Category: Reviews

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
Works from the Tavitian collection by Van Eyck, Rubens, Bernini, Vigée Le Brun and others, and a $45m donation

In a transformative donation, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has received a gift from the Aso O. Tavitian Foundation of 331 works of art, as well as more than $45m to fund the construction of a new museum wing and a new curator in early modern European painting and sculpture. The art comes from the personal collection of Aso Tavitian (1940–2020), a Bulgarian-born businessman and philanthropist who made his fortune in the software industry and was an avid art collector, amassing some 1,200 works. The donation includes an exceptional collection of Old Master paintings by artists including Watteau, Rubens, Van Eyck, Angelica Kauffman and Jacques-Louis David, as well as sculptures ranging from a bronze by Bernini and a bust of Nicolas Poussin by François du Quesnoy (both made in the 1630s) to a group of 18th- and 19th-century French plaster and marble figures by Jean-Antoine Houdon, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Gustave Crauk, among others. The Clark already has a strong collection of early modern European painting, but fewer sculptures – a gap that this acquisition will help to fill. Tavitian was a longtime friend of the Clark, serving on its board of trustees between 2006 and 2012. The new wing, which will display the gifted collection in its entirety when it opens, will be named after him.

Het Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch
Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (1885), Vincent van Gogh

Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch has acquired Van Gogh’s Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (1885) for €8.6m, making it one of the most expensive works by Van Gogh ever bought by a museum. The work, a rough oil painting of the face of a peasant woman named Gordina de Groot (who is one of the models in his Potato Eaters, produced in the same year), had been in the personal collection of the London-based collector and dealer Daniel Katz, who bought it at a Christie’s sale in February 2023. After he did so, the Noordbrabants solicited Katz to part ways with the painting, whereupon he agreed to loan it; the work went on view at the Noordbrabants in January. Now, after a dogged fundraising campaign to save what it calls ‘the Mona Lisa of Brabant’, the museum has purchased the painting permanently, thanks to large donations by the Dutch central government purchase fund, the Mondriaan Fund and Vereniging Rembrandt (an association of art patrons), as well as smaller donations by some 3,000 individuals. The acquisition marks a major step in the Noordbrabants’s project to strengthen its collection of works by Van Gogh, who was born and raised in Zundert, North Brabant, and who painted Head of a Woman while living in Nuenen, some 35 kilometres from the museum.

Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (1885), Vincent Van Gogh. Het Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
The Procession of Giants in Brussels on 31 May 1615 (1616), David Noveliers

Every year in Brussels in the medieval period, a pageant called an Ommegang took place, organised by the crossbowmen guild and consisting of processions and other festivities. The Ommegang of 1615 was a notable one, buoyed by a remarkable event that took place on 15 May. During the annual archery competition that formed part of the Ommegang, the daughter of King Philip II of Spain, Isabella Clara Eugenia, who ruled the southern Netherlands as Sovereign Princess, shot down the wooden parrot that was perched atop the Church of Our Lady of the Sablon with her crossbow. To mark the feat, Isabella and her husband, Archduke Albert of Austria, commissioned eight paintings of the Ommegang celebrations by noted court artists of the time, six of which have survived. The Prado, which already owns three of these works (all by Denijs van Alsloot), has now added another to its collection with the acquisition of an extraordinary 3.5-metre-long canvas by David Noveliers depicting the procession of giants, which involved huge, clothed wooden figures being paraded through the streets, as well as revellers, musicians and, on the far right of the painting, an enormous black horse draped in cloth.

The Procession of Giants in Brussels on 31 May 1615 (1616; detail), David Noveliers. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Doge Marino Faliero Accusing Michele Steno of Insulting the Honor of the Dogaressa (1844), Francesco Hayez

Marino Faliero, also known as Marin Falier, was doge of Venice for only seven months, but in that time he made a significant impression. He launched an abortive coup in 1355 against the city’s aristocracy in an attempt to strengthen his rule, which ended in his capture and beheading – a fate memorialised by Delacroix in a painting of 1826. Lord Byron’s blank verse drama Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1821) is about this turn of events, focusing on the (possibly apocryphal) story that Faliero’s coup was conceived as an act of revenge on the aristocrat Michele Steno for casting doubt on the faithfulness of Faliero’s wife, the dogaressa. Now the Yale University Art Gallery has acquired a painting from 1844 by the Italian Romantic painter Francesco Hayez, depicting the moment when Faliero is said to have confronted Steno in the doge’s palace. The work is highly detailed and full of visual drama, from the doge’s seething red eyes to Steno’s bowed head and the expectant faces of the onlookers. Faliero’s arm is outstretched, as if to banish Steno away from the palace; but a closer look reveals that he is in fact pointing to his own throne, on which lines have been scrawled implying that the dogaressa has been unfaithful. The painting was bought from Galerie Canesso and is now on display in Yale’s European galleries.

Doge Marin Faliero Accusing Michele Steno of Insulting the Honour of the Dogaressa (1844), Francesco Hayez. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
25 works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Paul and John Nash, Eileen Agar and more (acceptance in lieu, donation by Cameron’s great-great-granddaughter)

Anne Hewat, the great-great-granddaughter of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79), built up an impressive collection of British art for her home in Chichester, together with her husband, Angus. The couple were long-standing supporters of Pallant House Gallery in their home town – Angus was a trustee and Anne volunteered there, and they, along with two other donors, donated a plot of land to the museum, allowing it to build a new wing there in 2006. Angus and Anne died in 2014 and 2020 respectively; now Pallant House has announced the acquisition, through the acceptance in lieu scheme, of 25 works of art from the Hewat collection, including photographs taken by Cameron of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and John Herschel, a watercolour by Paul Nash, a linocut by Cyril Power and a colourfully abstracted self-portrait by Eileen Agar. The full set of works is currently on show at Pallant House in the exhibition ‘Julia Margaret Cameron to Eileen Agar: The Hewat Collection’ (until 12 January 2025).

Portrait of young girl with lute guitar (Lady Florence Anson) (1866), Julia Margaret Cameron. Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Musée du Louvre, Paris
Safe bearing the coat of arms of Louis XIV (1671), Louis Piau

A large chest bearing the coat of arms of Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, has been acquired by the Louvre. The king oversaw a blossoming in arts and culture in France, particularly in the decorative arts, his major project being the extensive renovations of and additions to the Palace of Versailles. This chest, made of oak with ornate steel plates and crafted by Louis Piau, the royal locksmith, is one of the few surviving examples of ornate furniture from the early part of Louis XIV’s 72-year reign that can be directly linked to the crown. It joins, among other objects in the Louvre’s collection, the king’s personal jewel casket, decorated with elaborate gold filigree and dating from 1676.

Chest bearing the coat of arms of King Louis XIV, signed and dated by Louis Piau (1671). Photo: © Musée du Louvre, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn/Tony Querrec

For more than fifty years, Mexican artists toiled in the shadow of revolution. So, too, does the Met with “Mexican Prints at the Vanguard,” through January 5.

The Mexican Revolution took ten long years, starting in 1910, but artists before it could see it coming in all its violence. Well after, it served as a model and a call for change. To the left, and there were many on the left, it served as a cry to support for other revolutions, in Russia and Spain. Later still, it served as a bitter memory, as a government dedicated to remaking the country and the world gave way to yet another dictator. Could, though, the cries put Mexico at the vanguard of twentieth-century art? Perhaps, but only by remaining in the trenches.

“Mexican Prints” is thoroughly out of fashion, which is to say seriously modern. These days, a proper Mexican revolution would be a cultural revolution, with women in the vanguard, like Amalia Mesa-Bains recently at El Museo del Barrio, and Mexican tradition their passion. The Met ends in 1955 as if to avoid all that. References to Pre-Colombian art do appear in square-jawed heads, but not often, and figures costumed for a carnival come only at the end, with Carlos Mérida, as one of the few spots of color. But then Mérida also produced an abstract composition, give or take a bird. Frida Kahlo, in native costume as a woman’s act of defiance, does not appear at all.

The curator, Mark McDonald, starts in the 1700s, but not with native tradition. He looks instead to Europe, much like a past show of “Painted in Mexico.” Later, Tina Modotti will depict soldiers with a debt to Baroque paintings of a Madonna rising. In between, artists turned to the satire of Honoré Daumier. But this was always art as illustration, in service to a cause. Text can overwhelm images. Tracts and newsletters precede starker lithographs by David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Of course, Siqueiros was also a muralist, and the show runs in parallel with Mexican murals. Diego Rivera, turns up a print after one of his most famous. Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary, stands beside his horse. Rivera came to New York as well, for a show of his work at MoMA. José Clemente Orozco came as well, too, with a print of a vaudeville act in Harlem. Here or in Mexico, change was in the air.

Mexican prints first entered the museum’s collection at the instigation of a French artist, Jean Charlot, who moved to New York in 1928. He contributes a woodcut of Rich People in Hell. Others, too, adopted woodcuts for their jagged edges, with praise for Lenin and Stalin as the bombs fall. Siqueiros himself depicts a Trinity of Scoundrels. This is art and ideology in black and white. After the revolution, the new regime sponsored arts education. As that became a tool for state propaganda, Taller de Gráfica Popular (or Graphics Workshop for the People), took up the slack.

Still, something sets Mexican prints apart from Europe and America—and from their own easy answers: revolution comes at a cost, and death enters even in triumph. Zapata looks humble and heroic enough, but he stands astride a dead body. Rufino Tamayo pictures a native couple as heros, but they might be confronting hills on fire. Alfredo Zalce sees the Yucatan, a target of agrarian reform, as a paradise. Yet his figures struggle with the overgrowth.

Death enters even before the revolution. Celebrated in his time, José Guadalupe Posada continued the tradition of pages dense with text. Couples embrace, but “death is inexorable,” and wooers, bikers, and angels alike are skeletons. So is the “people’s editor.” Less well known, Emilio Amero stands apart in 1930 with a clock and telephone in Surrealism’s ghostly light. This is modernity, and art is in the vanguard, but it might end in darkness.

To pick up from last time after the retirement of Roberta Smith and the death of Peter Schjeldahl, “I think if I have any legacy,” Smith said in a kind of exit interview, “it’s teaching people how to look at art.” Now if only The Times agreed.

Even before her departure, it began to cut its art reviews almost to nothing. (While changes at The New Yorker are more modest and far less toxic, it has reduced its capsule reviews across the arts as well.) It still covers museum exhibitions, if not critically and often belatedly. That leaves a huge, glib monthly compendium of “what to see in the galleries.”

It has room for anything but teaching. This is not about expanding minds, but planning your weekend, just as the food section tells you what to cook “this minute”—morning, noon and night. It is about letting you know that you are in the know. It is no coincidence that any remaining longer review is now a “critic’s pick,” and the critics write accordingly. They hardly have time for the art of looking, even if they cared to try, and make up for it with superlatives. I hesitate to call it criticism.

I have left out a still more visible change, as reviews give way to feature articles with the emphasis on the artist. They purport to take you behind the scenes, because real people sell papers. They go far to turn the arts pages into a second style section, with role models and rankings, just as opinion articles more and more take on lifestyle changes, and news articles stress the human angle as well, beginning with anecdotes and ending with catchy quotes.

I started this Web site, then the only Web site devoted to contemporary art and art history, nearly thirty years ago to get away from superlatives, with reviews that tell stories about how to look. I was put off by magazines, with their word counts and the need to pitch articles before I could see the show. I hoped to integrate values, theories, and description into something worth reading. (I have explained what I had in mind here and here.) I could not begin to rival those I admire as much as Smith, Schjeldahl, and many others, but I like to think that they would balk at puff pieces, too. Critics have better things to do than huffing and puffing.

Does any of this matter? After all, mainstream media exist to bring news and features to the general public, and there are others worth heeding. Yet art magazines are changing in much the same way, and magazines everywhere are dying, along with alternative weeklies like the Voice (once a home for Schjeldahl and Smith’s husband, Jerry Saltz, as well). Art in America is now hard to tell from ArtNews, which merged with it in 2015, and the latest cover leads with rankings, for “five trailblazing artists.” Artforum is no longer the house organ for Minimalism of its founding in 1962, which is only right. Yet its Web site, too, leads with “news”—and a “spotlight on select summer advertisers.”

Why, though, does it matter except to curmudgeons young and old like me? I shall not repeat my notion of good criticism, but I still believe it, and I still value those, online and off, who get readers looking and thinking—and, sure, than includes our paper of record and my favorite magazine. Galleries, under enormous financial pressure since the pandemic, need lookers and thinkers more than ever as well. But the new model for journalism caters to the art business in a way that shapes art as well. Shallow writing encourages the dominance of shallow artists, and clickbait translates into attention getting. Maybe Smith knew that it was time to retire.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

These have been tough times for art criticism. Just this spring and just here in New York, Roberta Smith announced her retirement from The New York Times. Not two years before, in October 2022, Peter Schjeldahl died of lung cancer at age eighty.

The double blow means so much more coming from such prominent and reliable writers at essential publications. Smith has been co-chief critic at The Times since 2011, where she has built a top-level roster, but no one cuts to the quick like her. Schjeldahl began writing for The New Yorker in 1998. Each had come to the right place. How many other newspapers have taken daily or weekly criticism as an imperative, and what other magazine would give a critic a two-page spread as often as he liked? The loss of their most influential voices should have anyone asking what else has changed.

They have left behind a changing critical landscape—one that they could never have foreseen or intended. It values artists more than their art, as seeming friends and real celebrities. It covers the business of art, without challenging art as a business. It cares more about rankings than seeing. It gives all the more reason to look back and to take stock. Good critics, when you can still find them, are looking better and better.

Peter Schjeldahl could see his death coming—clearly enough that he announced it himself, in place of a review, as “The Art of Dying.” It shows his insistence on speaking from his perspective while demanding something more, about art and language, and it lends its name to one last book of his criticism. He had been a poet, fans like to point out, and he must have seen the same imperative in poetry as well, just as for William Wordsworth reaching for first principles on long walks across north England’s Lake District. Schjeldahl quickly took back his finality, perhaps overwhelmed by letters of sympathy and offers to replace him. Death was not so easily dissuaded.

He was a stylist, but not to call attention to himself. He was not one to wallow in the first person at the expense of art. Rather, his point of view helped him engage the reader and to share his insights. One essay described his “struggles” with Paul Cézanne, which must sound like sacrilege in light of the artist’s place in the canon. And then one remembers that Cézanne painted not just landscape, portraits, and still life, but his struggle with painting itself—what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called “Cézanne’s Doubt.” Schjeldahl, too, had his doubts, and they led him to unforeseen conclusions.

He was most at home with someone like Cézanne, at the birth of modern art. Still, his interests ranged from Jan van Eyck, in a memorable article on restoration of The Ghent Altarpiece, to art in the galleries. Roberta Smith, in turn, was mostly content to leave art history to her fellow chief critic, Holland Cotter. I shall always remember her instead as literally climbing over contemporary art, in a photo together with Kim Levin from their days at the Village Voice. It gets me going each year through my own self-guided tours of summer sculpture in New York’s great outdoors. Smith, though, never does get personal, and she is not just out for a good time.

She had a way of landing at the center of things, going back to jobs at Paula Cooper, the first gallery in Soho, and The Times, where she had freelanced before coming on staff in 1991. She promises to keep going to galleries, too, “just to look.” Yet she has a way of expressing her doubts, serious doubts, about what she praises and what she seeks out. All that “on the other hand” can make her a less graceful writer, but it keeps her open-minded and critical. It is particularly welcome at a publication eager to suppress doubts in favor of hit counts. But I return to trends at The Times and elsewhere in a moment.

This could be a time not to mourn or to bury writers, but to celebrate. There have been worse in the past, and there will be strong voices in the future. Those old enough to remember Hilton Kramer at The Times will still cringe at his dismissal of postwar American art. His colleague, Grace Glueck, dutifully soldiered on despite obstacles to women. (John Russell brought a welcome change, and I still consult his survey text in The Meanings of Modern Art.) Besides, no critic can make or break a publication.

Smith had already brought on Jason Farago, who revives an old approach to art history going back to John Canady in the 1960s, walking a reader through a painting one detail at a time. It works well with interactive Web pages in the present. Cotter remains as well, at least for now, free to focus on what matters most to him—diversity in artists, especially gays and Latin Americans. With its typical care, The New Yorker took more than a year to come up with a successor to Schjeldahl, and it did well. Jackson Arn teems with insights, enough to have me wondering what is left for me to say, and, like Schjeldahl, he is not above telling one-liners. And yet something else, too, has changed that could defeat them all—and that is so important that I leave it to a separate post next time and to my latest upload.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Museums have been getting into the surveillance game lately, and we don’t mean CCTV and enhanced security measures to pre-empt protestors. We’re thinking, instead, of the institutions turning the tables on visitors looking at the work on the walls – by looking more closely at what those visitors are seeing. Last year, for instance, researchers tracked the eye movements of viewers of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch at the Prado and found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that hell is a much more appealing prospect. And, just the other week, the Mauritshuis in The Hague revealed the results of eye-tracking equipment connected to a brain scanner, which found – again unsurprisingly? – that people tend to look Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in the eye, before their gaze wanders over the rest of the canvas.

Now, the Art Gallery of Ontario has taken things further, in the interests of fun, with its Art Rate Monitor scheme. Since it launched in September, more than 3,000 visitors have moved round the Toronto Museum with a heartrate monitor and had the results summarised for them in an email at the end of their tours. This time the ‘findings’ are a little more unexpected. Rakewell wouldn’t quibble for a moment with the idea that Gerhard Richter is a great painter, but wouldn’t have predicted that his photo-realistic work Helga Matura (1966) would stop people in their tracks for so long – and slow the heart rates of the 20–30 age group more than that of any other group. And if viewers in the 30–40 age bracket are most stimulated by Otto Dix’s ghostly Portrait of Dr Heinrich Stadelmann (1922), is this the onset of midlife Weltschmerz?

The Heart of Mary (1759), Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz. Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City

It’s true that some general practitioners have, from time to time, prescribed cultural activities to their patients, but we are, one hopes, some way off from doctors telling us to stand in front of a Rothko to relieve stress. But while we’re thinking about the cardiac side of art, perhaps we should go straight to the heart of the matter? In a new book called The Beating Heart (Head of Zeus), Robin Choudhury, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Oxford, charts depictions of the art from ancient ayurvedic texts to Renaissance anatomical diagrams to the Surrealists and beyond. Rakewell is particularly keen on the medieval German story of Frau Minne, who in an allegory of courtly love, has power over men’s hearts – and on the wonderfully literal depictions of the sacred and immaculate heart in mid 18th-century paintings from Mexico.

But a project much closer to Rakewell’s heart is Christian Boltanski’s Les archives du coeur (Heart Archive). In 2008, the artist began asking people to record their heartbeats in booths placed at his exhibitions, all over the world. The results were then added to a collection of audio files kept in a museum on the uninhabited island of Teshima in Japan. A recording of your roving correspondent’s heartbeat is in there somewhere (made at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2010). Perhaps it’s high time for a reunion – and to see what the Art Rate Monitor would make of the encounter?

Lead image used under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 4.0)

In this exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, works by 17 artists reflect pan-African perspectives on the natural world, exploring its significance as a source of freedom, sustenance and enlightenment (2 November–21 April 2025). Highlights include photographs from the series Nadir (1987), by South African photographer Jo Ractliffe, which mostly comprises stark images of animals in the landscapes of apartheid-era South Africa, and Brazilian artist and Candomblé priest Ayrson Heráclito’s Cabeça de Nanã (2009), from the series Bori (Feed the Head), which pictures ritual offerings of nourishment to Yoruba deities. The exhibition accompanies the museum’s major show Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (15 December–30 March 2025), which seeks to provide a wider view of pan-Africanism and its expressions in contemporary culture. Find out more from the Art Institute of Chicago’s website.

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary

Cabeça de Nanã from the Bori (Feed the Head) series (2009), Ayrson Heráclito. Art Institute of Chicago. © Ayrson Heráclito

Santiniketan Studies (A Century Before Us II): Infinite Study (2018), The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar; Kodwo Eshun). Art Institute of Chicago. © The Otolith Group