Adam Fuss

Kunsthalle Bielefeld
Artur-Ladebeck-Straße 5
March 2–May 11, 2003

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
September 25, 2002–January 12, 2003

Curated by Cheryl Brutvan and Thomas Kellein

It’s easy to see Fuss’s cameraless photograms and latter-day daguerreotypes as reactions to our digital era, in which photography’s ring of truth has a hollow sound. But as this fifty-five-print not-yet-midcareer survey (curated by Cheryl Brutvan of the MFA and Thomas Kellein of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld) shows, Fuss is interested less in documentary fact than in evanescence and immateriality. His archaic techniques provide a direct imprint of the thing photographed, but the result is a paradoxical loosening of the image’s bonds to the physical world—an aspect that puts Fuss’s pictures in a league with Robert Ryman’s all-white canvases and Wolfgang Laib’s pollen floor pieces.

— Andy Grundberg

The Photography of Charles Sheeler

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
October 23, 2002–February 2, 2003

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
January 1–January 1, 2002

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
January 1–January 1, 2002

Curated by Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. and Gilles Mora

Photography by no means played second fiddle to Charles Sheeler’s work as a Precisionist painter. He was a true professional, earning his living from commissions (for Vanity Fair and Vogue, for example), and memorably recorded many disappearing aspects of American rural life as well as contemporary industrial architecture. This ambitious exhibition of more than 120 photographs (selected by Harvard University Art Museums curator Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. and French critic Gilles Mora) confirms his reputation as a master of the medium, a standing that may even eclipse his renown as a painter.

— Richard Shone

Jean Fautrier

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street
July 16, 2013–July 20, 2003

Haggerty Museum of Art
1234 W Tory Hill St Marquette University
September 19–December 29, 2002

Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University
615 W. 129th Street 6th Floor
January 28–March 29, 2003

Curated by Curtis L. Carter and Karen Butler

Jean Fautrier’s art has always been a matter of taste, and his often seemed pretty bad, down to the snakeskin shoes he famously wore to the opening of his war-inspired “Hostage” series. Some critics argue that the later paintings’ flirtation with kitsch is deliberate. Now we have a chance to judge for ourselves with this long-overdue first US retrospective. Organized by Haggerty Museum director Curtis L. Carter and Karen Butler of Columbia University, the exhibition surveys Fautrier’s forty-year career and is accompanied by a catalogue with contributions by the curators, along with Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, and Rachel Perry.

— Scott Rothkopf