Recently Published Reviews

Philippe Parreno’s exhibition H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS at the Park Avenue Armory offered New Yorkers a comprehensive view of a practice that has, since the 1980s, used cinematic and scenographic devices to merge art and reality. Building on his recent retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the installation construed the cavernous Armory space as a “street” lined with twenty-six of Parreno’s characteristic lightbulb marquees, and culminated in a set of bleachers that rotated to face three suspended screens. Onto these were projected four films made since 2000: Anywhere Out of the World (2000); June 8, 1968 (2009)… Full Review

Rulers of the Late Assyrian Empire (also known as the Neo-Assyrian Empire, ca. 900–612 BCE) constructed monumental royal palaces as part of large state-sponsored building programs at Assur, Kalḫu (Nimrud), Dur-Sharruken (Khorsabad), and Nineveh, the royal centers of the Assyrian heartland in present-day northern Iraq. These structures served as the principal residences of the royal family, as well as the administrative and ceremonial centers of state. Previous studies of this building type have focused largely on the role of their decoration in Assyrian visual culture, exploring questions of narrative, iconography, identity, and royal propaganda with respect to the carved stone… Full Review

The exhibition Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) is the result of collaboration among the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the KHM in Vienna. The show contained nearly one hundred paintings and artifacts that illustrated the development of courtly patronage and representation over the course of more than half a millennium. Curated by Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, the exhibition took a broad multidisciplinary approach that focuses on the history of the imperial family and the range of visual and figural media used… Full Review

International Pop recounts the emergence of Pop art from the 1950s through the early 1970s and takes a global approach to a phenomenon, which in its various iterations, responded critically and imaginatively to radical cultural and political currents. By including art across media and produced by artists associated with movements that originated in Europe, Asia, and North and South America, the show aims to broaden the scope of what previous exhibitions and prevailing scholarship have conceived of as “Pop.” These comparisons and confrontations reveal the myriad ways in which international artists deployed strategies and aesthetic modalities that alternately coincided with… Full Review

ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, curated by Valerie Hillings, provides the first opportunity in over fifty years for an American audience to take in the diverse array of experimental artistic practices developed across the international ZERO network. While Zero may initially bring to mind the German triumvirate of Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker, Hillings situates their experiments in an expansive community of peers and makes visible their sources of inspiration. Exhibition history provides the logic both for assembling this particular grouping of artists and for several of Hillings’s installation strategies, which seek to recreate the original experience… Full Review

Mary Ann Eaverly’s Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach addresses the skin color differentiation of men and women in ancient Egyptian and Greek art. Eaverly criticizes the marginalization of this topic in current scholarly discussion and contends that, in instances where the topic has been explored, interpretations are generally outdated. According to Eaverly, the consensus that male/female skin color differentiation occurs because it realistically indicates sun exposure—men are habitually outside in the sun, whereas women remain indoors—is an inadequate conclusion that continues to be recycled in scholarship today. In the book, she… Full Review

La peinture d’histoire occupe une place singulière dans l’histoire de l’art hollandais du XVIIe siècle. Cette peinture universelle qui, contrairement aux genres, s’adressent aux talents particuliers, suppose la maîtrise de toutes les parties de la peinture, est considérée théoriquement comme «le degré le plus haut et le plus important de l’art de peinture» (Samuel van Hoogstraten). De la peinture, elle est considérée en effet comme la partie la plus difficile, qui exige d’idéaliser la nature visible d’après l’antique, les grands maîtres et les grandes fables poétiques et historiques et de représenter la figure humaine, ses mouvements comme ses passions. … Full Review

Textbooks of nineteenth-century European art rarely mention the 1871 Paris Commune since it produced few memorable artworks, save for André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri’s photographs of dead bodies in coffins. The Commune is typically described as a workers’ insurrection that emerged after the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War left the city in ruins and absent of political authority as a result of the conservative government helmed by Adolphe Thiers having moved its headquarters to Versailles, along with most of the city’s wealthy population. Those left behind in the predominantly working-class neighborhoods established their own government on March 18, 1871. Disdéri’s images… Full Review

Containing nearly 160 artworks, the exhibition Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa explores what it means to be “Senufo,” a term describing some of the peoples, languages, and cultures in northern Côte d’Ivoire, southern Mali, and Burkina Faso. It also questions the canonical assumptions applied by many academics and culture brokers to the definition and underlying parameters of Senufo art, culture, and identity. In challenging the long-disputed but tenaciously enduring belief in the “one tribe, one style” model of conceptualizing traditional African art, this exhibition and catalogue embody a more expansive view of Senufo culture that can stand as… Full Review

The Imperial Augsburg: Renaissance Prints and Drawings, 1475–1540 catalogue accompanied the first exhibition staged outside Germany focusing entirely on Renaissance art in Augsburg. It is a handsome, small-format hardcover, beautifully designed and illustrated with superb color reproductions. It contains three essays and a checklist of the 102 objects exhibited—of which, regrettably, fewer than half are illustrated. The vast majority of these are prints, complemented by a few drawings and medals, slightly compromising the title of the publication which seems to imply a more balanced selection. The core of the exhibits is drawn from the rich holdings at the National Gallery… Full Review

Cathédrales 1789–1914: Un mythe moderne provides a rich overview of the post-Revolutionary European fascination for depicting Gothic architecture in art. Reproducing some 180 works by 60 artists working in different media—including painting, sculpture, photography, furniture, jewelry, and wood carving—this beautifully illustrated catalogue is the fruit of an exhibition presented first at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and then at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Fondation Corboud in Cologne. Like many commemorative exhibitions from 2014, this one, too, references the Great War, yet it focuses much more on shared values (mutual fascination for cathedrals) than on the cultural antagonism inherent in the… Full Review

The exhibition Whistler’s Mother: Grey, Black, and White is as spare and elegant as the painting it celebrates. It presents James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871), on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, isolated on a deep grey wall. Quotes from the eminently quotable Whistler and his critics punctuate adjacent walls, as does a copy of the artist’s etching Black Lion Wharf (1859), identified as the framed print in the portrait’s background. The simple installation hews to the painting’s logic, for as Whistler wrote in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London… Full Review

The subtitle for the twelfth edition of the Sharjah Biennial—“the past, the present, the possible”—is a term that curator Eungie Joo took from an essay by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who wrote about the concept of the right to the city, calling city dwellers to action in collectively shaping their urban environments. Within the context of Joo’s biennial, the title was deployed to address the role of contemporary art—how art is a vehicle to freely express the intangible through tangible form. Enter Steel Rings (2013) by Rayyane Tabet. On the ground floor of the Sharjah Art Museum, I encountered… Full Review

On first glance, Robin Kelsey’s Photography and the Art of Chance appears to be a playful book. Its cover features three orange balls against a bright blue sky, a detail from Conceptual artist John Baldessari’s 1973 photographic series Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts). However, in both its physical heft and intellectual ambitions, this is not a light or lighthearted book. Instead, this study of photography from its beginnings in the 1830s to its acceptance by the U.S. art world in the 1970s combines a history of the medium with… Full Review

Numerous books have been written about William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. While he is revered for his contributions as a sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist, Du Bois was also a poet, playwright, and novelist, and believed very deeply in the social and political potency of art. Art historians have noted the great influence this pioneering figure had on the careers of early twentieth-century artists. He encouraged the sculptors Meta Warrick Fuller and Edmonia Lewis, as well as the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, to create art that emphasized black subject matter. In his essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” Du Bois formulated… Full Review