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
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