Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

During the 1920s and 1930s, Charlotte Perriand and Sonia Delaunay both sought to transform the field then known as the decorative arts by applying the formal innovations of modernism and the industrial innovations of capitalist production to the design and manufacture of domestic objects. The two women were roughly contemporaries, formed by the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the wars, and both are now seen most often through the lens of feminist art history, which is in part responsible for recovering their work from obscurity. Two concurrent exhibitions—one in Paris devoted to Perriand and one in New York surveying Delaunay—offered… Full Review

The need for an investigation of Auguste Rodin’s influence on American artists was spawned at the 2002 symposium, “New Studies on Rodin,” held on the occasion of the publication of Albert Elsen’s monumental catalogue of Stanford’s Rodin Collection. How did American artists adopt, adapt, or reject Rodin’s art? What were the attributes in their work that reflected the master’s oeuvre? Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center was the ideal place for this study, with the third largest Rodin collection in the world, including two hundred works—mostly cast bronze, but also works in wax, plaster, and terra cotta--on view in three galleries and… Full Review

The New Museum’s exhibition Ostalgia represents one of the largest North American exhibitions of art from the areas of former Soviet influence, both in regional (countries formerly occupied by the Soviet Union or Soviet satellites, as well as ones that did not fit into either of these categories) and historical breadth (1991 is the key moment, although included works span from the 1960s to the present). Drawing its title from a term adopted in Germany in the 1990s that came to refer to the fetishization of objects from everyday life in East Germany under Soviet influence (the term’s pun derives… Full Review

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a surprisingly varied display of the artist’s exploration in process, the body, objectness, and architecture. Divided among the museum’s two fourth-floor wings, the retrospective flows chronologically. The first wing showcases some of Serra’s early small sculptures, several films, the residue of a sculptural performance, and drawings. The curators have dedicated the second wing solely to his mature drawings. The central staircase that divides the two wings creates a slightly awkward flow, and I initially walked through the exhibition backwards and almost missed the first segment… Full Review

Crowds gathered in Paris in the spring of 2011 to view an exhibition devoted to the Caillebotte brothers. Visitors enjoyed an opportunity to view famous works by Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) such as The House Painters (1877), Interior, Woman Seated (1880), and Interior, Woman at the Window (1880), as well as numerous less-known canvases (mostly drawn from private collections). More surprisingly, the exhibition introduced the amateur photography of Martial Caillebotte (1853–1910), his unknown younger brother. Exhibited here for the first time, and only recently studied in their entirety, these photographs offered a fresh perspective on familiar scenes. Indeed, visual echoes could… Full Review

Painting Between the Lines was an exhibition of the work of fourteen contemporary painters that sought to remedy the sad fact that literature has fallen by the wayside insofar as providing subject matter for contemporary art is concerned. True enough, but the remedy proposed by the exhibition was somewhat problematic, although it did manage to successfully reframe ways that we habitually look at contemporary paintings by encouraging a slower and more considered engagement. Curator Jens Hoffman commissioned each artist to make a work that specifically responded to a passage in a novel that describes a fictional character’s reaction to a… Full Review

The construction of a well-equipped museum building marks an important change in the cultural landscape of a city. Rarely on the map of major cultural destinations, the Tampa Bay area recently got not just one, but two, such additions, whose openings within less than a year created a momentous tectonic shift in the cultural scene. Built on comparable budgets and each located at a prominent waterfront site in its respective downtown, the Tampa Museum of Art (TMA) and the Dalí in Saint Petersburg are not only welcome new facilities, but also significant architectural events for the fast-growing metropolis. That, however… Full Review

The Phillips Collection was recently given a David Smith sculpture, Bouquet of Concaves, and a gestural egg-ink drawing (both 1959). The lateral steel assemblage of irregular metal concave and convex shapes, set atop a slender pole, contrasts with the densely drawn web of staccato black strokes on white paper. Their differences reflect essential aspects of Smith’s yin-yang creative forces, poles vital to understanding the scope of his ambition and achievement. From these seeds, Susan Behrends Frank developed a small but richly textured exhibition using concave and convex forms as visual glue to relate diverse two- and three-dimensional works from… Full Review

The year 2009 yielded a bumper crop of exhibitions about the art of the Japanese “samurai.” In addition to those documented in the three catalogues reviewed here, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA, mounted The Samurai Re-Imagined: From Ukiyo-e to Anime, showing Edo-period woodblock prints alongside contemporary manga comics and anime cels and drawings (but issuing no catalogue). Although the latter catered wholly to popular culture, the other three were far more conventional. But their evident success was surely abetted by the general fascination with the mystique of the “samurai” that is perpetuated precisely by movies, the martial… Full Review

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the nearby Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) were astutely planned as complementary perspectives on the broad contexts for Gertrude Stein’s life and work. The most important aspect of these affiliated exhibitions is the copious interwoven personal, historical, biographical, and legendary stories of this unique literary icon, opening with the Stein family’s roots in the San Francisco Bay Area before shifting to the more expansive narrative of Gertrude’s life and that of her family, expatriates living in… Full Review