Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Halfway through the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line, viewers craned their necks back to take in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901–02). The monumental painting was reproduced some twenty feet off the ground in the museum’s lofty galleries. The installation approximated the original 1902 display in the Viennese Secession Building where Klimt and his collaborators paid homage to the composer. As one scans the work, gaunt, floating genii on the first wall give way to severe, cowering gorgons on the center panel and an enormous primate glowering dumbly out of a pile of auburn hair… Full Review

Asa Berger’s book An Anatomy of Humor divides comedy into four general functional categories: language, logic, identity, and action (Asa Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993, 6). He then further breaks the collective identity into fourteen individual types of humor that deal with character: before/after, burlesque, caricature, eccentricity, embarrassment, exposure, grotesque, imitation, impersonation, mimicry, parody, scale, stereotype, and unmasking (7). To walk through the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), curated by the Museum… Full Review

Jason Cytacki’s visually compelling cowboy paintings, on view at the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, New York, have appeal for diverse audiences: lovers of art of the American West, classic Western movie buffs, and those fascinated with Americana. The exhibition, Enduring Legend, Fragile Myth: Cowboy Paintings by Jason Cytacki, is comprised of twenty-two paintings in three related series, which are intermingled in one gallery. The first series—the toy series—is from Cytacki’s MFA thesis, and consists of six large paintings, which are based on photographs of dioramas that feature toy cowboys placed in suburban neighborhoods. The… Full Review

Two recent exhibitions, Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fowler Museum, and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), complicate and extend previous scholarship on the Chicano art movement, focusing in particular on the theme of artistic collectives. While previous analyses of the group Asco (such as C. Ondine Chavoya’s essay “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderberg, ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 189–208) emphasize the fact… Full Review

Anyone who approaches Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), expecting to encounter the familiar collection of lush, awe-inspiring photographs of monumental Earthworks remotely situated in the American Southwest (concomitant with the usual array of drawings, models, and videos documenting these iconic projects) finds instead a hugely informative and compelling exhibition that considerably broadens her or his conception of this tendency that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organized by Phillip Kaiser, MOCA's senior curator, who has since left Los Angeles to become director… Full Review

Although Willem de Kooning has been a central figure in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) canon for over sixty years, he has never fit comfortably into the story of modern art it has advanced. Accordingly, in de Kooning: A Retrospective, MoMA presents de Kooning as a difficult artist whose work has long been misunderstood. Organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, the retrospective offers a new interpretation that aims to challenge many of the generally accepted ideas about de Kooning's life and work, from his initial critical reception to the significance of his controversial… Full Review

The three museums that hosted The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900 appeared to be staging three different exhibitions. Curators Stephen Calloway at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Yves Badetz at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris championed the late blooming “decadent” aspect of the Aesthetic Movement that the Victorians derided, contending that it was the definitive expression of an aesthetic disposition. Calloway’s curatorial selections and catalogue essays highlighted sensuous works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and Aubrey Beardsley, among others. Unlike Badetz, however, he recreated period rooms and crowded the V&A’s exhibition galleries with… Full Review

Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism is an intimate exhibition. Circumscribed in both scale and subject, it is in turn satisfying and disturbing for the keyhole access and insights it offers into the life and art of two of European Surrealism’s notable American exponents during their brief, fecund, and often tempestuous creative partnership and love affair. Man Ray and Lee Miller were together in Paris from 1929 to 1932, three short years. But like a pebble that life casually skipped on the water, this particular time and place instigated ripples and reverberations for both protagonists and, this exhibition… Full Review

Gathering close to eighty assemblages, collages, lithographs, reliefs, and sculptures made between 1918 and 1947, as well as a partial replica of the Merzbau installation, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is the first large-scale retrospective in the United States of Schwitters’s work since John Elderfeld’s 1985 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Here at the Berkeley Art Museum, where I saw it, it is also the first big retrospective of his work to reach the West Coast. Isabel Schulz, coeditor of Schwitters’s catalogue raisonné, curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive, and executive director of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung at… Full Review

Two recent exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) offer opportunities to contemplate the changing face of Mexican art in relation to issues of nationalism and identity. With curatorial assistance at SDMA from Amy Galpin and Julia Marciari-Alexander, Mexican Modern Painting from the Andrés Blaisten Collection presents eighty paintings from the first half of the twentieth century, complementing the San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection by including works by many of the same artists, such as Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Rufino Tamayo, and Alfredo Ramos Martínez. Although the exhibition loosely situates these works within the context of… Full Review