Recently Published Reviews

The 2014 Whitney Biennial, the last in the iconic Marcel Breuer building on New York's Upper East Side, is divided into three floors curated by Anthony Elms, Stuart Comer, and Michelle Grabner, respectively. Each floor has its own more-or-less open thematic, and little attempt is made to connect them aside from the premise that the curators come from outside of New York (Comer only recently took a job at the Museum of Modern Art). Nevertheless, the Whitney’s impending departure for its new Renzo Piano building downtown seems to have inspired artists throughout the exhibition to grapple with the histories, discourses… Full Review

A New Way Forward: Japanese Hanga of the 20th Century is a small exhibition, consisting of sixteen prints and one album, which will be rotated once during the course of the show. The exhibition allows viewers to compare styles and techniques in prints of the shin hanga lineage with those of the sōsaku hanga group. Shin hanga (new prints) as a practice was organized by Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885–1962) in Tokyo, who found artists willing to design prints with a Westernized drawing style, volume, atmosphere, and perspective on traditional themes, especially beauties (bijin), landscapes or cityscapes, and kabuki actors… Full Review

A monumental sculpture made with over two hundred recycled speaker boxes sourced from the Seattle area, William Cordova’s machu picchu after dark (pa’ victoria santa cruz macario sakay y aaron dixon) (2003–14) was shown at the Seattle Art Museum alongside the massive and largely historical exhibition Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and Moon. Organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, this exhibition claimed to survey 3000 years of art and culture from a civilization turned nation. A golden “octopus,” or eight-armed forehead ornament, from the Mochica culture, which had been stolen during the 1980s and repatriated… Full Review

Eva Hesse’s Washer Table (1967), a little-known and rarely exhibited work, stands in the middle of the four open gallery spaces of the Blanton Museum of Art’s exhibition Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt. Originally painted white with a gray grid, the squat, four-foot-square coffee table was constructed by LeWitt and given to Hesse as a gift. Hesse subsequently painted the table black and covered its surface in tight rows of rubber washers like those found in a hardware store. Despite the serial, orderly layout of the industrially manufactured circular forms, the pliable rubber material produces subtle ripples… Full Review

Curated by Amy Ingrid Schlegel, director of galleries and collections at Tufts University, Seeing Glacial Time: Climate Change in the Arctic asks the question: “how can something as gradual and imperceptible as climate change . . . be narrated or visualized to tell a story?”[1] The exhibition purports to provide one answer: “through artistic representations, rather than scientific visualizations, created with the aid of imaging technologies.” Participating artists Subhankar Banerjee, Olaf Otto Becker, Resa Blatman, Diane Burko, Caleb Cain Marcus, Gilles Mingasson, Joan Perlman, and Camille Seaman have produced new work for the exhibition or are showing Arctic-based work in… Full Review

“We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men.” —Description by Russian visitors to the Byzantine Church of Hagia Sophia, Constantinople/Istanbul. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, eds. and trans., Samuel H. Cross and Olgerd Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953, 110–11. A clumsy cross etched into the forehead of a serene sculpted head of Aphrodite; a small amulet case that could… Full Review

The March 1968 cover of Life magazine featured a large black-and-white photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe above a headline declaring her a “pioneer painter.” O’Keeffe is pictured in profile, her face lined and back curved as she leans forward with arms crossed, dressed simply in black. She sits in front of an adobe chimney, and behind her a wide, open sky and stark desert landscape stretch uninterrupted. The Life magazine cover helped cement O’Keeffe’s public image as an iconic American painter of the Southwest, a popular understanding of the artist that has persisted into the present day. Modern Nature:… Full Review

The Frick Collection has positioned itself as one of the premier forums for the study and exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque bronze sculpture. Past exhibitions have focused on single artists as well as on individual collections: Willem van Tetrode (2003), Andrea Riccio (2008), Antico (2012), the private Quentin collection (2004), and a selection from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2005). With Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection, curated by Patricia Wengraf, the Frick adds to this impressive list with the first public exhibition of the formidable bronze collection of Janine and J. Tomilson Hill. The collection… Full Review

Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa presents work by twenty-three South African artists and artistic collaborators. The several dozen works in the exhibition span sixty years worth of production in media ranging from photography and performance documentation to installation, print, and drawing. The exhibition places contemporary South African artists in conversation with several apartheid-era photographers including Ian Berry, Ernest Cole, and David Goldblatt. This dialogue proposes intimacy—a concept as complex and open to interpretation as the countless lives that enact it—as an aesthetic instrument prevalent in contemporary South African art and prefigured in these earlier photographic… Full Review

In the time since Sarah Blake McHam lamented the relative dearth of scholarship on Italian Renaissance sculpture in her introduction to Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) (click here for review), the field has been enriched by a number of voices and publications, as well as the application of new interpretive methodologies. The same period has also seen a striking number of international exhibitions devoted to Italian sculpture in marble, bronze, and terra cotta, so these extraordinarily heavy and unwieldy works have been transported and recontextualized, at least temporarily, as indeed frequently happened… Full Review

Intimate Impressionism from the National Gallery of Art is an exhibition of small pictures. By the same token, it is an exhibition about small pictures. Scale matters. Only, for it to matter, for it to develop as an orientation, we have first to break with the usual connotations that accrue to it as a criterion of judgment. Small pictures have their way of drawing us in, of revealing different kinds of relations of people to things; they ask that we view them up close, intimately. In a word, small pictures belong to the interior. That, it would seem, is the… Full Review

The title of John Ott’s book, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority, is a riff on Sarah Burns’s important Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Ott covers much the same ground chronologically as Burns and with the same high ambitions. But while Burns’s focus is a traditional one on the artist as the maker of meaning, Ott turns his attention to the patron. Ott argues that for the most part Americanists have labored in the shadow of Thorstein Veblen… Full Review

Eve Meltzer’s Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn returns readers to the structuralist adventure in art history. To recall something of the stakes and texture of that adventure, consider the following exchange in 1976 between Robert Morris, an artist, and A. A., a blind woman hired to assist him with a series of drawings entitled Blind Time II. [R. M.:] “Letting the page stand as a ground for yourself, an analog, letting the space of the page stand as an analog for yourself—” [A. A.:] “Where are you getting this?” … Full Review

An ambitious statement about American art, Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology examines the intersection of institutional critique, a practice entailing a structural analysis of museums and the art market, and appropriation, a mechanism of recontextualizing found images and ideas. Curators Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton show that the two, despite having originated from distinct strategies of practice and consecutive historical periods (the 1970s and 1980s), have overlapped significantly, as reflected in their reception by the generation of artists that followed. Although the two movements have typically been understood as extending from Conceptual art, the exhibition highlights the… Full Review

The work of the painter René Magritte is well known, if not as art, then at least as image. Magritte himself claimed that looking at a reproduction of his works was every bit as good as looking at a painting. The exhibition Magritte: Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 sets out to disprove this notion, foregrounding the materiality of Magritte’s work alongside his conceptual preoccupations. Foremost among those preoccupations is the resistance—even refusal—of Magritte’s painted objects to operate according to their material constrictions. And so the Menil has set up an appropriately counterintuitive project—the exhibition is physically grounded in our perception… Full Review