Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Not too many years ago, the story of American art as characterized in survey courses and other summary narratives was told in an apologetic tone. How could one make a case for the importance or singularity of a nation’s output before there was a nation and in the face of a European model then characterized as a teleological progression of ever-increasing artistic greatness? John Singleton Copley’s (1738–1815) story was frequently presented as the pinnacle of colonial uncertainty and inferiority. His output was cast as British art but lesser; the epistolary reviews from Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West of A… Full Review

At the most superficial level, Edward Hopper’s paintings represent modern American life as a series of moments oscillating along a continuum between solitude and desolation via loneliness, isolation, and alienation and back again. As the drawings, paintings, prints, and ephemera included in Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) attest, those oscillations can generate a curious sense of longing that endures well after one departs the gallery spaces. The exhibition, a version of which opened at the Whitney Museum of Art in May 2013, features a small portion of the 2,500 drawings included in the… Full Review

Twenty-first-century media is marked by the rise of social networks and the concomitant tools to analyze and manipulate the data produced and transmitted through those networks. The work of R. Luke DuBois has emerged within this milieu, and his explorations of mass media and popular culture amid a world of unprecedented shared cultural production and exponentially proliferating data have provided a rich body of work over a relatively short period of time. In a span of just over a decade, DuBois has produced an abundant and varied oeuvre, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art has gathered that… Full Review

Agnes Martin: Before the Grid offered a rare opportunity to examine a selection of Martin’s artwork made before the iconic grid paintings she began around 1960. Martin destroyed much of her early work; for her, only the grids successfully embodied the authorial detachment and holistic union of painterly elements she sought in her practice. Despite the obvious curatorial challenges caused by Martin’s acts of destruction, the exhibition’s organizers, Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman, presented a visually rich selection of approximately two dozen paintings and works on paper depicting standard modernist genres—a still life, landscapes, portraits, and Surrealist abstractions—as well as… Full Review

Beauty Revealed is the first exhibition dedicated to Chinese paintings of meiren (beautiful women), a subject that is as complex and fraught as the English translation. Consisting of twenty-eight paintings drawn from eleven private and institutional collections in the United States, Canada, and Europe, it explores a genre of painting that appeared during the late Ming and continued in the Qing dynasty (seventeenth-to-late eighteenth century). Organized by Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White, in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley, Professor Emeritus James Cahill, the exhibition occupies the larger galleries in the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum… 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