Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Annibale Carracci spent most of the twentieth century in relative obscurity, his reputation overshadowed by that of other artists from his era. Though he was acknowledged by Caravaggio as a fellow “true painter” (Bellori) and served as inspiration to an awestruck adolescent Bernini (Baldinucci), Annibale’s fame has steadily dwindled since the nineteenth century, when illustrious visitors on the Grand Tour waxed rhapsodic over his work and made pilgrimages to Bologna and Parma to admire his altarpieces. Despite Dennis Mahon’s Herculean efforts to bring Annibale and his academy back into the spotlight and Charles Dempsey’s explorations of the technical and… Full Review

The Prado’s exhibition on Tintoretto, mounted by curator Miguel Falomir, meets the standard that a show is justified by its educational value to both the specialist and the public. Occupying the central wing of the primo piano of the Prado, the exhibit is mounted spaciously and offers judicious juxtapositions of paintings, drawings, and technical data. While presenting itself as the first monographic exhibition for the artist since 1937, the show also disclaims any pretension to be complete. (During the Tintoretto anniversary year of 1994, the Accademia in Venice provided an exhibition of Tintoretto’s portraiture, at which time an itinerary of… Full Review

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, there is a scene in the Forbidden City after the 1911 Republican Revolution in which the already abdicated last emperor P’u-i (John Lone) warned his two chief eunuchs with these words: “I’ve recently learned that many pieces from the imperial collections were on sale in the antique stores of Peking!” Palace eunuchs were notorious thieves of imperial treasures. The Forbidden City, first built from 1406 to 1420, was not only the world’s largest palace complex for the twenty-four successive emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, but also the home to the magnificent… Full Review

“I myself have done sculpture as the complement of my studies. I did sculpture when I was tired of painting. For a change of medium. But I sculpted as a painter. I did not sculpt like a sculptor. Sculpture does not say what painting says. Painting does not say what music says. They are parallel ways, but you can’t confuse them.” —Henri Matisse Matisse’s statement, printed high on the wall in the Dallas Museum of Art foyer, sums up the motivation for Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, an ambitious exhibition jointly organized by the Dallas Museum of Art,… Full Review

Contemporary art from the Middle East has only begun to emerge from obscurity in the past decade. Its struggle for recognition by the mainstream art world stems from an indefinable hesitation, lack of understanding, and the absence of established standards by which to evaluate it. A handful of major museums have started to collect this art seriously, while others continue to resist such acquisitions, often dismissing them as derivative and of questionable quality. Two recent exhibitions that focused on contemporary art from the Middle East and helped to put it on the map were Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking… Full Review

The greatest gift of the exhibition documented in this catalogue is exemplified by catalogue entry 44 (by Glenn Peers), a small panel of just two figures. The desert father Makarios stands to one side, straight and intensely decorous in the “angelic robe” of the monk, his right hand resting on his long beard, his left lightly raised. Beside him looms a seraph, its upswept wings echoing Makarios’s hood, its cherubic face intent. Gently, it takes the monk’s left wrist in its small, red hand. Monastic inspiration is distilled here in an image of penetrating simplicity. Previously published only once, the… Full Review

This spring Phoenix, Arizona has become a center for Baroque art. Under the able leadership of James K. Ballinger, Director, and Thomas J. Loughman, Curator of European Art, the Phoenix Art Museum is hosting two major exhibitions of European seventeenth-century art, and for one of these, Phoenix is its sole venue. In the last decade, the museum has organized other major Baroque exhibitions, most notably in 1999 with Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Painting on Copper, 1525–1775; but scheduling two concurrent shows on seventeenth-century art—one focusing on the Mediterranean city of Naples, the other on the Dutch… Full Review

Constantine is the man of the hour. The 1700th anniversary of his ascent into the ruling circle of the Roman Empire, just as the administration of shared authority instituted by Diocletian was about to break apart in civil war, is being celebrated across Europe. Rimini led off in 2005 with an important show and sumptuous catalogue (Angela Donati and Giovanni Gentili, eds., Costantino il Grande: La civiltà antica al bivio tra Occidente e Oriente, Milano: Cinisello Balsamo, 2005). The volume under review here, the catalogue of York’s effort in the fall of 2006, is the second entry in the… Full Review

The University of Texas’s spacious new Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, which opened in April 2006, recently mounted an outstanding exhibition devoted to Luca Cambiaso, the leading native-born figure in sixteenth-century Genoese painting. Organized with the Palazzo Ducale Genoa, this first monographic exhibition in fifty years was supported by a beautifully produced catalogue, in English, edited by Jonathan Bober, the show’s chief architect and the Blanton Museum’s curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings. The volume comprises 118 substantial catalogue entries, each accompanied by a superb full-page color plate, preceded by an excellent fortuna critica, an anthology of… Full Review

For some there is a paradox in the fact that Bob Jones University, a Christian-fundamentalist institution that bills itself as the bastion of “old-time religion” based on the absolute authority of the Bible, should be a repository for one of the best collections of Catholic art in the United States. In the words of Henry Hope, who first introduced the university’s museum to the public (“The Bob Jones University Collection of Religious Art,” Art Journal XXV, no. 2 (1965–66): 154–162), the spirit of the collection is “more that of the Counter Reformation than of Martin Luther” (162). In this respect… Full Review