Henri Labrouste, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1838–50, Paris. Photo: Michel Nguyen.

“Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought To Light”

MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through June 24
Curated by Barry Bergdoll, Corinne Bélier, and Marc Le Coeur

In his essay for the volume accompanying the Museum of Modern Art’s 1975 show “The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts,” Neil Levine sought to recover the “architectural legibility” of Henri Labrouste’s self-consciously precise drawings, which, Levine ruefully noted, had been “rarely unrolled and examined in detail.” This first solo exhibition in the United States of the challenging nineteenth-century French architect’s work is the occasion for unrolling them once again at moma, in a gathering of two hundred items: rarely seen drawings, photographs, models, and Labrouste’s own box of drafting tools. A catalogue with essays by each curator, as well as by Levine and David Van Zanten, will further illuminate the solecistic inventiveness of this student of the École who at once brilliantly articulated and subtly but forcefully undermined its classical orthodoxies. The exhibition debuted at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris, where it remains on view through January 7.

— Edward Eigen

“Koloman Moser: Designing Modern Vienna, 1897–1907”

NEUE GALERIE NEW YORK - MUSEUM FOR GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN ART
NEW YORK
Through September 2
Curated by Christian Witt-Dörring

Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, and Egon Schiele are now household names, so excavated has the Viennese Secession been this past half century. To that roll call of eminences, we may now add Koloman Moser (1868–1918), the subject of this comprehensive survey, the designer’s first institutional show in the US. In 1903, already famous as a contributor to the Secessionist publication of sacred rites and adolescent rut Ver Sacrum, Moser went on to cofound the storied Wiener Werkstätte, whose textile, furniture, ceramics, wallpaper, and jewelry ateliers mixed nature and geometry, their patterns symbolizing the rationalism and luxury of the Austrian haute bourgeoisie. The Neue Galerie exhibition will gather at least 230 of Moser’s works, in all of the above media and more, and will occasion a catalogue with several scholarly essays on this brilliant if undercelebrated artist’s triumphs.

Travels to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Sept. 29, 2013–Jan. 12, 2014.

— Robert Pincus-Witten

Jason Lazarus, Untitled, 2011, found photos, board, blanket, tape, hardware, 33 x 29".

Jason Lazarus

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
CHICAGO
Through June 18
Curated by Steven L. Bridges

In 2006, the MCA Chicago gave Jason Lazarus his first institutional solo exhibition. He was known then as a photographer, and he’s sort of still known as one now, but as this display of new and recent work should clarify, Lazarus is not a photographer in any conventional sense. Re-created protest signs from Occupy Wall Street demonstrations will be available for museumgoers to shoulder during their visit; a music student will learn a Chopin nocturne live on a piano installed in the gallery; photos found in a New Orleans antiques shop after Hurricane Katrina will be hung on the wall, still taped up in their packing blanket. Images become afterimages, permanence gives way to becoming, pictures are retired—and Lazarus thus proposes ways to practice photography critically in an image-saturated society.

— Lori Waxman

“William Pope.L: Forlesen”

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
CHICAGO
Through June 23
Curated by Susanne Ghez

William Pope.L’s first solo exhibition in Chicago since moving to the city takes its title from science fiction writer Gene Wolfe’s 1974 short story “Forlesen.” Much like Wolfe’s allegorical, nested narrative in which a lifetime of negotiating a corporate bureaucracy occurs in a single day, Pope.L constructs his own labyrinthine exhibition space within the gallery: Drawings hang on successively larger walls, which together form a spaceship-like or phallic shape. Inside the shaft’s head, stacked monitors play cropped and abstracted porn from the 1980s and ’90s, and next to the installation stands Du Bois Machine, 2013, a statue of the father of twentieth-century African American intellectual thought from the waist down that plays a sound track of Pope.L’s own biography narrated by a teenage girl. Enveloping the viewer in an apparatus of masculinist sexuality, cleaved and hewn, this show will surely be the artist’s most manifestly libidinous presentation to date.

— Thomas J. Lax

Eric Owen Moss Architects, Samitaur, 1996, Los Angeles.

“A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture From Southern California”

THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY (MOCA)
LOS ANGELES
Through July 29
Curated by Christopher Mount

There is a certain irony in using the rubric of “sculpturalism” to encapsulate the influential architecture that has emerged from Southern California in recent decades, because its sculptural quality is now probably its least defining characteristic; its once-novel forms—and the pioneering digital technologies that enable them—have become ubiquitous, and what previously had the cachet of a local style has become a global export. Fortunately, the region’s architecture has always been distinguished above all by its heterogeneity and restless experimentation, so this show and extensive catalogue, focusing on thirty designers, including LA legends Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne and a host of emerging talents, are sure to offer more than one way to keep the field moving forward long after it leaves sculpture behind.

— Julian Rose

Jef Raskin with an installation of his “Bloxes,” University of California, San Diego, 1969. From “Everything Loose Will Land.” Photo: David Wing.

“Everything Loose Will Land”

MAK CENTER FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE, MACKEY GARAGE TOP
LOS ANGELES
Through August 4
Curated by Sylvia Lavin

What brings together Alison Knowles’s House of Dust, 1971; Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s 1971–72 Womanhouse; Jef Raskin’s cardboard “Bloxes”; the Studio Watts Workshop; Bernard Tschumi’s “Sanctuaries” essay; and Archigram’s Instant City Death Valley project? The answer: Los Angeles in the late 1960s and ’70s—a productively unstable environment, conducive to exchanges between artistic and architectural practices, processes, tools, sites, materials, and even audiences. Lavin’s exhibition and catalogue, under the auspices of the Getty Research Institute’s “Pacific Standard Time” initiative, celebrates such heterogeneity and mixing of artists, architects, media, and concepts as the very conditions for experimentation, recasting the valence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s derogatory quip, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”

Travels to the Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, Aug. 28–Nov. 9.

— Felicity D. Scott