Best of 2008

As I come up on the first anniversary of this blog, it's time to look back on the best show's of year. To that end, I present the Top 10 of 2008:

1. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at P.S. 1.
The farthest thing from a nostalgic time capsule, this survey of feminist art from the 60s to the 80s felt more alive and relevant than most art today. With 120 artists, including many from outside the U.S., the sprawling and celebratory show gave a wealth of evidence that women and feminist art are central to the the story of contemporary art, with subjects like the body and identity and strategies like media critique, autobiography, video and performance all pioneered by these women. [My Review]


2. Jeff Koons at the MoCA Chicago and Metropolitan Museum of Art [My Review]
The Jeff Koons experience is irresistibly giddy and pleasurable. For work that traffics in seductive superficiality and lightness, it is surprisingly weighty and ambitious, toying with concepts of kitsch, consumerism, the banal, the profane and the artistic ego.








3. Gustave Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [My Review]

Self-styled bohemian with a healthy ego, Gustave Courbet made a name for himself thumbing his nose at convention, paving the way for modernism's mavericks. The show's most memorable paitings were erotic works like “Women with a Parrot” (1866), a naked wild-haired woman is in the midst of a reverie and the infamous crotch-shot, “The Origin of the World” (1866).




4. Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [My Review]
The opposite of Courbet, this quiet, unsexy show nevertheless
show packed a surprising punch. Canvas after canvas of the plainest objects promised tedium, but delivered crackling, shimmering vitality.





5. Tara Donovan at the ICP, Boston

Mass quantities of styrofoam cups, paper plates, drinking straws in were transformed into hallucinogenic landscapes -- clouds, fields, mountains, coral that defied and delighted the senses.





6. William Eggleston at the Whitney Museum [My Review]

Darkness, decay, alienation at the heart of the American everyday -- drive-ins, grocery stores, strip malls, living rooms -- was dressed up in eye-popping color photos.






7. Frida Kahlo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art [My Review]
The first major exhibit in the U.S. in 15 years, this show was timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mexico's most famous art export. Like religious icons, these her unnaturally beautiful paintings chronicled her physical pain and the emotional pain of her imperfect marriage and health problems







8. Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush with Leisure at the New York Historical Society [My Review]

This survey of Ash Can art was a snapshot of leisure in New York City in the first part of the 20th Century, from swims in the East River to beers at McSorley's Ale House.






9. Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [My Review]

This show included Poussin's most stunning paintings -- those done early in his career, when he lived in Rome where he soaked in the Renaissance love affair with Greek and Roman mythology, painting small, sensuous canvasses under the influence of Titian. The second half of the show featured the artist’s decidedly less-sexy mature style – larger canvasses, smoother brush work and more sober and allegorical works.






10. Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum [My Review]

This show featured a face-off between Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, whose influential writings helped define Abstract Expressionism. Organized around an impressive ensemble of works from many of the heavyweights of the era, the show was refreshingly non-reverential, even downright critical of the two critics, who are shown to be bigoted, self-contradictory, pompous and overly rigid.

Eggleston (and Six Others)

William Eggleston, "Untitled," c. 1975

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

Whether he's shooting landscape, portraits or still lives, the photos of Memphis-born William Eggleston have a sense of place, and are often labeled with the city they were taken -- "Untitled New Orleans," "Untitled Nashville," etc. He visited New York, meeting contemporaries like Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, but unlike them he never shot the streets. His is a rural roadside milieu. Born into wealth, he has carried himself like a dandy, affecting capes, driving cars like a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce. In the 70s, he embarked on long road trips, sometimes joined by Dennis Hopper, drinking and shooting photos as they went.

There is a bit of, for lack of a better word, slumming going on: His subjects are mundane in the American vernacular -- drive-ins, grocery stores, strip malls, living rooms. The shots have the casual intimacy of the snapshot, yet there is always something alien or off. He is drawn towards messiness and decay -- exemplified by an early black & white image of a car with one working headlight.

His eye -- and that of his editors (he never culls his own images) -- is drawn toward the freakish in the familiar: the empty stare of the scruffy tie-dye-wearing man sitting in the backseat of a car with a license plate beside him; the old man wearing a suit, sitting on a bed loosely holding a pistol; and the naked man on a sofa, gun rack on the wall. These made me think of Thoreaux's "lives of quiet desperation."

The moments Eggleston captures can be tacky, but without being camp of judgmental: an old woman sitting on a sofa in her untended backyard, her bold dress clashing with bold patterned sofa; the big man with a greased pompadour playing pinball; a young woman wearing a puppy dog t-shirt straddles a fire hydrant, her face contorted, apparently in some kind of religious ecstasy.

This sense of heightened reality also comes from the juxtaposition of bleak scenes with bold color. He was one of the first art photographers to use a dye-transfer printing -- an expensive process theretofore mainly used in advertising that could selectively intensify colors to eye-searing results. This can especially be seen in still lives like a blood red ceiling crisscrossed with a tangle of white electric cords, an open oven door in sickly metallic green and a half-empty bottle of cherry pop on the hood of a car (the latter, a perfect 20th Century American take on the classic still life arrangement).

Eggleston's last major showing in New York, his 1976 debut at the MoMA, launched his career, and kicked opened the door for color photography as serious art -- despite the show getting panned.

In the mid-70s, he experimented with video, modifying a Sony Portapak with infrared tube and documenting the colorful demimonde he encountered in Memphis and on the road. An edited version of this footage called "Stranded in Canton" is included in the retrospective, nicely presented on four CRT monitors paired with stools. There is much drinking, culminating in one scene where a man bites the head off a live chicken. While the video experiments were short-lived, Eggleston's aesthetic has been influential to filmmakers like David Lynch, David Byrne ("True Stories"), Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola.

Since the 1980s, Eggleston has been shooting fewer people. The bad news is that his newer work, all tightly-cropped still lives, is suffocating and charmless. The good news is that everything else is sings. At his height, Eggleston had a unique ability to capture the uncanny in the ordinary.


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

Giorgio Morandi is thought by many to be the greatest Italian painter of the 20th Century. This is a bit odd considering Morandi's known for contemplative still lives. Brash like Picasso or Pollack, he wasn’t -- on canvas or in his life. Born in Bologna, the shy artist lived with his two sisters for most of his life, rarely traveling outside the city. His style emerged through a friendship with Giorgio de Chirico, and Morandi's early paintings share the metaphysical artist’s proto-surrealist style, down to the bare mannequins. The exhilarating Met survey includes several lovely Cézanne-influenced landscapes and a couple of early self-portraits, but the main attraction is his renderings of objects on a table. He did some traditional arrangements of roses, shells and such, but Morandi's breakthrough idea was fashioning semi-abstracted forms -- bottle, box and cylinder -- painted-over Platonic objects that he grouped as models in his studio and painted. The results often have the deliberately imperfect look of Japanese wabi-sabi ceramics with wavy outlines. The palate is muted, mostly limited to grays and browns. This flattens the image. There is just enough tonal variation and highlights to keep the illusion of three dimensionality and volume. The paintings must be seen in person -- reproductions just don't do them justice. Morandi followed this formula for decades, creating a monomaniacal fugue of still lives. The variations evolved towards abstraction until his final paintings look like Rothkos (although his true artistic beneficiary is Wayne Thiebaud).


theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)

Relational aesthetics seems like a good idea -- an arts movement about tweaking the relationship between artist and viewer and even rethinking places like museums, galleries, biennials, etc. Rirkrit Tiravanija was one of its original instigators, best known for cooking meals for gallery goers. Now he's one of 10 artist-friend-collaborators in what is the Gugg's confoundedly awful "anyspacewhatever" show. His main contribution? An Illy-branded coffee stand that resides somewhere near the top of the spiral. The caffeine does little to overcome all the half-baked tackiness. The most memorable object is a rotating bed, which could be reserved at luxe hotel rates for overnights at the museum (a couple critics, including Jerry Saltz, took the bait). Most representative, however, is a tedious video of Tiravanija and his friends, including a few other art luminaries such as Elizabeth Peyton, as they hang out and shoot the shit. Did I metion you have to remove you shoes and sit on pillows to watch? Whatever is right.


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

The Met’s farewell to Philippe de Montebello is a microcosm of the museum itself, stuffed with exquisite objects of the most diverse kind. Celebrating the treasures acquired during the museum director's 31-year tenure, the show features remarkable juxtapositions. For instance, Baroque statuary with a Francis Bacon, a Balthus lolita with Guercino's "Sampson Captured by the Philistines," or 15th Century playing cards and a Rothko. The show also reveals visitors' own favorites. With some guilt, I skimmed over much of the non-European objects, although there are amazing examples from the Americas, Asia, Africa and on. My overall favorites were Thomas P. Anshutz's handsome 1907 John Singer Sargent-style oil portrait "A Rose," and Joachim Wtewael's fleshy dayglow "The Golden Age" (see image at left) and Rubens' oil of the painter with his wife and child -- one of de Montibello's favorites. While remarkably inclusive, the show also reveals some gaps in the museum’s collection, particularly the scarcity of any art other than photos from the last 50 years, the Bacon excepted. Thinking about this show, I'm reminded of all the times I've visited the museum, beginning sometime in the mid-70s. While I've never met the man, I have to wonder, how much as my taste been influenced by Philippe de Montebello?


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

I had always thought of Catherine Opie as a lesbian Mapplethorpe who documents and celebrates the gay, transgender and s&m cultures. One of her best known works is a self-portrait with the word “pervert” carved raw into her chest. But as this seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim shows, she is so much more. Even her most sexually provocative images exude a warmth and vitality missing in Mapplethrope’s brutal black and white formalism. This difference becomes more pronounced in her newer work. Adjacent to the “pervert” photo, is a more recent matching shot of Opie breastfeeding her son. The scar from the self-inflicted wound can still be seen, but the focus is motherhood and domesticity. Her photos documents her family life -- such as with one of her son in a pink tutu (see image at right) -- and other lesbian households with and without kids. My favorite series in her diverse body of work are landscapes that have nothing to do with sexual preference -- such as black & whites of lovely curving highway overpasses and on-ramps. Best of all are her recent images of surfers and ice fishing shacks. Brilliantly installed on opposite walls, the images illustrate how communities pull individuals together.


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

In 1940, Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt and his pal, poet Edwin Denby collaborated on a book celebrating the city where they lived -- New York. The work was created on aimless walks, which they sometimes took with their Chelsea neighbor Willem de Kooning. I didn’t have much patience for Denby’s poetry or for Burckhardt’s dogs-eye-view photos of pedestrian legs, fire hydrants and so on.


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

George Tooker was trained at the Art Student’s League by social realist Reginald Marsh, where he developed a style known as American Magical Realism. Taking the psychologically tinted real-life representations of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, he adds a hallucinogenic and cartoonish quality that is heightened by bright colors of egg tempera painting method of Piero della Francesca. Tooker's work of the 50s and 60s has an element of social critique, taking on broad subjects like alienation. One of his more famous works, which is owned by the Whitney, portrays the fear of a woman on her own in a subway station. Another conveys the bureaucratic oppression of waiting in line for what might be the DMV. A third, a menacing grid of office cubicles with no way out. Tooker's art also increasingly takes on non-political themes. A 1940s painting depicts a group of young men and women under a Coney Island boardwalk that references traditional imagery of Christ's crucifixion (see image at right). Tooker also made paintings of his Puerto Rican and African-American neighbors -- mainly homoerotic images of shirtless men in their windows. While there's nothing earth-shattering about this work, there is something refreshing about his allegiance to representation, like a gay Norman Rockwell.

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

Dreams From His Father

"Rubin Singleton" (2008)

Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage: Africa: Lagos ~ Dakar
New Intuitions: Leslie Hewitt, Tanea Richardson and Saya Woolfalk: Artists in Residence, 2007-08
Studio Museum Harlem
(closed; July 17 - Oct. 26, 2008)

As related in his memoir "Dreams From My Father," Barack Obama was abandoned at the age of 2 by his Kenyan father. He only saw his father again once, when he was 10. The Brooklyn painter Kehinde Wiley, similarly abandoned, was left by his Nigerian father even before he was born. Wiley never knew him or saw a photo of him until, as a 20-year-old art student, he traveled to Lagos, managed to find him and even painted a few portraits.

Ten years later, Wiley returned. By then, he was successful artist, launched into prominence after a post-Yale MFA stint as artist-in-residence Studio Museum, where he got noticed for his oil portraits of black men he met on 125th Street, near the museum, done in a formal realist style indebted to the greats of the 18th Century and 19th Century. Wiley really broke out after being commissioned by VH1 to do portraits of hip-hop royalty. Images such as Ice-T as Napoleon in the style of Tiepolo are unforgettable -- mashups of high and low, black and white, past and present that are highly artificial, but hold an ironic meaning. Jarring juxtapositions that make sense. On his return trip to Africa, he was there for the second in his "World Stage" series of internationally-themed works. The first go-round involved posing young black males from Brooklyn in poses taken from Mao-era Chinese propaganda posters. It was a tentative step, really a fakeroo since he never had to leave his borough (the paintings were shown last year in Wisconsin at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center).

The new series -- 10 canvasses all dated 2008 -- takes the international idea more seriously. He traveled to Lagos and Dakar and posed models, this time based on the body language of post-colonial public statues there. The statues, photos of which can be seen in the exhibition catalog, like the Mao paintings, are only used as a starting point. With "On Top of the World," the figure in the source sculpture flashes a peace sign; in Wiley's painting, it has become a black power fist. And in "Place Soweto (National Assembly)," the sculpture shows man and a woman, their two hands touching. In Wiley's it is two young men. Their contact now has homoerotic meaning.

Wiley is gay, and homoeroticism is a part of his art, but not in any explicit or political way. At least one writer noted that his way of finding models on the street is much like gay cruising. But just going on the paitings, there are are signs of a subtle sensuality. First, most of the models look like, well, models. They're good looking. And their unsmiling visage and steady gaze at the view, often have an objectifying feel more more akin to something you'd see in a fashion spread. This is especially the case of "Rubin Singleton," which shows a model sporting a pastel camo hoodie that looks more Lower East Side than Lagos.

Wiley does an interesting thing with these portraits -- he adds a backdrop of brightly colored decorative pattern -- flowers, birds, it's feminine but bold. Look again and you'll notice that the pattern is partially covering the subjects, consuming them like some kind Little Shop of Horrors. The effect is to flatten and lose context. It also amps up the visual appeal. These paintings really pop.

But it begs the question: Why travel to Africa if many of the paintings could have been done in Brooklyn? Why pose the models after post-colonial statues if this isn't apparent in the works?

Part of the answer is given by Wiley in a short documentary video displayed on the museum's second floor. The artist hints that he wants to subvert any false ideas about his subjects. Visiting Africa, he was acutely aware of the tendancy to belive you are observing an objective, anthropolitical truth. His antidote is to heighten the viewer's awareness of artifice, what he calls "a type of non-truth." Wiley makes a point of discussing how the photos taken in Africa are processed in Photoshop, their colors heightened. We can see the "stage" of his "World Stage" paintings as a kind of theatrical remove. As one essay in the catalog points out, he does not seek to heroize, but to expose our impulse to heroize.

While some of these weighty concepts seem like afterthoughts, the art itself is good stuff. I'm happy with where Wiley's going -- he's maturing into a style that's less gimicky. The next series will focus on Brazil and will be on view in Los Angeles next year.

Wiley got his start as an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum (other luminaries include David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall), so it's only appropriate for three to be a concurrent group show of the program's current crop, three women: Leslie Hewitt, Tanya Richardson and Sarya Woolfalk.

Common themes include quests for identity, body issues, emptiness and loss. Leslie Hewitt makes ramshackle architectural assemblages using raw wood, drywall, glass and old photos (see image at right). They would have fit in at this year's Whitney Biennial (not a compliment; my review here). Tanya Richardson makes fabric sculptures of oozing organic forms that speak a language of spiderwebs and worms. She also makes politically charged works about race, such as one that is a screen-capture of the Web site blackandmaleinamerica.org showing an error message reading "temporarily unavailable." Sarya Woolfalk creates a childlike Teletubby world of day-glow alien beings on a quest through a land of Louise Bourgeois-like hermaphroditic shapes.

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