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