Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The first work of Olafur Eliasson’s that one encounters upon entering the atrium lobby of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is an ordinary fan swinging wildly just overhead. Mesmerizing and a bit menacing at the same time, the work, titled Ventilator (1997), serves as an introduction to a series of meticulously choreographed interactive installations that comprise the artist’s first major U.S. survey exhibition. I experienced a similar sense of heightened awareness when I visited Eliasson’s exhibition at the Musee d’art moderne de la ville de Paris five years ago. There, I had to cross a carpet of lava… Full Review

A Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting: The Art of Lin Fengmian was jointly organized by the Shanghai Art Museum and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The long-awaited exhibition consisted of paintings from the two museums as well as private collections. On display were the artist’s paintings from the 1930s to the 1980s. This retrospective presented Lin’s technical virtuosity and innovative spirit and reaffirmed his artistic authority in twentieth-century Chinese art. Lin Fengmian was born in 1900 in Guangdong province in China. He started his formal education locally and later went to Shanghai and joined a study program that… Full Review

Compared to his contemporaries such as Nicolas Poussin and Georges de la Tour, Philippe de Champaigne remains the one great painter of seventeenth-century France who has attracted little scholarly attention. Most scholarship reduces Champaigne’s artistic production to his portraits of Cardinal Richelieu and to his involvement with the Benedictine Convent of Port-Royal, seen as the stronghold of Jansenism in France and to which he gave his famous Ex-Voto (1662, cat. 57). Champaigne dominated both religious painting and portraiture in Paris from his arrival in the capital from his native Brussels in 1621 until his death in 1674. The… Full Review

Gelderland, Australian artist Stephen Bush's recent exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, revealed him to be someone who both embraces and perverts the academic training he received at the Royal Melbourne Institute in the 1970s. Simply put, Bush’s work examines the absurdity of rehearsing those academic conventions in the early twenty-first century on a continent straddling the Indian and Pacific oceans. Bush's postcolonial self-awareness is itself simultaneously romanticized and pathologized in the ongoing project in which he has been engaged since the early 1990s, specifically, his serial painting of an image titled The Lure of Paris. Inspired… Full Review

The superb exhibition Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum could hardly have been more timely. There has not been an exhibition devoted to Claude in the United States since the landmark 1982 retrospective at the National Gallery (H. Diane Russell, Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery, 1982). To formulate the current exhibition, Clark senior curator Richard Rand relied principally on the British Museum, which holds an unparalleled and uniquely comprehensive collection of Claude drawings. Encompassing the Richard Payne Knight collection of some three hundred nature and compositional drawings and Claude's own Liber Veritatis (the… Full Review

For over fifteen years Peggy Phelan’s astute characterization of performance art has remained persuasive. This is due in equal parts to the elegance of her formulation and to the radical social possibilities her understanding of the medium implies and permits. “Performance’s only life,” Phelan contends, “is in the present. Performance cannot,” she continues, “be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s… Full Review

The Smart Museum bears a long tradition of exhibiting the art of early twentieth-century Germany, a period of remarkable cultural, political, and social transformation. Exhibitions such as The German Print Portfolio, 1890–1930: Serials from a Private Sphere (1993) and Confronting Identities in German Art: Myths, Reactions, Reflections (2003) have explored different manifestations of this change across several themes, from the portfolio as a medium for visualizing personal experience to collective and individual notions of national identity from the nineteenth century through National Socialism. Living Modern: German and Austrian Art and Design, 1890–1933, curated by Richard A. Born, senior curator… Full Review

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is an international survey of artworks featuring radical subject matter, experimental processes, and aesthetic activism from the women’s movement. This exhibition is one of the first major retrospectives of women’s artwork from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. It also includes performance documents, interdisciplinary projects, and journals that reflect the many different political responses that gender discrimination provoked in the seventies. Since that decade, we have come to call this social revolution “feminism.” And like the social movement itself, this extensive collection of “early feminist art” reflects the complex set of issues and… Full Review

Annibale Carracci spent most of the twentieth century in relative obscurity, his reputation overshadowed by that of other artists from his era. Though he was acknowledged by Caravaggio as a fellow “true painter” (Bellori) and served as inspiration to an awestruck adolescent Bernini (Baldinucci), Annibale’s fame has steadily dwindled since the nineteenth century, when illustrious visitors on the Grand Tour waxed rhapsodic over his work and made pilgrimages to Bologna and Parma to admire his altarpieces. Despite Dennis Mahon’s Herculean efforts to bring Annibale and his academy back into the spotlight and Charles Dempsey’s explorations of the technical and… Full Review

The Prado’s exhibition on Tintoretto, mounted by curator Miguel Falomir, meets the standard that a show is justified by its educational value to both the specialist and the public. Occupying the central wing of the primo piano of the Prado, the exhibit is mounted spaciously and offers judicious juxtapositions of paintings, drawings, and technical data. While presenting itself as the first monographic exhibition for the artist since 1937, the show also disclaims any pretension to be complete. (During the Tintoretto anniversary year of 1994, the Accademia in Venice provided an exhibition of Tintoretto’s portraiture, at which time an itinerary of… Full Review