Review Roundup

The Big New Show of the moment is the Kehinde Wiley show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. And our Review of the Week goes to Martha Schwendener at the Village Voice for teasing out exactly why she isn't comfortable with the painter's new work.


Kehinde Wiley, The World Stage: Africa, Lagos—Dakar at the Studio Museum Harlem (-Oct. 26)

"I wish I liked Kehinde Wiley's paintings more than I do. For about half a decade, Wiley has been painting young men posed in front of elaborate, patterned backgrounds. Initially, his subjects were African-Americans dressed in the uniforms of hip-hop—baggy jeans, hoodie sweatshirts, basketball jerseys, puffy down jackets—but arranged in compositions cribbed from haute 18th- and 19th-century European paintings. ... The paintings at his current Studio Museum show follow the same format as the earlier canvases, except that instead of copying European paintings, the sitters mimic the poses of African public sculpture. ... But despite the positive, empowering vibes coming from these paintings, my sense of discomfort remains. Or maybe I should clarify: my sense of discomfort with the art world's embrace of Wiley as 'a history painter, one of the best we have' (to quote one review), or the descriptions of his work as 'conceptually based critical works that are about representation rather than enactments of the process itself' (as one Foucault-heavy essay in the SMH catalog has it). ... Wiley, though, isn't even in the first generation of black men to paint the figure. Kerry James Marshall's patchwork compositions are subversive confections of Eisenhower-era vignettes filled with tar-baby black figures and jarring texts. And then there's Barkley Hendricks—in fact, Wiley's paintings are a kind of juiced-up redux of Hendricks, with similar centralized figures and an emphasis on pattern. ... Wiley's version of neo–Black Power is complicated, since it centers on the corporatized fields of sports and entertainment, and captures Africans dressed in the cheap outfits (born out of sweat shops and globalized commerce) that mean a young man in Lagos wouldn't look out of place on 125th Street. ...neutrality spills over into the paintings, which feel most of the time like a hedging of bets between multicultural political correctness and messier gay/black politics. ... ...Wiley is glossy, market-ready, and safe—unless the feel-good, one-world/one-love vibe is a ruse, a way of making a large population fall in love with paintings that they might, under clearer circumstances, reject." -Martha Schwendener/Village Voice

"That Mr. Wiley is gay certainly influences his choice of subjects — men have always taken both the male and female roles in his compositions — yet in the Africa series, at least, the implications of his all-male cast are richer than mere sexual preference. ... The poses his models assume are based on local public sculptures, which themselves draw on a number of traditions, from European colonial styles to the Soviet Socialist aesthetic to local sculptural styles. ... He's not out to right the wrongs of the past — as any realist does, he's seeking to portray the heroism of everyday people, black people. Yet when he states that he's 'more engaged ... with the possibilities of easel painting' than with the social or conceptual implications of his work, he loses me. ... If he is an excellent thinker, Mr. Wiley is, at best, only a competent painter. His idealized figures, enhanced through Photoshop, have a photographic quality that distances them; they seem almost like wax figures. Worse, they have no organic relationship to their backgrounds, which are relentlessly flat; the highly modeled figures seem to float free of them. " -Daniel Kunitz/New York Sun

"Currently, his work is installed in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum and can be seen in a group survey, 'Recognize!,' at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. And on Wednesday 16 at Studio Museum in Harlem... The resulting works are less familiar as icons than the images of rap stars, but they hardly stint on Wiley’s signature attention to brilliant fabrics and patterns. He envisions painting in six countries on three continents, making 'The World Stage' into its own version of 'Family of Man.'" -Sophie Fels/Time Out New York


Paul McCarthy at the Whitney Museum (-Oct. 12)
Albrecht Dürer at the Museum of Biblical Art (-Sept. 21)

"There's little hint in this exhibition of the scatological deluges of ketchup, chocolate, and mayonnaise for which the artist is notorious... ... Our contemporary surveillance society may make these gyrating doppelgängers feel old hat, but McCarthy gets points for prescience: Although the installation wasn't realized until this year, the piece was conceived in 1971. Like whirling on a carnival ride till you puke, McCarthy nails the fault line between sensation and agitation, ushering us into an American funhouse where liberty is mirrored by queasy excess. ... Forerunners to contemporary styles as diverse as M.C. Escher's geometric conundrums and S. Clay Wilson's horror-vacui biker comix can be glimpsed in the innovative graphics that Dürer discovered just a few decades after Gutenberg invented the printing press." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Progress at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Nov. 30)

"In the second half of the 20th century the dream of an increasingly better world brought to you by human ingenuity ran out of gas. That is the message of 'Progress,' an intermittently thought-provoking exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art that starts strongly but ends weakly. ...a display of works, from 1926 to 2008, that at its best vividly juxtaposes expressions of Modernist optimism and Postmodernist skepticism. ... At the heart of the exhibition are a pair of paintings by Ed Ruscha and three art-about-art sculptures by Paul Sietsema that meditate with rueful wit on lowered expectations. ... While it is true that the tragedy of Vietnam and heightened consciousness about racism and sexism did much to undermine faith in 20th-century progress, the exhibition seems to have gotten stuck at about 1990. It offers no hint of what progress might mean today in an age of world-shrinking digital technology, financial crisis, global warming and food and energy shortages." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe at the Whitney Museum of Art (-Sept. 21)

"...should be mandatory viewing not just for those curious about the great visionary—whose ideas are increasingly relevant—but for anyone with a speck of concern about the fate of the planet. That is, for all of us. ... One of his greatest gifts to the future was a resistance to notions of absolute ownership of resources. On the drawing One Ocean World Town he scrawled the phrase if MATERIALISM WINS, HUMANITY IS LICKED." -T. J. Carlin/Time Out New York


Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities at the Museum of Modern Art (-Nov. 10)

"...too many of the museum’s usual suspects. ... 120 prints, illustrated books and the editioned objects called multiples, as well as a sprinkling of sculptures, drawings and even design objects from the museum’s other departments. ... The installation proceeds in thematic clusters with certain subjects — eyes, for example — recurring throughout. Living creatures are everywhere, whole or in part, real or imaginary, including humans, pigs, jellyfish and horned beetles. ... The grotesque in varying degrees is favored, which gives the show something of a buzz, like an aberrant ark. ... Many inclusions feel perfunctory and predictable. Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud and Cindy Sherman, for example, should be cycled out of the rotation for a while. Even Paul Cadmus, Bill Traylor and Howard Finster have become, for the moment, familiar departures from the norm. Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, José Posada and Paul Wunderlich add freshness." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


House Proud: Nineteenth-Century Watercolor Interiors From the Thaw Collection at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (-Jan. 25)

"...dovetails seamlessly with our voyeuristic, overdecorated times. Its jewel-like renderings of rooms and their furnishings are, at the very least, delightful, mordantly signifying artifacts full of tips to try at home. Often they are much more. For one thing, they prove that the modern era did not invent the guilty pleasure known as shelter porn: the glossy monthlies heavy with images of picture-perfect domiciles orchestrated for but evidently not much used by the megarich. Seeds of our current need to peruse radiantly colored images of the houses of others — or of exposing our own in this manner — were sown in early-19th-century Europe with the genteel genre of the watercolor interior, of which there are around 70 examples in 'House Proud.' ... Richly detailed and generally irresistible... ... The Industrial Revolution was creating the bourgeoisie along with the notion of the house as a private domain that both protected and expressed the self. This trickled upward, helping make royal life more private and gemütlich. ... In its own refined way, this exhibition tracks a domestic revolution while also affirming that the room is one of the greatest of all human inventions and one of painting’s most appealing subjects." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling at the Museum of Modern Art (-Oct. 20)
Paul McCarthy at the Whitney Museum (-Oct. 12)

"...relives Modernism's urge to make it new, but with readymade parts. One can see the urge and the urgency in the exhibition subtitle—beyond the dwelling as prefabricated, to the fabric and creation of modern living. The exhibition never really teases out that story, and neither can most of the architects. Still, with five prefabricated homes outside and a history dating to the 1830s inside, it adds up to a shadow history of modern architecture. ... The Modern never does explore the concept at the show's heart. It excludes artists like [Andrea] Zittel, with her sharp eye for all this prefabricated luxury. It never acknowledges how the paradox of novelty and the readymade has haunted modern art since the first collage. Even its architecture skirts suburban subdivisions, old shanties, and new luxury knockoffs. ... An assertive mix of sound, video, mirrors, bright lights, and mechanical devices, the installation might politely pass for new media. No one, however, would accuse this artist of playing polite." -John Haber/HaberArts


J.M.W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Sept. 21)

"The retrospective goes lightly on the precocious careerist and downplays his portraiture, but it gives him a very fair shake. It picks him up in his twenties and leans heavily on the Tate's collection, as it must. From there, a largely thematic arrangement does not have to play fast and loose with chronology. The artist's subject keeps changing because he goes in search of it. ... He had a working-class upbringing and an unstable, possibly psychotic mother. When, late in life, he paints castles and estates as preternaturally isolated and drenched in color, he could be lifting them above his settings. He could also be conveying his own alienation and proximity to suffering. ... Criticism today distrusts an academic style, allegory, representation, self-expression, masculine gesture, formal abstraction, and self-effacement. Contemporary art also wallows in them all. Turner scrambles them up and defines the mad scramble as Romanticism." -John Haber/HaberArts


Tacita Dean’s "Merce Cunningham performs 'Stillness (in three movements)' to John Cage's composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six Performances; six films)" at Dia:Beacon (-Sept. 1)
Imi Knoebel’s "24 Farben — für Blinky" ("24 Colors — for Blinky") at Dia:Beacon

"A filmed variation on Cage’s score is playing this summer at Dia:Beacon; it’s well worth spending time with. It’s one of two Dia installations that, in very different ways, quietly commemorate artists now gone whose names have a magic ring to contemporary ears. ... We are pulled into the performance because our perceptions stay unstable. Are we looking at one performance filmed from six angles, or six separate performances, adding up to one long one? (It’s six adding up to one.) Which movement of Mr. Cunningham’s version of Cage are we seeing at any given time? Where and when does Ms. Dean’s piece, with its staggered comings and goings of images, begin or end? ... Ms. Dean’s film of Mr. Cunningham’s performance is about the sound and motion of history in action: the personal history of one man’s fidelity to the memory of another; the cultural history of a living artist transmitting and rejuvenating the creative essence of one who has died; the contemporary history of a younger artist preserving and honoring all this, and the two men (the piece is above all a portrait of Mr. Cunningham) in her art. ... I have no problem with the [Imi Knoebel's] remake. The original was always meant as a conceptual gesture, a complicated act of self-assertion and self-abnegation, an exercise in loudness and dumbness, volubility and silence-seeking. The new version seems faithful to that. It will look old and 'authentic' soon enough, and may then acquire a kind of authoritative voice it was never really meant to have." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Larry Rivers: Major Early Works at the Guild Hall Museum (East Hampton) (-Oct. 19)

"...only 20 paintings, drawings and sculptures from 1952 to 1965, about half of which could be called major. But it is an exciting show. Tracking Larry Rivers’s rapid evolution as a painter from figurative realism at the start of his career to Pop-style history painting in the mid-’60s, the show reveals a terrifically fertile, energetic and daring talent discovering itself and lunging into the future. ... His best model was not his wife but his mother-in-law, Berdie Burger, whom he pictured nude twice in a painting that remains one of the great miracles of mid-20th-century American art." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Wedded Bliss, the Marriage of Art and Ceremony at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA) (-Sept.14.)

"If you associate weddings with kitsch, with artifice, with almost pathological levels of optimism, relax: I'm not here to set you straight. But 'Wedded Bliss,' the tendentiously titled exhibition of nuptial art from across the globe at the Peabody Essex Museum, is not out to convert anyone, and it is about as far from the tackiness of a wedding industry trade fair as you could get. ... ...a wonderful array of objects earthily connected to weddings from dozens of disparate cultures, from the rough-hewn to the glittering, from slickly painted portraits to intricately hennaed hands. ...intensely intimate, private, even erotic. Consider, for instance, the small watercolor painted on ivory of two pearly white breasts surrounded by sensuous swaths of gauzy white fabric. The artist, surprisingly, was not some concupiscent male voyeur attempting to illustrate the word 'nubile.' Rather, she was Sarah Goodridge, the distinguished 19th-century Boston miniaturist and proud owner of these fine physical attributes. Because the painting descended in the family of the statesman Daniel Webster, whom Goodridge painted at least a dozen times, art historians have surmised that the painting was presented as a love token to the widowed Webster. Goodridge was 40 at the time." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Sculpture at Evergreen 2008 at the Evergreen House (Baltimore) (-Sept. 28)

"...the historic house is owned and operated as a museum by Johns Hopkins University, the Gilded Age mansion -- former home to the railroading Garrett family... ... biennial summer exhibition of contemporary outdoor sculpture on its 26-acre grounds. ... 'This is less an exhibition about nature,' writes guest curator Andrea Pollan, in case you missed it, 'than about man's incursion into nature.' What a fitting theme for a garden, then, where man's struggle to subdue nature is often more felt than seen." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post


Repeating Islands: 6 New Jersey Latino Artists at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ) (-Aug. 29)

"We've reached the point now in the United States where Latino artists demonstrate a kind of layering about identity and culture that meshes into the dominant society, but with a distinct twist," says Alejandro Anreus, former curator at the Jersey City Museum, now associate professor of art history and Latin American studies at William Paterson University. This month, he's curating 'Repeating Islands: 6 New Jersey Latino Artists,' the Summer Show 2008 at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit, which illustrates his argument with three painters, two photographers and a sculptor." -Dan Bischoff/Newark Star-Ledger


Completing the Circle: The Fiber and Beaded Art of Ina Golub at the Newark Museum (- May 3, 2009)

"...more than 30 beaded and woven textiles by a Newark native who has been making art out of fabrics since the 1960s. Golub, who was born in 1938, specializes in Judaica, art made to enhance Jewish spiritual life in both the home and synagogue, and this show, up through May 3, highlights her sometimes rakish updates of Torah mantles, wedding canopies, tapestries and wall hangings." -Dan Bischoff/Newark Star-Ledger


Spared From the Storm: Masterworks From the New Orleans Museum of Art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (Stanford, CA)

" 80 notable works from its outstanding holdings in European and American art. Portraits of women happen to predominate..." -Kenneth Baker/San Francisco Chronicle


Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (1882-1966) (-Sept. 1) and Multiple Modernities: India, 1905-2005 (-Dec. 7) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Word is that contemporary Indian art is the next sensation on the international market. So now’s the time to learn something about where it came from, which the nuanced, storytelling show... Along with detailed information about one artist’s life and times, the show delivers a significant piece of news, or what is still probably news to many people: that modernism wasn’t a purely Western product sent out like so many CARE packages to a hungry and waiting world. It was a phenomenon that unfolded everywhere, in different forms, at different speeds, for different reasons, under different pressures, but always under pressure. As cool and above-it-all as modern may sound, it was a response to emergency. In India the emergency was a bruising colonialism that had become as intolerable to artists as to everyone else. From the official British perspective, India had no living art. ... as an example of a polymath artist and teacher who through consistent and diligent generosity put his talent to the service of the life of his time, he is worthy of prolonged and intensive notice. The Philadelphia show, which will travel to India, immerses us, wonderfully, in both that life and that time. And it reminds us that every Museum of Modern Art in the United States and Europe should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change its name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right to do otherwise." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool at the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven) (-Aug. 31)

"The 80 works on view tell two stories: that of a young painter finding his niche, and that of a fast-growing northern city asserting itself as a cultural and economic hub. ... ...a fascinating subplot. As one of Britain’s major port cities, Liverpool was a capital of the slave trade. Many of Wright’s patrons amassed fortunes by shipping Africans across the Atlantic. The abolitionist movement was beginning to make inroads, however, and Wright made at least one painting that suggests his views on slavery were not necessarily aligned with those of his subjects." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image at the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.) (Sept. 7)

"...an exhaustive survey of film and video art... ...showcases 19 artists who find fictions lurking behind every window, door and screen. ... The young video artist Kerry Tribe hired actors to impersonate her in 'Double,' a short autobiographical piece. The five women, chosen for their superficial resemblance to Ms. Tribe, make improvised statements based on their conversations with her. Their acting abilities (and levels of flakiness) vary widely, but a fuzzy picture of Ms. Tribe gradually emerges." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Peter Saul at the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA) (-Sept. 21)

"The influence of Mr. Saul’s paintings, with their cartoony figures, lurid-lush colors, splatter-film expressionism and contrarian take on topical subjects, pervades recent art. It has contributed mightily to major careers, like those of Carroll Dunham and Elizabeth Murray. And it has paved the way for the neo-Surrealist noodlings of countless student painters spilling out of art schools and straight into the arms of a ravenous market. ... Mr. Saul’s art is not pretty, though it has many eye-catching pleasures. Nor is it polite. Indeed, the artist makes zealous efforts to ensure the opposite. In America today, he says in a catalog interview, 'there’s a tremendous need to not be seen as racist, not seen as sexist. So I want to make sure I am seen as those things.' ...with scant critical encouragement until recent years, has gone his own masterly realized hideous-hilarious way. ... If his work has softened and broadened with time — a few of the later pictures in this otherwise sterling selection feel undercooked or overstated — its essence remains tough and firm. This is an art of combative moral ambiguity that looks as if it’s coming from some laugh-riot lunatic fringe but is, in fact, a sane and realistic depiction of the world. What’s wrong with this picture? each Saul painting asks. And each one answers: Everything." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


National World War II Museum (New Orleans) Louisiana State Museum at the Cabildo (New Orleans) Museum of the American Cocktail (New Orleans)

"Now that many museums are no longer imagined as repositories for cherished objects, they are becoming repositories of cherished identities, chronicling the ways we like to imagine ourselves or portray ourselves to others. They have always been declarations of pride: look what we have made! Look what we have collected! Now they are declarations of our self-images: look at what we have been! Look at what we seek to be! ... Perhaps because New Orleans has had more than its share of near-death experiences — one is still being felt — or because decadence, disease and racial strife have long accompanied its ecstatic festivities and intermingling cultures, many of its museums seem to touch slightly raw nerves. In some cases unsteadiness almost seems to be sought." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


The Summer Pavilion at Serpentine Gallery by Frank Gehry (London) (-Oct. 9)

"...its massive, steel-reinforced Douglas fir columns and beams and its roof of angled, suspended glass planes — looks like an explosion in an architecture factory. ... compared with its predecessors, this pavilion looks almost primitive. Gehry calls it a reaction to the computer-designed buildings that are so prevalent today. Of course this seemingly casual pileup required the engineering expertise of the firm Arup, a constant presence in the pavilion program." -Pilar Vildas/NYTimes

Blockbusters and Fashionistas

Haute couture by Gareth Pugh

Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Sept. 1)

The latest and most improbable step in the mainstreaming of comic books, "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy" at the Met takes a look at the commonalities between costumed characters and haute couture from the runway fashion, and what they say (or don't say) about our bodies and ourselves. The small and shallow exhibit matches wardrobes from TV and the movies with an assortment of recent designer frockery in several ponderous groupings.

"Graphic Body" pairs Christopher Reeve's 1977 Superman suit with a Moschino homage that substitutes an "M" for the famous "S," and Tobey McGuire's Spiderman with a web-themed gothy getup by exhibition-sponsor Georgio Armani. "Patriotic Body" puts Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman alongside a Dior ensemble with a headpiece made of Coke cans. The "Paradoxical Body" has Michelle Pfeiffer's black latex Catwoman suit alongside very similar looking dominatrix-inspired numbers by designers including Versace and Dolce Gambana. "Armored Body" features Christian Bale's Dark Knight and Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man -- suspiciously well-timed for the films' summer release -- together with a sexy take on Fritz Lang's Metropolis by Thierry Muggler, police-inspired uniforms by Armani and a stunning angular black angel of death by Gareth Pugh (see above). "Mutant Body" predictably matches Rebecca Romijn's Mystique from the X-Men, with a feathery mermaid fantasy from Thierry Muggler (see below). "Aerodynamic Body" doesn't have a superhero costume, but it does have -- Olympic tie-in! -- Michael Phelp's Speedo.

The movie costumes come off as dingy, faded and smaller than you remember them. The high-fashion too suffers from lifeless mannequin displays -- why no photos or video? But overall, if we were to imagine some epic face-off between the forces of fashion and the superfriends, we'd definitely give the edge to the frockists. That said, while there are some inspired fashions from the 1990s to the present on display -- especially those by Mr. Muggler -- it's a rather thin historic slice.

Review Roundup

This week a special two-for-the-price-of-one Reviews of the Week for Peter Schjeldahl. In separate write-ups he goes after Damien Hirst as the embodiment of all that's wrong in the contemporary art world. Schjeldahl sees "After Nature" at the New Museum as a sign of a "saturnine new direction in art," and Huma Bhabha's skull piece as a critique of Hirst's diamond-encrusted death's head. Then, while others have been grumpy about the overstuffed Turner show at the Met, Schjeldahl has the balls to flat-out dismiss the famous British painter, writing that the artist's style is "synthetic, leaning on picturesque convention (never more so than when most nearly abstract) while brazening arbitrary audacities." He goes on to call him "the Damien Hirst of his day." Fantastic! Bonus: Karen Rosenberg wonders why no marijuana at the UBS Art Gallery.


Albrecht Dürer: Art in Transition at the Museum of Biblical Art (-Sept. 21)

"... the greatest printmaker — rivaled only by Rembrandt — the Western world has ever seen. ...an enthralling exhibition... ....the hallmarks of a proto-cinematic genius: fantastic stories, beautiful men and women, hideous villains and demons. Sex, violence and pageantry; tragedy, comedy and cosmic vision: Dürer made all this and more visible with a grasp of pictorial space and composition that is as powerfully muscular as it is delicately intimate. ...offers connoisseurs and neophytes a not-to-be-missed opportunity to examine pristine examples of his most famous images. ... Unlike the more public forms of his day, painting and sculpture, which tended to be subject to orthodox hierarchical strictures, prints appealed to private delectation and permitted idiosyncratic, freely experimental and even heretical expressions. It was the perfect medium for the Protestant Reformation. ... The first prolific European self-portraitist, he spoke not to a public, undifferentiated collective consciousness but to the inner, complexly varied experience of the individual. Long before Freud and Jung, he instinctively understood the multiplicity within the human psyche, and he mirrored it in a printed oeuvre of mind-expanding scope and profundity." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


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

"...the art world is becoming a horticultural hotbed... ...roughly 100 works by 45 contemporary artists... ...inspired by Michael Pollan’s 2001 book, 'The Botany of Desire,'... ...adds to our sense of a gradual shift in the artist-plant relationship, from sublime awe in the face of nature to something more reciprocal. ...makes few references to the Dionysian properties of plants (a major theme of Mr. Pollan’s book). Perhaps the corporate setting is to blame, but you won’t find herbs of the five-leafed variety growing in Mr. Coffin’s greenhouse." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait With Horn at the Neue Galerie (-Sept. 1)

"...one of the finest treasures of the Neue Galerie... Painted in brusque, brushy strokes in high-contrast darks and lights, it depicts the artist in a black-and-orange striped dressing gown holding up a silver hunter’s horn in one sausage-fingered hand. He looks sideways with an intent expression as though he had sounded a note and was awaiting an answering response. Or he may be listening for the hounds of war. ... The story behind Beckmann’s self-portrait is told in a brief, illuminating book by the art historian Jill Lloyd recently published by the Neue Galerie. The museum has celebrated the occasion by assembling a small exhibition of portraits by other German artists centered around 'Self-Portrait With Horn' and two other Beckmanns from the 1920s, a self-portrait and a small political allegory. Perusing the reproductions in Ms. Lloyd’s book — which includes numerous other self-portraits and examples of the late allegorical triptychs — you can imagine a great exhibition focusing on Beckmann in exile. The exhibition now at the Neue Galerie is not so exciting. ... Half-baked as it is, however, the show does have the virtue of highlighting what is distinct about Beckmann’s art and suggesting what made him so much better than his contemporaries. ... Since all the portraits in the show are of identifiable men, and all the nudes or partial nudes represent anonymous women, there also is a sexist tinge." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


After Nature at the New Museum (-Sept. 21)

"...an important group show... ...which proposes a saturnine new direction in art... The catalogue is a foldout slipcover around a paperback of 'After Nature,' a book-length poem in three parts by W. G. Sebald. It’s an arresting gesture. The rapturously depressive German writer, who died in 2001, would seem an unlikely hero for contemporary avant-gardists, who have been more easily imagined reading comic books. ... Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized market and the spectacle-bedizened biennials circuit. (In fact, the underappreciated recent Whitney Biennial hinted at the mutation.) It’s a fashion auditioning as a sea change. ... [Huma] Bhabha’s gruesome death’s-head neatly—that is to say, messily—critiques Damien Hirst’s famous diamond-encrusted skull, which sold last year for a reported hundred million dollars. ... Existentialist standards of authenticity may be back in force, however fleetingly. How much can we bear of art that, like Sebald’s writing, glories in bottomless malaise? I expect we’ll find out. ... This has often signalled a backward crouch preceding a forward leap. I think of Picasso’s world-weary blue period, T. S. Eliot’s 'Gerontion' and 'Prufrock,' and the budding Abstract Expressionists’ wallows in Jungian mythology. The syndrome announces the exhaustion of a received cultural situation, whose traditions are slack and whose future is opaque. ... Politically, the new art is benumbed. Desperate to eschew narcissisms of money and fame, along with academically entrenched ideology, the artists operate at psychological depths at which social attitudes can’t coalesce. ... What we want now is a major artist—a Manet, Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, or Beuys—who will manifest durable truths at the core of inevitable hypes and hyperboles. If none such appears, that will be a valuable datum. It will help us adjust to the happenstance that, once and finally, our particular civilization is spent." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"The show pits the helplessly human against the forces of the natural world to decidedly uplifting effect. ... triumphs of the spirit find echoes throughout the show... ...teeter precipitously between the sickening and the marvelous, in poetic or anthropological ways. ...a cabinet of curiosities, with all the grotesque marvels that implies. ... groups works by single artists together in ways that tighten its focus. ... Make no mistake: This is a tough show to visit, but one considerably leavened by its repeated faith in the power of art to transcend ruin and touch something closer to rapture." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"...heralds our fear and bravely imagines the world post-apocalypse. ...a dense and haunting exploration of death..." -Adda Birnir/Village Voice


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

"...no relaxing summer show. Hot and bothersome, it is a barrage of guileful effects, surveying the artist’s lifelong campaign to surprise and impress—when not shocking and awing—British sensibility. ... Turner invested little watercolors of quotidian subjects with tonal sparkle, and bombastic battle and disaster canvases with lyrical dash. But unlike John Constable, his quieter, more profound peer, Turner conveys only irritable ambition. We must never forget to admire him. This tires. Turner’s style is synthetic, leaning on picturesque convention (never more so than when most nearly abstract) while brazening arbitrary audacities. He overlays splooshes of paint with passages of tidy drawing like bathtub decals. ...a congeries of misty, fiery, surfy, sunset stunts—an art less to contemplate than to talk about, calculated to jazz the talkiest of nations. Turner was the Damien Hirst of his day." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker


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

"MOMA's exhibition includes seven of Kirchner's street paintings, in which the artist downplayed architecture and vehicles in favor of the degraded glamour of the demimonde: Flesh tones shift from pink to yellow to gray under the glare of unseen street lamps and electric signs. In numerous drawings and prints, Kirchner's breakneck hand manifests the frenzy of early modernism, his figures abandoned to sinuous, expressionistic lines." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy at the Met (-Sept. 1)

"...powerful new exhibition... The most persistent creative force in the show is the French designer Thierry Mugler, whose work from the 1980s - all sharp shoulders and rigid hourglass waists - reverberates from the decade of feisty feminism in the later work of Alexander McQueen, Dolce & Gabbana and the British designer Gareth Pugh, whom Armani described as the most inventive purveyor of superhero style. ... But the conundrum of 'Superheroes' is that this subject, so quintessentially American that the flag was the costume of Captain America and Wonder Woman in the 1940s, has been used as fashion inspiration almost entirely by foreign designers. ... Perhaps a few more humble pieces, such as the T-shirts with superhero logos, would have given the lofty show a closer link to middle America. ... And seeing the caped crusaders land in the Met offers fashion a chance to display designers at their most fantastical and for the museum to pull in a fresh young crowd." -Suzy Menkes/IHT


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

"...dazzling show... ...pomp and scope... To our eyes these objects owe their unique and often strange beauty to the deep and brilliant colors of the minerals themselves. Even their names have a delicious sonority, among them rose quartz, golden amber, green malachite, blood-red coral, blue lapis lazuli, spotted red jasper, orange carnelian, and a vast range of delicately shaded alabasters, colored marbles, agates and sardonyx. Moreover, while the hues of paintings or wood-inlay cabinetry usually fade over time, the colors of these inorganic hardstones remain fresh and vivid. ...truly a royal pleasure to experience such abundance in the kind of magnificent concentration with which pietre dure masterworks were displayed by their original princely owners." -Barrymore Laurence Scherer/WSJ


Van Gogh's "Cypresses" and "The Starry Night": Visions of Saint-Remy at the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven) (-Sept. 7)

"...it's well worth taking the trouble to see... ...placing them together like this makes qualitative comparisons inevitable. And for me, the revelation of this show is that 'Cypresses' knocks 'The Starry Night' clean out of the ring. ... It absolutely teems with life. It bubbles over with atmospheric energy. You can feel the wind, the heat, the summer juiciness, and the interconnected, overwhelming beauty of all the elements it boldly sews together." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Space Is the Place at the Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY) (-Sept. 7)

"...one of those goofy but enjoyable theme exhibitions that every now and then arrive at regional museums. ...around 30 artworks by a dozen international contemporary artists addressing space exploration. There is an impressive variety of media, including photography, painting, sculpture, video, installation and even sound art. ...will appeal more to adults interested in art rather than to children interested in adventure. It is a concept show that requires patience, for most of the art is indecipherable without reading extended wall labels." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Eloquent Vistas: The Art of 19th-Century American Landscape Photography From the George Eastman House Collection at the Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, NJ) (-Sept. 14)

"Both the paintings of the Hudson River School and those of early modern artists suggest that landscape is the genre, above all others, in which 19th-century American artists excelled. ...sets out to prove that photographers also made outstanding contributions in this area, equaling if not surpassing the painters. ...60 American landscape photographs from the 19th century, drawn from the extraordinary Eastman House collection." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Michal Rovner: Video, Sculpture, Installation at the Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, NY) (-Sept. 28)

"On view are nine of her works from the last five years, including video, sculpture and installation. Some are showing in the United States for the first time. ... What makes her so special? Her work, full of pathos and poetry, is radically different from anything else you are likely to see in a gallery or museum. She is a philosopher as much as an artist, assembling mysterious tableaus that are haunting metaphors for our lives. ...theatrical without being entertaining. In this they hark back to an earlier period — that of Minimal art, for instance — when artists began to think about harnessing and manipulating relationships between objects, viewers and the exhibition space as an integral part of the experience of an artwork. ... Over all this show is intelligent, elegant and restrained, and certainly worth a trip to the museum. It is just small. Obtaining the loans of artworks by artists as renowned as Ms. Rovner cannot be easy, I know. But I, for one, wanted to see more, including some of her large sculptures. Doing proper justice to an artist means showing his or her work in depth." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Jim Henson's Fantastic World at the International Gallery of the Smithsonian's S. Dillon Ripley Center (Washington, D.C.) (-Oct. 5)

"...ranges from early concert and theater poster designs from when Henson was still a University of Maryland undergrad to elaborate props, costumes and characters created for such feature films as 1982's 'The Dark Crystal.' ... Less well known, and, quite frankly, more fascinating to grown-ups than to kids, will be the behind-the-scenes tidbits detailing Henson's creative process: sketches that show the herky-jerky evolution of now-beloved characters, rough storyboards and documentary photos illuminating the hard work that goes into making puppets look alive (and then making all that hard work look easy). But the exhibition's real surprises have nothing to do with Muppets. The nine-minute film 'Time Piece' is one such surprise. Made by Henson in 1965, this Academy Award-nominated live-action short probably will come as a revelation to anyone who associates Henson exclusively with puppetry..." -Michael O'Sullivan


Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles) (-Oct. 26)

"Whoosh! You can practically hear the sound of satin flung over papal shoulders and the rustle and creak of silk against silk brocade... ...has to be one of the outstanding displays of 17th-century European sculpture in the United States in recent decades. As the largest show yet of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s portraits, it couldn’t be otherwise. Just look at the guest list: Scipione Borghese has come from Rome, Costanza Bonarelli from the Bargello in Florence, Cardinal Richelieu from the Louvre and Thomas Baker, he of the Steven Tyler mop, from the Victoria and Albert in London. These people almost never travel, yet here they are in Los Angeles, cleanly installed and plexi-free... ...Italian Baroque, a period style defined by virtuosic naturalism, kinetic emotionalism and high-flying formal glamour. ... He pushed the spiritual potential of art in radical directions but was a propagandist for hire to the Church Triumphant." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Bridget Riley at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (-Sept. 14)

"...an extensive show of her work, the first in France. ... When a U.S. clothing brand used a Riley painting in a design for flared trousers, she sued for breach of copyright -- and lost. ... On a visit to Egypt in 1979, she discovered that local craftsmen used the same colors that their ancestors did in the days of the Pharaohs. On her return to London, she recreated the palette from memory; in her 'Egyptian paintings,' she gave up acrylics for oils, because they offered more saturation possibilities." -Jorg von Uthmann/Bloomberg

Lighten Up

"Sacred Heart (Red/Gold)," 1994–2007

Jeff Koons at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Oct. 26)
Jeff Koons at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) (-Sept. 21)

Jeff Koons is a bit of guilty pleasure. Shiny candy-colored balloons, kitsch, cartoons, porn -- it's the kind of thing that normally would give you a stomach ache, or that you'd hide under your bed.

Happily the artist has a unique talent for imbuing surfaces with depth, and giving lightness weight. As such, the Met's roof garden is an ideal setting for a trio of his large-scale sculptures -- standing on museum's stolid seriousness, but exposed to the air, floating free over the green canopy of Central Park.

Here we see "Balloon Dog (Yellow)" (1994–2000), a horse-size blow-up of the twisty type made by child entertainers. Flawlessly fabricated in highly reflective stainless steel down to its creases, it is a yellow-gold-tinted instant icon and mirror to our desires. "Sacred Heart (Red/Gold)" (1994–2007), an oversized red-foil-wrapped chocolate heart, has Christian associations that contrast with the pooch's pagan feel. "Coloring Book," (1997–2005), a tall flat monolith, takes us back to kindergarten with a barely discernible crayon color scribble depicting Winnie the Pooh's Piglet.

For more Koons, we head to Chicago, whose Museum of Contemporary Art is showing a career survey, with two largish galleries with a non-chronological grouping of sculpture and paintings emphasizing common themes from his break-out works of the 1980s to the present day.

Lightness and Weight

Entering the museum, we are greeted with "'Hanging Heart (Blue/Silver)" (1994-2006) in reflective ice-blue. It hangs dramatically by what appears to be thin ribbed silver ribbon, a talisman of the artist’s heavenly cool love.

His early series of basketballs in fish tanks -- submerged they appear to float like a three-pointer on its way to swish. In another half-full tank is the visual pun of a ball literally floating on water. "Aqualung" and "Lifeboat" (both 1985) are a scuba outfit and boat cast in bronze; what keeps us from drowning are made heavy enough to sink.

The illusion of weightlessness can also be seen with Koons balloon sculpture, first with smallish silver bunny ("Rabbit," 1986), and more recently with the balloon dogs and a series of works involving blow-up floating pool toys. They are detailed and realistic, appearing pliable and lightweight, made of mylar, rubber or plastic, while they are in fact solid and heavy stainless steel. Koons reveals this magic trick with "Dolphin" (2002), which has a pool-toy porpoise supporting a kitchen rack with an extensive array of heavy pots and pans.

Kitsch

Illusion and transmutation are also at work in Koons use of kitsch. He out-Warhols Andy Warhol, tapping into the tackiest of popular imagery. Here we see tacky collectible tchotchkes -- a big-head Bob Hope figurine, a Hummel-esque ensemble with cherubs -- grouped along side what appears to be high art -- a 16th Century Italian woman, a rococo mirror (the latter recently seen at the Cooper-Hewitt). There are the stunning larger-than-life wood sculptures showing an interaction between a cartoon animal character with a human figure: in one a bowtie-wearing grizzly bear stares down a policeman; in another the Pink Panther is held by a busty blonde (innocence triumphs over authority and sex). All of these objects are made to the highest standards by highly trained craftspeople, and many are even signed by their makers, not by Koons. What’s rarified is reproduced, and what’s commonplace is refined. Koons wants his art to be accessible to everyone, no art history degree required. It's irreverent and antiestablishment, but also open and embracing.

Witness the masterpiece "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" (1988), a larger-than-life baroque gold-leafed porcelain sculpture of the King of Pop posing with his identically outfitted pet monkey. It’s quintessentially Koons, a startling fusion of pop culture, kitsch and art history. MJ is the perfect subject for Koons — a tacky and ambiguously sexual Peter Pan.

(Speaking of pop stars, we ran into Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips at the show, who told us how much he wanted to touch the art works. We wonder, did he want to touch Michael Jackson?)

Childhood

Youth and innocence is everywhere in Koons work. In black & white photo light box ("The New Jeff Koons," 1980), we see the artist as a child posing with a set of crayons, an oddly self-confident smile and impish twinkle in his eyes (look at a contemporary photo -- that slick trickster look is still there). His tinted stainless steel "Cracked Egg (Magenta)" (1994-2006) is an symbol of birth and newness. And, a prelapsarian notion of sexual innocence is depicted in the halfway creepy "Naked" (1988) a porcelain sculpture of naked boy showing a naked girl a bright red heart-shaped flower with prominent phallic stamen.

Sex

Sizzling below the surface in much of his work, sex is made explicit in his "Made in Heaven" series, which includes photorealist paintings of the artist having sex with his then-wife, Ilona Staller, the Hungarian-born Italian porn star and politician better known as Cicciolina. The best of these is "Manet" (1991), which has Koons paying homage to the French Impressionist’s famous luncheon by showing cunnilingus en plein air. Perhaps he was also anticipating scandal -- "Dejeuner sur l’herbe" had caused a stir when it was first exhibited.

The series is interlaced with a stain of arch vanity -- such as in the exquisitely lifelike and comically vain white marble "Bourgeois Bust - Jeff and Ilona" (1991), capturing the couple in the midst of a corny softcore romantic embrace, and "Self Portrait" from the same year, which has the artist eyes-closed, basking in a kind of irony-infused religious self-regard.

Sex is also forefront in a series of paintings that collage his blow-up toys with images of eros. The most memorable of these is "Elvis" (2003), which juxtaposes an inflated lobster and a double image of a centerfold model with pneumatic breasts (the title may reference Warhol's famous double image of Presley). While it treads a bit too close to Richard Prince territory, the work announces that sex is everywhere, even lending adjacent works like "Balloon Dog (Orange)" (1994-2000) a fleshiness and erotic charge.

Chicago

In a fairly weak sidebar exhibition, the MCA features work by Chicago artists of the 1970s that Koons has said were an influence. He briefly studied at the Art Institute, and worked as a studio assistant for Ed Paschke. And it’s Paschke whose vivid colors and sexually charged images come closest to the Koons aesthetic; the half dozen or so other artists exhibited, considerably less so.

This isn’t Koons first return to Chicago; in 1988 the MCA hosted his first solo museum show, something they are rightly proud of.

Consumerism

Like Richard Prince, Koons has a very 1980s interest in consumerism and advertising imagery, although the latter's is more cheeky and celebratory than dark and detached. He appropriated Nike posters of NBA stars like Moses Malone as part of the basketballs-in-fishtanks series, as well a commercial images for cigarettes and liquor.

Another series of transparent tanks contains brand-new Hoover vacuum cleaners. While the tactic and presentation owes much to Marcel Duchamp's readymades and prefigures Damien Hirst's shark and sheep, the work is a paean to cleanliness and newness. It also offers a clue to the fastidiousness perfection that pervades all his work.

Like the tschochkes, he is drawn towards objects like the homely Hover, the epitome of mundane, functional consumerism. Elsewhere can be seen a toaster, a ladder, kitchenware, a cyclone fence.

Consumer cultures power to degrade is the subject of "Jim Beam - J.B. Turner Train" (1986), a beautiful recreated promotional train that the artist had filled with alcohol by the whiskey maker and sealed with a paper alcohol tax stamp. The train appears to be silver, but is actually stainless steel -- a material that Koons calls "fake luxury." He also plays with the idea of value in "Diamond (Yellow)," (1994-2005) a giant color-tinted stainless steel gem and setting that looks more like a big cartoon, or the kind of diamond you might get in a gumball machine.

Color

The Jeff Koons experience is giddy and pleasurable, tickling our inner child. One reason are the seductively sumptuous surfaces. Another is the cheeky (and sometimes creepy) superficiality of the subject matter. Then there is the artist's A-1 color sense -- arrestingly bright purples, greens, blues, oranges that just sing.

Review Roundup

This week, members of the NYTimes Dream Team are cranky. Ken Johnson spits out his second recent thumbs-down -- this time of P.S. 1's politically-themed "That Was Then...This Is Now." And Roberta Smith chastises the new crop of the Bronx Museum’s AIM students, writing "I think most of them should ask for their money back. On the evidence here, at least, they have only a meager understanding of what being an artist entails." Ouch! Across the pond, no fewer than seven reviews of the Tracy Emin survey in Edinburgh. Despite the artist's overexposure, most come out in her favor. These include Rachel Campbell-Johnston of the Times of London, who writes our Review of the Week, chosen for this memorable sentence: "I have grown sick of the whining of this now successful woman who sits at the centre of our culture parading her wounded psyche like some contemporary martyr; displaying her vagina as St James displays a cockle shell."


That Was Then ... This Is Now at P.S. 1 (-Sept. 22)

"Simplistic yet muddled, strident yet curiously tepid... ....an ambitious if disappointing effort to extend the activist spirit of the Vietnam War protest days into the Iraq war era. ...a confusing mix of politically motivated artworks from the 1960s to today by more than 60 artists... It was organized by the director of P.S. 1, Alanna Heiss; the center’s senior curatorial adviser, Neville Wakefield; and six other advisers. So many curators! Maybe that is why the show is so unfocused." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


How Soon Is Now? at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (-Aug. 18)

"...almost nothing but symptoms reflecting almost nothing but failings. Yet this show of amateurish and derivative work by 36 emerging artists also says a lot about the competition among art mediums, the latest trickle-down trends in art making and the shortcomings of higher art education. In answer to the show’s catchy title, for many of the artists here, 'now' may never come. ...the 28th version of the annual culmination of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace, or AIM, program. ...in this rather undifferentiated morass of feints at video, photography, sculpture and above all earnestly political, identity-based Conceptual Art, the paintings spring out like little oases of personal thought, concentration and effort. ... Perhaps an overfamiliarity with Conceptual Art and especially the theories it inspired can leave young artists with no sense of how to make an artwork that holds together as an experience. You can sense the lack of connection to either materials or self in their statements, which appear on the wall labels beside the work. They mix overblown, one-size-fits-all artspeak with quite a bit of wishful thinking about their work’s impact, as if they could control the meaning or effect of their work. ... It does gives me pause that 26 of the 36 artists have master’s degrees in fine arts from respected universities or art schools. I think most of them should ask for their money back. On the evidence here, at least, they have only a meager understanding of what being an artist entails." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


How Soon Is Now? at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (-Aug. 18) Eminent Domain at the New York Public Library (-Aug. 29)

"...market-oriented themes are employed by some of this year's crop of 36 AIM artists. ... This group photography show, typically well presented in the main library's soaring exhibition hall, focuses on New York City's ragged edges. ... This is Gotham without glitz or wealth, poignant in its quotidian splendor." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice


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

"...a terrific visual wallop right at the start and then continues to reverberate. ...a set of seven paintings by the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner... Vigorously realized in jagged brushstrokes — lurid pinks, greens and yellows and shades of charcoal black — they depict stylishly dressed streetwalkers and furtive, darkly cloaked men on the nocturnal, vertiginously tilted streets of an infernal city... Kirchner was not a gifted painter, but his paintings have a bracing ugliness and a burning emotional intensity. Looking at his claustrophobic pictures is like seeing through the feverish eyes of a lost and tormented soul. Considered among the most important achievements of Kirchner’s career, the Berlin paintings are exhibited together for the first time here. ... There is an explosive tension in the works between male and female and between forces of disintegration and containment. ... But it is not too much of a stretch to see the Berlin street series as a desperate, last ditch effort to hold together, if only through the magic of metaphor, a world that was about to be blown to smithereens." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes

"Art tends to find itself in a lot of louche, exciting places just before the civilized world rears up and exterminates another two or three million people. After the rest of that generation dies off, we in the present get to view the remains of a moment’s anxiety and pleasure. ... In Street Scene, Kirchner’s swains dance down Friedrichstraße in the background like a line of Bob Fosse chorus boys, but the women with their feathered hats and voodoo masks would terrify Picasso. Kirchner had to paint fast and with an emotional reaction bordering on fear, lest his courtesans level his soul to dust. ... What they are is a snapshot of the great train to hell that never returns and never changes." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet


From Another Shore: Recent Icelandic Art at Scandinavia House (-Aug. 15)

"...a 21-artist survey of contemporary work from the collection of the National Gallery of Iceland. ... Neither show makes a case for Reykjavik as the next Leipzig. More to the point is the friction between global contemporary art and an island nation’s folk traditions, between urban hives and otherworldly landscapes." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


After Nature at the New Museum (-Sept. 21)

"...a little fever dream of a show that brings together works by 35 artists that either have a post-apocalyptic mood or that assume one by association with the other work in the show... more or less Germanic exhibition — Germanic in its Romanticism; Germanic in its post-Romantic apocalyptic nostalgia... ...Maurizio Cattelan, the Harpo Marx of contemporary art..." -Richard Lacayo/Time Mag.'s Looking Around

"Sure, seeing our environment as in crisis is not exactly a controversial position anymore -- like, the roof of the world is melting, after all. But the artists who made the 90 pieces spread over three floors here, most of them European and many never before shown in the United States, are about more than blighted landscapes. They detect a pollution of the soul, particularly the Western soul, in all these things. There's an exact copy of Unabomber Ted Kacynski's wilderness cabin, built by artist Robert Kusmirowski, on the third floor, for pete's sake. ... At the very top of the staggered New Museum building is a sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan, the artist famous for his realistic depiction of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, which consists of a stuffed horse with its head buried high up in the gallery wall, its hooves dangling ominously over your noggin. No longer a symbol of imperial power, this rearing horse is part ostrich, part idiot, and everybody in the art world knows which part of the horse's anatomy is meant to resemble American leadership. So there's an almost tribal feel to this exhibition, as if 'After Nature' represents a whole continent of white people going back to their roots in despair." -Dan Bischoff/Newark Star-Ledger


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

"The show is both nerve-racking and thrilling: As presented here, Turner’s career resembles nothing so much as a massive storm seen from space, gathering speed and ferocity as it rages toward the unwelcoming shores of early Victorian Britain. ... The early years of the 19th century find him alternating between thunderous historical narratives and more quotidian subjects... Light and water increasingly became Turner’s great metaphors, and in his last works, many unfinished, the world is reduced to these two elemental forces. ... After Turner’s death, John Ruskin, his most enthusiastic supporter, would refer to him as 'faithless,' perhaps belatedly recognizing the notion of change without progress implicit in these later works. Some of these paintings—in particular, Peace-Burial at Sea (1842)—appear startlingly contemporary. And if, in their emphasis on uncertainty, contingency and temporality, they reflect views more widely accepted at the beginning of the 21st century than the beginning of the 19th, they still look radical." -Anne Doran/Time Out New York

"...used remorseless observation to move painting beyond fusty allegory and ponderous historical narrative. ... Like his sometime rival John Constable, Turner was forging an inseparable bond between his imagery and the physicality of his materials. Although he made detours into cumbersome history painting (an 1824 scene of the Battle of Trafalgar is stagy and leaden), Turner at his best stripped painting to its essentials. In 1834, he and thousands of other horrified Londoners witnessed the nighttime destruction of the Houses of Parliament, and his swift watercolors of the conflagration remain marvels of near abstraction. ... It's no surprise that this 'uncouth' visionary became the namesake for the coveted prize that young British artists strive for in our own day." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim Museum (-Sept. 28)

"For a self-styled matriarch, Bourgeois makes some of the most approachable art of the twentieth century. ...Bourgeois's sculpture seems soft where it should be firm and firm where it should be soft. Fabric lovers look like diving suits. Pink marble looks like resin. ... Born just months before Jackson Pollock, she falls between generations as between countries, but she spans them, too. Her husband, Robert Goldwater, argued for the relationship between primitivism and modern art. She has experienced Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and everything since at first hand. Increasingly, they knew her as well. ... She has the first solo exhibition covering sixty years that you or I may ever see. ... In fact, one can look at Bourgeois's entire long career either as constant repetition—or constant reinvention. It is not easy to decide, and the conundrum helps explain her psychological weight and range of influence. ... The Guggenheim has the advantage of twenty-five years since her MOMA retrospective. It has the disadvantage of little urgency, plus the biases of later years. The show, which originated at the Tate and the Pompidou Center, gives way too much space to the Cells. It runs away from the spiders as from a plague of locusts. The caged version remains at Dia:Beacon, and one could almost miss a large one out of its cage by the ticket counters. ... The ramp ends at the top of the rotunda, and one can imagine the artist still at work in the chamber behind the closed passage. It leaves her a riddle, which should make her very happy." -John Haber/HaberArts


Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s at the SculptureCenter (-July 28)

"In the 1970s, men were tearing the human landscape apart. They were burying a shed in earth, filling a lake with sand and stone, ripping deep into the land and piling it high, cutting through low houses and river skylights, and depositing the debris in bins on the gallery floor. And what were women doing? They were building, saving, planting, and growing. They were creating tunnels in the earth for sunlight to penetrate and platforms in the sky. They were binding trees and building stairwells for others to climb. They were leaving seeds and time capsules underground, waiting for recovery to unfold of itself. So, at any rate, argues 'Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s.' It asks whether recovery can still begin or has continued all along. ...extending the view of the same period in "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution," closing just up the street at P.S. 1. They could also be countering it, with continuities that the blockbuster leaves out. They could be insisting on feminist histories, like art histories, in the plural." -John Haber/HaberArts


Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting at the Guggenheim (-Sept. 14)

"...a small, engrossing, meditative exhibition... ...intense amounts of information with the dramatic pacing of an adventure story, and it is an adventure: after all, you are watching an object being taken apart, layer by layer, molecule by molecule, in an exhaustive, elusive and ultimately inconclusive quest for something — a living work of art — that may no longer be there." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Home Delivery at MoMA (-Oct. 20)

"...reveals the history of prefabrication as veering uncertainly between utopian aspirations and crushingly anonymous standardization. The modernist dream of housing for the masses—combining aesthetic purity with supreme efficiency, affordability, and hygienic standards—could swerve and become a totalitarian nightmare: Witness the endless rows of Krushchovkas, the almost indistinguishable apartment blocks that covered the Eastern Bloc like a fungus, architectural symptoms of an ill society." -Leslie Camhi/Village Voice


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

"...back before the 18th-century Brits took matters in hand, watercolors were just used to tizzy up drawings, or to tint maps, prints, and drawings of architecture. By the mid-19th century, however, watercolor was deservedly regarded on equal terms with oil painting, and the achievements of British artists in the medium were a source of national pride. ... I recommend arriving in a mood conducive to the contemplation of landscape, because landscape - in an array of muted greens, grays, and blues - is what you get, and lots of it." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Seascapes: Tryon & Sugimoto at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (-Jan. 25) Richard Misrach: On the Beach at the National Gallery of Art (-Sept. 1) (Washington, D.C.)

"To varying degrees, what Tryon, Sugimoto and Misrach are all confronting is the notion of the liminal, the threshold state between one place and another. Despite appearances, their subject matter isn't just the ebb and flow of surf on sand or that place where the ocean meets the sky." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post


Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) (-Oct. 12)

"For those who find consolation in visionary architecture, this city has always been a powerful antidepressant. Its wealth of 20th-century treasures, mostly private homes, reminds us that it is possible to find quiet corners of enlightenment in dystopian times. ...makes a strong case that Lautner’s role in forging that architectural legacy has been curiously underestimated. ...it presents about 120 plans, sections and renderings that counter his longstanding image as an architect who succumbed to Hollywood gaudiness and glamour. What we glean instead is a keen structural knowledge wedded to an environmental sensitivity — a seamless bond of nature, space and humankind. ... An impressive work of scholarship, this is nonetheless an oddly dry show that may bore the average viewer. ... His work is never a mere sculptural exercise; it always starts with an intimate understanding of the site, which prevents him from slipping into self-indulgence. That spirit of empathy, of context, unites all great architecture." -Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYTimes


Wilfredo Lam at the Museum of Latin American Art (Los Angeles) (-Aug. 31)

"...a handsome and long overdue survey... one of those second-tier Modern artists -- there are a lot of them -- whose work rarely fails to impress when it is encountered but isn't encountered nearly often enough. Out of sight, out of mind, his paintings have become perpetual surprises. ... The deliriously hybrid nature of Lam's art makes it of special interest to the way art has developed in the quarter-century since his death. Purity is out, hybridity is in." -Christopher Knight/L.A. Times


The Audubon Insectarium (New Orleans)

"...forces a confrontation with a segment of the animal kingdom before which Homo sapiens might nearly be humbled. This museum, billed as the first major new institution to open in post-Katrina New Orleans, has been created in a section of the United States Custom House by the Audubon Nature Institute, a nonprofit group that also runs a local aquarium, park and zoo (and has no relationship to the National Audubon Society). By rights, though, this shouldn’t be called an Insectarium at all, since it incorporates arthropods (900,000 known species that encompass insects, spiders, centipedes, millipedes and crustaceans) and annelids (segmented worms). ...at once bracing, unsettling and amusing... the double visions of respect and fear, amazement and shock, fascination and disgust, are woven throughout the exhibits; indeed, throughout human encounters with these creature." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Tracey Emin: 20 Years at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh) (-Nov. 9)

"Here are 20 years of self-revelation, self-dramatisation, self-this and self-that. Step into the first room and you're knee-deep in raw emotion: Emin's memories of growing up at the Hotel International in Margate; a tribute to her gran, who's with the angels now; a shrine to her Uncle Colin, who's also with the angels after a horrific car crash - and that's before you get on to her abortion, her mum, her tour of America, her abortion. Is there anything that has happened to Emin that she hasn't turned into a blanket, a neon, a drawing, a painting or a video? By the end of this show, I felt as if someone had been shouting at me down the phone for a couple of hours - a kind of emotional earache. ...in many ways Emin's achievement is the same as Caravaggio's: she rubs our noses in reality, in a way that subverts all our illusions, fantasies, snobberies and repressions, those barriers we put up between us and death. ... I've rarely seen an exhibition that so constantly changed my mind about an artist. ... Emin presents herself as an emotional artist, but her real strength is intellectual: she confuses art and life in a way that is profound, philosophical and has a core of greatness." -Jonathan Jones/Guardian

"Until I spent time with Tracey Emin, I had never thought of art as an instant route to depression. ...not so much an exhibition, more a cry for help. By the time we have suffered the artist's experiences of rape, adolescent sex, abortion (several), drunkenness, 'emotional suicide' and a seemingly never-ending list of failed relationships with exploiting men, we are left fairly close to death ourselves. ... Being with Emin and her art is like walking unexpectedly into the bedroom of a teenage daughter who is going through a bad patch. The room is a mess, the things she has scrawled on the walls don't bear looking at, and you can only hope that she will grow out of it. That many of her cries of rage and despair are appliquéd on to quilts, or stitched with some skill on to tapestries, does not alter the fact that they are ultimately banal, unrelieved by irony, unleavened by poetry or anything that reaches out beyond the confines of her own, tortured world." -Magnus Linklater /Times of London

"I would really love to hate Tracey Emin. Haven’t we heard too much about the abuse and abortions, the bullying boyfriends and self-abasing depressions? Haven’t we picked our way too often through the detritus of her despair? I have grown sick of the whining of this now successful woman who sits at the centre of our culture parading her wounded psyche like some contemporary martyr; displaying her vagina as St James displays a cockle shell. ... Tracey Emin: 20 Years feels about as fresh as a Friends repeat. And yet this show grabbed my attention and kept me lingering. ... Mad Tracey from Margate has become a caricature. But you can’t help but be struck by her courage. ... She mixes all the ingredients — the cult of personality, the unabashed self- promotion, the blatant commerce — to make something that shows us with a mixture of repulsive brashness and unbearable poignancy how sad and superficial and self-serving it all is." -Rachel Campbell-Johnston/Times of London

"Walking around the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, two things immediately strike you about her art. First, Emin is a writer as much as she is a visual artist: words feature prominently in almost every piece. Her best-known works - her appliqué blankets - are graphic banners blaring thoughts and slogans, like placards for some eccentric feminist demonstration. Second, her art is disarmingly direct: she has no need for pundits to explain her work. ... In this respect, she is democratic, just like Big Brother (her rise to celebrity has often been linked to our preoccupation with reality TV). ... If Emin has a presiding style, it is tentative and nervous. ... But Emin's faltering gestures are central to her art. The form of her work reflects the content of her life's project, examining the neuroses of a fractured and highly conflicted self. Anxiety and insecurity are things we can all relate to. Consequently many of her pieces, such as her suite of monoprints about abortion, have a heart-piercing power. ... Emin does have two big weaknesses: one for melodrama (when her unmade bed was originally shown in Tokyo and New York, she hung a noose nearby); the other for mawkishness (her ramshackle tree house on stilts, on show in Edinburgh, contains a sentimental video of her father offering a flower to the camera). Overall, I'm not a big fan of her splurging, self-revelatory art, mainly because visually I find it insufficiently stimulating. But I can't stop myself from warming to her as a person. And this makes me fear for the longevity of her work. What will happen when she is no longer around? Emin is her art to such an extent that without her backstory to hand, the half-life of the objects that she preserves and makes might quickly decay. This is the fragility of her celebrity: she is her most successful work of art." -Alastair Sooke/Daily Telegraph

"Is Tracey Emin a religious artist? Don't laugh. There is a certain amount of evidence for this admittedly improbable thesis in her new exhibition... The galleries are full of detritus from her ordeals. Some of these items -- for example, 'My Abortion,' containing among other things a plastic hospital wrist-band and a blood-soaked tissue -- have the same quality as saintly relics. ... And the Bed of St. Tracey? Is it a work of art or a pile of carefully conserved dirty linen, exhibited in public? As with other relics, how you view it depends on whether you have faith." -Martin Gayford/Bloomberg

"...it's not hard to find something to relate to in the highly personal and constantly intriguing inspirations that feed her art. ...the essence of Emin's personality – the intelligent, articulate and vital versus the bolshie, moody and self-centred – and it is what makes her and her work, so imaginatively presented in this important retrospective, worth our time and attention." -Lynne Walker/The Independent

"From beginning to end this exhibition confirms Tracey Emin as a passionate and compulsive exhibitionist, one of the great publicists of a self trapped in - and sometimes appearing to revel in - a raw, naked and intensely personal kind of hell." -Robin Blake/Financial Times


Correggio and the Antique at the Borghese Gallery (Rome) (-Sept. 14)

"...a gathering of 25 paintings and more than 30 drawings... Correggio’s love of feminine beauty and the sensuality often present even in his sacred paintings can be seen in his later mythological canvases. ... Many art historians have long recognized that Correggio both anticipated (by nearly a century) and inspired the Baroque. Nearly 20 years ago the historian Francis Haskell argued that Correggio changed the entire course of the history of art. This show highlights the depth and breadth of his long-term influence." -Roderick Conway Morris/NYTimes