of Francisco Goya at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, NJ) (-Dec. 14)

"...should not be missed by anybody with a serious interest in the visual arts. The show presents two complete sets of Goya’s print series, 'Los Caprichos' ('The Caprices') and 'Los Disparates' (most commonly, and loosely, translated as 'The Follies'). ...they represent the pinnacle of his technical and creative achievement as an artist. Without them it is very likely that he would not have achieved his exalted place in art history." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


George Segal: Modernist Humanist at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ) (-Dec. 11)

"Few artists have been more consistently out of sync with their times than George Segal, the South Brunswick-based sculptor who died in 2000 at the age of 75. But on the evidence of the small but lovely retrospective of his work at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University, it seems that at long last his historical moment may have arrived. For 50 years, Mr. Segal practiced what might be called psychological realism. His figurative sculptures and 'environments,' tableaux that combine cast-plaster figures with everyday objects, a genre he pioneered in the 1960s, are big, blunt and fragmentary representations of the human condition. With realism now widely in vogue, Mr. Segal increasingly seems prescient." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008 at the Baltimore Museum (-Jan. 4)

"...a gentle anarchist whose audience-friendly works anticipated—and considerably outshine—the recent vogue of 'relational aesthetics' in international art. ... West’s please-touch-me objects dependably entertain but never seem trivial. ... His art enlists, rather than addresses, its viewers. His best-known works are the 'Adaptives' ('Passstücke,' also translatable as 'Prostheses'), which he started making in 1974: odd-shaped, white-painted lumps of papier-mâché on bent steel rods, vaguely Giacometti-esque in look. They are meant to be handled. To pick one up is to become a self-conscious performer, improvising ways to hold, wield, or wear it. ... West’s startlingly comfortable sofas, in welded rebar and cushioned or carpet-draped steel mesh, precipitate a vision of society at once domestic and public, in which everyone is both a spectator and a spectacle. ... West’s recent abstract, painted-aluminum sculptures—successors to his coarse but fragile, galumphing forms in papier-mâché—may be the most energetic and affable art for public spaces since Alexander Calder." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"West's sculptures are like theatrical props, the gallery is the stage they decorate, and you're on set as the star of the production. ... Lewis Carroll gave us talking chess pieces and playing-card gardeners. West gives us us, as sculptural elements. ... I don't think anything West makes could work without the surrealist precedent -- without a whole bunch of artistic precedents he's playing with. That's because with West, we're not entering any old alternate universe. We're entering the alternate universe already set up in other works of art." -Blake Gopnik/Washington Post

"Critics have used phrases such as 'artfully awkward' and 'clumsy elegance' to describe his work. If his sculptures were characters in a play, they would be Gogo and Didi, the hapless protagonists of Waiting for Godot. They give off the impression of the clownish interloper who doesn't quite fit in with his refined surroundings, the underdressed dinner guest who didn't realize the invitation called for black tie." -Edward Gunts/Baltimore Sun

"He obviously was influenced by the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, in which Italian artists used common objects that spoke to everyday life. The so-called Happenings taking place in that decade also influenced him, because this performance-based movement made no distinction between art and props. ... -Mike Giuliano/Howard County Times

"West is well known for rejecting the typical museum-going experience. His work consciously tries to break the barrier between the artist and the viewer by creating work that is interactive and engaging, thereby making the viewer a part of the art. His work is also demonstratively colorful and playful, exploring a variety of sizes, color palates and media; the playfulness acts as an attempt to make sculpture a social experience. This exhibit is marked by the playground-like quality that permeates West's body of work." -Chloe Mark/Johns Hopkins News-Letter


William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005 at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design's Bakalar Gallery (Boston) (-Dec. 6)

"William Christenberry locates his photographs at the intersection of simplicity and profundity. His enduring concerns are the interplay between the eternal and ephemeral; the passage of time generally; and how that interplay and passage figure in the rural Alabama where he grew up and which he's photographed for nearly half a century. Christenberry is one of the great visual chroniclers of the South, very much an heir of Walker Evans and counterpart of his friend and fellow colorist William Eggleston." -Mark Feeney/Boston Globe


Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, MA) (-2033)

"Sol LeWitt was at the forefront of two of the 20th century's most esoteric and alienating art movements, Minimalism and Conceptualism, yet he somehow managed to keep his own work as crowd-pleasing and hypoallergenic as a Goldendoodle. ... ...as wonderful as anything I've seen in years. It will be staying in place for at least a quarter-century, over which period it is sure to become a site of pilgrimage for all those susceptible to the proposition that life can be beautiful as well as absurd. ... I felt like a little boy watching a mile-long freight train rattle past, each car holding some new, un-guessed-at enchantment. ... Many of the early works on the ground floor are in fine pencil; they feel as austere and otherworldly as distant galaxies. Others, in ink wash or acrylic paints, are so big, bold, and emphatically present they virtually snap their heels and salute. ... LeWitt's great contribution was to lighten the burden of expectation artworks had to carry. In this, irony became his ally. He relished various contradictions: between, for instance, the simplicity of his own 'ideas' and the (in many cases) devilish complexity of their execution. I think he also enjoyed the tension between the cold inflexibility of the logic he employed and the emotional experience it could give rise to." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered at the National Gallery of Art (-Jan. 11)

"Lievens (1607-74) is not a household name now, but in his time he was famous throughout northern Europe for his portraits and his religious and history paintings. Today his main claim to fame is his friendship with Rembrandt, who was a year older. ... Why Lievens did not become something more than a skilled journeyman is a matter of conjecture. Did premature success throw off his development? Did he diversify too much? Was his peripatetic life a distraction?" -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


The Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (-Jan. 11)

"Last year he sold the Hirshhorn a coherent piece of his collection, open in its mood and subdued in its colors. The museum wisely chose an important early drawing by Sol LeWitt (the artist conceived hundreds; Panza's is the third), two also important, also early aerated Robert Irwins (one, a painted canvas, seems to show a glowing fog of bright dissolving dots) and exemplary pieces by Larry Bell and Richard Long, On Karawa, Joseph Kosuth -- 39 things in all, by 16 different artists. A good buy. Panza's finest pieces carry a stately, cool austerity. They re-balance the collection of the museum on the Mall. ... One virtue of the Hirshhorn's Panza acquisition is how tellingly it maps that key mid-'60s moment when conceptualism and minimalism joined. ... Much of Panza's art is crisp and fine, but not all of it. What dims his exhibition, at least for me, is its excessive wordiness. Half its works of art depend -- this long has been a drag on conceptualism's ambitions -- on words we're meant to read." -Paul Richard/Washington Post


Prospect.1 (New Orleans)

"New Orleans has joined the biennial rush with Prospect.1, the sprawling exhibition that opened across the city over the weekend. With a roster of nearly 80 artists, this show has an unsurprising mix of good, bad and phoned-in art. But it is also a testing ground with little in the way of way of superstars, big curatorial egos and elaborately produced works, and none of the vast, chilling art halls endemic in biennials." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes at the de Young Museum (San Francisco) (-Jan. 18)

"...a stunning collection of recent and brand-new works that explore what the New York–based artist describes as the 'notions of landscape and geologic phenomena.' ... Lin’s second nationally traveling exhibit within 10 years, ranges from a 50-ton sculpture created by 65,000 pieces of 2x4 set on their ends (2x4 Landscape) to Rand McNally into which Lin has cut through page by page to create new fictional landscapes that feature canyons through France and a valley in southeast Brazil that bottoms out as a lake (Atlas Landscape series)." -Miyoko Ohtake/Dwell

Turner Prize 08 at the Tate Britain (London) (-Jan. 18)

"Turn up, tune in and drop off. That’s the mood of the Turner Prize exhibition this year. This award once played an important role in British culture, pulling contemporary artists out of their studios and putting them on the public stage. They may, as often as not, have been pelted with metaphorical eggs. But at least that was a sign of critical life. ... The Brit pack’s visual one-liners, the short, sharp clarity of their shock, begin to feel positively cosy when compared with the confusing installations with which we now have to come to terms. These are not artworks in any traditional sense. They seem far less about objects than the connections between objects. They leave you to do the thinking. ... And I can't help thinking that this show will prove more like the returns desk of Ikea on a Monday morning. Lots of frustrated people will be left staring at a pile of inscrutable junk." -Rachel Campbell-Johnston/Times of London


More Reviews:
Vermeer's "A Lady Writing" at the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, CA) (-Feb. 2) -Suzanne Muchnic/LATimes

Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes

An Iconography of Contagion An Exhibition of 20th-Century Health Posters at the National Library of Medicine (Washington, D.C.) (-Dec. 19) - Amanda Schaffer/NYTimes

Tornadoes Paintings by John Brosio at the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, D.C.) (-Jan. 19) -Jessica Dawson/Washington Post

Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids at the Museum of Science (Boston) (-March 22) -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe

This is War! Robert Capa at Work/Gerda Taro: A Retrospective at the Barbican (London) (-Jan 25) -Sean O'Hagan/Guardian

Babylon: Myth and Reality at the British Museum (London) (-March 15) -Waldemar Januszczak/Times of London

Reviews Roundup

The edition's Starred Review -- we can't really call it "Review of the Week" if we're not doing this roundups as often anymore -- is shared by Karen Rosenberg for her take on Rachael Whiteread's installation at the MFA -- "like visiting the home of a friend with immaculate Modernist taste and stumbling on a hidden room filled with knickknacks," and Daniel Kunitz's harsh-but-accurate review of the Elizabeth Peyton show -- "Peyton is more a chronicler of lifestyle than of life."


Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone at the New Museum (-Jan. 26)

"Over the last four decades Mary Heilmann, 68, has been painting with an infectious, unabashedly hedonistic joie de vivre. Working with big brushes and generous quantities of paint, she continues to produce wildly colorful abstractions that riff with irreverent verve on basic elements of Modernist painting: the grid, the monochromatic rectangle, stripes, organic forms, linear webs, spots, checks and drips. There’s a charming sloppiness about Ms. Heilmann’s paintings, which are on display in an exhilarating retrospective... Color is the most exciting aspect of her painting. Her palette extends to tarry black, but mainly it goes to bright colors from the 1960s and ’70s: fruity stains; carrot and avocado hues; swimming pool blues; psychedelic Day-Glos; and minty whites. ...the exhibition has a wonderfully airy, optically elating effect. ... She may be a natural, but she is also a female dandy whose seemingly ingenuous way of painting masks an extremely sophisticated sense of style. Ms. Heilmann is a Postmodernist scavenger, but unlike Sherrie Levine and Peter Halley, whose parodic abstractions deconstruct Modernist myths, she takes 20th-century art history as her personal toy box. A kind of painterly Pop artist, she gives vibrant new life to standard forms of 20th-century visual culture. Imagine the Ramones covering Cole Porter." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Feb. 15)

"Few exhibitions have focused so intently on one artist’s child within. It’s a Peter Pan syndrome show. It’s also a large show, with a chunky, charming catalog. Yet it feels intimate and light, not to say lightweight. Gallery by gallery, it’s as suspenseful and insubstantial as a magic act: what will the artist pull from his sleeve next?The story it tells is like a Kids R Us version of early 20th-century Modernism..." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"The Whitney’s new show devoted to Alexander Calder’s Paris years in the 1920s reveals the young sculptor facilely mimicking all the art around him and producing an array of works which are not exactly art, more like toys, presents and party favors. ... In the 1980s, there was a homeless Rastaman in Tompkins Square Park who sold stuff like this for ten dollars, deft animals spun from wire coat hangers. Right now, Broadway Windows Gallery on 11th Street has a clever exhibition by Steve Rodgers of wire coat hanger abstractions. Everybody does it! ... you would have to be pretty low down and mean not to take minimal delight in Calder’s toys. Let me suggest that the Whitney allow visiting children to play with them on the museum’s floor. After all, Calder’s early amusements can’t be worth more than a few dollars apiece. For the adults, this infantile show has but one true attraction: a stunning film of chanteuse Josephine Baker slinking around a boxing ring in a satin evening gown..." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet


New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)

"Along with his companion and later lifelong friend, the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, he belonged to perhaps the last generation for whom it was still possible to live comfortably as artists-not-particularly-concerned-with-their-careers in Manhattan. The city has lost something with their passing. Just how much may be glimpsed in this show of a unique, handmade album that the two men put together in 1939, consisting of Burckhardt's photographs of New York accompanied by sonnets that Denby wrote in response to them. ...the sublime, three-part 'scrapbook' whose title (hand-lettered) betrays his signature combination of diffidence and drollery. (The Metropolitan owns the sole copy, which is temporarily unbound for display here; the exhibition catalog is a newly printed facsimile.)" -Leslie Camhi/Village Voice


The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 1)

"...the cavalcade of world cultures that rolls through the museum’s second-floor special-exhibition galleries is very much Mr. de Montebello’s creation. Everything in them was acquired under his aegis. Curators may have proposed specific items, and donors offered others, but it was Mr. de Montebello who ultimately signed off on the acquisitions, giving each his famously resonant, bass-baritone 'O.K.' And there were many O.K.’s: some 84,000 in total. The 300 objects in the show represent a tiny fraction, and a madly eclectic one. Chinese scrolls, Greek vessels, Oceanic effigies and an 18th-century American pickle holder share the spotlight, with no object privileged as better — grander, rarer, prettier — than any other. This is a wonder-cabinet situation, an exercise in proprietorial pride, an unabashed, if surprisingly low-key, display of fabulousness." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Yael Bartana at P.S.1 (-Jan. 19)

"...the five films that curator Klaus Biesenbach has chosen for the show probe the complex issues of Zionism, anti-Semitism and the wars that have shaped Israel’s national story, they are not political statements per se. Instead, they are open-ended, poetic explorations of personal identity and shared history, patriotism and dissent, idealism and reality." -Joshua Mack/TONY


Yaddo: Making American Culture at the New York Public Library (-Feb. 15)

"Many of the guests stay in the Trasks’ 55-room mansion, which is itself a kind of fantasy, an imitation Austrian castle. They may not have sipped the waters of Hippocrene, but they have drunk just about everything else, despite a rule that used to require them to tipple only in their rooms. And countless torches of the romantic sort have been kindled and extinguished there. John Cheever used to boast that he had enjoyed sex on every flat surface in the mansion, not to mention the garden and the fields. ... A computer display, if the bugs are ever worked out, will enable the viewer to search through the many other friendships and liaisons that began at Yaddo, but the database leaves out the innumerable one-night or one-week stands. ... If 'Yaddo: Making American Culture' has a fault, it’s that it neglects the kind of silliness and high jinks that have taken place there: guests prancing naked through the hallways or sliding on trays down the main staircase. The closest the exhibition gets to nudity in a display is a series of photographs showing the painter Philip Guston for some reason decorating the bare torso of the writer William Gass with a clock in back and a window shade in front." -Charles McGrath/NYTimes


Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909 at the Neue Galerie (-Jan. 26)

"...replete with the terrors of the freshly analyzed psyche. Monsters, demons and mythical beasts roam free; humans abandon themselves to bestial impulses. Done in black-and-white pen, ink and spray on heavy paper used for cartography, Kubin’s drawings map the shadowy corners of the unconscious. ... Playing to the art’s dark themes, the Neue Galerie’s third floor has been made over in the sensationally macabre style of a Tim Burton movie. The walls are painted black and brown; red crushed-velvet curtains hang in the doorways; and Kubin’s death mask is displayed in a coffinlike glass case. These ghoulish touches are gratuitous and a bit puzzling. They seem designed to make the exhibition more appealing to the young, but parents may have reservations about the often explicit sex-and-death imagery." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Grant and Lee in War and Peace at the New-York Historical Society (-March 29)

"...these two generals, implacable opponents on the battlefield, have been linked by posterity in push-me-pull-you fashion, so that the reputation of one can’t go up unless the other’s sinks. For most of the last 140 years Lee, or a romanticized version of him, has been on top. This Lee is the tragic and valorous embodiment of the Lost Cause, a mythic South that fought not so much to defend slavery as to protect states’ rights and a noble, superior way of life, while Grant becomes a drunken butcher, a slaughterer of his own men and a failed, scandal-plagued president... Only in the last few years have historians tried to address the balance a little..." -Charles McGrath/NYTimes


Woman of Letters at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (-March 22)

"The subject is the novelist Irène Némirovsky, born in Kiev in 1903, whose affluent family fled the Bolsheviks and eventually settled in France. By the time she was in her mid-20s, Némirovsky had become a critically acclaimed French writer. But in 1942 she was arrested by gendarmes for being a Jew; taken from her husband, Michel Epstein, and children; and sent to Auschwitz, where she died. ... 'Suite Française.' It was published in 2004, hailed as a masterpiece even in its unfinished form, and has since been translated into 38 languages and has sold 2.5 million copies." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future at the American Museum of Natural History (-Aug. 16)

"There is something almost biblical about these worst-case scenarios, apocalyptically suggested even in the subtitle: 'The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future.' And if the plagues promised with global warming don’t include an onslaught of frogs, there is more than enough to worry about: the exhibition predicts proliferation of malaria and desperate foraging of wildlife. ... There are real issues to be considered here — questions about probabilities, alternative technologies, industrial evolution, relationships between developed and undeveloped nations — but they are never really explored. The main impression, instead, is of an almost religious urgency. ... And perhaps the religious overtones are no accident. Recently the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in The New York Review of Books that environmentalism has become a 'worldwide secular religion' in which the 'path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.'" -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze at the Frick Collection (-Jan. 18)

"Cast in dark bronze and resembling Roman antiquities, Riccio’s small-scale statuettes, reliefs and oil lamps are not immediately impressive. But their modesty is deceptive. Let your eyes adjust to the formal subtlety and expressive urgency of Riccio’s art and you will fall in love. Sculpture does not get much better than this. ... The beauty of Riccio’s sculptures — especially those he made for the private delectation of scholarly collectors — is their nearly supernatural physical and psychological vitality." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum (-Jan. 11)

"...a style that's as simple, live, and light as a fashion sketch. She uses large, fluid brushstrokes in exuberant passages of vivid color that could stand alone as gorgeous abstract motifs, if they weren't serving as, say, a purple shirt or curling locks of hair. Her drawing, though seductively skillful, is also highly stylized, attuned more to form and gesture than to individual characteristics. ... Peyton's idealizing style invests her subjects with a sort of clubhouse glamour, a glamour reinforced by the mix within her imaginary coterie: historical personages, pop icons, art-world friends, and friends, like Marc Jacobs, who've become pop icons. ... Peyton captures her subjects not at their most revealing but at their most alluring, and because of this, she tends to focus on subjects, famous or not, who are self-consciously theatrical... For all their appeal, these paintings offer little in the way of emotion or psychological insight. ...Peyton is more a chronicler of lifestyle than of life. The danger is that we swallow the pictures too easily, like a diet short on roughage. Or like photos in a celebrity rag: Peyton, despite her considerable talent, often comes off as a paparazza with a paintbrush." -Daniel Kunitz/Villlage Voice

"Elizabeth Peyton's deceptively modest photo-based portraits don't just flatter the friends, lovers and public figures who are her subjects. They disarm her viewers as well. ...nuance and color. Especially color. ... Part of the easy appeal of her work is that it's pretty and looks the way most people think art is supposed to look: ideal. ... Again and again, Peyton homes in on what is vulnerable or even delicate in the figures she illuminates, almost all of whom are young men... The show's enlightening catalog, a hard-cover portfolio containing both the photos Peyton has clipped from magazines or snapped herself as well as her paintings, reveals the work involved in her creative process. It's an essential complement to this exhibition. Ultimately, it makes Peyton seem an admirer more of images than actual people. Though personalities emerge from her portraits, they aren't as distinct as their appearance in her paintings." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg


Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at the Museum of Modern Art (-Jan. 5)

"I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years. My rants mount when I see work from the last two years of his life, when he was in an amazing state of hellish grace. ... The Night Café and The Starry Night still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself. ... In the first of its four sections, 'Early Landscapes,' we see flat-footed work by the self-taught late bloomer, revealing that Van Gogh, like Pollock, was one of the least naturally talented artists ever, that he virtually willed himself to greatness. ... These are works of outrageous vulnerability, and in this last part of the show, we see Van Gogh, having checked himself into an asylum, bravely suffering the disintegration of his soul. He didn’t survive this disintegration, but his best work takes us to an almost bottomless level of consciousness." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.


Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) (-Dec. 7)

"...the show’s powerful premise, which is to encourage viewers to think about the ways in which artists and photographers use and abuse documentary principles. Nina Felshin, the gallery’s curator, has done a terrific job assembling interesting and provocative work in this vein, the best of which invite viewers to consider issues of agency, context and interpretation in documentary-based art." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


The Greatest of All Time: Muhammad Ali at the Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University Museum (Hempstead, NY) (-Dec. 2)

"...more social history than art — a visual commentary on the life and times of the boxing champion Muhammad Ali told through news and documentary photographs. Organized by Hava Gurevich, and touring nationally, it assembles more than 60 rare and vintage photographs of Mr. Ali ranging from the early 1950s to now." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Huma Bhabha: 2008 Emerging Artist Award Exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT) (-Feb. 8)

"...her art practice consists of scouring the streets in search of detritus for her elegant but enigmatic sculptures. She is the artistic equivalent of a magpie. Organized by Merrill Falkenberg, this exhibition is much smaller than I expected and would have liked. Still, it contains a terrific new sculpture, 'Bumps in the Road' (2008), along with half a dozen of Ms. Bhabha’s recent works on paper, suggesting the artist may be extending her practice into drawing — a positive new development... No doubt some viewers will find this work ugly. I know I do. But it is also marvelously inventive, the artist using her humble, often discarded materials to create a work that references sculptural traditions from modernism to those of ancient Egypt and Greece. ... Not everyone will like this exhibition, I suspect. It is dark and strange. But it is also urgent and even universal. Pervading the artist’s work is a wariness and sense of regret at the persistent human impulse to destroy." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Rachel Whiteread at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) (-Jan. 25)

"Ms. Whiteread’s latest project is not a single dwelling but an entire village: an installation of some 200 vintage dollhouses lighted from within and arranged on stepped pedestals in a darkened room. 'Place (Village),' the centerpiece of a mini-survey devoted to the artist at the Museum of Fine Arts here, may strike the artist’s admirers as a bizarre and kitschy departure. ... Still, the exhibition, which includes drawings and a few smaller sculptures, reveals the more emotive side of an artist who can come off as somber and humorless. ...like visiting the home of a friend with immaculate Modernist taste and stumbling on a hidden room filled with knickknacks." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Tara Donovan at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) (-Jan. 4)

"...her sculptures are filled with surprises as she finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, turning masses of quotidian materials like styrofoam cups into gee-whiz sculptures resembling bubbles, rocks, seas, and other forces of nature. They seem like something dreamed up by a mad-scientist Martha Stewart tinkering in her cellar late at night. ... Like the ICA’s Anish Kapoor survey this summer, it’s one of the best shows seen around here this year. Perhaps the ICA has found its footing and is on a roll after a mediocre first year in its new building. ... Of course, Donovan — like Kapoor — is one of Minimalism’s offspring. Three (overlapping) styles of sculpture dominate the art world these days: accumulations of found junk, 'crafty' art (traditional crafts like knitting or embroidery turned to fine-art ends), and kinder, gentler minimalism. ... Classic Minimalism favored the materials of factories (bricks, sheets of steel, fluorescent lights) presented it-is-what-it-is fashion. It tended to be severe, hard-edged, macho, buttoned-up stuff predicated on the notion that if you concentrate on it hard enough and are worthy, you might discover transcendence. Donovan deploys mass-produced materials, but hers come from home and office — tape, toothpicks, disposable cups. Via massing (a few dozen cups is just a few dozen cups, but a million cups is something else) and optical illusion, she magics her ordinary stuff into accessible spectacles and, when she’s really on, something sublime." -Greg Cook/Boston Phoenix

"Tara Donovan's hypnotic work subdues thought the same way that viral infections subdue the body. Struggling against the initial effect is pointless. Most of these works are so straightforwardly beautiful, so right, that you have no choice but to submit. ... it's nice to encounter almost any proposition about beauty these days - even one as potentially ironic as Donovan's. Until a few years ago, beauty's repression in contemporary art was almost absolute. ... It is not only beautiful, it is relaxed about being so, leaving her scope to admit all kinds of subtleties and ironies into her fantastically simple, if labor-intensive, forms." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe

"Though beautifully crafted, Donovan’s exhibit uses millions of wasteful products to create expansive images of the natural world, a concept that feels contradictory in its overall message. ... Donovan’s apparent lack of concern for the environment becomes more and more apparent from one room to the next. ... To the left of the entrance, paper plates glued to each other in round shapes are jammed together to resemble a sea sponge. Yet again, the exhibit seems to be comparing mounds of waste to everyday environmental images, which comes across as both strange and inappropriate." -Kate Andrews/Berkeley Beacon

"A person cannot grasp the greatness of the exhibit without seeing it in person, as many of the sculptures seem to take on a livelihood of their own..." -Elizabeth Mullen/Suffolk Journal

"Puzzling over sculptural installations made by Tara Donovan from pins, drinking straws and buttons is like looking for the image of the Virgin Mary that's been seen on the window of a Springfield hospital. ... Her works are like Rorschach's ink blots that tease viewers into sifting through their unconscious to see what images rise to the surface. They can easily suggest many things at once." -Chris Bergeron/Daily News Tribune


Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice at the List Visual Arts Center (Boston) (-Jan. 4)

"An unnerving, fitfully brilliant show by Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed at MIT's List Visual Arts Center includes video footage of a cat eating a dead rat on a Paris sidewalk. ... His work is raw and direct - sometimes offensively so (he is an artist with a strong urge to rub our noses in things) - but he can also be sly and funny. ...Abdessemed was stunned by how little the French knew, or wanted to know, about political repression in Algeria, where thousands of artists, journalists, authors, and other intellectuals had recently been killed by the government and Islamic militants." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) (-March 22)

"...The galleries unfold according to the floor plan of a typical villa, starting with a 'cave canem'(“beware of the dog”) sign at the entrance and continuing through an atrium, gardens and dining room. The installation — which includes decorative columns, wall borders, living plants and reproductions of mosaics — works hard to maintain the illusion of classical architecture... In the next few galleries, paintings and sculptures echoing Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel, 'The Last Days of Pompeii,' show Romans panicking and collapsing, as Vesuvius spews ash and flame. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the still active volcano was a popular stop on the Grand Tour and a fixture in paintings by British and French artists... Also on display are ephemera from the tourist economy that developed around Pompeii; these include photographs of casts made by pouring plaster into the cavities left by decayed bodies. It is easy to see how these nauseating artifacts might have appealed to death-obsessed Victorians." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Byzantium: 330-1453 at the Royal Academy of Arts (London) (-March 22)

"Can we discover its glories through a series of historical artifacts when what we really hoped for was the Hagia Sophia, the epitome of Byzantine architecture in Istanbul? The visitor must bring as much to this new Royal Academy exhibition as the curators have done. And they have brought a lot, gathering together almost 350 objects, many of which are only very rarely loaned from the museum collections and monastic treasuries to which they belong. ... Sometimes you can almost hear the music of a society whose long banquets were enlivened by dances performed to organs operated by water power, whose church services were accompanied by choirs of castrati, by unearthly chanting and the sounds of bells. You can almost smell the headily exotic scents that rise smoking from braziers or uncoil from the lips of a fish-shaped perfume flask." -Rachel Campbell-Johnston/Times of London


Picasso and the Masters at the Grand Palais (-Feb. 2)

"No show in Europe at the moment bids to be more spectacular, or ends up being more exasperating, than 'Picasso and the Masters,' sprawling here through the Grand Palais. If there’s good news to the financial meltdown, it’s that maybe bloated blockbusters like this one should become harder to organize. ... Let it first be said that Picasso, having taken on history as if fated to do so from childhood, embraced such extravagant comparisons — which isn’t to say he survives the competition altogether intact. ... The canon, in other words, remained his starting point but increasingly became his crutch. His achievements were Promethean and unparalleled in the last century, but having said that, as the show proves almost despite itself, Picasso ended up often mired in vain, backward-looking riffs on grander achievements." -Michael Kimmelman/NYTimes

Reviews Roundup

This edition of Reviews Roundup leads with London. There is nearly universal praise for the Francis Bacon show at the Tate, but mixed reactions to Rothko at the Tate Modern and Gerhart Richter at the Serpentine. No one seems very happy with the Tate Modern's big Turbine Hall installation by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. In New York, there's a review of the newly reopened and renamed Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle, whose inaugural show, in the words of Bloomberg's Linda Yablonsky "piles on the schmaltz pretty thick." Of Catherine Opie at the Gugg, most comment on how the focus of her photos has shifted from provocative portraits to more pedestrian fare. Review of the Week goes to Holland Cotter for his descriptions of Gilbert & George, who are showing at the Brooklyn Museum, as a "dynamic duo, gruesome twosome" and "a little outside the coolness loop, a tad beyond the pale, a touch too much."


Francis Bacon at the Tate Britain (-Jan. 4)

"Francis Bacon did for despair what Michelangelo did for faith. He made it majestic. The Bacon retrospective that just opened at Tate Britain in London is one of the most powerful shows I've seen in more than 40 years of museum-going. This is Bacon's fifth retrospective, and by now his screaming Popes, wrestling lovers and tread-marked faces are so famous it's impossible to make them new. But the Tate show, which runs until Jan. 4, does something better. It brings almost five decades of Bacons together into a kind of collective cry, one that makes you realize how rare it is to see contemporary art that attempts, much less achieves, a genuine tragic dimension. ... The soft tissue of Bacon's boiling men and women is wrenched, smeared and vaporized by their own drives and desires, and by whatever it is they do to one another. Their heads are fissured, their torsos are invertebrate; their limbs, stretched and exploded, truly deserve to be called extremities — because with Bacon the body is always in extremis." -Richard Lacayo/Time Mag.

"Bacon had no interest in contributing to the history of art or its advancement. I faulted him for this, but now that lack of interest looks like the most avant garde thing about his work." -Richard Dorment/Telegraph

"He's a familiar. You talk about Bacon as you talk about The Beatles or Monty Python. ... Bacon has a very British mix of violence, comedy and bloody-minded big-heartedness. And perhaps you hadn't noticed how fond of animals he is. Bacon's art is not a tunnel vision of horror, expressing the futility of the human condition or the special nightmare of the 20th century. And going to this retrospective, you shouldn't expect to be inching forward in agony through frescoes of the skull (to use a Beckettian phrase). You should expect your money's worth – and you'll get it. The art of Bacon is a variety bill. It's a hall of mirrors, a crooked house, a peep show, a ghost train, a circus, a limbo dance, a stand-up act, a piece of conjuring." -Tom Lubbock/Independent

"He is the single greatest artist that Britain has produced in the hundred years that have passed since his birth in 1909. ... This was the man who (to steal a line from Paul Valéry) aimed to evoke sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. His images short-circuit our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul. ... This show offers front-row seats in an arena in which atrocities as complex and cruel, as flamboyant and painful, as the bullfights that inspired Bacon take place." -Rachel Campbell-Johnston/Times of London

"Rather than varnishing his paintings, Bacon preferred to cover them in glass, so that in their darkly reflective surfaces our own image is imprisoned in Bacon's hellish vision of humanity: we are forever forced to be mere helpless witnesses to others' pain." -Fisun Güner/Metro U.K.

"Bacon fakes his boneless anatomies, and has the ingenuity to make us believe them, too. I vacillate between admiration and dismissal. Bacon invariably fell back on something like illustration, for all that he disdained it. He overtly references Velázquez, Van Gogh and Ingres, and steals backgrounds from Mark Rothko and British colour-field paintings of the 1960s, about which he was always dismissive. He was a card. Maybe he thought no one would notice. ... Francis Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. It was a kind of method acting. His career took off in the 1940s and with a few exceptions his best work was behind him by the mid-1960s. Walk through this show and feel the disengagement - yours as well as his - setting in. This latest retrospective, which will travel, among other places, to the Prado in Madrid, is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was." -Adrian Searle/Guardian

"The show is a landmark, a knockout, and its timing turns out to be nearly perfect. ... Cunning and self-conscious, glad to outrage, with the delicacy of those blurry but somehow distinct faces and electric palette, conjuring up Carnaby Street, his work translates quite easily to a new century. So does the sweaty sex and violence, luxuriant but couched in aloofness and girded, always, by grand allusions to old masters and learned texts." -Michael Kimmelman/NYTimes


Rothko at the Tate Modern (London) (-Feb. 1)

"Though Tate Modern's new exhibition of Rothko's work asks us to ditch the mumbo jumbo and look instead at the formal properties of his work, I'm an unreconstructed romantic, convinced that the way to look at Rothko is surrender to his suffusions of soft colour, and to allow your mind to lead you – sorry to have to come right out with it – to another level of consciousness. Of all American artists working during the heroic age of Abstract Expressionism, Rothko is the one whose roots lie deepest in 19th century symbolism. His pictures can easily stand comparison with the visions of Odilon Redon, but he also belongs in a tradition of American transcendentalism that embraces such diverse figures as Hermann Melville, William James, Timothy Leary and James Turrell. ... All of Rothko's greatest pictures are exercises in frustration. Though we feel that if we looked long and hard enough we might see through and beyond the bands of darkness we can't. His art has no meaning beyond what you see, and this in itself is the most profound meaning of all. ...I absolutely hated the installation..." -Richard Dorment/Telegraph (U.K.)

"To stand amid the Seagram murals - eight of the Tate's massive canvases have, for the first time, been reunited with nine others of similar dimensions - which unspool like a frieze around the space, is to stand in a sombre, almost sepulchral world. Rothko said that he wanted his works to create their own 'place.' And they do. This gallery is pervaded by a quiet, almost lowering mood. To me, it feels like stepping into a cathedral. It has a melancholy, almost sacramental, magnificence which comes partly from the scale of the installation and partly from the way that the colours almost open like windows, then close like veils drawn across a void. The eye slowly loses itself in its own thoughts. ... And what if you feel nothing in front of his canvases? Well, that's not nothing because to feel nothing is one of the strongest feelings you can have." -Rachel Campbell-Johnston/Times of London

"...the great thundercloud of 20th century American painting... ...a quietly devastating show of his late work... The Four Seasons was glittering, elegant and worldly. Rothko, then 54, was intense, anguished and obsessed with producing images for an era in which, as he saw it, God was an exhausted convention but the need for transcendence was not. Did he really believe that his pulsing canvases could insinuate their note of basso profundo between the oyster starter and the soufflé? Maybe not. He once snarled: 'I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.' But in the end it was Rothko whose endurance gave out." -Richard Lacayo/Time Mag.

"...it didn't quite deliver the punch of sacred enclosure that quite a lot of writing about Rothko might lead you to expect – and which the Tate's ordinary, segregated hang of these paintings can sometimes achieve. There were a lot more people around, for one thing – and a lot more of them than usual seemed to be sitting on Tate Modern's big arched benches, as if already exhausted by the task ahead. ... The colours are confined to a narrow chunk of the spectrum and the repertoire of shapes is small – scuffed rectangles, henge-like uprights. Yet the rhetoric you bring with you is one of transcendent vision and a philosophical sense of the sublime. It is a rhetoric of overwhelming impact, so that it's going to be a very delicate sensibility, or a very confident one, that doesn't experience at least a brief shock of disconnection – the feeling that either we or the paintings aren't properly plugged in, that the current isn't flowing." -Tom Sutcliffe/Independent


Gerhard Richter at the Serpentine (-Nov. 16)

"The Dresden-born German artist Gerhard Richter is best known for his hauntingly strange, photography-based paintings, works that often seem to hover somewhere between the documentation of everyday life, and some Dantean netherworld of haunted beings. At the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, he has returned to an earlier manner of pure abstraction, the beginnings of which he first developed more than 40 years ago, when he made paintings based on industrial colour charts. ... Relentless abstraction of this kind has severe limitations. When the elements don’t challenge each other rhythmically in some way, the surfaces can look inert and unaffecting. When the colour combinations look crude and randomly chosen - as they do here - we don’t feel anything about them. Other than that they seem lacking in finesse, charm or sophistication of any kind." -Michael Glover/Times of London

"By any standards, this is a disciplined, cerebral, even austere approach to picture-making. But the joy of the series is how amazingly alive and energetic each painting feels. Spend time staring at any one of them, and you quickly notice that the blocks of colour appear to be constantly rearranging themselves, like a giant Rubik's cube in perpetual motion. They have a visual hum and thrum, like a brightly coloured version of TV static. And even though we know that every hint of figuration has been eradicated, our eyes still comb the multicoloured tesserae searching for shapes and pattern. ... Everyone is currently talking about the transcendental experience on offer at Tate Modern, where a show of late works by Mark Rothko has just opened. But Richter's new works, with their pixellated surfaces that yoke spirituality to artificial intelligence, strike me as more in keeping with the times." -Alastair Sooke/Telegraph


Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at the Tate Modern (London) (-April 13)

"...larger-than-life copies of a Louise Bourgeois spider, a bright red Alexander Calder, a morose Henry Moore and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's apple core loom over rows and rows of camp beds. The sculptures look like bronze and painted steel, but they are as weightless and insubstantial as papier-mache. Weirdly, these sculptures (made by a movie-prop business) are unveiled in London the day after the Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset had their own, motorised versions of modern sculptures – by Giacometti, Jeff Koons and Barbara Hepworth - voiced by the likes of Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey, whizzing round the stage of the Old Vic. There must be something in the air. Next we won't be really satisfied till the museum's Rothkos really sob and the Francis Bacons utter camp and curdling screams. ... This is an extended joke about the purpose of art and art galleries, but I am not entirely convinced that all the overblown sculptures add to the scenario. They fill the space and lend it grandeur - and make the lines of bunks look less exposed and tiny in the hugeness of the Turbine Hall. Perhaps Gonzalez-Foerster is telling us what the fate of art, as well as mankind, will be a half-century from now." -Adrian Searle/Guardian

"...the most disappointing Turbine Hall commission to date. It lacks the scale of the giant trumpet, the drama of the crack, the atmosphere of the Sun, the fun of the slides." -Rachel Campbell-Johnston/Times of London


Andy Warhol, Other Voices Other Rooms is at the Hayward Gallery (London) (-Jan. 18)

"Why is the Hayward offering us another major Warhol exhibition when only last year we were treated to a huge Warhol show at the National Gallery of Scotland? In 2002 Tate Modern put on a definitive Warhol retrospective and before that there was the Hayward's own classic retrospective in 1989. His name is a synonym for contemporary art. Yet the curator Eva Meyer-Hermann is adamant that this exhibition, already shown in Amsterdam and Stockholm, will be different. ...the meat of the show is in the videos and films. ... This show does offer a fresh focus on Warhol, but the footage is long and often dull or obscure. It is the artist's least accessible side. Twenty-one years after his death, Warhol still commands remarkably greedy levels of attention." -Joanna Pitman/Times of London


Disposable People: Contemporary Global Slavery at the Royal Festival Hall (London) (-Nov. 9)

"Ten wrinkled faces peer out from inside their picture frames. They seem ordinary photo subjects -- until you read the caption. These were Korean 'comfort women' during World War II: sex slaves to the Japanese military, raped for years in camps. Only one of them ever married. Another lost two of the three children she had in the camp. They are now stepping forth to demand recognition and compensation. ... Images on display include Bangladeshi child laborers by Iranian-born Abbas, trafficked Ukrainians by Jim Goldberg, Haitian sugar-cane cutters by Alex Webb, and Indonesian housemaids by Susan Meiselas. ... As a photo show to be judged on its own merits, mission- driven 'Disposable People' is less successful. Its individual parts are disconnected, and it would need more careful curating." -Farah Nayeri/Bloomberg


Second Lives at the Museum of Arts and Design (-Feb. 15)

"The shows resemble an art seminar-cum-food-fight — an amazing cacophony that is by turns dismaying, enervating, infuriating and invigorating. I recommend a visit. ... Together the works broadcast loud and clear the museum’s ambition to upgrade its profile and segue from its previous concentration on craft to a hipper, more wide-ranging program. The first sign was the 2002 change of name from the American Craft Museum to the more amorphous, cosmopolitan Museum of Arts and Design. You might wonder if every museum on earth has to be involved with contemporary art. ... This is not so much art or craft as acrobatics. The works are also peculiarly hostile and festooned with jokes — whether overt, like Marilyn Levine’s leather jacket made of carved wood, or covert, like Steve Sinner’s vase of painted, lathe-turned maple that looks more like blown glass or ceramics." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"...piles on the schmaltz pretty thick. Fortunately, its inaugural exhibition also veers on the edge of danger. ...The show dives right into a current trend among artists who practice a socially conscious form of bricolage, assembling or recycling discarded consumer goods into equally non-functional but highly decorative objects of wonder that also make a point. ... Accumulation is clearly king at this museum, which tries to blend high-concept art with the passions of a hobbyist. What goes into making a work becomes more important than the sum of its parts. ... ...a sense of overkill in an exhibition where so many works tend to show off rather than create much meaning. Nonetheless, there is enough humor and humanity here to make one stop and think and not just shake the head in disbelief." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg


Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)

"Best known as a portraitist, Ms. Opie is also a photographer of landscapes, cityscapes, architecture, still lifes and lifestyles. She is an insider and an outsider: a documentarian and a provocateur; a classicist and a maverick; a trekker and a stay-at-home; a lesbian feminist mother who resists the gay mainstream; an American — birthplace: Sandusky, Ohio — who has serious arguments with her country and culture." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"The mid-career retrospective is often a mixed blessing: a monument to youthful achievement couched as a scary signal that your best days may be behind you. In the case of Opie, I take the outcome personally. In the mid-'90s, I liked her work so much that the band I was in used one of her freeway photographs for a CD cover. Revisiting her oeuvre now, I am impressed by how she's mixed technical chops with critical theory (she is, after all, a product of the '80s and early '90s) and an activist's humanity. Sure, I'm disappointed by the recent work. But I'm pulling for an Opie comeback, since, as Oliver in a Tutu shows, the domesticated art-professor mom still has teeth, even if they're no longer as sharp as scalpels." -Martha Schwendener/Village Voice

"As this handsome retrospective makes clear, she is that rare kind of photographer who is able to move between outwardly heterogeneous subjects, with sufficient smarts to not only avoid any hint of dilettantism, but also to unite a raft of separately defined projects into an accomplished, satisfying whole. ...'Portraits' remains Opie’s best-known series. The photographs, in which sitters adopt regal poses against richly colored backdrops, are as notable for their up-close-and-personal cast as for their art-historical riffs. In much of her subsequent work, people are glimpsed or obscured, and the implied gaze is, if never objective, certainly cooler. ... It’s always gratifying when the most recent work by an established artist is also the most successful..." -Michael Wilsom/TONY

"In planning the show, Opie had hoped that putting all these different series of photos together would show a cohesiveness and coherent vision. For Opie, this vision is documenting community and cultural identity, what it means to belong, though there is a palpable sense of loneliness in much of her work. Opie's photos are dignified, beautiful, political, provocative and hinge on an amazing formal vision and an almost unreal clarity, but the subjects are often alone, as if testing whether identity can hold up without community." -Sara Rose/AP

"Opie's outsiders don't look so radical. And shoving private predilections before a squeamish public seems like a quaint project in an era of media exhibitionism. Since the advent of reality television, YouTube and blogs, privacy has all but disappeared. ... Despite their historical resonance, it is hard not to see her tattooed ladies as characters in a play that has long since shut down. Opie's recent photos suggest she herself has moved on to a bland domesticity. ... Polemics fade away in a beautiful series called 'Icehouses' that Opie shot in 2001. She excises herself and everybody else from the austere white landscapes, bisected by a thin brown horizon and flecked with coloured sheds." -Ariella Budick/FT


Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum (-Jan. 11)

"The best collapse the distances between realist painting, modernist abstraction, personal snapshot and magazine, and are accessible, devotional and visually alive. Their gem-rich colors are applied with brazen abandon, like miniature action paintings. This elegantly micromanaged presentation doesn’t have the best timing. It comes after the first peak of Ms. Peyton’s career, in the late 1990s, when her influence was at its height, but before a second phase has completely gelled. The show is uneven in some places and overlong in others. At its conclusion Ms. Peyton is shown heading in several promising new directions, although unsteadily. This will help perpetuate the underestimation that has often surrounded her work. ... By fits and starts, this exhibition reveals the complicated fusion of the personal, the painterly and the Conceptual that informs Ms. Peyton’s work. Each image is a point on entwined strands of artistic or emotional growth, memorializing a relationship, acknowledging an inspiration or exposing an aspect of ambition." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"...very, very pretty. ... In the aggregate, one sees why some complain (other jealous artists among them). Peyton paints basically the same person over and over again whether it's a self portrait or a historic figure or a friend of hers. The aquiline features, fey, aristo, emerge from Hockney-like images that she freely echoes. ... My favorites are the drawings and the historical pieces that are finely wrought and evoke the romance and drama of previous centuries. Napoleon, Delacroix, Marie Antoinette, King Ludwig. Juxtaposed with the highly colored rock stars and fashionistas, they are notable for the virtuosity and the way they make their subjects look utterly contemporary, as if they could be hanging with Kurt and Keith." -Patricia Zohn/Huffington Post


Paris/New York: Design Fashion Culture, 1925-1940 at the Museum of the City of New York (-Feb. 22)

"...compact yet kaleidoscopic... Understandably this show is something of a shoe-string effort within a larger boot-strap epic, but Mr. Albrecht has done a superb job of extracting maximum wattage from every juxtaposition, object and image, including a great many surprisingly effective digital reproductions. ... The show jumps from Parisian and New York architectural designs and city plans, both built and unbuilt, to that famous American expatriate Josephine Baker and the relatively integrated nature of Paris night life, which is evoked by Marcel Vertè’s Lautrec-like lithographs. There are silver-plate serving dishes and cunning souvenirs from the French luxury liner the Normandie, which is also represented by a six-foot-long model. ... But the real bonus of the details in this finely wrought show is the way they can draw your attention outward, back to the city. 'Paris/New York' should sharpen your appreciation of some of the Art Deco landmarks that many of us pass every day — not only the masterworks like the flamboyant Chrysler Building and its more austere siblings the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and the Waldorf-Astoria, but the Paramount Building, the Squibb Building, the Chanin Building and the Madison-Belmont Building." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (-Jan. 11)

"Dynamic duo, gruesome twosome or just plain geeks in ties and tweeds, the British artists Gilbert & George don’t seem to care what you call them as long as you pay attention, which you couldn’t avoid doing if you tried in their suffocating and disordered wraparound survey at the Brooklyn Museum. ...popular is not really the word for them. They’re too strange for that. And to perpetually temperature-taking art-world eyes, they have always stood a little outside the coolness loop, a tad beyond the pale, a touch too much. ...their sleek, photo-based, politically incorrect across-the-spectrum art is as hard to love as it is to categorize. Even if you appreciate it, you may prefer not to spend time with it. Then there’s the perversity factor. They have a funky sense of beauty and an appetite for unsightly things, things most people come to art museums not to see. They were using images of feces back in the 1980s, long before Andres Serrano got the idea. In the 1990s, when they had reached an age at which most exhibitionists put their clothes back on, Gilbert & George, then in their mid-50s, took theirs off. ...outlandish self-exposure, unmeasured moral outrage, and a belief in love, death and no heaven — that makes their art both all but unendurable and right for right now." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
"...gaudy, overwhelming... ...almost defiantly autobiographical and queer in every important sense of the word... Gilbert & George use their own working-class East End London neighborhood as a microcosm in which to explore urban vitality, anxiety, bigotry, and decay, along with the bigger issues of sex, death, faith, and the redemptive power of beauty." -Vince Aletti/New Yorker
"Gilbert & George the art characters are designed to send up British repression. All this almost Edwardian politeness and stodginess is entirely belied by the art they make." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger

Street Art Street Life: From the 1950s to Now at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (-Jan. 25)

"...the Bronx Museum's slick, slightly stilted, but ultimately lovable show focusing on art 'from the 1950s to Now' that's infused with the messy energy of the city. The 40 artists in the show represent a grab bag in terms of style and sensibility. Yet at the exhibit's core is a buried theme of artists grappling with urban blight. With the economy once again circling the toilet, this could not feel more timely. ...it's notable that 'Street Art, Street Life' features little actual 'street art.' The show offers exactly zero works by graffiti artists. There's not even a Keith Haring (Basquiat appears, but only in cameo form, his street tags photographed in solemn black-and-white by Peter Moore). There are likewise no music posters, a medium into which so much earnest countercultural zeal has been poured, from the hippies of '60s San Francisco to the hipsters of '90s Providence. There are performance artists, but no street performers. Despite curatorial patter about opening the museum to 'the street,' what guest curator Lydia Yee has really done is cut a crisp slice out of the museum-approved canon of art. In this, there seems to be some thesis about presenting not just mere urban creativity, but showing how the more cerebral tradition of visual art reacts off street culture—but the idea is only half-developed." -Ben Davis/Village Voice

"In its attempt to keep an impossibly broad and popular subject manageable, the Bronx Museum stunts and nearly smothers 'Street Art, Street Life,' but the sprawling exhibition’s best work survives. ...the range of works is savvy and international, and this expansive world view is the exhibition’s key strength. While that can’t cover up weak spots (like the strictly marginal presence of graffiti art and the lifelessness of much of the performance documentation), it does provide plenty of smart and unexpected diversions. ...a lively, ambitious starting point for a more extensive investigation." -Vince Aletti/New Yorker


Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions at the Brooklyn Museum (-Jan. 4)

"Included in 'Romantic Delusions,' an enchanting show of four short films by Mr. Just at the Brooklyn Museum, “Bliss and Heaven” exhibits most of the qualities for which he has become known since completing his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, in 2003. Melodramatic but never campy or over the top and with Hollywood-quality production values, his films probe vulnerable, ordinarily well-armored zones of the masculine psyche like grief, same-sex love, Oedipal conflict and spiritual desire." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Susan Meiselas: In History at the International Center of Photography (-Jan. 4)

"...a sad, disturbing and fascinatingly problematic exhibition... How do you reconcile the demands of professionalism with those of human compassion? To her credit and that of the exhibition, Ms. Meiselas — whose coverage of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1978 and ’79 made her one of the world’s most celebrated and criticized war correspondents — does not try to duck the question. On the contrary, the tension between opportunism and conscience emerges more or less inadvertently as the main interest of the exhibition — to the point that it trumps its ostensible subjects." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Art and China’s Revolution at the Asia Society (-Jan. 11)

"Few shows have inspired in me such mixed feelings. On the one hand, 'Art and China's Revolution,' which focuses on images, objects, and artworks sanctioned or suppressed by Mao during the three decades following the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, is, with few exceptions, practically without aesthetic merit; ultimately, it is much more interesting as social history, propaganda, artifact, and the clash of traditions and artistic styles — some embraced, some forced — than as a gathering of artworks. Yet the show is educational and welcome: The first of its kind — and impossible to have been mounted in China — it offers another level of historical and artistic perspective to a horrific period that the Chinese ministries of culture and propaganda, respectively, would like to continue to control, spin, put a happy face on, forget, censor, and erase. (This is the show from which the Chinese Ministry of Culture suddenly pulled its promised 100 key works last January — museum objects that, in storage and without public access, had already been officially censored, and that have since been replaced by private lenders.) ...Mao is still strangling Chinese art." -Lance Esplund/NY Sun


Implant at the UBS Art Gallery (-Oct. 31)

"...endeavors, via art, to see things from the plants' perspective. Taking off from author Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire (2001), a provocative investigation of the way plant life has helped to shape human behavior, curator Jodie Vicenta Jacobson has assembled 96 works by 45 mostly contemporary artists, all inspired by or incorporating various forms of vegetation. ... ...loose and very uneven bouquet of videos, photographs, conceptual pieces, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and assemblages... ...a focus on microcosmic creations, an effort to effect change through small-scale, local gestures, and a constant invocation of the ever-shrinking sphere of nature..." -Leslie Camhi/Village Voice


Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Dec. 14)

"Even if Morandi's compositional variations are easily grasped from photos, the material presence of these small paintings must be experienced in the flesh. 'Painter's painter' and 'once in a lifetime' are two clichés surpassed by the Met's eloquent survey of this under-recognized modern master, which includes more than 100 works gathered primarily from Italian collections. ... Like a physicist probing the atom, Morandi's obsessive rearrangements of a limited number of workaday objects—their contours softened by coats of gesso or wan colors—led to images that feel straightforward, yet vibrate with an emotional resonance that the mind cannot quite pin down." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Identity by Design: Tradition, Change and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses at the National Museum of the American Indian (-Sept. 2009)

"These are heavy garments, and not just because they are dripping with beads, coins and other ornaments. Each is weighted with the circumstance and life story of the woman who wore it, as well as the history of her tribe. ... The wall text consists almost entirely of quotations from these artists. Their reminiscences and musings are sometimes cloying, but the absence of pedagogy is refreshing." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World at the Jewish Museum (-Jan. 4 )

"...the exhibition, a collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority, is not fully satisfying. It seems to suggest that since so much has already been said, there is no need to rehash the scandals and hypotheses that surround the scrolls. The show’s curator, Susan L. Braunstein, has chosen instead to stand back and point, reminding us of the scrolls along with archaeological discoveries from Qumran, the ancient settlement beneath the caves. ... One scroll here refers to a messianic figure, 'the Son of God,' and seems to anticipate the Annunciation in Luke. Another includes excerpts from Jeremiah, one of the earliest biblical texts in existence (225 to 175 B.C.). This combination of familiarity and strangeness makes the scrolls seem beyond our conceptual, if not our physical, grasp. ... It is discomfiting, too, to see photographs in which scholars — who pieced together fragments using scotch tape — smoke over them as destructive daylight streams onto tables." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Tiffany Lamps: Articles of Utility, Objects of Art and Tiffany and the Gilded Age at the Nassau County Museum of Art (Roslyn Harbor) (-Jan. 4)

"...exceeds all expectations. Focused and compact, it includes about 45 exceptional lamps as well as displays on how the glass and lamps were made. The exhibition is as jewel-like as the objects." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes

Invasion 68 Prague at the Aperture Foundation (-Oct. 30)

"The Czech photographer Josef Koudelka belongs to the tradition of street photography that begins with Cartier-Bresson and Brassai. It is a genre of images snatched from chance encounters with passing strangers, seen against urban backdrops and preserved in memorable form. But for a few days in August 1968, Mr. Koudelka practiced a rarer, more precarious form of street photography, taking pictures inside history, where little is clear, and nothing is still. ... Strangely, none of these photographs are less than beautiful; some combination of emotional urgency and Mr. Koudelka’s instinctive artistry makes them so. His restless vigilance created a historic and historical document that is less a series of photographs than a slow-moving film that we absorb one still at a time." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Painting for the Grave: The Early Work of Boris Sveshnikov at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, NY) (-Oct. 12)

"Has any artist captured human misery with more shocking clarity than Boris Sveshnikov? None that I can think of. His Vetlosian series of drawings, ink on yellowed paper, humble things really, are brutally simple: They bring us face to face with the horrors of life in a Stalinist labor camp in the 1950s. ... The show draws from more than 300 works by the artist in the Zimmerli Museum’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union..." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Hawaiian Modern: The Architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff at the Yale School of Architecture (New Haven) (-Oct. 24)

"Architectural models, drawings, site plans, photographs and assorted documentation by the celebrated Hawaiian Modernist architect Vladimir Ossipoff (1907-1998) are the subject of an overhung but nonetheless extraordinarily interesting exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven. The show celebrates the reopening of the Art and Architecture Building after a $126 million restoration and addition, designed by the New York firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


The Sant Ocean Hall opens on Saturday at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Washington, D.C.)

"...the museum’s century-long history and a transformation of its largest exhibition space, making it as much about the museum’s future as about the ocean’s. ... the displays deliberately push humanity off center stage. They emphasize not what we have accomplished or have collected, but what is unknown or beyond our complete knowledge." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) (-Jan. 11)

"Walking through this exhibition, it’s difficult to resist a feeling of estrangement—not because the art is deliberately off-putting (as it often is in the similarly-themed After Nature at the New Museum) but because it is embedded in a well of history and experience that we cannot fathom. It is also worth noting that the third question posed by the exhibition ('are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds?') uses the plural—'our own worlds'—implying a multiplicity of cultural tracks that rarely, if ever, intersect. ... this exhibition, due to a shortage of vision, or of funds, is as Western-centric as the Hall of Architecture: out of forty artists, thirty-three are from the U.S. or Europe; the remaining seven come from Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Japan, Korea and Thailand. There is not a single artist from Africa or the Middle East, which is nothing short of unconscionable." -Thomas Micchelli/Brooklyn Rail

Bay Area Now 5 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) (-Nov. 16)

"The triennial has been a must-see since it first launched in 1997, full of work that’s either great to look at or interestingly awful, and a way-station on the path to national recognition for John Bankston, Todd Hido, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Catherine Wagner, and numerous other artists. But the folks responsible for this year’s edition seem to have succumbed to an excess of curatorial modesty. ...the Yerba Buena galleries seem scanty and emptied out, like the site of a party that didn’t quite come off. An awful lot of the show is literally someplace else." -Tessa DeCarlo/Brooklyn Rail

"The fifth edition of the YBCA's triennial snapshot of regional art activity accords pretty well with my own sense of it, though painting gets slighted, as tends to happen in the art world at large these days. ... Themes of ecological and social concern, of hometown archaeology and many-faceted identity prevail. War and utopia also get somewhat ponderous nods from Maria Antelman, among others. ... Even allowing for diverse, perhaps incommensurable, criteria of quality, the caliber of work on offer dips and spikes wildly." -Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle


Dalí: Painting and Film at the Museum of Modern Art (closed)

"Although he once denounced film as an inferior form of expression, few artists have experimented more with the medium than Salvador Dalí. Throughout his career, the artist collaborated with the likes of Luis Buñuel, the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney to create fantastic visions that played out on the big screen..." -Valery Oisteanu/Brooklyn Rail



J.M.W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (closed)

"In the current retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, Turner’s exuberance sometimes grates, and there are paintings that, taken alone, might have relegated the artist to the lesser ranks. But the overall impression of this retrospective is one of a great artist grappling with vast changes in his environment and in himself." -Ben La Rocco/Brooklyn Rail


After Nature at the New Museum (closed)

"The exhibition glories a bit much in the 'intensities' of its artists, striving for a feverish atmosphere that’s both amusing and a little irritating. In both the selected artworks and the exhibition materials... vacillates between a hyped-up end-of-the-world scenario ('after nature' as post-nature) and a more subtle interrogation of the art-nature relationship ('after nature' as a mode of descriptive art-making). The real meat of the show lies in those pieces that probe the latter... For all the heated searching on display in these works, there’s a powerful sense of emptiness at the center. This isn’t a comment on the artwork, which for the most part thrives on the tensions at hand. Rather, it’s a comment on where we stand as a culture. It’s here, in that emptiness, that the twin strands of 'After Nature' come together, if only briefly. Now that art-making ‘after nature’ is no longer a practicable technique for seeing and creating, we’ve entered a new and alien territory. It’s not so much a landscape post-nature, though, as it is post-culture. ... We seem to have lost our efficacy as reworkers of nature, and with it, a stable sense of ourselves." -Emily Warner/Brooklyn Rail


Jilaine Jones: Sculpture at the New York Studio School (closed)

"Displayed in the charmingly shabby gallery at the Studio School, where the noble if perhaps wistful motto is 'Ambition for the work, not ambition for the career,' Jones’s sculptures are composed of steel, concrete, rockboard and hydrocal. She began this series in 2003-04 with life studies from a model. Directing the model to move through scaffolding she had erected in the studio, Jones observed the body’s motions, weight shifts, and position. In the studies, using sticks and glue, Jones tried to capture the body’s experience from within—as opposed to simply incorporating a mimetic likeness—in a fragile, three-dimensional template for the full-scale sculpture. ... Jones’s work embodies a return to hand-making processes and craftsmanship, and re-establishes a premium on aesthetics over art theory and rhetoric. The implicit message in her emphasis may be that the cul-de-sac of transitory site-specific installation and collaboration in which we find ourselves is giving way to a renewed vision of individual authorship, density of expression, and the inexorable presence of discrete objects." -Sharon Butler/Brooklyn Rail


Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling at the Museum of Modern Art (-Oct. 20)

"...could be the most daring museological exercise of the decade—after all, it gives us real live buildings to look at. ... Today MoMA might be primed for a more meaningful engagement, with a sharper eye for how architecture reaches its audience, and vice versa." -Ian Volner/Brooklyn Rail


Louise Bourgeois at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (closed)

"...a recurrent problem throughout the exhibition, the Guggenheim’s tendency to make sculpture seem like it is on a proscenium. Bourgeois’s work is theatrical, but very often it has its own built-in staging mechanisms, which the museum frequently overwhelms. ... As a young woman in Paris, before she began studying art formally, Bourgeois wrote her Baccalauréat thesis on Kant and Pascal. Going through the exhibition, my mind truncated one of the latter’s more famous phrases and proceeded to trip over it repeatedly. The heart has reasons, I could not stop thinking. And since they’re reasons, it’s extremely odd that the mind cannot understand them. At times Bourgeois is very, very good at mining that strangeness." -Anne Byrd/Brooklyn Rail


Kirchner and the Berlin Street at the MoMA (-Nov. 10)

"Brief but intense (Kirchner’s stark focus on urban street life began to ebb by 1915), the series marked one of the most significant achievements of his career. Kirchner’s work from the previous decade had been deeply influenced by the Fauves, Munch, and Van Gogh, as well as African and Oceanic art, but in the Street Scenes, he began to develop a style that was less of an homage and more of a unique mélange. Losing himself in the anonymity of the big city, he seemed to become one with his surroundings, capturing the ephemeral energy of the streets. This outstanding exhibition brings together seven of the eleven paintings associated with the Street Scenes and contextualizes them with more than sixty works on paper, ranging from finished pastel drawings to prints and loose studies. It is unusual in that it offers, for the first time, a scholarly, in-depth study of this particular body of work, as well as a superb portrayal of an apocalyptic era in a place that, in the gloom of history, will remain as incomprehensible as it was notorious. ... Cocottes dressed in elaborate fur coats are transformed into night-crawling vampires by the green glow of a streetlamp. Stepping out of the shadows, self-made and immune to bourgeois superiority, they blithely enter the rich texture of urban life without wasting a thought on what might come tomorrow." -Stephanie Buhmann/Brookyn Rail


Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at the Museum of Modern Art (-Jan. 5)
to: Night. Contemporary Representations of the Night at The Hunter College Art Galleries (-Dec. 6)

"As Joachim Pissarro, the curator of the MoMA show and co-curator (with Mara Hoberman and Julia Moreno) of the two-part Hunter show explains, the forty-some Hunter artists in effect answer the question: How would van Gogh respond to night were he to have available our sensibility and artistic media? Van Gogh might enjoy the way that Vija Celmins, Jennifer Coates, Lauren Orchowski, and Pat Stein show the night sky, in their contemporary versions of The Starry Night (1889). And he could be fascinated with how such works as Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (penitent girl) (2001-2002), which shows a young woman in her underwear facing someone (her mother perhaps) in a suburban driveway, and Kohei Yoshiyuki’s 1970s photographs showing men watching nighttime sexual activity in Japan’s parks, all extend the social commentary of The Potato Eaters (1885). The worker in The Sower (1888) deserves comparison with the man in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1994-1999), who is kicking a can through the streets at night and in the gay nightclub in Love is all Around (2007), a video by Marc Swanson and Neil Gust. If Laurent Grasso’s Infinite Light (2006/2008) mounted on the college’s pedestrian bridges, which repeats the words “night for day” can be associated with the Enlightenment, so too can Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon (1889). And Stan Douglas’s Every Building in 100 West Hastings (2001), a long narrow image of a street in Vancouver, is a photographic version of Terrace of a Café at Night (Place du Forum) (1888)." -David Carrier/ArtCritical.com


Traces of the Calligrapher: Islamic Calligraphy in Practice, Circa 1600-1900 and Writing the Word of God: Calligraphy and the Qur’an at Asia Society (-Feb. 8)

"Perfect in size and proportion, carefully thought out and gorgeous, they are worthy of the book they honor. Gorgeous is important. Precious jewels should be superbly cut and set. Many would say that the word of God is the most precious jewel of all. 'Traces of the Calligrapher' is about how that word was packaged for earthly consumption. Basically, the show is a manual of fine handwriting and luxury bookmaking, illustrated by superb examples of tools of the trade and finished products. ... The second and smaller of the two shows, 'Writing the Word of God: Calligraphy and the Qur’an,' affords something like this experience. It is a deep-end dive into writing and its history." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-March 22) The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art at the Grey Art Gallery (-Dec. 6)

"'The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End,' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents 19th-century fabrics alongside a few relevant contemporary artworks. Flipping the scales, 'The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art,' at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, emphasizes the place of traditional textiles in works by contemporary African artists." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Dec. 7)

"...an interesting but problematic exhibition ... considers the impact of machine age idealism on a few progressive British printmakers. ... It groups the prints into thematic sections like 'Speed and Movement,' 'Urban Life/Urban Dynamism' and 'Industry and Labor' as though the artists were Social Realist illustrators. These divisions make for a confusing, fragmented show. ... But most of the prints reflect modern experience more in terms of formal and stylistic innovations than through illustration of generic subject matter. Absorbing Cubism, Futurism and other Continental styles, these early Modernists favored semiabstract, machinelike compositions. A chronological arrangement would give a better idea of how artistic ideas, influences and affinities developed over the 25-year period that the show addresses." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


George Tooker: A Retrospective at the National Academy Museum (-Jan. 4)

"Back in the days of the cold war and the Organization Man, George Tooker painted some of the 20th century’s most memorable images of modern angst. ...a richly affecting exhibition... ... Part of what makes Mr. Tooker’s baleful visions of modern life so gripping is how he updates models and methods that Modernism had supposedly rendered obsolete. He emulates masters of the Italian Renaissance, especially the rounded, simplified figures and exactingly calculated architectural perspectives of Piero della Francesca. ...Mr. Tooker’s painstaking approach produces fantastic, extraordinarily palpable images. He objects to the label magic realism, which some critics applied to his work; he is not, after all, a realist. Magic classicism might be closer." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at the Currier Museum of Art (Manchester, NH) (-Jan. 4)

"The Currier Museum of Art's decision to mount an exhibition devoted to Andy Warhol and politics during this extraordinary political season may look opportunistic, even cynical, to some. I think it's pure genius. ... Liberals who cleave to the idea that Warhol was an important artist don't like to be reminded of his political agnosticism." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Chihuly at RISD and After You're Gone: An Installation by Beth Lipman at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art (Providence) (-Jan. 4, Chihuly; -Jan. 18, Lipman)

"Chihuly can work wonders with glass; no one is arguing with that. He has a strong record of innovation, as well as ambition and energy to burn. But under the self-induced pressure of ceaseless demand and a factory-style production, his work long ago fell into kitsch. ... the best display of recent art is Beth Lipman's installation of cast and blown glass. ...She may use the same medium as Chihuly, but in other ways the contrast between the two is extreme. To begin with, Lipman favors clear instead of colored glass. And instead of transposing the forms of nature, she uses the medium to suggest an array of ideas connected to wealth, materialism, and death." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe

"Too bad I didn’t buy many more Chihulys for the Metropolitan, for in my book he’s one of America’s most inventive and powerful artists." -Thomas Hoving/ArtNet


My Life in Fiction: New and Recent Work by Kianga Ford at the Contemporary Museum (Baltimore) (-Nov. 23)

"...the Contemporary Museum has helpfully installed puffy white air mattresses for visitors to lie down on. You'll be glad it did. See, Ford's work is all about storytelling. On those mattresses you'll find headphones. Pop on a set and flop down. What you'll hear is one of three stories, written and read by the artist. Chapters in an ongoing, site-specific storytelling series called 'The Story of This Place,' they're walking tours set in North Miami, Los Angeles and Bergen, Norway. In the original context, you would have experienced each tale on an iPod as you followed a set route around the city in which the action takes place. ... What might help make more sense of all this is to recall that Ford is based in Los Angeles. Hello? It's the capital of contemporary storytelling, where the line between reality and unreality is blurred on a daily basis. Ford talks about once driving past a burning car. The first thing she did? Look for the movie cameras. ...the idea that truth and fiction aren't necessarily opposites, but two sides of the same coin. It's a coin Ford likes to keep flipping -- head's up, head's down -- without ever telling you which is which." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post

"...a multidimensional experience that uses narrative as a starting point for a rediscovery of the spaces we share with each other. The result is a kind of cinematic art, unfolding in real-time to a portable, eclectic soundtrack of sampled music - a walking tour unlike anything an everyday tourist would encounter." -Tim Smith/Baltimore Sun


Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) (-Dec. 7)

"Despite its title — 'Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography' — the exhibition at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University contains many artworks that are not, strictly speaking, documentary photographs. Some of them are not even documentary in nature. They are more conceptual projects that employ photographic material ranging from snapshots of everyday life to portraits and conventional documentary imagery. But this in no way negates the show’s powerful premise, which is to encourage viewers to think about the ways in which artists and photographers use and abuse documentary principles. Nina Felshin, the gallery’s curator, has done a terrific job assembling interesting and provocative work in this vein, the best of which invite viewers to consider issues of agency, context and interpretation in documentary-based art." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Richard Diebenkorn, Artist, and Carey Stanton, Collector: Their Stanford Connection: Paintings, drawings and other works on paper and Richard Diebenkorn: Abstractions on Paper at the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University (Stanford, CA) (-Nov. 9)

"The intimate but intense presentation of Richard Diebenkorn's work that charts friendship between the artist and Carey Stanton at Stanford's Cantor Center closes a circle. After getting his medical doctorate in 1947 and after nearly a decade of medical practice, however, Stanton found himself summoned to manage his family's ranch on Santa Cruz Island, off the Santa Barbara coast. The Stanton clan owned most of the island and over the next 30 years, Diebenkorn and his family would make frequent visits there. Stanton began to acquire Diebenkorn's work, eventually accumulating 45 pieces. After his death, they became property of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation, which Stanton established in 1985 to preserve and document the culture of the Channel Islands." -Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle


Emil Nolde: 1867-1956 at the Grand Palais (Paris) (-Jan. 9)

"His most important early influences were Vincent van Gogh and James Ensor, the Belgian fan of fantastic masks. In 1905, Nolde was among the founders of ``Die Bruecke'' (The Bridge), the group of Expressionist painters in Dresden. After 18 months, he fell out with his colleagues and left. ... In the first part of the show, you walk on planks -- probably an allusion to Nolde's studio at the time, a wooden hut. Up to 1909, his work is derivative; if you are in a hurry, you can skip the first five rooms. Then, in room six, an orgy of violent colors and ecstatic gestures will bowl you over. Here you find 'The Life of Christ,' a crucifixion flanked by eight smaller canvases; it's inspired by Mathias Grunewald's celebrated Isenheim Altar and no less powerful." -Jorg von Uthmann/Bloomberg