Robert Rosenblum

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  previews January 2002

  After the Scream: The Late Paintings of Edvard Munch

  You’d never know that Edvard Munch, like James Ensor, went on living and painting well after his fifteen minutes of fame; but now that we’ve become fascinated by the late work of several innovators whose art presumably expired long before they did (de Chirico, Picabia), perhaps Munch, too, will be swept up in this sea change.

  You’d never know that Edvard Munch, like James Ensor, went on living and painting well after his fifteen minutes of fame; but now that we’ve become fascinated by the late work of several innovators whose art presumably expired long before they did (de Chirico, Picabia), perhaps Munch, too, will be swept up in this sea change. The Scandinavian painter lived to be an octogenarian. What happened after his high anxiety of the 1890s? The sixty-plus works in the exhibition, curated by Elizabeth Prelinger, should yield some discoveries—his variations on earlier themes and,

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  previews January 2002

  Andy Warhol

  Like Picasso, Andy Warhol has kept the wheels of the art industry turning, inspiring one generation after another.

  Like Picasso, Andy Warhol has kept the wheels of the art industry turning, inspiring one generation after another. Coming to London from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, the latest blockbuster, curated by Heiner Bastian and the Tate’s Donna De Salvo, offers yet a new version of Warhol’s epic scope, including a look at his much neglected late abstract work, which, like his early wallpaper, just keeps on rolling out. And this time around, Warhol’s expanding universe embraces not only the usual fat catalogue (with contributions by Bastian, De Salvo, Kirk

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  previews January 2002

  Kees Maks

  Even in the artist’s native Holland, the name Kees Maks (1876–1967) still draws blanks.

  Even in the artist’s native Holland, the name Kees Maks (1876–1967) still draws blanks. Unlike better-known compatriots Jan Slujters and Kees Van Dongen, who were also immersed in Parisian nightlife, Maks worked far from the front lines of modernism, and this distance kept his reputation dimmed. But timing is everything, and today Maks’s stylish conservatism—a cross between Walter Sickert’s belated Impressionism and Guy Pène du Bois’s Art Deco rhythms—seems just the right language for capturing nostalgic vignettes of everything from tango dancers to champagne snacks. The period flavor is so

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  print December 2001

  Robert Rosenblum

  ROBERT ROSENBLUM

  1 Santiago Calatrava, Bilbao Airport It couldn’t have been easy, even before September 11, to rediscover the joyous, gravity-defying thrill of air travel, but Calatrava has done it. A light-drenched update of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK (1956-62), this aviary, with its supersonic wingspread, is perched as if ready to soar, transforming arriving and departing passengers into blithe spirits. Another kudos for Bilbao architecture.

  2 Clyfford Still (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC) The least sighted and most ornery of the AbEx constellation, Still was

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  previews September 2001

  Impressionist Still Life

  Curators have lately been slicing the blockbusting Impressionists from every thematic angle: horse races, portraits, cityscapes, Mediterranean views. Now we find out what happens when a vision predicated on a thousand points of changing light collides with inert objects on a tabletop. The range of answers gathered together by Eliza E. Rathbone and George T.M. Shackelford is as varied as the roster of artists, which includes Courbet and Morisot, Bazille and Cassatt, Renoir and van Gogh, and is sure to make us look as hard at the objects chosen as the ways they are painted. Expect everything from

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  passages September 2001

  David Sylvester

  It’s hard to believe David Sylvester is no longer with us. On both sides of the Atlantic, his imposing presence—a huge amalgam of mind, body, and passion—seemed a permanent fact; and his death on June 19, after a prolonged battle with cancer, feels as unreal as the news that a mountain on our horizon has vanished.

  I cannot remember the art world without David’s looming large. Only last October, in Berlin, I came upon him by surprise while touring Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. The effect was hallucinatory, with his dramatic figure and oracular voice radiating throughout those haunting, still

• print May 2001

  Realist Camp

  One of Basel’s favorite sons, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) is up for a second survey in his hometown. The first, in 1977, marked the 150th anniversary of his birth. “Arnold Böcklin: A Retrospective” (Kunstmuseum Basel, May 5–Aug. 8), curated by Katharina Schmidt, will commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death. As a student in Düsseldorf, Böcklin learned to record what was before his eyes, to give trees and family members the same no-nonsense treatment, but he soon grew dissatisfied with the mere reality embraced by so many artists of his generation and began to populate his landscapes with

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  print May 2001

  Arnold Böcklin

  One of Basel’s favorite sons, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) is up for a second survey in his hometown. The first, in 1977, marked the 150th anniversary of his birth. “Arnold Böcklin: A Retrospective” (Kunstmuseum Basel,May 5–Aug. 8), curated by Katharina Schmidt, will commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death. As a student in Düsseldorf, Böcklin learned to record what was before his eyes, to give trees and family members the same no-nonsense treatment, but he soon grew dissatisfied with the mere reality embraced by so many artists of his generation and began to populate his landscapes with

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  previews May 2001

  Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making

  All that glitters is gold in North America’s first full-scale Klimt retrospective (thirty-six paintings and ninty-five drawings). Organized by Frick Collection chief curator Colin Bailey, formerly of the National Gallery of Canada, the show relocates this favorite ’60s poster artist back in the murky world of Freud’s Vienna, with sumptuous offerings of both superego and id. Portraits of the rich and glamorous alternate with ruminations on the mysteries of love, sex, and death. Mixing decorative motifs from Mycenae to Byzantium, Klimt makes his imperious female sitters look like reincarnations

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  print January 2001

  Goya

  Anybody lucky enough to have seen Truth and Fantasy, the 1994 traveling exhibition of Goya’s small paintings, will never forget this Gulliverian voyage to the artist’s terrifyingly diminutive planet, where the plenitude of human folly, from rape and shipwreck to witchcraft and Catholic piety, was grotesquely mirrored in pictures that could be held in one hand. Now, Goya’s teeming microcosmos will become even smaller and perhaps still stranger when we view an anthology of one hundred of his drawings dating from the 1790s, the decade of the Caprichos, until his death in 1828. Curated by Goya

• previews January 2001

  Henri Laurens

  With the right birthdate (1885) and connections (Kahnweiler, Braque Picasso, Diaghilev, Chanel), Laurens claims a niche in every account of Cubism. But his early works have seldom made anyone’s pulse beat faster; and his later anguished females tend to seem well-mannered next to Moore’s and Lipchitz’s heroic earth mothers. With this retrospective, curated by Thomas Kallein, things may change, especially with Louise Bourgeois’s promised essay, which will explore the personal mysteries in what now look only like “modernist” period pieces. (An amputee, Laurens was particularly dependent on his

• previews January 2001

  Pop Art Revisted

  Back in the ’60s, I used to think that Pop art sprung, fully formed, from the head of Leo Castelli at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street and that its shocking, larger-than-life newness was the birthright of an exclusive club whose charter members were Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist, and Oldenburg. For most New Yorkers at the time, art across the Atlantic was so beyond the pale that it might just as well have been from another planet. Despite Sidney Janis’s “New Realists” show in 1962, with its French contingent, or the realization that Richard Hamilton’s little collage of 1956, Just what is it that