Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

With a decade of solo exhibitions devoted to the work of nineteenth-century photographers Édouard Baldus (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), Gustave Le Gray (Bibliothèque nationale de France and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), and Roger Fenton (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), French and American museums succeeded in demonstrating that a focus on individual oeuvre, rather than period style, lent some much needed scholarly substance to the early history of photography. Given his significance to the medium’s history, it is a mystery as to why a similarly ambitious monograph on Charles Marville (1813–1879) had not been published until now. Curator Sarah… Full Review

No matter what the relationship between art and medicine, I would rather keep it on the aesthetic plain. . . . Why don’t you show your paintings and the thesis in a medical hospital —Betty Parsons, letter to Forrest Bess, 1958 Female patron: The paintings up there are amazing! Male patron: Did you look at the stuff in the middle? Female patron: No. Male patron: Super weird. —exchange in Berkeley Art Museum gift shop, September 2014 Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, the latest retrospective of Forrest Bess’s (1911–1977) work, is one animal on the… Full Review

As signaled by its title, visitors to the exhibition The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux learned that the artist (1827–1875) had many: an obsession for art at a young age; an enthusiasm for portraiture; a desire for major government-sponsored commissions; and fervor for work. His was also a life full of passions unrealized, as he died from pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-eight. Yet Carpeaux’s impact on nineteenth-century sculpture was significant. His works fill museums and streets in Paris and in his birthplace of Valenciennes, and he influenced a younger generation of sculptors, including Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin. … Full Review

“While George Seurat was the founder of the Neo-Impressionist movement, he was not the first to create portraits in the style”: so announces an initial wall text for Face to Face: The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886–1904 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, curated by Ellen W. Lee and Jane Block. These words accompany a line of four portraits (one by Vincent van Gogh, two by Albert Dubois-Pillets, and one by Achille Laugé), which in turn reveal exciting curatorial minds at work—Face to Face is not yet another exhibition with an object list recycling famous works by famous names. Despite Paul… Full Review

The Art of Video Games exhibition raises an intriguing question: How should a curator go about making the argument that a medium long associated with mass culture deserves to be taken seriously as an art form? Considering the possible approaches to such a situation, we can look to precedents—cinema provides an obvious analogue. Cinema’s initial tentative steps into the space of the museum during the first half of the twentieth century were governed by a conservative philosophy of curatorial selectivity: early exhibitions were often limited to a small group of exemplary works that seemed appropriately highbrow, appropriately challenging, and, importantly… Full Review

It is fitting that the first major retrospective of John Altoon’s work takes place in his hometown, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), since the show’s assembly necessitated considerable sleuthing by curator Carol S. Eliel, often with the aid of Altoon’s Los Angeles-based contemporaries. John Altoon, a compact show featuring eighteen works on canvas and fifty on paper or board, fills five galleries of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum and offers the first comprehensive look at the artist’s prolific oeuvre, or what remains of it (Altoon destroyed much of what he made during the short period… Full Review

For many, the high point of this retrospective of Josef Koudelka’s work will be the series of images of the Soviet invasion of Prague in August of 1968. The photographer had just returned to the city from a trip photographing Roma communities when the seven-day invasion began. Weaving in and among the crowds of protestors, his camera loaded with yards of East German movie film, he managed to capture the fragile power of such instances of collective heroism. Images of conflict between the heavily armed invading forces and the very human Czech resistance combine with those of cleverly detourned propaganda… Full Review

The exhibition A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography, along with curator Anne M. Lyden’s fine catalogue of the same name, bring together the remarkable photography collections of the Royal Collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, as well as one notable photograph from a private collection. The exhibition and in particular the catalogue’s essays are insightful and thought-provoking, raising a number of fascinating issues about art, class, democracy, power, tradition, gender, and ways of knowing and seeing in the photographic age. This opportunity to examine the birth of that period both… Full Review

Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection elegantly showcases a recent donation gifted to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It brings Native art into the spotlight alongside the institution’s diverse holdings from its permanent collection, and celebrates the beauty of objects often unknown to both the general art museumgoer and established art connoisseur. The exhibition features a large selection of ceramic works and textiles by Native artists from the southwestern United States, as well as pieces from the Pacific Northwest and the Great Plains. The title itself evokes images of the… Full Review

Just beyond the main galleries of the Art of the Americas Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is a small room featuring eight large painting by Sam Doyle (1906–1985). The paintings are created from everyday materials, making them distinct from the oil paintings, art deco objects, and mid-century modern furniture in the neighboring galleries. Using house paint on found wood and metal to create figurative and text-based paintings, Doyle portrayed famous African American entertainers and athletes as well as legendary figures, friends, and family from his Gullah birthplace on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. The intimate… Full Review