Recently Published Reviews

As the Great Recession demonstrated, membership in the U.S. middle class is tenuous and perhaps only temporary. Real wages have been declining for decades, but the deceptive practices of Wall Street mortgage brokers leading to the financial collapse of 2008 proved particularly detrimental by stripping more than a million households of the defining badge of middle-class rank, that is, owning a single-family house on a small plot of land. Twelve times as many owed more on their mortgage than their homes were worth in late 2011. This recent painful history has not only crushed families but has undermined faith in… Full Review

The “colossal” in the title of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal refers to the size of the monumental objects she examines, as well as to the scale of their production, the range of their reproduction in images and models, and the scope of their reception over time and across the Atlantic Ocean. This book is about big things as much as it is about the broad visual culture of those big things. In six chapters, the reader travels from Egypt to France to the United States and Panama… Full Review

Robert Motherwell: Early Collages gathered the artist’s most important works in that medium from 1943 through 1951. Expertly directed by Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim, New York, the exhibition included many pieces that had not been shown publicly for decades and demonstrated the pivotal role that collage played in Motherwell’s early career. The artist was unique among those of his generation in creating important collages throughout his life. The first impression yielded by the exhibition was Motherwell’s immediate and intense identification with the medium as well as his willingness to experiment in it. For instance, Joy… Full Review

Upon entering Pierre Huyghe’s extraordinary retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, curated by Emma Lavigne, the visitor encounters a tall, abstract, concrete sculpture covered with marks of time and material deterioration. The sculpture, titled Mère Anatolica 1, is not by Huyghe but by Parvine Curie, who produced it in 1975 as part of an event at the College Pierre de Coubertin de Chevreuse, a junior high school that Huyghe attended. Huyghe moved the sculpture from its outside location at the school into the enclosed south gallery of the Pompidou. In the background the visitor hears sound extracts from one day… Full Review

A gray day is a good day to visit the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado. Against the museum’s cast concrete walls, natural lighting, and textured cement surfaces, Still’s paintings give off a luminous glow that recalls the artist’s own statement, “You can turn the lights out. The paintings will carry their own fire” (Clyfford Still, letter to Betty Freeman, December 14, 1960; Betty Freeman Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). As a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, Still’s influence has without question helped define the history of abstract painting. The exhibition Red, Yellow, Blue (and Black and White)… Full Review

For more than fifty years, studies of Spanish art have disproved the myth that peninsular artists did not draw. While some Spaniards drew very little—most notably El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Diego Velázquez—others drew a great deal. Francisco de Goya, for example, was a remarkably prolific draftsman. Nevertheless, curators and historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to assume that the scarcity of Spanish drawings in European collections compared to those by Italian or Dutch Old Masters evinced a national dislike for draftsmanship or, worse yet, an essential Spanish passion that did not lend itself to disegno… Full Review

The first career retrospective of Waltercio Caldas, The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas, at the Blanton Museum of Art, and co-organized with the Fundação Iberê Camargo, was shaped by two framing devices before the viewer even set eyes on the art. First, upon entering the museum the visitor was offered headphones and an iPod to listen to music selected by the Brazilian artist. The playlist featured Brazilian bossa nova, jazz, and minimal music from the United States, along with European classical music—all “favorites” of the artist. The booklet with the names of the musicians and… Full Review

This international loan exhibition presents a nuanced understanding of Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra's life and work in California, contextualizing it within a broader discussion of the Spanish colonial enterprise in New Spain (the formal name of Spanish colonial North America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, including parts of what is today California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida until Mexican independence in 1821). Born in Petra, Mallorca, in 1713, Serra took vows as a Franciscan priest as a young man. Adept at scholarly teaching and writing, he became a professor of philosophy and religion prior to his calling to… Full Review

It is appropriate that State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, the wonderful, timely, necessary exhibition curated by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, was at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which in the context of the New York art world is as far away psychologically from the gallery districts of Chelsea and the Lower East Side and the museums of Midtown and the Upper East Side as Los Angeles and San Francisco and other hotbeds of California art are geographically. The parochialism of New York—Manhattan, really—is well known, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just… Full Review

During its time at the Musée d’Orsay L’impressionnisme et la mode elicited a flurry of anxious reviews from French critics and journalists, who sketched connections between the museum’s approximately twenty-eight-million-dollar facelift, the decline of public funding for museums, the institution’s increasingly liberal loan policy, and the need to generate revenue through ticket sales and private sponsorships—which, in the case of L’impressionnisme et la mode, was fittingly provided by Christian Dior and the French multinational luxury goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton. (LVMH is Dior’s parent company; the financial interests of the two companies are intimately intertwined.) Indeed, from the… Full Review

In Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750–1870, Suzanne Glover Lindsay takes an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of modern funerary sculpture in France—how it functioned historically, culturally, and aesthetically. The book places new emphasis on the dynamic that existed between tomb cult and the funerary arts, highlighting contemporary French attitudes toward death and burial as a result of Enlightenment thought and the Revolution of 1789. To frame this discussion, Lindsay focuses on a specific type of funerary sculpture—the recumbent effigy depicting the deceased in death—from its consideration and dismissal in France around 1750… Full Review

We often speak about Michelangelo’s influence on other artists as an active force to which later artists merely yielded. Morten Steen Hansen’s In Michelangelo’s Mirror turns the equation around, making Michelangelo’s work the object that later artists use for their own varied purposes. He focuses on three artists—Perino del Vaga, Daniele da Volterra, and Pellegrino Tibaldi—who knew each other in Rome, but this intelligent study is not about their connections to each other. Rather, Hansen considers their references to Michelangelo’s art as part of the discourse about the older artist’s work that took on particular urgency after the unveiling of… Full Review

Chris Burden: Extreme Measures at the New Museum, the Los Angeles-based artist’s first major museum exhibition in the United States in twenty-five years and his first solo museum show in New York, is a boy’s dream come true. Organized by Lisa Phillips with Massimiliano Gioni and Jenny Moore, the show presents a grown-up man playing with toys. The difference is that, this time around, Burden’s adolescent universe gets a big injection of money, engineering, and industriousness. Even if the exhibition does not directly address issues of gender, the male-oriented sensibility is felt all over. Everything is presented in a large-scale… Full Review

Of the many urban operations that contributed to making modern Paris, the construction of the Halles Centrales (Central Markets; 1854–74) was among the largest, most radical, and most influential projects undertaken as part of the Second Empire renovation of the city. Designed by the academically trained architect Victor Baltard (1805–1874), the Halles Centrales required the rebuilding of an entire neighborhood in the heart of the French capital. Planned on a regular grid and linked by covered streets, Baltard’s iron market pavilions were designed to provide for the efficient transaction of commerce and remained in operation until 1969. For a couple… Full Review

What constitutes live/performance art today? The terms and definition(s) have always been slippery. In the past, live art was a large, interdisciplinary umbrella that included body art, interactive installation, postmodern dance, post-dramatic theater, time-based work, and performance video. Live art has also included the work and products of artistic collectives, interventionist work, relational aesthetics, eco art, social practice, institutional critique, and, recently, reenactment. Live art is further related to a burgeoning category in academic writing that is known as performance studies and which includes contributions from scholars who locate their disciplinary home in theater, fine arts, art history, dance, anthropology… Full Review