Jeffrey Weiss

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  previews January 2010

  “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917”

  The formula is virtually ideal: Subject a landmark painting to long, deep analysis both historical and forensic and use those findings to reinterpret a crucial body of the artist’s work.

  The formula is virtually ideal: Subject a landmark painting to long, deep analysis both historical and forensic—with the close collaboration of the conservation studio—and use those findings to reinterpret a crucial body of the artist’s work. If the painting in question is Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River, which the artist reworked multiple times between 1909 and 1917, the results promise to be thrilling. Well over a hundred objects from the 1910s in all media will be assembled for this joint project between the Art Institute of Chicago and

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  previews September 2009

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Can this retrospective—a collaboration with Munich’s Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau and the Centre Pompidou in Paris—change the familiar split in our assessment of Kandinsky's achievement?

  Wassily Kandinsky is perhaps the most neglected of the chief modernist painters. Can this retrospective—a collaboration with two other deep repositories of the artist’s work, Munich’s Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (both of which have already mounted the show)—change the familiar split in our assessment of his achievement: the thrilling rush, between 1907 and 1918, from apocalyptic landscape painting to a rhapsodic upheaval of line and color, versus the work made after around 1920,

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  previews May 2009

  “Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works, 2000–2007”

  New work has largely been seen only at Gagosian Gallery in New York, where it is shown for a month before disappearing into blue-chip private collections. So this exhibition of pieces made between 2000 and 2007, marks a rare opportunity. It will include thirty-two works: photographs, drawings, sculptures, and large-scale paintings, all thematically related through subjects from nature.

  Over the years, Cy Twombly has received few important museum exhibitions in the United States. New work has largely been seen only at Gagosian Gallery in New York, where it is shown for a month before disappearing into blue-chip private collections. So this exhibition of pieces made between 2000 and 2007, organized by James Rondeau with Twombly’s cooperation, marks a rare opportunity. It will include thirty-two works: photographs, drawings, sculptures, and large-scale paintings, all thematically related through subjects from nature. What should we expect to find? Having

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  books February 2009

  Mel Bochner’s collected writings

  IN HIS PREFACE to this volume, Mel Bochner describes a turning point in his approach to writing. Learning that the short exhibition reviews he had been producing for Arts Magazine in 1965 were actually being read by the artists he reviewed, he further found himself being assailed for failing to comprehend the art. Bochner concluded that, in his own writing, “it was impossible not to be misunderstood.” This realization, he explains, was liberating. Abandoning writing criticism per se (his own included seminal theoretical essays about Minimal art), he began “testing the boundary between

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  print October 2008

  Cy Twombly

  BY WHAT STANDARD are we to comprehend the career of an artist whose significance to artmaking, while everywhere felt, nonetheless manages to elude critical consensus? Cy Twombly has long been such a figure. Many artists (not just painters), now two generations of them, revere him, although the visual evidence of his impact on their work is in some cases difficult to discern. Yet it is safe to say that, while Twombly likewise commands an intense following in the museum community, he has managed to escape the kind of public interest that, over time, has been heaped on his close contemporaries

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  print September 2008

  Land Art

  LAND ART, whatever else it is, can be identified with a specific narrative of American space: the road trip. I draw this notion from T.S.O.Y.W., a 2007 film by Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler included in the Whitney Biennial this past spring. Distantly related to The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe’s Romantic novella of longing and suicide (from which Granat and Heitzler’s acronymic title is derived), T.S.O.Y.W. depicts the romance between a lost soul and his motorcycle. This remarkable film, which has no diegetic sound (its ambient, semi-improvisational electronic sound track was composed by

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  print December 2005

  “Melancholy: Genius and Madness in the West”

  The sitter leans forward. The head tilts slightly to the side, propped up by the hand (an open palm or a closed fist) at the end of a bent arm. The elbow is supported by a flat surface—a desk, a table, often the sitter’s own knee. The brow is usually furrowed, throwing a real or implied shadow over the eyes, which are lowered but never closed. Posture and facial gesture imply a layered interiority, acts of reflection flashing across the surface of troubled depths. The downward rotation of the propped head conveys an impression of heavy weight. The force of “gravity” is understood to be both

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  print Summer 2004

  LANGUAGE IN THE VICINITY OF ART: ARTISTS’ WRITINGS, 1960–1975

  “I DON’T LIKE THE INCORPORATION OF THE NAMABLE IN SCULPTURE.” Carl Andre’s observation from a 1968 interview reflects on the absence of image or allusion in advanced art of the period, but it remains pithily ironic: It is one hallmark of American art between roughly 1960 and 1975 that objects and installations were attended by massive quantities of artists’ words, texts that fall across the artmaking landscape and settle like a heavy discursive drift. For one thing, artists were critics: Donald Judd reviewed dozens of exhibitions in New York galleries from 1959 to 1965 and composed several

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  print September 2003

  SPACE OPERA: THE DIA IN BEACON

  VASTNESS IS THE QUALITY THAT CHIEFLY DEFINES ITS CHARACTER: The white, daylight-filled interior of the new Dia facility at Beacon is so expansive that, at first, the very notion of “interior” hardly even seems to apply. To enter is to be transformed from visitor into rapt beholder, all agog in stunned silence and quasi-agoraphobic awe. It could be said that the name dia, a Greek word that translates as “through,” has, in a manner of speaking, become doubly allegorical: Originally devised to characterize the institution as a selfless agent for the ideals and ambitions of the art, it is also now

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  print September 2002

  RADIANT DISPERSION: ROBERT RYMAN’S PHILADELPHIA PROTOTYPE, 2002

  Last spring at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Robert Ryman realized the third incarnation of his Prototype paintings, multipanel works that the artist executes in situ on the gallery walls. JEFFREY WEISS, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, examines this latest permutation in Ryman’s ongoing exploration of his medium.

  PAUL VALÉRY WAS INTRODUCED TO Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés” by Mallarmé himself in 1897, shortly after the poem had been completed. In his memoir of this first encounter with what he perceived to be a