Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The Berthouville Treasure, discovered by a farmer in Normandy, France (ancient Gaul), in 1830, represents one of the largest and best-preserved collections of Roman silver to survive from the ancient world. The objects, most of which date to the second and third centuries CE, were found within the confines of a large sanctuary to the god Mercury, and functioned as votive objects. The treasure, on loan from the Département des Monnaies, médailles et antiques of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is on display as part of the exhibition Ancient Luxury and the Roman Silver Treasure from Berthouville at the Getty… Full Review

Billed as the “first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to contemporary art of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora,” Memory, Place, Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi Diaspora is the culmination of a year-long series of events and programs that took place during 2014 at Haverford College. Initiated by Visiting Associate Professor Carol Solomon, the program included an undergraduate curatorial praxis seminar (spring 2014), two Mellon-funded artists’ residencies (March 2014), an exhibition at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (fall 2014), and a fully illustrated catalogue. Solomon curated the two-month-long exhibition in collaboration with her seminar students, who… Full Review

In K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood’s video installation New Report: Morning Edition (2005), viewers watch two female newscasters, Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), listlessly deliver news of their everyday lives. Dressed in all black, turtlenecks topped by berets, they sport the costume of revolutionaries: the Black Panthers, Patty Hearst, Che Guevara—Audrey Hepburn, in Funny Face. Otherwise covered up, one has exposed her breast, the other her crotch, to live-feed cameras. Monitors on either side of the central projection broadcast these feeds zoomed in and close-up. Neither salacious nor erotic, this full disclosure self-surveillance, this technological intimacy effectively… Full Review

“My name is Talky Tina . . . and I’m going to kill you.” In 1963, Morton Bartlett, a freelance commercial photographer based in Boston, carefully disassembled and packed up the dolls of children he had painstakingly made over the previous twenty-eight years. He wrapped these painted plaster creations in newspaper along with the assorted outfits and undergarments he had designed and tailored for them, interring everything in wooden crates in a locked cabinet in his home. There they remained, consigned to darkness for decades, together with numerous graphite drawings of children and hundreds of photographs of his creations staged… Full Review

Madame Cézanne was an unprecedented, likely once-in-a-lifetime exhibition that spotlighted Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his wife, Hortense Fiquet. Organized by Dita Amory, Acting Associate Curator in Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show sought to revise misconceptions, especially about the artist’s affection, or lack thereof, for his wife, and reinvigorate general and scholarly interest in this group of work. To that end, it presented twenty-four of the twenty-nine known portraits of Hortense and contextualized them with less formal graphite sketches, watercolors, and one of her few extant letters. In addition, an… Full Review

Because the few grand tapestries of the early modern period that survive are frail and rarely exhibited, we forget that they were the most luxurious and prized of art forms among European elite, far costlier than painting or sculpture. So it is rare to encounter not one but four monumental Flemish tapestries in the remarkable exhibition Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The four belong to a series of twenty tapestries, known as The Triumph of the Eucharist, commissioned in the 1620s by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, Habsburg princess and Spanish… Full Review

This exhibition and accompanying catalogue of Andrew Wyeth paintings illustrating views looking out of and through windows are the most recent examples of a sea change in scholarship on the artist. In 1977, Robert Rosenblum called Wyeth at once the most overrated and underrated artist of the twentieth century (cited in Henry Adams, “Wyeth’s World,” Smithsonian Magazine [June 2006]: 84–92). Wanda Corn has labeled the critical and academic hostility to Wyeth’s work throughout much of the second half of the twentieth century “the Wyeth curse.” In 2005, Anne Classen Knutson organized a session called “Rethinking Andrew Wyeth” at the College… Full Review

Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and presented by Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art opened at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in a festival-like manner and included two densely installed museum galleries and a plethora of performances presented in the sculpture garden. At the Walker, Radical Presence featured thirty-six artists—one less than the original showing in Houston due to conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s public and controversial self-removal from the exhibition. Predominantly hashed out during the New York leg of the exhibition’s tour, not much beyond posting the ARTnews article on the subject was made of the… Full Review

In 1911, while viewing new works by the emerging Viennese Expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890–1918), Albert Paris von Gütersloh suggested that Schiele’s paintings “yearn only for gestures”—an observation that epitomizes the very crux of Schiele’s varied portraits, with their enigmatic visual language of the human body (Albert Paris von Gütersloh, Egon Schiele, Vienna: Brüder Rosenbaum, 1911, 1). Gütersloh, who was a fellow artist, writer, and critic in turn-of-the-century Vienna, was aware of the power of these signs early in Schiele’s career; thus, it is not surprising that Schiele later captured Gütersloh’s likeness (and hand gestures) in a number of… Full Review

In Other Primary Structures, Jens Hoffmann’s recent exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the presence of Primary Structures, a show organized by Kynaston McShine at the same museum in 1966, was felt through text and images. Most aggressively, photographic murals of installation views from the earlier exhibition pervaded the galleries. Larger-than-life-size, the images reached from floor to ceiling. In these period photographs, canonical works of Minimalism were pictured, including a Sol LeWitt untitled cube from 1966, Walter De Maria’s stainless steel Cage (1961–65), and Carl Andre’s long row of firebricks, Lever (1966), among others. Instead of being pasted directly… Full Review