Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 was a splendid exhibition covering the period from the time Columbus arrived until the moment when emerging nations from Chile to Mexico moved toward independence. Showing it in three dramatically different venues—Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—resulted in three profoundly different statements. In Philadelphia one simply gasped to see such luxury from so many fabulously wealthy colonies (mostly Spanish and Portuguese). When visitors walked through the Mexican show, however, they noticed something different: a preponderance of Mexican works, with the less numerous objects from the Andes, Brazil, and other nations positioned as if to… Full Review

Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830 is the companion publication to the best and most comprehensive exhibition of portraits, and indeed of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European art, not to have come to the United States in a long time. The show, conceived by the late Robert Rosenblum and MaryAnne Stevens, was originally intended to travel to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in addition to the Grand Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. But construction issues at the Guggenheim prompted the cancellation of the U.S. venue, and the exhibition stayed in… Full Review

In the spring of 1944 the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the exhibition Modern Cuban Painters; it was the first time that modern Cuban art was presented in the international arena. Organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., with assistance from the Cuban art critic José Gómez Sicre, the exhibition was a success with the public as well as the critics. Although limited to the work of only thirteen painters, Modern Cuban Painters remains a seminal moment in the history of Cuban art. Since then there have been over twenty exhibitions focused on Cuban art that have… Full Review

The story behind this unusual, revealing, and enjoyable exhibition and accompanying catalogue begins with the voyage, in May 2003, of a life-size painting, fifteen-feet across, of an exotic, two-ton beast. Rolled up in storage for a century and a half, this all-but-forgotten portrait of a celebrity rhinoceros arrived in Los Angeles that month from the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, in the former German Democratic Republic, to be conserved at the Getty Museum and readied for permanent exhibition back home in Schwerin. The voyage of the painting mirrors another, earlier voyage—that of the animal herself. Born in India and brought to… Full Review

Gerald and Sara Murphy were admired—adored—by many of the best-known members of the transatlantic avant-garde in the 1920s. John Dos Passos, their frequent guest both in Paris and on the Riviera, wrote happily of being “entertained . . . with great elegance and a great deal of gin fizz.” For Fernand Léger, Gerald was “the only American painter in Paris.” F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is the Night to them; the novel’s protagonists, the Divers, were modeled on the Murphys. Perhaps the best indicator of the breadth of their sparkling circle is a souvenir menu from a party they threw… Full Review

Bernini pittore, the title of the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s painterly practice as well as of the accompanying catalogue, is a provocative reconstruction of this lesser-known aspect of the Baroque artist’s multidisciplinary career. Conceived and curated by Tomaso Montanari for the recently restored Palazzo Barberini in Rome, the comprehensive exhibit and catalogue offer a new monograph on Bernini’s painting under a purposely familiar title. Montanari’s version of “Bernini pittore” is preceded by two catalogue raissonnée of the same name: Luigi Grassi’s pioneering monograph, Bernini pittore (Rome: Danesi, 1945), and the recent book by Francesco Petrucci, Bernini… Full Review

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, curated by Okwui Enwezor, explores a variety of ways in which contemporary artists appropriate, investigate, and reconfigure archival materials and structures. It focuses on photography and film while at the same time conducting, as Enwezor argues in his catalogue essay, “critical transactions” against “the exactitude of the photographic trace” (11). The term “archive” is thus meant to suggest not the literal image of a dusty file cabinet full of old documents but, following Michel Foucault’s influential The Archaeology of Knowledge (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan… Full Review

I kept the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) title photograph of Joseph Cornell at work as the main wallpaper on my cell phone for over a month. It is a wonderful and unexpected image: a forty-four-year-old Cornell leans over an uncluttered worktable, where the empty shell of a large box and a few art supplies are neatly laid out. The lean frame of the artist forms a silhouette of dark hair and clothing against a white paper backdrop. It looks totally staged—somewhere between a cooking demo and a magic act. Perhaps it was the jolt of seeing a… Full Review

Pompeo Batoni (Lucca 1708–Rome 1787) was one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most famous artists, lionized by popes, princes, and connoisseurs who saw his poetic and technically dazzling art as the acme of Italian painting and wore a path to his studio in one of Rome’s most fashionable districts. That simple fact bears stating, given how far Batoni’s star would sink among later generations; Sir Joshua Reynolds’s prediction that the artist would soon fall into near oblivion seems justified by the sale of a distinguished painting in 1928 for just £2. Few of his pictures were on view to the general public… Full Review

bq. “. . . this slumber of forgetfulness will not last forever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past.” (Petrarch, Africa, IX, 453–7, quoted by Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Westview Press, 1960, 10) Petrarch’s concluding words to his epic poem Africa are equally applicable to Ghiberti studies. Long under the dark shadows of Richard Krautheimer and John Pope-Hennessy, Lorenzo Ghiberti and his magnificent Gates of Paradise from the Florentine Baptistery are finally being seen in a… Full Review