Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Hard and unyielding, marble is a rock that must be wrestled with by sheer force, exquisite care, and grunt of labor. Human hands require the intermediary hammer and chisel, and touch is distanced in the service of the eye. To give this rock the spark of life is a formidable task, one that few are able to accomplish. Red clay is mud. Dirty, cheap, and plentiful, it is underfoot, low, and common. By dint of water it is plastic and alive, the fingers imprinting an instant record of presence, time, and motion. A mound is grasped—three, four moves,… Full Review

More than a formal practice of using earth as material, Land art has from the beginning been concerned with social, political, and cultural issues that cannot be separated from the land we inhabit. We know that “landscape” is an ideologically invested term, and artists dealing with their relationship to the land are by no means unique to contemporary art. However, Nancy Holt: Sightlines demonstrates that in the 1960s and 1970s the expansion of media in art played a central role in how Nancy Holt (b. 1938) interpreted the landscape. This exhibition comes at an opportune moment, building on current interest… Full Review

Prior to the opening of the Musée du Louvre’s spectacular new galleries for Islamic art in September 2012, this renowned collection largely had been in storage for the last thirty-five years, with brief reinstallations in 1987 and again in 1993. After such a long and much anticipated wait, the galleries did not disappoint this reviewer; rather, they absolutely dazzled. Five lengthy, successive visits were just enough to get a sense of the sheer depth of this remarkable assemblage, which encompasses the breadth of Islamic art, traditionally defined as extending from Spain to India between the seventh and nineteenth centuries.… Full Review

“See the largest selection of Rembrandt paintings assembled in the United States. . . . Ever.” Such ads helped make Rembrandt in America one of the most successful exhibitions in the history of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In its last days, demand was so high that an aggressive scalper tried to sell his extra ticket to a senior administrator as she returned from lunch. The show’s success was all the more remarkable given its genesis: curatorial conversations about the links between collecting and connoisseurship. With those links as its defining concept, Rembrandt in America, curated by George S… Full Review

Once in a while an exhibition comes along that achieves many things. It illuminates past and present, and does so by creating a viewing experience both beautiful and instructive. All the better when such an exhibition also brightens up a blind spot in the history of art. The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens achieved this. Curated by Wolfram Koeppe, Maria Kellen French Curator of European Decorative Arts, the show was a monographic investigation of father-and-son furniture makers Abraham (1711–1793) and David Roentgen (1743–1807), whose workshop in the German town… Full Review

The development of photography over the course of the nineteenth century was a development of vision. For the first time, a person, via a mechanical device, could transcribe reality, freeze it, as it were, into an external, two-dimensional image. Thus, rather than providing an objective recording of reality, photography presented viewers with a new way of seeing reality. The manner in which artists utilized this new vision is the subject of Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard, an exhibition curated by Elizabeth W. Easton, Edwin Becker, Eliza Rathbone, and Ellen W. Lee. It features an impressive array of… Full Review

The complicated relationship between war and photography is the subject of a massive exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Entitled War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, the exhibition includes more than 500 objects (pared down from over 2,000 initially under consideration) that range from photographs and photographic equipment to books, magazines, and albums. Produced by more than 280 photographers from 28 nations, the exhibition covers wars that occurred over six continents, beginning with the Mexican-American War in 1846 and culminating with the 2011 civil war in Libya. Yet, rather than organize this extensive material chronologically… Full Review

Chinese characters have assumed a position of supreme cultural power and authority within traditional Chinese society since their creation more than five thousand years ago, and calligraphy, the art of writing characters, is among the most ancient, venerated, and lasting Chinese art forms. Today, every child in China practices calligraphy in public schools or with private tutors. In public parks, retirees dip giant brushes (sometimes even mops) into water and write calligraphy on the ground as a means of physical exercise as well as art practice. Bookstores feature a large selection of guidebooks on calligraphy, most of them reproductions of… Full Review

Some sweet day, a three-week program presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the fall of 2012, featured six dance performances by contemporary choreographers, as well as interstitial installations and lively discussion sessions. (Select performances and the three response sessions streamed live on MoMA’s website. Archival videos of the performances will be made available online at a future date.) Presented in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, a challenging gallery site, the programming for Some sweet day prompted questions often triggered by performance exhibitions: How should dancers, actors, or musicians navigate the shift from black-box theaters to white-cube galleries? Can… Full Review

Bernini: Sculpting in Clay argues for the centrality of modeling in clay to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s total conception of sculpture (also reviewed here in caa.reviews), ranging from the placement of one or more bodies and their limbs in space, down to the treatment of folds of drapery, locks of hair, and the articulation of the elasticity of flesh—regardless of whether the intended sculptures were to be cast in bronze, carved from marble or travertine, or modeled in stucco. Bernini sought to match both the suppleness and tensile strength of his clay models, which he could, in the words of… Full Review