André Dombrowski

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  previews January 2017

  “Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie”

  Ever since the invention of this particular breed of dandy in the early nineteenth century, the flaneur has been the art world’s favorite visitor. Mobile, curious, omnipresent, and critically adept, the flaneur came to embody—through the work of Baudelaire and other writers—modernity’s demands for an agile and nimble way of seeing art and the world at large. The Barnes Foundation, in a notable expansion of its historical purview, has assembled artworks stretching from the postwar era to today that were made with the flaneur’s most esteemed qualities in mind:

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  previews January 2016

  “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible”

  The unfinished exudes a special allure as attractive during the Renaissance as it is to contemporary art. The incomplete even developed its own aesthetic paradigm, the non finito, which favored the look of flux and forestalled finish. A work in progress itself, the Met Breuer is poised to open in the former Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue, which has been repurposed to house the Metropolitan’s new gallery of modern and contemporary art. What, then, could be more apt than for the Met Breuer’s inaugural exhibition to celebrate the magnetism

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  print May 2015

  Gustave Caillebotte

  AS LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY sped up, so did the century’s art. Paintings created in “fifteen minutes,” as the poet and critic Jules Laforgue described Impressionism in 1883, characterized a novel kind of picture built of hectic signs: Freewheeling brushstrokes encoded both the materiality of paint and the abruptness with which it seemed to have been applied. A lack of focus, coupled with odd angles and viewpoints, became the new pictorial norm, and constantly changing social protocols became painting’s primary theme. Impressionism thus chronicled the profound cultural shifts of its era;

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  previews October 2012

  “Ferdinand Hodler: View to Infinity”

  The work of Ferdinand Hodler embodies fin de siècle contradictions like that of few other painters.

  The work of Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) embodies fin de siècle contradictions like that of few other painters. Fluidly mixing Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and naturalism, Hodler’s style offered an international vocabulary that also revealed a deep attachment to his native Switzerland. His paintings illustrate the alienation of the individual under the modern collective order, with figures frozen in haunting landscapes and rigidly parallel groupings. This fall, the Neue Galerie will mount the largest Hodler retrospective ever assembled in this country,

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  previews May 2012

  “Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940”

  Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) is often credited with having elevated the domestic interior to its crucial position in modernism.

  Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) is often credited with having elevated the domestic interior to its crucial position in modernism. His experiments with pictorial form were rooted in seclusion from urban life, and under his treatment, interior spaces and their elaborate decors and patterns became synonymous with flatness. The Jewish Museum now promises to highlight the degree to which Vuillard’s art, by contrast, was social and collaborative in nature, emphasizing the crucial role played by his family, friends, dealers, and patrons. The Natanson family, the Hessel family,

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  previews January 2012

  Pierre Bonnard

  Pierre Bonnard created on canvas, in small, impressionistic strokes, a world far more colorful than gray.

  Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) created on canvas, in small, impressionistic strokes, a world far more colorful than gray. Facets of his life and intimate surroundings—his house, his garden, his urban environment—emerge from his brush with a singularity, vivacity, and intensity belying their ordinariness. This exhibition organizes the prolific painter’s output by sites depicted, allowing us to accompany him in a grand tour through his maison imaginaire: Across more than sixty paintings, viewers pass from street to garden to dining room before, perhaps most unexpectedly,

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  previews September 2011

  “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye 1900–1944”

  As perhaps no other painter of his generation, Edvard Munch (1863–1944) gave radically innovative form to the traumas of the modern psyche.

  As perhaps no other painter of his generation, Edvard Munch (1863–1944) gave radically innovative form to the traumas of the modern psyche. That he did so in perfect sync with the dawning media age in which he lived is the intriguing premise of one of the largest Munch exhibitions ever assembled in France. Including some 140 diverse works of painting, drawing, photography, film, and sculpture, this exhibition explores Munch’s later career, his twentieth-century output. An unexpected agility with the camera and a propensity for filmic and theatrical

• previews January 2011

  Birth of the Modern: Style and Identity in Vienna 1900

  Birth of the Modern: Style and Identity in Vienna 1900
  NEUE GALERIE
  February 24–June 27
  Curated by Jill Lloyd and Christian Witt-Dörring
  

  The nineteenth century—and its bourgeois democratic ideals—experienced a spectacular demise in Vienna around 1900. This major exhibition at the Neue Galerie, and its accompanying scholarly catalogue, promises to shed new light on the material expressions brought forth by this profound crisis of cultural identity. Considering ornamented surfaces across the media of painting, fashion, architecture, music,

  
  
  

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  previews January 2011

  Vienna 1900: Style and Identity

  The nineteenth century—and its bourgeois democratic ideals—experienced a spectacular demise in Vienna around 1900.

  The nineteenth century—and its bourgeois democratic ideals—experienced a spectacular demise in Vienna around 1900. This major exhibition at the Neue Galerie, and its accompanying scholarly catalogue, promises to shed new light on the material expressions brought forth by this profound crisis of cultural identity. Considering ornamented surfaces across the media of painting, fashion, architecture, music, and decorative objects alike as key sites for the negotiation of self, psyche, gender, and sexuality, the exhibition will portray the