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Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews
The three museums that hosted The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900 appeared to be staging three different exhibitions. Curators Stephen Calloway at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Yves Badetz at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris championed the late blooming “decadent” aspect of the Aesthetic Movement that the Victorians derided, contending that it was the definitive expression of an aesthetic disposition. Calloway’s curatorial selections and catalogue essays highlighted sensuous works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and Aubrey Beardsley, among others. Unlike Badetz, however, he recreated period rooms and crowded the V&A’s exhibition galleries with…
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December 19, 2012
Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism is an intimate exhibition. Circumscribed in both scale and subject, it is in turn satisfying and disturbing for the keyhole access and insights it offers into the life and art of two of European Surrealism’s notable American exponents during their brief, fecund, and often tempestuous creative partnership and love affair. Man Ray and Lee Miller were together in Paris from 1929 to 1932, three short years. But like a pebble that life casually skipped on the water, this particular time and place instigated ripples and reverberations for both protagonists and, this exhibition…
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December 14, 2012
Gathering close to eighty assemblages, collages, lithographs, reliefs, and sculptures made between 1918 and 1947, as well as a partial replica of the Merzbau installation, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is the first large-scale retrospective in the United States of Schwitters’s work since John Elderfeld’s 1985 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Here at the Berkeley Art Museum, where I saw it, it is also the first big retrospective of his work to reach the West Coast. Isabel Schulz, coeditor of Schwitters’s catalogue raisonné, curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive, and executive director of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung at…
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December 12, 2012
Two recent exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) offer opportunities to contemplate the changing face of Mexican art in relation to issues of nationalism and identity. With curatorial assistance at SDMA from Amy Galpin and Julia Marciari-Alexander, Mexican Modern Painting from the Andrés Blaisten Collection presents eighty paintings from the first half of the twentieth century, complementing the San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection by including works by many of the same artists, such as Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Rufino Tamayo, and Alfredo Ramos Martínez. Although the exhibition loosely situates these works within the context of…
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December 12, 2012
The Matter Within, presented at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, is the first major survey in California dedicated to Indian art of the twentieth century. The show's title is, indeed, its own topic and conundrum. Eighteen artists, at various stages in their careers, are clustered under the umbrella term of “New Contemporary Art of India.”
The criteria for artists included in this exhibition was dependent on their background as Indian and as artists whose works comment on the ever-changing Indian diaspora through video, photography, and sculpture. Some of the included…
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November 30, 2012
Francesca Woodman was three months shy of her twenty-third birthday when she took her own life in 1981, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA) surprisingly extensive retrospective of her work, curated by Corey Keller, is haunted by this fact. One reason is the attention and acclaim that has been given to Scott Willis’s 2010 documentary titled The Woodmans, which chronicled the family romance of artistic competition surrounding Francesca’s short life and career, noting among many other things that she jumped to her death five days before her father George was to enjoy the opening of a…
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November 13, 2012
The collages of Kurt Schwitters—layered arrays of newsprint, packaging labels, advertisement fragments, train schedules, ticket stubs, envelopes, receipts, and even candy wrappers, all tacked down and anchored by expressionist paint—are surprisingly prescient for the postwar period, even proleptic. Although produced between 1918 and 1947, they nonetheless register a communications environment familiar to the second half of the twentieth century; their readymade accumulations of word and image suggest a relentless media barrage and advertising assault, a constant flow of data and information. Schwitters called these collage works “Merz”—a neologism he coined from the second syllable of the German word Kommerz…
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October 24, 2012
The Walter De Maria: Trilogies exhibition at the Menil Collection is a sparse, elegant, and highly controlled experience. Despite this, the show manages to play nimbly with the essential premise of a retrospective, offering three series of new works that are each complete on their own, but reprise and revise older pieces, just as the Menil mines its own institutional legacy.[1]
The exhibition begins in the museum’s foyer, where viewers are surrounded by three large monochromatic canvases—one yellow, one red, one blue—that articulate the De Stijl ideal of the integration of painting and architecture to construct a utopian…
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October 10, 2012
The thirty-seven alabaster figures—most of them roughly sixteen inches tall—that visited the superbly expanded and renovated Virginia Museum of Fine Arts this spring have now completed their second of three years on the road. Having never before been seen as a complete grouping outside of France, in early 2010 the sculptures left Dijon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts for a seven-stop American tour that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and concluded in Richmond. From there they have proceeded to Bruges and now Berlin, two cities added after their voyage began. Organized by the French Regional American Museum Exchange (FRAME) and…
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October 9, 2012
South Los Angeles. August 1972. A crowd of 100,000 spectators fills the Los Angeles Coliseum to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts uprisings. Jesse Jackson delivers a rousing invocation, inciting the crowd to raise their fists in solidarity. The occasion: Wattstax Music Festival, the black analogue to Woodstock. Footage from this event went largely unnoticed until the 2004 re-release of Wattstax, Mel Stuart’s 1973 documentary of the landmark concert. A mash-up of interviews and live concert footage, Wattstax highlights the urgent political climate of the 1960s and 1970s that fostered emerging discourses around identity, resistance, visibility, and…
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October 2, 2012
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