Museum Exhibitions

Museum Exhibitions

Joan Semmel’s simple truth

Contributed by David Carrier / Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art opens with a surprising juxtaposition of two drawings. One portrays Rubens’ handsome little son, the other Dürer’s aged mother. Of the latter Gombrich says: “His truthful study of careworn old age may give us a shock which makes us turn away from it – and yet, if we fight against our first repugnance we may be richly rewarded, for Dürer’s drawing in its tremendous sincerity is a great work.” Gombrich was, to be sure, a conceptually conservative art historian. But this declaration is a perfect introduction to the once iconoclastic Joan Semmel’s “In the Flesh,” now on view at the Jewish Museum.

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

The Nihonga avant-garde’s cultural outreach

Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / On a recent trip to Japan, I visited Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art. Behind the museum’s massive burnt orange Torii gate, in the Higashiyama Cube, is its special exhibition, “Nihonga Avant-Garde: Kyoto 1948–1970” which, in the cube’s labyrinthine interior, encompasses three of Kyoto’s significant 20th-century avant-garde art movements (Pan Real, Cella Art Association, and the Sozo Bijutsu), propelled by a disaffection with traditional Nihonga painting. 

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Folk Art’s faux-ish innocence

Contributed by Bill Arning / “Self Made: A Century of Inventing,” now on view at the American Folk Art Museum, asks a thorny question: Why does the descriptive term “self-taught” continue to resonate so strongly with dedicated fans of folk and outsider art? At its most basic, the term describes artists who did not attend traditional art schools. To be sure, these institutions embody uneasy contradictions. Tasked with encouraging free expression, they simultaneously prepare artists to attract patronage by targeting the moneyed class. But at their best, they embed young artists in an ongoing, object-based cultural conversation. So why are we so drawn to work that emerges outside their influence?

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Paul Klee, degenerate for the ages

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Branded a degenerate artist for his “insane childish scrawling” by the Nazis, Paul Klee, once anointed at the Bauhaus, left Germany for Switzerland in 1933. Scleroderma was already affecting his will and ability to paint, and his theretofore prodigious output waned. But as Germany’s onslaught in Europe effloresced into World War II, he regained purpose and productivity, yielding over 1,250 works in 1939, the year before his death. During this period, he downplayed his signature sublimation via color in favor of succinct line to expose the toxicity of fascism. Everything that concerned him as a citizen of the world seemed to catch light in his art. This valedictory turn is the subject of “Other Possible Worlds,” the Jewish Museum’s superbly curated show, uniquely centered on his final decade. 

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Miró’s far-reaching tutelage

Contributed by David Carrier / “Miró and the United States,” now up at The Phillips Collection, offers a useful take on an important, much-discussed issue: the origins of Abstract Expressionism. Joan Miró (1893–1983) taught many Americans how to make a successful abstract painting. Between the First and Second World Wars, when American artists were finding themselves, Miró’s work was a welcome and beneficial influence. The Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso and Matisse’s works from the early twentieth-century may have been greater. But, like Kandinsky, Miró provided…

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Grandma Moses’s simple world

Contributed by David Carrier / Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), who was born in Washington County, New York, and spent much of her adult life in Virginia before returning to upstate New York, has long been famous. The first American celebrity artist, she appeared on the covers of Life and Time and was portrayed as a celebrity in Norman Rockwell’s painting Christmas Homecoming (1948), which is included in the exhibition of her work currently on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Most people my age have seen reproductions of her artworks.

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Valerie Hegarty: Enlivening Emily Cole

Contributed by Bill Arning / The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill presents a conspicuous curatorial challenge. It no longer owns any of Cole’s major paintings and relies heavily on devoted visitors remembering his masterpieces sufficiently that encountering the rooms where they were conceived will hold interest. Given this, its single-artist focus, and fixed historical narrative, the museum also often invites contemporary artists to enliven the experience it offers. This approach can fail because if the living artist is reduced to little more than an interpretive prompt to appreciating a familiar figure. But Valerie Hegarty, with her devotion to an aesthetic of destruction infused with autobiographical trauma, is a truly provocative foil for the works of Emily Cole, Thomas Cole’s daughter. 

Continue Reading →
Ideas about Painting Museum Exhibitions

St. Francis at the Frick

Contributed by Ken Buhler / There is an unsubstantiated claim in Catholic lore that the number of books written about St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) is second only to the number written about Jesus. But keen interest in the life of St. Francis has been continuous. During his lifetime, his many followers had already established a religious order in his name. My particular interest began towards the end of the twentieth century, when my job in the Frick Collection afforded me many hours, essentially alone, in the galleries with Giovanni Bellini’s much-beloved St. Francis in the Desert, which depicts an ecstatic St. Francis in an idyllic landscape. 

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Kathy Butterly’s small-scale magnitude

Contributed by Bill Arning / Kathy Butterly’s largest survey to date could, in theory, be boring. Thirty-five years of work in the same medium – highly glazed porcelain and earthenware – always at conspicuously small-scale, from four to 14 inches, might sound stultifying. You could perhaps imagine some visitors, having glanced at a sea of colored dots arranged on three massive irregular platforms in roughly chronological order, anticipating a hard slog and a rapid escape.

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Wifredo Lam’s global reach

Contributed by Margaret McCann / “When I Don’t Sleep I Dream” at the Museum of Modern Art traces the odyssey of Afro-Asian Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam (1902–1982). His 20th-century oeuvre encompasses a prescient global combination of influences. Youthful talent afforded him portraiture study in Spain, where he remained for 15 years. But, like Goya, inclination and events pushed his art past appearances.

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

George Morrison, Native American modernist

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Before going to see “The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York” at the Met, I did not know a Native American artist had been part of the Abstract Expressionist movement. The 35 works in this exhibition include paintings and drawings made during Morrison’s two stints in New York – the first in the late 1940s, when he was in his early twenties, the second in the mid-1950s – along with paintings from his 1980s Horizon Series. The best paintings come from the artist’s New York years, when he was committed to full abstraction.

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

The Columbus Museum of Art’s clever tribute to Artemisia Gentileschi

Contributed by David Carrier / Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654) has been much celebrated for two generations, in a now vast critical literature. And she has had numerous museum shows, some large. Both the intrinsic quality of her paintings and her difficult and extraordinary life as a female Italian artist warrant the praise and attention are warranted. How then could the Columbus Museum of Art, which owns just one Gentileschi – Bathsheba (1635–37) – duly highlight her achievement in its current exhibition “Artemeisia Gentileschi: Naples to Beirut”? The story is remarkable. 

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

At the Guggenheim: Gabriele Münter’s enduring brilliance 

Contributed by David Carrier / The Guggenheim has frequently presented the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). Now, finally, the museum has provided the opportunity to celebrate Gabriele Münter (1877–1962), Kandinsky’s domestic partner of ten years and a fellow founder of the Blue Rider Group – the Munish-based network of artists that pioneered German Expressionism just before the First World War.

Continue Reading →
Intermedia Museum Exhibitions Solo Shows

Peter Doig’s tropical opera

Contributed by David Carrier / Upon entering Peter Doig’s show at Serpentine South Gallery in London, you see Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.), a vibrant depiction of a half-finished mural he photographed in the Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s capital city. If Henri Rousseau had actually gone to the tropics, and they had inspired him to intensify his pigments, he might have painted something like Doig’s three large-scale works, which feature sensuous, saturated colors depicting the Lion of Judah, a Rastafarian symbol, freed in the streets of the city.

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Ben Shahn’s vigilance

Contributed by Margaret McCann / Ben Shahn’s lifelong advocacy against poverty, racism, and fascism is showcased in his solo exhibition “Ben Shahn and Nonconformity,” now up at the Jewish Museum. With engaging documentation, an array of global topics are addressed in printmaking, photography, commercial art, and calligraphy – and some excellent paintings.

Continue Reading →
1 2 3 … 12