Curated by Max Hollein

The Schirn Kunsthalle is giving Julian Schnabel a retrospective covering the past twenty-five years and comprising over fifty paintings, many of them very big. While the artist lately seems omnipresent in the media, a serious consideration of his art has thus far been lacking. Did the ’80s begin with Schnabel’s first solo painting show at Mary Boone Gallery in 1979? Is the artist’s real future in Hollywood? Catalogue essayists Max Hollein, Robert Fleck, Alison Gingeras, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Kevin Power, and Maria de Corral also attempt to put Schnabel in context.

— David Rimanelli

Hannah Höch was not a “good girl.” She was, as curator Juan Vicente Aliaga notes, a “total woman.” Staking her claim among the male Berlin Dada group with grotesque photomontage hybrids that critiqued stereotypical gender relations, Höch continued, until her death in 1978, to propose a heterogeneous approach to art. The nearly two hundred objects on view—spanning the five decades of her productive life and including photomontages and lesser-known paintings, watercolors, drawings, etchings, and dolls—attest to this; catalogue essays by Aliaga, Ralf Burmeister, Karoline Hille, and others address the entirety of Höch’s creativity. In any case, her arguments are as relevant to current debates on women’s identity as they were in 1920s Germany, when the New Woman first realized her dilemma.

— Nicole Rudick