Brigid Doherty

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  previews January 2014

  Hannah Höch

  This first major UK exhibition of Hannah Höch (1889–1978) will span some sixty years of the artist’s career, illuminating aspects of her work frequently overshadowed by her association with Berlin Dada. Highlights among the more than one hundred collages, photomontages, watercolors, and woodcuts on display will include an impressive selection of her pathbreaking 1920s photomontage works, which exploit the medium’s capacity to produce comic effects and insist on the political significance of art outside of activist engagement, as well as a remarkable

• previews May 2013

  “Textiles: Open Letter”

  Titled after a 1958 tapestry by Anni Albers and inspired by the writings of art historian Aloïs Riegl—who, as a museum curator in Vienna in the late nineteenth century, developed an expertise in Oriental carpets that influenced his approach to the study of other art forms—this exhibition explores the material and media-historical significance of textiles in contemporary art. From Nasreen Mohamedi’s photographs of looms to Rosemarie Trockel’s wool pictures to a participatory floor piece by Cildo Meireles, the show will consider textiles as the

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  previews May 2011

  “Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World”

  Encompassing the full range of Lyonel Feininger's production, from graphic art to abstract and figurative painting to photography, the Whitney’s retrospective will be the first in the US since 1966.
  

  Born in New York in 1871, Lyonel Feininger set off in 1887 to study art in Germany, where he enjoyed a successful practice as a graphic artist and caricaturist. He was active in the Berlin Secession and went on to teach at the Bauhaus; it was Feininger’s woodcut Cathedral, 1919, that served as the cover illustration for Walter Gropius’s epochal Bauhaus manifesto. But Feininger’s work was subsequently denounced as degenerate by the National Socialists, and he returned to the United States in 1937. Encompassing the full range of his production, from graphic art to abstract

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  previews September 2010

  Kurt Schwitters

  In 1919, Kurt Schwitters repurposed a syllable of the word Kommerz (“commerce”), originally cut out from a bank advertisement, to designate his artistic project: Merz. “Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage,” which includes some ninety works (collages, prints, assemblages, reliefs), promises to make a case for the central place of color in the art of the great German modernist, while also emphasizing Schwitters’s engagement with abstraction and his inventive use of found objects and print technologies.

  In 1919, Kurt Schwitters repurposed a syllable of the word Kommerz (“commerce”), originally cut out from a bank advertisement, to designate his artistic project: Merz. “Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage,” which includes some ninety works (collages, prints, assemblages, reliefs), promises to make a case for the central place of color in the art of the great German modernist, while also emphasizing Schwitters’s engagement with abstraction and his inventive use of found objects and print technologies. The first North American solo museum show of his work in more than

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  previews January 2009

  “Hypnos: Contribution to a Visual History of the Unconscious, 1900–1949”

  “Hypnos” sets out to make visible what the curatorial team calls “the encounter between the unconscious and modernity” by presenting some 250 works by roughly 100 artists, writers, filmmakers, and psychoanalysts from across Europe who variously sought to analyze, depict, and actualize aspects of unconscious thought and experience during the first half of the twentieth century. “Hypnos” will include a wide-ranging selection of materials—from texts by psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi to Spiritualist photographs,

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  books December 2007

  THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

  13 SCHOLARS, CRITICS, WRITERS, AND ARTISTS CHOOSE THE YEAR’S OUTSTANDING TITLES.

  BRIGID DOHERTY

  I turned to Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I (edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg; Stanford University Press) in connection with my attempts to look differently at what is made of thinking (and writing) in the art of Hanne Darboven, whose work has often been regarded (to my mind erroneously, or mostly erroneously) as an instance of “Conceptual art.” Psyche—which comprises translations of the first sixteen essays from a volume of Jacques Derrida’s writing that originally appeared

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  print September 2005

  Max Ernst

  This first major museum show of Max Ernst to take place in New York in thirty years stakes a grand claim for his importance to twentieth-century art, and to the development of modern painting in particular. “Only Picasso,” announces a wall text at the exhibition’s entrance, “played as decisive a role in the invention of modern techniques and styles.” Ernst’s technical inventions in the 175 works on view include the “overpainting” of the Dada pictures that are commonly called collages, as well as the semiautomatist frottage, grattage, decalcomania, and “oscillation” processes of his Surrealist

• previews September 2005

  James Ensor

  This retrospective of around eighty paintings and sixty works on paper draws on the rich history of James Ensor’s German reception. Since the 1890s, the Belgian artist’s output has been collected by German institutions (several of which are lenders), and its impact is visible from Expressionism to Dada and beyond. Emil Nolde was among those who made pilgrimages to visit Ensor, whose work anticipates the pictorial experiments and anarcho-socialist politics of Dada in Zurich and Berlin. One might quibble with curator Pfeiffer’s stated aim to present Ensor’s oeuvre as an