Review Roundup

• This week's big opening is Gustave Courbet at the Met (Feb. 27 – May 18, 2008). Roberta Smith calls it a "majestic installation" of "sublime strangeness," focusing on an artist who "virtually wrote the definition of the modern artist as a bohemian, narcissistic loner and political radical who shunned the academy." While he was known as a Realist, Smith writes that Courbet was a kind of proto-postmodernist in that his paintings used irony and "inborn dissonance," even addressing the subject of painting itself. She nails it, describing his "The Desperate Man" (1844-45) as "Johnny Depp’s pirate rendered by Caravaggio." A review by Ariella Budick in Newsday notes that the artist used "ugliness as a creative strategy." The New York Sun's Kate Taylor looks at how he used photography, such as a guide for his anatomic-pornographic "L'Origine du Monde" (1866). Dan Bischoff in the Newark Star Ledger finds the paintings "a bit too rubbery for modern tastes," and discusses the artist's antagonistic relationship to Napoleon III, touching on his role in the Paris Commune.

• Over at the Whitney, Ken Johnson checks out the new Charles Demuth show “Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster” (Feb. 23 - April 27, 2008). Johnson speculates that Demuth switched from watercolors to oils because that latter was more "serious," but also more hetero. Demuth was gay, and he may have felt his feminine watercolors made him an outsider. Johnson, who loves the watercolors, points out the phallic structures (chimneys and towers) in the oils, which are a "kind of hymn to the United States."
  

• Charlie Finch plays pit bull with the the MoMA design show "Design and the Elastic Mind." Calling the show "nerdvana," he writes that it "resembles a trade show for security firms and would-be secret agents at your local convention center."
  

• Writing in the Voice, Leslie Camhi calls the P.S. 1 "WACK!" show "unwieldy, at times didactic, yet wildly inspiring." She notes that "one of feminism's most profound legacies is the erosion of the boundaries between art and life, which remains with us today in the confessional art of Tracey Emin or Sophie Calle, or even the performances of Matthew Barney." Also looking at "WACK!" is John Perreault, who opines that "much of the art by women in this ancient period [60s/70s] was superior to dead-end formalist painting and many of the largely male prerogatives of the time." Yet: "After so many successful feminist actions by feminist pioneers, the slippage has been appalling. Art history may be cruel, but commerce-driven art is merciless."

• Lee Rosenbaum says of Gugg's Cai Guo-Qiang show, "never have the [museum's] ramps and rotunda been put to such compelling use." Although she wonders whether Frank Lloyd Wright's building will hold all of those suspended automobiles given the problems with Fallingwater.

• Holland Cotter pays a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for their newly opened Frida Kahlo (Feb. 20 - May 18, 2008) show. "Modest and compact," he writes that the show demonstrates Kahlo's ability to "[enter] your system, fast, with a jolt, an effect as unnerving, and even repellent, as it is pleasurable." Regina Medina notes in the Philadelphia Daily News that one of the show's curators, Hayden Herrera, wrote the 1983 biography of the Mexican artist that was the basis for the 2002 movie "Frida." Included in the show are four works that have never been seen in the U.S.
  

• In Washington, D.C, the National Portrait Gallery is showing "Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture" (Feb. 8 - Oct. 26, 2008). NPR notes that the show features photos and portraits of hip hop performers, including Kehinde Wiley's portrait of LL Cool J.

• Nancy Durrant in London Times reviews "The Listening Post" by artist Ben Rubin at the city's Science Museum, which now owns the piece. The high-tech multimedia installation, once showed at the Whitney, allows the viewer to eavesdrop on Internet chat rooms. She writes that it is the "first work of art to communicate effectively the scope and nebulous nature of the Internet."

• Matti Friedman at the AP writes up the "Looking for Owners" show at the Israel Museum, featuring paintings, including by Matisse, Monet and Seurat, stolen by the Nazis. Visitors who recognize a painting as their own and can prove it can file a claim. It's estimated that as many as 600,000 art works from this period have never been returned to their pre=WWII owners. One of a few in the show that wasn't looted is Courbet's "The Bathers" (1858), purchased from a Parisian dealer by von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister.