Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The second half of the sixteenth century in Iran and Turkey brought with it great interest in the art of bibliomancy and the utilization of pictures for prognostication. This is made abundantly clear by the recent splendid exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, which centered around four illustrated manuscripts (three written in Persian, one in Ottoman Turkish) dedicated to the art of divination. These four magnificent books contain a large number of paintings that were the focal point of the exhibition and catalogue. Throughout the show they were referred to as: the Dispersed Falnama, which… Full Review

Given the increasingly knotty exigencies of scheduling—much less securing and financing loans—it seems all but inevitable that more and more museums will be forced to feature shows culled from the oft-unseen resources of their permanent collections. Such proverbial icebox raiding was evident at the Hirshhorn of late—and to great consequence. Curated by Valerie Fletcher to fill an eleventh-hour programming gap, Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration featured nearly seventy works produced over almost as many years (from a 1917 sketch of workers’ houses to 1973’s comparatively monumental Variants), a number of which had never been exhibited previously. Augmented by select… Full Review

At first glance, the scale of Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, initially on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, belies its significance. The exhibition features photocollages, composed of cut-out albumen prints pasted into watercolored settings and assembled into albums by women (mostly) and men of the Victorian era. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibition contained works illustrating fifteen albums, some of which had been disassembled and not previously displayed together until this monumental undertaking. Individual pages from these disassembled albums lined the walls, while intact albums were displayed in cases. Wall decorations, composed of enlarged… Full Review

The exhibition (and accompanying catalogue) Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 sets out to convince viewers that it was a “singularly important year” in the artist’s career (9). In contrast, at a panel discussion on March 27, 2010, at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, curator Catherine Morris referred to 1950 as a “minor moment” in Hans Hofmann’s life. So which is it? After several visits and a thorough reading of the catalogue, it’s hard to say. While the year was clearly a momentous one for Hofmann (American, b. Germany, 1880–1966), it was only sometimes so for the reasons the curators suggest… Full Review

During the Tibetan Shrine exhibition at the Sackler gallery in Washington, DC, at the foot of the staircase leading into the museum’s subterranean atrium, a red gateway drew visitors toward a small opening on the opposite, neutral wall. Introductory wall text explained that what lay inside approximated a shrine that an elite family in Tibet might have had in their home. Comprised of objects collected over several decades by Alice Kandell, the single-room shrine installation was an adaptation of what one might encounter in her New York home. Upon visiting Sikkim as a young woman, Kandell became fascinated by Tibetan… Full Review

This exhibition and catalogue reassemble the surviving fragments of one of Paolo Veronese’s largest altarpieces, a work completed around 1565 for the cousins Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli to adorn the family’s chapel in San Francesco at Lendinara, a town west of Rovigo in the Po valley. The church no longer survives, and Veronese’s altarpiece had disappeared by 1795. The three largest fragments have been known to relate for more than a century, but only recently has Xavier Salomon recognized the small Head of an Angel in the Blanton Museum of Art as the missing archangel from the center. Thanks to… Full Review

In the first gallery of the Montclair Art Museum’s excellent and illuminating exhibition, Cézanne and American Modernism, two arresting views of Mont Sainte-Victoire from 1927 by the American artist Marsden Hartley flanked a painting by Paul Cézanne of the same subject, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (ca. 1897), an exemplary work by that artist, acquired by the Baltimore collector Claribel Cone in 1925. The comparison drawn between Cézanne and Hartley (same subject, related style) mirrored the strategy employed in the majority of the exhibition’s galleries, where affinities of subject matter and style or technique dictated the grouping… Full Review

J. Paul Getty purchased his first work of art, a painting, in 1931 and, eight years later, his first antiquity. Collector’s Choice: J. Paul Getty and His Antiquities, on view at the Getty Villa in Malibu, thus marked the seventieth anniversary of the initiation of a renowned and still-expanding collection. The exhibition was a natural for the museum, particularly since the construction of the Getty Center has allowed the Villa to devote itself entirely to the art of the ancient world. Where better to think about Getty’s collecting habits than deep inside the building he designed, an environment inspired… Full Review

The visual artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group are not so well known in the United States. The explanations for this are varied, but essentially boil down to the fact that few of them ever achieved fame here for their art. Roger Fry was best known for the pioneering art criticism he wrote in the early days of modernism; Vanessa Bell is most often portrayed as the artist sister of Virginia Woolf; Dora Carrington and Duncan Grant, both talented artists, typically earn brief mention as part of the broader group of creative individuals who formed part of the group. In… Full Review

Organized by Michael R. Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective offers the richest survey of this artist’s oeuvre in more than a quarter century. With nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, as well as some comparative works and materials, the exhibition traces the full range of Gorky’s career and amply demonstrates his critical importance as a late Surrealist on the threshold of Abstract Expressionism. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition unfolded chronologically through ten galleries, with several rooms large enough to… Full Review