Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Penelope Curtis, ed.
Depth of Field: The Place of Relief in the Time of Donatello
Leeds: Henry Moore Institute in association with Victoria and Albert Museum, 2005. 140 pp.; 45 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Paper $62.95 (1900081393)
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, September 23, 2004–March 27, 2005
The recent exhibition, Depth of Field: The Place of Relief in the Time of Donatello, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, focused on early fifteenth-century Italian relief sculptures from the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Organized by Peta Motture, Glyn Davies, and Stuart Frost at the museum and by Penelope Curtis, Martina Droth, and Stephen Feeke of the Henry Moore Institute, it was the first exhibition to focus on Italian early fifteenth-century relief sculpture, and it presented the subject in a provocative and innovative way. Its specific purposes were to explore how the sculptures might be… Full Review
March 30, 2006
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Philippe Bordes
Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile
Exh. cat. Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 400 pp.; 80 color ills.; 95 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300104472)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, February 1–April 24, 2005; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, June 5–September 5, 2005
Although many of Jacques-Louis David’s best-known paintings are in French public collections, over the past century U.S. institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Clark Art Institute have managed to snap up significant works by the artist. The presence in the United States of these images, which date mainly from the Napoleonic Empire and David’s period of post-Napoleonic exile in Brussels, was the stimulus for an exhibition of David’s late work at both the Getty and the Clark last year. The exhibition was accompanied by… Full Review
March 15, 2006
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Alanna Heiss, Klaus Biesenbach, and Glenn D. Lowry
Greater New York 2005
Long Island City, NY: P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 2005. 392 pp. Cloth (0870709879)
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, March 13–September 26, 2005
On the evening I attended the Greater New York 2005 exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, I was surprised to find that the line queuing around the block was not there to see the works of one hundred and sixty of New York’s freshest artistic talents hanging in the galleries, halls, stairwells, bathrooms, and boiler room, but was waiting to join the mass of bodies slowly packing into the building’s courtyard. As it turns out, on summer Saturday nights P.S.1 hosts d.j.ed dance parties with liquor licenses (my admission ticket was a self-stick fiberglass wrist band). Much of the crowd… Full Review
March 8, 2006
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The 51st Venice Biennale: The Experience of Art (Giardini) and Always a Little Further (Arsenale)
Venice, Italy, June 12–November 6, 2005
The themes of parent-child relationships, migration, and colonialism resonate throughout the exhibition spaces of the two-pronged Venice Biennale, as well as in the national pavilions. Curated by María de Corral, the Experience of Art at the Giardini and the Italian Pavilion joins forces with Always a Little Further, curated by Rosa Martínez at the Arsenale, to engage visitors in an overall exhibition that cuts across several countries and time periods. Despite the often incongruous juxtapositions, viewers can self-curate a selection of works, making the overwhelming Biennale a more manageable exhibition. What follows is this reviewer’s attempt at lending some… Full Review
March 1, 2006
Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch
Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public
National Gallery of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 371 pp.; 177 color ills.; 53 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300113390)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 4–November 27, 2005; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, December 14, 2005–March 19, 2006
When Peter Parshall authored his standard work, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (with David Landau; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), critical readers noted one significant omission: the earliest century of woodcuts before the generation of Albrecht Dürer. Perhaps it was because those works offered stark outlines and relatively little interior modeling, though they frequently were also colored to enhance their naturalism. Now the missing link has been forged. Drawing from extraordinary holdings of this material in their respective museums, Parshall and Schoch provide the first real study of early woodcuts since Arthur Hind in 1935 (though Richard Field, who contributes… Full Review
February 17, 2006
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Seymour Slive
Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape
Exh. cat. Yale University Press, 2005. 288 pp.; 160 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. $45.00 (1903973740)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 26–September 18, 2005;
Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until February 5, 2006, is a splendid exhibition; it is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in landscape painting or in Dutch art. The show provides an admirable overview of Ruisdael's work. It includes expected monuments such as the Dresden Jewish Cemetery (ca. 1655; cat. no. 22) and the Hermitage Marsh in a Forest (ca. 1665; cat. no. 37), but also a number of little-known gems. Though paintings quite understandably dominate the exhibition, works on paper—including all of Ruisdael's exceedingly rare etchings—are given their… Full Review
January 27, 2006
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John House, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, and Jennifer Hardin
Monet’s London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames, 1859–1914
Exh. cat. St. Petersburg and Gent, Belgium: Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in association with Snoeck, 2005. 206 pp. $35.00 (9053495452)
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Fla., January 16–April 24, 2005; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, N.Y., May 27–September 4, 2005; Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts, Baltimore, Md., October 2–December 31, 2005
At first glance this exhibition seemed misnamed, since, far from focusing exclusively on Monet, it presented a diverse group of dozens of artists and image-makers including European and American painters, printmakers, and photographers, all of whom were fascinated by the River Thames. A catalogue entry by the exhibition organizer, Jennifer Hardin, chief curator at the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, explains that the original motivation for the exhibition was the museum’s own Monet, Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog (1903). Unlike this work, the majority of those shown in the exhibition were not Impressionist, and anyone expecting roomfuls of… Full Review
January 23, 2006
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Joachim Pissarro
Cézanne and Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting, 1865–1885
Museum of Modern Art, 2005. 256 pp.; 92 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (0870701851)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 26–September 12, 2005; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 20, 2005–January 16, 2006; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, February 27–May 28, 2006
The Museum of Modern Art’s Cézanne & Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting is the latest in a spate of recent shows focused on the theme of collaboration between a pair of modern artists.[1] Yet even if the theme and subject it proposes to examine is not new, the body of work assembled and shown together for the first time in this retrospective overview of the nearly twenty-year period that Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro were in closest dialogue is undeniably impressive.[2] The three-room exhibition presents nearly one-hundred paintings and a few works on paper, all organized more or less chronologically. As… Full Review
January 16, 2006
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Pieter Biesboer
Pieter Claesz: Master of Haarlem Still Life
Waanders, 2004. 144 pp.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9040090068)
Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, November 27, 2004–April 4, 2005; Kunsthaus Zürich, April 22–August 22, 2005; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 18–December 31, 2005
It is perhaps not surprising that the exhibition of the still lifes of Pieter Claesz. at the National Gallery in Washington is the first monographic show devoted to this artist. As a friend commented on paging through the catalogue, “His works are rather all of a piece, aren’t they?” It is very likely that more than one curator has turned away from the idea of such a show out of concern that the public might find the work too much alike to sustain interest. It is undeniably true that Claesz. devoted most of his career to painting still lifes marked… Full Review
January 10, 2006
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Jean Frémon and Antoni Tàpies
Tàpies/Rainer—Porteurs de Secret
Exh. cat. Klosterneuberg, Austria: Edition Sammlung Essl Privatstiftung, 2005.
Sammlung Essl: Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg, June 24, 2005–October 23, 2005
In this exhibition, Klosterneuburg’s Essl Collection—dedicated since 1995 to the dissemination of contemporary art—brings the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies and the Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer together for the first time, thereby creating a unique encounter between their respective oeuvres. Conceived by collector Karlheinz Essl, whose collection contains most of the ninety-plus works on display, the exhibition was curated by Jean Frémon, a co-director of Paris’s Galerie Lelong and a long-time follower of both artists’ careers The exhibition sets out to explore the echoes and convergences, not necessarily intentional, between the two artist’s oeuvres and their lives. Formal relationships and echoes… Full Review
December 16, 2005
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