Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The exhibition (and accompanying catalogue) Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 sets out to convince viewers that it was a “singularly important year” in the artist’s career (9). In contrast, at a panel discussion on March 27, 2010, at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, curator Catherine Morris referred to 1950 as a “minor moment” in Hans Hofmann’s life. So which is it? After several visits and a thorough reading of the catalogue, it’s hard to say....

During the Tibetan Shrine exhibition at the Sackler gallery in Washington, DC, at the foot of the staircase leading into the museum’s subterranean atrium, a red gateway drew visitors toward a small opening on the opposite, neutral wall. Introductory wall text explained that what lay inside approximated a shrine that an elite family in Tibet might have had in their home. Comprised of objects collected over several decades by Alice Kandell, the single-room shrine installation...

This exhibition and catalogue reassemble the surviving fragments of one of Paolo Veronese’s largest altarpieces, a work completed around 1565 for the cousins Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli to adorn the family’s chapel in San Francesco at Lendinara, a town west of Rovigo in the Po valley. The church no longer survives, and Veronese’s altarpiece had disappeared by 1795. The three largest fragments have been known to relate for more than a century, but only recently...

In the first gallery of the Montclair Art Museum’s excellent and illuminating exhibition, Cézanne and American Modernism, two arresting views of Mont Sainte-Victoire from 1927 by the American artist Marsden Hartley flanked a painting by Paul Cézanne of the same subject, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (ca. 1897), an exemplary work by that artist, acquired by the Baltimore collector Claribel Cone in 1925. The comparison drawn between Cézanne and Hartley (same subject, related...

J. Paul Getty purchased his first work of art, a painting, in 1931 and, eight years later, his first antiquity. Collector’s Choice: J. Paul Getty and His Antiquities, on view at the Getty Villa in Malibu, thus marked the seventieth anniversary of the initiation of a renowned and still-expanding collection. The exhibition was a natural for the museum, particularly since the construction of the Getty Center has allowed the Villa to devote itself entirely to...

The visual artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group are not so well known in the United States. The explanations for this are varied, but essentially boil down to the fact that few of them ever achieved fame here for their art. Roger Fry was best known for the pioneering art criticism he wrote in the early days of modernism; Vanessa Bell is most often portrayed as the artist sister of Virginia Woolf; Dora Carrington and...

Organized by Michael R. Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective offers the richest survey of this artist’s oeuvre in more than a quarter century. With nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, as well as some comparative works and materials, the exhibition traces the full range of Gorky’s career and amply demonstrates his critical importance as a late Surrealist on...

The heart of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is its four-story Venetian courtyard around which circle palatial rooms lined with exquisite tapestries, treasures of Medieval and Renaissance art, gems of U.S. painting, and sumptuous holdings of decorative arts. Along the narrow paths of the central garden rest Grecian urns and a gently running fountain. It was here, one night in the winter of 2007, that Taro Shinoda, a guest at the Gardner’s artist-residency program, looked...

One critical question for exhibiting past art is its contemporary relevance. Instead of asserting a work’s temporal transcendence, a more convincing way to prove its enduring life is to show that it can still captivate an audience and contribute to the creation and appreciation of art today. This is the approach taken by the exhibition Looking for Antonio Mak, an extraordinary show that brought an unprecedented vitality to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Centered...

Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius, organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Italy, aims to explore an aspect of Leonardo’s wide-ranging interests long acknowledged but still poorly understood. That Leonardo studied from, theorized on, and made designs for sculpture has been established through his drawings and writings yet...