The edition's Starred Review -- we can't really call it "Review of the Week" if we're not doing this roundups as often anymore -- is shared by Karen Rosenberg for her take on Rachael Whiteread's installation at the MFA -- "like visiting the home of a friend with immaculate Modernist taste and stumbling on a hidden room filled with knickknacks," and Daniel Kunitz's harsh-but-accurate review of the Elizabeth Peyton show -- "Peyton is more a chronicler of lifestyle than of life."
Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone at the New Museum (-Jan. 26)
"Over the last four decades Mary Heilmann, 68, has been painting with an infectious, unabashedly hedonistic joie de vivre. Working with big brushes and generous quantities of paint, she continues to produce wildly colorful abstractions that riff with irreverent verve on basic elements of Modernist painting: the grid, the monochromatic rectangle, stripes, organic forms, linear webs, spots, checks and drips. There’s a charming sloppiness about Ms. Heilmann’s paintings, which are on display in an exhilarating retrospective... Color is the most exciting aspect of her painting. Her palette extends to tarry black, but mainly it goes to bright colors from the 1960s and ’70s: fruity stains; carrot and avocado hues; swimming pool blues; psychedelic Day-Glos; and minty whites. ...the exhibition has a wonderfully airy, optically elating effect. ... She may be a natural, but she is also a female dandy whose seemingly ingenuous way of painting masks an extremely sophisticated sense of style. Ms. Heilmann is a Postmodernist scavenger, but unlike Sherrie Levine and Peter Halley, whose parodic abstractions deconstruct Modernist myths, she takes 20th-century art history as her personal toy box. A kind of painterly Pop artist, she gives vibrant new life to standard forms of 20th-century visual culture. Imagine the Ramones covering Cole Porter." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes
Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Feb. 15)
"Few exhibitions have focused so intently on one artist’s child within. It’s a Peter Pan syndrome show. It’s also a large show, with a chunky, charming catalog. Yet it feels intimate and light, not to say lightweight. Gallery by gallery, it’s as suspenseful and insubstantial as a magic act: what will the artist pull from his sleeve next?The story it tells is like a Kids R Us version of early 20th-century Modernism..." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
"The Whitney’s new show devoted to Alexander Calder’s Paris years in the 1920s reveals the young sculptor facilely mimicking all the art around him and producing an array of works which are not exactly art, more like toys, presents and party favors. ... In the 1980s, there was a homeless Rastaman in Tompkins Square Park who sold stuff like this for ten dollars, deft animals spun from wire coat hangers. Right now, Broadway Windows Gallery on 11th Street has a clever exhibition by Steve Rodgers of wire coat hanger abstractions. Everybody does it! ... you would have to be pretty low down and mean not to take minimal delight in Calder’s toys. Let me suggest that the Whitney allow visiting children to play with them on the museum’s floor. After all, Calder’s early amusements can’t be worth more than a few dollars apiece. For the adults, this infantile show has but one true attraction: a stunning film of chanteuse Josephine Baker slinking around a boxing ring in a satin evening gown..." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet
New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)
"Along with his companion and later lifelong friend, the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, he belonged to perhaps the last generation for whom it was still possible to live comfortably as artists-not-particularly-concerned-with-their-careers in Manhattan. The city has lost something with their passing. Just how much may be glimpsed in this show of a unique, handmade album that the two men put together in 1939, consisting of Burckhardt's photographs of New York accompanied by sonnets that Denby wrote in response to them. ...the sublime, three-part 'scrapbook' whose title (hand-lettered) betrays his signature combination of diffidence and drollery. (The Metropolitan owns the sole copy, which is temporarily unbound for display here; the exhibition catalog is a newly printed facsimile.)" -Leslie Camhi/Village Voice
The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 1)
"...the cavalcade of world cultures that rolls through the museum’s second-floor special-exhibition galleries is very much Mr. de Montebello’s creation. Everything in them was acquired under his aegis. Curators may have proposed specific items, and donors offered others, but it was Mr. de Montebello who ultimately signed off on the acquisitions, giving each his famously resonant, bass-baritone 'O.K.' And there were many O.K.’s: some 84,000 in total. The 300 objects in the show represent a tiny fraction, and a madly eclectic one. Chinese scrolls, Greek vessels, Oceanic effigies and an 18th-century American pickle holder share the spotlight, with no object privileged as better — grander, rarer, prettier — than any other. This is a wonder-cabinet situation, an exercise in proprietorial pride, an unabashed, if surprisingly low-key, display of fabulousness." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
Yael Bartana at P.S.1 (-Jan. 19)
"...the five films that curator Klaus Biesenbach has chosen for the show probe the complex issues of Zionism, anti-Semitism and the wars that have shaped Israel’s national story, they are not political statements per se. Instead, they are open-ended, poetic explorations of personal identity and shared history, patriotism and dissent, idealism and reality." -Joshua Mack/TONY
Yaddo: Making American Culture at the New York Public Library (-Feb. 15)
"Many of the guests stay in the Trasks’ 55-room mansion, which is itself a kind of fantasy, an imitation Austrian castle. They may not have sipped the waters of Hippocrene, but they have drunk just about everything else, despite a rule that used to require them to tipple only in their rooms. And countless torches of the romantic sort have been kindled and extinguished there. John Cheever used to boast that he had enjoyed sex on every flat surface in the mansion, not to mention the garden and the fields. ... A computer display, if the bugs are ever worked out, will enable the viewer to search through the many other friendships and liaisons that began at Yaddo, but the database leaves out the innumerable one-night or one-week stands. ... If 'Yaddo: Making American Culture' has a fault, it’s that it neglects the kind of silliness and high jinks that have taken place there: guests prancing naked through the hallways or sliding on trays down the main staircase. The closest the exhibition gets to nudity in a display is a series of photographs showing the painter Philip Guston for some reason decorating the bare torso of the writer William Gass with a clock in back and a window shade in front." -Charles McGrath/NYTimes
Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909 at the Neue Galerie (-Jan. 26)
"...replete with the terrors of the freshly analyzed psyche. Monsters, demons and mythical beasts roam free; humans abandon themselves to bestial impulses. Done in black-and-white pen, ink and spray on heavy paper used for cartography, Kubin’s drawings map the shadowy corners of the unconscious. ... Playing to the art’s dark themes, the Neue Galerie’s third floor has been made over in the sensationally macabre style of a Tim Burton movie. The walls are painted black and brown; red crushed-velvet curtains hang in the doorways; and Kubin’s death mask is displayed in a coffinlike glass case. These ghoulish touches are gratuitous and a bit puzzling. They seem designed to make the exhibition more appealing to the young, but parents may have reservations about the often explicit sex-and-death imagery." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
Grant and Lee in War and Peace at the New-York Historical Society (-March 29)
"...these two generals, implacable opponents on the battlefield, have been linked by posterity in push-me-pull-you fashion, so that the reputation of one can’t go up unless the other’s sinks. For most of the last 140 years Lee, or a romanticized version of him, has been on top. This Lee is the tragic and valorous embodiment of the Lost Cause, a mythic South that fought not so much to defend slavery as to protect states’ rights and a noble, superior way of life, while Grant becomes a drunken butcher, a slaughterer of his own men and a failed, scandal-plagued president... Only in the last few years have historians tried to address the balance a little..." -Charles McGrath/NYTimes
Woman of Letters at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (-March 22)
"The subject is the novelist Irène Némirovsky, born in Kiev in 1903, whose affluent family fled the Bolsheviks and eventually settled in France. By the time she was in her mid-20s, Némirovsky had become a critically acclaimed French writer. But in 1942 she was arrested by gendarmes for being a Jew; taken from her husband, Michel Epstein, and children; and sent to Auschwitz, where she died. ... 'Suite Française.' It was published in 2004, hailed as a masterpiece even in its unfinished form, and has since been translated into 38 languages and has sold 2.5 million copies." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes
Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future at the American Museum of Natural History (-Aug. 16)
"There is something almost biblical about these worst-case scenarios, apocalyptically suggested even in the subtitle: 'The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future.' And if the plagues promised with global warming don’t include an onslaught of frogs, there is more than enough to worry about: the exhibition predicts proliferation of malaria and desperate foraging of wildlife. ... There are real issues to be considered here — questions about probabilities, alternative technologies, industrial evolution, relationships between developed and undeveloped nations — but they are never really explored. The main impression, instead, is of an almost religious urgency. ... And perhaps the religious overtones are no accident. Recently the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in The New York Review of Books that environmentalism has become a 'worldwide secular religion' in which the 'path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.'" -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes
Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze at the Frick Collection (-Jan. 18)
"Cast in dark bronze and resembling Roman antiquities, Riccio’s small-scale statuettes, reliefs and oil lamps are not immediately impressive. But their modesty is deceptive. Let your eyes adjust to the formal subtlety and expressive urgency of Riccio’s art and you will fall in love. Sculpture does not get much better than this. ... The beauty of Riccio’s sculptures — especially those he made for the private delectation of scholarly collectors — is their nearly supernatural physical and psychological vitality." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes
Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum (-Jan. 11)
"...a style that's as simple, live, and light as a fashion sketch. She uses large, fluid brushstrokes in exuberant passages of vivid color that could stand alone as gorgeous abstract motifs, if they weren't serving as, say, a purple shirt or curling locks of hair. Her drawing, though seductively skillful, is also highly stylized, attuned more to form and gesture than to individual characteristics. ... Peyton's idealizing style invests her subjects with a sort of clubhouse glamour, a glamour reinforced by the mix within her imaginary coterie: historical personages, pop icons, art-world friends, and friends, like Marc Jacobs, who've become pop icons. ... Peyton captures her subjects not at their most revealing but at their most alluring, and because of this, she tends to focus on subjects, famous or not, who are self-consciously theatrical... For all their appeal, these paintings offer little in the way of emotion or psychological insight. ...Peyton is more a chronicler of lifestyle than of life. The danger is that we swallow the pictures too easily, like a diet short on roughage. Or like photos in a celebrity rag: Peyton, despite her considerable talent, often comes off as a paparazza with a paintbrush." -Daniel Kunitz/Villlage Voice
"Elizabeth Peyton's deceptively modest photo-based portraits don't just flatter the friends, lovers and public figures who are her subjects. They disarm her viewers as well. ...nuance and color. Especially color. ... Part of the easy appeal of her work is that it's pretty and looks the way most people think art is supposed to look: ideal. ... Again and again, Peyton homes in on what is vulnerable or even delicate in the figures she illuminates, almost all of whom are young men... The show's enlightening catalog, a hard-cover portfolio containing both the photos Peyton has clipped from magazines or snapped herself as well as her paintings, reveals the work involved in her creative process. It's an essential complement to this exhibition. Ultimately, it makes Peyton seem an admirer more of images than actual people. Though personalities emerge from her portraits, they aren't as distinct as their appearance in her paintings." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg
Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at the Museum of Modern Art (-Jan. 5)
"I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years. My rants mount when I see work from the last two years of his life, when he was in an amazing state of hellish grace. ... The Night Café and The Starry Night still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself. ... In the first of its four sections, 'Early Landscapes,' we see flat-footed work by the self-taught late bloomer, revealing that Van Gogh, like Pollock, was one of the least naturally talented artists ever, that he virtually willed himself to greatness. ... These are works of outrageous vulnerability, and in this last part of the show, we see Van Gogh, having checked himself into an asylum, bravely suffering the disintegration of his soul. He didn’t survive this disintegration, but his best work takes us to an almost bottomless level of consciousness." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.
Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) (-Dec. 7)
"...the show’s powerful premise, which is to encourage viewers to think about the ways in which artists and photographers use and abuse documentary principles. Nina Felshin, the gallery’s curator, has done a terrific job assembling interesting and provocative work in this vein, the best of which invite viewers to consider issues of agency, context and interpretation in documentary-based art." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes
The Greatest of All Time: Muhammad Ali at the Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University Museum (Hempstead, NY) (-Dec. 2)
"...more social history than art — a visual commentary on the life and times of the boxing champion Muhammad Ali told through news and documentary photographs. Organized by Hava Gurevich, and touring nationally, it assembles more than 60 rare and vintage photographs of Mr. Ali ranging from the early 1950s to now." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes
Huma Bhabha: 2008 Emerging Artist Award Exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT) (-Feb. 8)
"...her art practice consists of scouring the streets in search of detritus for her elegant but enigmatic sculptures. She is the artistic equivalent of a magpie. Organized by Merrill Falkenberg, this exhibition is much smaller than I expected and would have liked. Still, it contains a terrific new sculpture, 'Bumps in the Road' (2008), along with half a dozen of Ms. Bhabha’s recent works on paper, suggesting the artist may be extending her practice into drawing — a positive new development... No doubt some viewers will find this work ugly. I know I do. But it is also marvelously inventive, the artist using her humble, often discarded materials to create a work that references sculptural traditions from modernism to those of ancient Egypt and Greece. ... Not everyone will like this exhibition, I suspect. It is dark and strange. But it is also urgent and even universal. Pervading the artist’s work is a wariness and sense of regret at the persistent human impulse to destroy." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes
Rachel Whiteread at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) (-Jan. 25)
"Ms. Whiteread’s latest project is not a single dwelling but an entire village: an installation of some 200 vintage dollhouses lighted from within and arranged on stepped pedestals in a darkened room. 'Place (Village),' the centerpiece of a mini-survey devoted to the artist at the Museum of Fine Arts here, may strike the artist’s admirers as a bizarre and kitschy departure. ... Still, the exhibition, which includes drawings and a few smaller sculptures, reveals the more emotive side of an artist who can come off as somber and humorless. ...like visiting the home of a friend with immaculate Modernist taste and stumbling on a hidden room filled with knickknacks." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
Tara Donovan at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) (-Jan. 4)
"...her sculptures are filled with surprises as she finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, turning masses of quotidian materials like styrofoam cups into gee-whiz sculptures resembling bubbles, rocks, seas, and other forces of nature. They seem like something dreamed up by a mad-scientist Martha Stewart tinkering in her cellar late at night. ... Like the ICA’s Anish Kapoor survey this summer, it’s one of the best shows seen around here this year. Perhaps the ICA has found its footing and is on a roll after a mediocre first year in its new building. ... Of course, Donovan — like Kapoor — is one of Minimalism’s offspring. Three (overlapping) styles of sculpture dominate the art world these days: accumulations of found junk, 'crafty' art (traditional crafts like knitting or embroidery turned to fine-art ends), and kinder, gentler minimalism. ... Classic Minimalism favored the materials of factories (bricks, sheets of steel, fluorescent lights) presented it-is-what-it-is fashion. It tended to be severe, hard-edged, macho, buttoned-up stuff predicated on the notion that if you concentrate on it hard enough and are worthy, you might discover transcendence. Donovan deploys mass-produced materials, but hers come from home and office — tape, toothpicks, disposable cups. Via massing (a few dozen cups is just a few dozen cups, but a million cups is something else) and optical illusion, she magics her ordinary stuff into accessible spectacles and, when she’s really on, something sublime." -Greg Cook/Boston Phoenix
"Tara Donovan's hypnotic work subdues thought the same way that viral infections subdue the body. Struggling against the initial effect is pointless. Most of these works are so straightforwardly beautiful, so right, that you have no choice but to submit. ... it's nice to encounter almost any proposition about beauty these days - even one as potentially ironic as Donovan's. Until a few years ago, beauty's repression in contemporary art was almost absolute. ... It is not only beautiful, it is relaxed about being so, leaving her scope to admit all kinds of subtleties and ironies into her fantastically simple, if labor-intensive, forms." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
"Though beautifully crafted, Donovan’s exhibit uses millions of wasteful products to create expansive images of the natural world, a concept that feels contradictory in its overall message. ... Donovan’s apparent lack of concern for the environment becomes more and more apparent from one room to the next. ... To the left of the entrance, paper plates glued to each other in round shapes are jammed together to resemble a sea sponge. Yet again, the exhibit seems to be comparing mounds of waste to everyday environmental images, which comes across as both strange and inappropriate." -Kate Andrews/Berkeley Beacon
"A person cannot grasp the greatness of the exhibit without seeing it in person, as many of the sculptures seem to take on a livelihood of their own..." -Elizabeth Mullen/Suffolk Journal
"Puzzling over sculptural installations made by Tara Donovan from pins, drinking straws and buttons is like looking for the image of the Virgin Mary that's been seen on the window of a Springfield hospital. ... Her works are like Rorschach's ink blots that tease viewers into sifting through their unconscious to see what images rise to the surface. They can easily suggest many things at once." -Chris Bergeron/Daily News Tribune
Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice at the List Visual Arts Center (Boston) (-Jan. 4)
"An unnerving, fitfully brilliant show by Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed at MIT's List Visual Arts Center includes video footage of a cat eating a dead rat on a Paris sidewalk. ... His work is raw and direct - sometimes offensively so (he is an artist with a strong urge to rub our noses in things) - but he can also be sly and funny. ...Abdessemed was stunned by how little the French knew, or wanted to know, about political repression in Algeria, where thousands of artists, journalists, authors, and other intellectuals had recently been killed by the government and Islamic militants." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe
Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) (-March 22)
"...The galleries unfold according to the floor plan of a typical villa, starting with a 'cave canem'(“beware of the dog”) sign at the entrance and continuing through an atrium, gardens and dining room. The installation — which includes decorative columns, wall borders, living plants and reproductions of mosaics — works hard to maintain the illusion of classical architecture... In the next few galleries, paintings and sculptures echoing Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel, 'The Last Days of Pompeii,' show Romans panicking and collapsing, as Vesuvius spews ash and flame. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the still active volcano was a popular stop on the Grand Tour and a fixture in paintings by British and French artists... Also on display are ephemera from the tourist economy that developed around Pompeii; these include photographs of casts made by pouring plaster into the cavities left by decayed bodies. It is easy to see how these nauseating artifacts might have appealed to death-obsessed Victorians." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes
Byzantium: 330-1453 at the Royal Academy of Arts (London) (-March 22)
"Can we discover its glories through a series of historical artifacts when what we really hoped for was the Hagia Sophia, the epitome of Byzantine architecture in Istanbul? The visitor must bring as much to this new Royal Academy exhibition as the curators have done. And they have brought a lot, gathering together almost 350 objects, many of which are only very rarely loaned from the museum collections and monastic treasuries to which they belong. ... Sometimes you can almost hear the music of a society whose long banquets were enlivened by dances performed to organs operated by water power, whose church services were accompanied by choirs of castrati, by unearthly chanting and the sounds of bells. You can almost smell the headily exotic scents that rise smoking from braziers or uncoil from the lips of a fish-shaped perfume flask."
Picasso and the Masters at the Grand Palais (-Feb. 2)
"No show in Europe at the moment bids to be more spectacular, or ends up being more exasperating, than 'Picasso and the Masters,' sprawling here through the Grand Palais. If there’s good news to the financial meltdown, it’s that maybe bloated blockbusters like this one should become harder to organize. ... Let it first be said that Picasso, having taken on history as if fated to do so from childhood, embraced such extravagant comparisons — which isn’t to say he survives the competition altogether intact. ... The canon, in other words, remained his starting point but increasingly became his crutch. His achievements were Promethean and unparalleled in the last century, but having said that, as the show proves almost despite itself, Picasso ended up often mired in vain, backward-looking riffs on grander achievements." -Michael Kimmelman/NYTimes
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