Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The current, straightforwardly titled Frida Kahlo retrospective, organized by the Walker Art Center and traveling to Philadelphia and San Francisco, follows two unrelated but identically titled surveys of the same artist—one organized by the Tate Modern (2005) and another, more hastily put together, at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (2007), each with unique, well-illustrated catalogues. While the shows in Mexico and the United States were explicitly tied to the centennial of Kahlo’s 1907 birth, the Tate version seems to have been conceptualized as the best way to get British audiences excited about Latin American art, a new curatorial direction for the museum. Kahlo, after all, is the number one crowd-pleaser as far as Latin American art is concerned—like Van Gogh and O’Keeffe, one can count on her to sell tickets. Great Kahlos are now worth several million dollars: they might be a bargain in comparison with some of her European contemporaries but are at the pinnacle of the Latin American market. These shows are thus expensive organizational nightmares, requiring diplomatic negotiations with collectors and institutions increasingly reticent to lend their over-requested works. But judging by popular success, the varied efforts were all well worth it,...

Although most of his works normally reside in Florentine museums and his role as a proponent of the maniera in sculpture is well-known, Vincenzo Danti (1530–76) is finally being feted with an exhibition of his own. On view at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence through September 7, I grandi bronzi del Battistero: L’arte di Vincenzo Danti, discepolo di Michelangelo is the schizophrenic title for what is essentially a monographic show on the career of the artist. Its occasion is the restoration of a three-figure bronze group from the southern door of the Florentine Baptistery, but the show and especially its catalogue reexamine his entire output, both within and outside the shadow of Michelangelo. Equally important, the exhibition separates Danti’s sculptures from their usual location in the large room of Cinquecento sculpture in the Bargello, where they are surrounded by contemporary Medici commissions from Bandinelli, Cellini, Ammannati, and Giambologna—the flood of talented practitioners Danti regularly competed against for patronage and whose work often is confused with his. Seen as a group (with some important additions from collections in the United States and England), Danti’s sculpture is thematically varied, technically diverse, and—probably the biggest surprise of the exhibition—most rewarding on...

First, a disclaimer. Throughout my art-history education, which began in the 1960s and was probably typical, pre-twentieth-century sculpture was evaluated much as it had been since the Renaissance, which is to say in formal terms, the purity of its planes and contours competing with painting’s reliance on surface and color. I came to know, at least intellectually, that perceptions and judgments are indelibly affected by the conventions and values of our time, and assumed that, in the objective spirit in which art historians are taught to approach works of art, I would adjust gracefully to new evidence requiring shifts in interpretation. In fact, The Color of Life exhibition at the Getty Villa in Malibu, and particularly the classical gallery that serves as introduction, was far more unsettling than I would have imagined. The exhibition traces, in broad strokes, the history of polychromy in figural sculpture from the ancient world to the present day. Ambitious in scope and including both works of art and reconstructions based on scientific evidence of original coloration, it raises a number of questions as well as questions a number of assumptions about the way we see and evaluate three-dimensional representations of the human form. This effort...

Enthusiasts of early twentieth-century American art have long recognized George Bellows’s facility for powerful draftsmanship, yet his energetic, even boisterous, paintings and lithographs remain appreciably better known than his drawings. The artist made hundreds of original works on paper, largely black and white, now hidden in museums and private collections across the country. Their broad dispersal may account, in part, for the limited scholarly attention paid this fascinating aspect of the artist’s work. The exhibition The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library begins to redress this lacuna by showcasing works from one of the key repositories of Bellows’s works on paper. Presented with a critical mass of thirty-two drawings, the viewer has the rare opportunity to revel in Bellows’s vigorous slashes of black, greasy crayon, and, on occasion, expressively precise pen and ink. Dense networks of animated lines suggest an impulsive conception, yet close observation reveals Bellows’s seemingly innate and purposeful placement of form and detail. Chronologically, the featured drawings cover the entire seventeen-year span of Bellows’s career. The earliest dates to 1907, just three years after Bellows (1882–1925) moved from his native Columbus, Ohio, to New York City in search of his artistic destiny....

The curators of Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730–2008 have gathered an impressive collection of well-known objects from Europe and the United States to showcase the curving beauty of the eighteenth-century Rococo and of later designs with similarly sinuous lines. The show was mounted by members of the Cooper-Hewitt curatorial staff, including Sarah Coffin, Gail Davidson, and Ellen Lupton, with Penelope Hunter-Stiebel as a guest curator. The focus is on the formal elements of the Rococo, demonstrating the historical persistence of sculptural curves across media and through space and time. The exhibition consists of a roughly chronological display of furniture, ceramics, large and small-scale metalwork, works on paper, and textiles. Despite this great variety, the curving line is primary in the form of each piece. Although the text panels mention “the spirit of the rococo” and define this ethos as celebratory, sybaritic, libertine, and ludic, visitors are largely left to imagine what the furnishings might teach us about the social and physical contexts in which they were first used. The catalogue and a lecture series produced in conjunction with the exhibition expanded on contextual topics, such as production and transmission through time and across the Western world. The catalogue, in addition,...

Only seven years after their resplendent pioneering exhibition and catalogue on the seventeenth-century Japanese artist Hon'ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), Felice Fischer, Kyoko Kinoshita, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art produced an even more magnificent catalogue and exhibition on the artists Ike (also known as Ikeno and Ike no) Taiga (1723–76) and Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727/28–1784). Like Kōetsu, who was himself a calligrapher, potter, and lacquer-ware artist, Gyokuran and her husband Taiga were stylistic and social pioneers who worked in several arts, in their case painting, calligraphy, poetry, and even seal-carving and lacquer, in the style called Nanga. One of several new styles that emerged and flourished in Edo period Japan (1603–1868), Nanga was inspired by Chinese literati ideals and derived from Chinese literati sources. Nanga, literally “Southern School painting” (also known as Bunjinga), like its antecedent, the Chinese wen-jen hua, or “literati painting,” integrated the study of painting, calligraphy, poetry, Chinese classics, connoisseurship, and tea and other arts. The ideals are expressed both in the "calligraphic" line (of painting as well as calligraphy per se) and the vocabulary of strokes, in countless stylistic subtleties such as color usage, and in subject matter. Cherished themes are plants symbolizing the virtuous qualities of the...

A curtain of clear plastic sleeves hangs in the shop window that serves as the façade to Ooga Booga’s main space. Inside each transparent pocket rests a simple, photocopied, and staple-bound book available for visitors to touch and flip through. In this modest exhibition of zines and artists’ books, the manner of installation complements the temperament of the work on view. Everything is straightforward and accessible. Ooga Booga, an alternative space in Los Angeles’s Chinatown District, presents for the first time in the United States the complete range of publications issued by the Zurich-based publisher Nieves. Nestled within a network of hip Los Angeles commercial galleries, the exhibition at Ooga Booga makes an implicit statement about an alternative mode of making and selling art—that is, the low-tech and low-price route. The exhibition is in two parts. In the main space, the complete oeuvre of Nieves publications from 1999 to the present (about two hundred zines and books) is displayed for visitors to peruse. The exhibition’s second component can be found in a small room across the outdoor walkway where the personal collection of contemporary artist publications and zines owned by the publisher of Nieves, Benjamin Sommerhalder, is on view. A...

El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts brings to light a period in Spanish art which, despite the quality of artistic production and the rich history of the period, has been overshadowed by the art produced during the reigns of Philip III’s father, Philip II, and son, Philip IV. Philip III reigned from 1598 to 1621; notably, neither El Greco nor Velázquez, the protagonists of this exhibition to judge by its title, lived at Philip’s court. El Greco had long been settled in Toledo (he died there in 1614) and Velázquez, born in 1599, visited Madrid for the first time the year after Philip III died. The exhibition’s parameters mark a period during which El Greco’s style became increasingly popular at court, local artists found greater success than had been the case during Philip II’s reign, and painters began experimenting with naturalism. El Greco to Velázquez illustrates this transitional period with spectacular paintings from a selection of styles and genres. The curators, Sarah Schroth of the Nasher Museum and Ronni Baer of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, have organized the exhibition into five thematic sections: “Late El Greco,”...

Curated by Silvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Sciré, the exhibition of late paintings by Titian initiated at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and continued with variations at the Accademia was rich in materials from which to learn more about the great Venetian artist. While the Venetian venue showed only twenty-eight paintings, these offered much upon which to meditate. Occupying a space that was once the church of the Carità, and typically used at the Accademia for temporary shows, the paintings were displayed with artificial lighting. At first one wished for daylight, but with time one found that this arrangement worked. The rectangular venue was shaped by partitions that created three interconnected, irregularly shaped sections. Designed for the exhibition and painted a mottled, warm gray-brown, the partition surface was evidently inspired by the backgrounds of many of the paintings shown. The curved entrance wall and the technical wall were distinguished by their matte-red surfaces. In the first and largest area, portraits filled the right wall while the perpendicular and opposite walls displayed mythological and allegorical paintings. Among the former, the Portrait of Paul III (1543) from Capodimonte; the Girl with Fan (1561; called “Lavinia” ), belonging to the Dresden Gemaldegalerie; and Titian’s famous...

The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 was a splendid exhibition covering the period from the time Columbus arrived until the moment when emerging nations from Chile to Mexico moved toward independence. Showing it in three dramatically different venues—Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—resulted in three profoundly different statements. In Philadelphia one simply gasped to see such luxury from so many fabulously wealthy colonies (mostly Spanish and Portuguese). When visitors walked through the Mexican show, however, they noticed something different: a preponderance of Mexican works, with the less numerous objects from the Andes, Brazil, and other nations positioned as if to frame the national pieces. Los Angeles was different still: though the Mexican-American population is immense, that exhibition replicated the politically remote overview of the Philadelphia show. Yet that distance, in this case from the local latino audience, sparked reaction. It is important to realize that the works in each venue were not the same objects arranged in different ways: like a fresh cast of actors for a play, the items themselves changed more than usually happens when an exhibition travels: Mexico added an unusual number of major works that were available only there. In Los Angeles one saw a distilled...