Robert Rosenblum

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  previews September 2006

  Michael Craig-Martin

  Reaching back to Michael Craig-Martin's precocious beginnings in the ’60s as a Duchampian Conceptualist dealing with film and readymades, the show, comprising some fifty works, will expand to acrylic paintings and neon sculptures and to site-specific mural environments that seem to wed Pop to LeWitt.

  In 1989, Michael Craig-Martin, already a talismanic figure for young British artists, had his first retrospective, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. Now, seventeen years later and in his native Dublin, Craig-Martin’s second retrospective should reveal an artist of even greater breadth and historical magnitude. Reaching back to his precocious beginnings in the ’60s as a Duchampian Conceptualist dealing with film and readymades, the show, comprising some fifty works, will expand to acrylic paintings and neon sculptures and to site-specific mural environments that

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  print May 2006

  Robert Rosenblum

  IN UNEXPECTED WAYS, Bill Rubin and I seem to have been twinned for life. He was born in New York City in the summer of 1927 (a Leo only eighteen days my junior), and each of us at one point considered a career in music or musicology before ending up doing graduate work in art history. He went uptown to Columbia, and I went downtown to NYU. I got my Ph.D. in 1956; he got his in 1959. And during those years, when we first met and when most art historians, either out of ignorance or aversion, shied away from contemporary art, we both espoused not only Abstract Expressionism but also the work of a

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  previews January 2006

  “Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination”

  This show promises to be an educational Halloween party. With 160 works, it explores the demons, witches, and elves imagined by two dozen high-minded British visionaries and considers such popular entertainments as “Phantasmagoria.”

  This show promises to be an educational Halloween party. With 160 works, it explores the demons, witches, and elves imagined by two dozen high-minded British visionaries and considers such popular entertainments as “Phantasmagoria,” which offered nineteenth-century Londoners a preview of the modern horror film, complete with grisly slide shows and creepy sounds. This rich territory was a core ingredient in the Romantic imagination, which, from the 1760s on, expanded into an ever-more irrational world. Here, the focus is on the odd couple of Swiss-born Henry Fuseli, with

• previews January 2006

  “Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939”

  This exhibition not only extends as far afield as Japan, Brazil, and Israel but mixes the exalted heights of Mondrian and Mies van der Rohe with 350 more-earthbound examples of graphic design, furniture, photography, painting, film, and costume.

  For some die-hards, Modernism with a capital M may still be a religion of absolute truth and beauty, but for the rest of us (especially antique dealers) it's become as much a period style as Second Empire or Art Nouveau. Fraught with the historical nostalgia of a long-lost utopian dream, the movement can now seem as quaint and precious as Bakelite and glass brick, which means it's high time for an all-embracing retrospective. This one not only extends as far afield as Japan, Brazil, and Israel but mixes the exalted heights of Mondrian and Mies van der Rohe with 350

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  print December 2005

  Robert Rosenblum

  1 “MATISSE: THE FABRIC OF DREAMS—HIS ART AND HIS TEXTILES” (ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, LONDON; METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK) Instead of kneeling again at Matisse’s shrine, curator Ann Dumas thoroughly resurrected him. The master’s “working library”—a half century’s ragbag accumulation of fleamarket cotton prints, couture gowns, Romanian blouses, North African hangings, and more—was excavated from family trunks and displayed beside the works that incorporated their patterns and textures into landscapes for a new vision of Paradise. Seeing the alchemy that turned rags into riches

• previews September 2005

  Elizabeth Murray

  Updating her 1987–88 traveling retrospective, MoMA’s survey of seventy-odd paintings and drawings spanning four decades is a tribute to Elizabeth Murray’s eccentric presence in today’s art world. With a funk sensibility that connects her to the indigenous art of her native Chicago, as well as to Guston and Crumb, she has created her own, Pop-inspired universe swarming with forms resembling Mickey Mouse ears, Dagwood shoes, thought balloons, and domestic objects that morph into illegibility. But her work has equally strong parallels to the story of abstraction, often echoing

• previews September 2005

  Egon Schiele

  Put together for the first time, the more than 150 paintings and drawings by Egon Schiele amassed in the collections of Neue Galerie cofounders Ronald Lauder and the late Serge Sabarsky amount to a comprehensive survey of the short-lived rebel’s work. The staged gawkiness of Schiele’s naked bodies—ready for sex or painful self-reflection—not only fit perfectly into the world of Klimt and Freud, but offer a Janus-faced mirror of Viennese art, looking backward to the grimacing busts of Messerschmidt and forward to the kinky body-art performances of Nitsch. And there’s another

• previews September 2005

  The Surreal Calder

  “Surrealism,” like “Romanticism,” encompasses a bewildering variety of artists as different as Magritte and Miró. Now Calder will be initiated into this strange fraternity. Often pigeonholed simply as the inventor of the mobile, Calder in fact participated in many of the vital artistic movements of his time, but it was Surrealism that rooted his art in a biomorphic universe. Calder’s flying, crawling creatures, celestial visions, and fantastic constructions from unexpected fragments—dating from 1927 to 1947—will find themselves at home in the company of works by his

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  print Summer 2005

  Salvador Dalí

  Hail to the newborn Salvador Dalí, so often scorned by the last century! Now resurrected in a retrospective for his hundredth birthday (in 2004), he is making a vengeful comeback that will open eyes both old and young. It turns out that he is not only still alive and well (the crowds goggling each painting were testimony to his miracle working), but he is also emerging as a surprisingly unfamiliar master whose work has yet to be integrated into art history.

  My credentials for this overview are venerable. It was in May 1939, just before my twelfth birthday, that I rushed to Flushing Meadow to see

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  passages April 2005

  Tom Wesselmann

  BY NOW, the works of Tom Wesselmann, who died on December 17, 2004, have become textbook icons of the ’60s. Born in 1931, he began to paint, like other members of his generation, under the shadow of New York’s chef d’école, de Kooning, before veering in the direction of Bonnard’s and Matisse’s domestic interiors. But with the passing of the ’50s, startling intrusions appeared in his work, mirroring one of the landmark rebellions in twentieth-century art. In 1961, for example, in two of the earlier entries in “Great American Nude,” the ongoing series he began in the same year, Wesselmann slipped

• previews January 2005

  Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subcultures

  Takashi Murakami's global empire keeps expanding. The next takeover promises to rival even Christo dimensions: transporting the high-tech universe of otaku to Manhattan, where a visiting delegation of Murakami's compatriots will present some two hundred works, immersing us in an ethos of game arcades and shop-window displays.

  Takashi Murakami's global empire keeps expanding, whether he's marketing riffs on Louis Vuitton or kiddie-party decorations for Grand Central Terminal. The next takeover promises to rival even Christo dimensions: transporting the high-tech universe of otaku—that infinite profusion of comics, video games, toys, and websites—to Manhattan, where a visiting delegation of Murakami's compatriots will present some two hundred works, immersing us in an ethos of game arcades and shop-window displays. These installations will turn up everywhere, from subway cars and

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  print December 2004

  Robert Rosenblum

  1 “Andy Warhol: The Late Work” (Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz) In a year that honored our pantheon of twentieth-century deities (see below), two Warhol shows soared high. Organized by Mark Francis and Jean-Hubert Martin for Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, “The Late Work” buried stale prejudices that favor ’60s over ’70s and ’80s Warhol by offering an eye-popping spectacle of little-known work, including mural-size crosses and knives, replays of Pollock’s drip paintings as tangled yarn, and takes on Arp’s and Kelly’s organic contours as the flattened profiles of a dozen supermarket eggs.