Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

According to the curators of Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History, the dominant themes of Spanish painting can be captured in fifteen categories ranging from art-historical genre (“Bodegones,” or still lifes) to those seemingly made to fit the loans received (“Flyers,” “Landscapes of Fire”). The curators took great—and controversial—license in liberating Spanish painting from the conventions of chronology, school, and patronage that usually provide the foundation for its presentation. However, if the resulting exhibition does not succeed in presenting the masterworks on view in a more memorable way, or in making them somehow more… Full Review

Of the diverse artistic specialties that developed in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century, architectural painting was the last, fully emerging only during the 1650s. Interior and exterior views of major local buildings—real or imagined—along with depictions of the larger built environment of the rapidly growing Dutch cities allowed artists to celebrate national power and prosperity while examining aspects of visual experience also explored in many landscapes and genre paintings of the period: space and the interaction of solids and voids as revealed within varying conditions of natural light. Particular artistic problems are posed, however, by the need to… Full Review

Of the myriad exhibitions mounted worldwide to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, Rembrandt and the Aesthetics of Technique at Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum stands out for its serious consideration of the very basis for such celebrations: the category of genius. Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator in the Department of Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts; William Robinson, Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings at the Fogg Art Museum; and their assistants deserve praise for resisting the temptation merely to trot out the museum’s Rembrandt holdings, or to organize yet another exhibition fixated on discriminating the hand of… Full Review

If large-scale exhibitions are a measure of an artist’s lasting success, then Yves Klein has admittedly fared better than some of his more neglected French peers. This is the third major exhibition of Klein’s work in a Paris museum since his death in 1962, and the second exhibition the Pompidou Center has devoted to the artist. Perhaps best known for his signature International Klein Blue (IKB) two-and-three dimensional works and his Anthropométries (1960–61), paintings resulting from his use of the nude female model as a “human paintbrush,” Klein still remains a contested figure despite the recognition he has received in… Full Review

Over the last few years, our knowledge of Tuscan painting in the late duecento has expanded considerably. In Siena, the recent unveiling of frescoes in the crypt of the cathedral has challenged our assumptions about late medieval Italian art. Previously unknown panel paintings have come to light as well, among them a dazzling small panel of the Enthroned Virgin and Child, recently acquired from a private collection by the National Gallery in London, and attributed to Cimabue by the National Gallery’s curator of early Italian art, Dillian Gordon. Gordon went on to associate the new acquisition with the closely related… Full Review

What if every new biennale mattered? Take Belief, for instance, the inaugural Singapore effort, which opened in September 2006. Headed by Fumio Nanjo, the new director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, Belief was curated by Nanjo and his three appointees: Roger McDonald, deputy director of Arts Initiative Tokyo; Sharmini Pereira, an independent curator based in London and Sri Lanka, and founder of Raking Leaves publishing; and Eugene Tan, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. The show was installed in over sixteen venues across town: from the National Museum to mosques, churches, and temples, from the defunct Tanglin… Full Review

Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images. Essays by Richard Armstrong, Stephanie Barron, Roberta Bernstein, Sara Cochran, Michel Draguet, Thierry de Duve, Pepe Karmel, Theresa Papanikolas, Noëllie Roussel, Dickran Tashjian, Lynn Zelevansky. Ghent and Los Angeles: Ludion and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2006. 256 pp; 250 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. $60.00 (cloth) (9055446211) The impetus behind the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the presence in the permanent collection of an iconic modernist painting, The Treachery of Images (1929), better known… Full Review

In Japan, Toyo Ito (born 1941) is considered one of the most important figures in post-War Japanese architecture. Based in Tokyo, he has valued both theory and practice, and has used each of them to perceptively articulate the implications of social change. In the 1970s, Ito reflected Japan’s technological enthusiasm, originally calling his firm URBOT, an abbreviation of “Urban Robot.” His work of this period ultimately culminated in Silver Hut, a high-tech aluminum home for his family, where windows were cranked shut by the kind of mechanisms found in automobiles of the time and people sat on airy, expanded-metal chairs… Full Review

It is unusual but probably auspicious for an exhibition to last from January to December, as Tradition and Transformation: Japanese Art 1860–1940 does. Presenting visually compelling images and well-documented histories, the exhibition offers a revealing glimpse into the formative decades of Japan’s emergence as a modernizing nation. The Museum of Fine Arts’ collecting of Japanese art can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, and is deeply indebted to the insight and generosity of a group of Bostonians, including Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, William Sturgis Bigelow, Charles Goddard Weld, and Deman Waldo Ross, all of whom traveled… Full Review

Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz navigates the unstable border between art and life. Among his well-known interventions are the ongoing paraSITE series in which he collaborates with urban homeless to design portable housing shelters that can be hooked up to a building’s exterior ventilation system (a working example was included in MoMA’s 2005 exhibition Safe: Design Takes on Risk) and 2001’s Rise, in which Rakowitz extended a duct from a nearby Chinese bakery into an exhibition space on New York’s Lafayette Street. His current project—a functioning store and import/export business located at 529 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn—is his most… Full Review