SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010 art} fall arts preview
KLMNO
E5
SAMUEL UHRDIN
BIZARRE TASTE: Sixteen of Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fruit-inspired portraits will be at the National Gallery starting Sept. 19. They are among a number of under-the-radar gems.
With autumn, a rush of arresting lesser-knowns
Sackler, others give eccentric and insightful works the spotlight
by Blake Gopnik T
his fall, it’s quiet times in Washington’s art world: No big names or blockbusters are heading our way.
That could be a big plus. Do we really want to battle crowds in order to discover, once again, that Rembrandt’s a half-decent brushman or that Renoir could handle color? There’s surely more artistic
value added in seeing work we don’t already know. We could take in the portraits of the bizarre Renaissance paint- er Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose canvases build faces from fruit. (Sixteen of them are coming to the National Gallery on Sept. 19.) Or the paintings of Lois Mailou Jones, a Washington artist and longtime teacher who was one of the first black women to achieve success in art. (They’re getting their first retrospective at the National Museum of Women in the Arts from Oct. 9.) Further from our Western
comfort zone, on Oct. 23, the Sackler Gallery will offer us the great Islamic miniatures of the Shahnama, Persia’s epic “Book of Kings.” Photography fans could head
off the beaten track, and back in time, by looking at a Phillips Col- lection show, launching Oct. 9, that explores the soft-focus im- agery of the pictorialist move- ment, which flourished early last century. A show opening Oct. 31 at the National Gallery will look at how the earliest photos from that same movement, shot in Britain in the mid-19th century, related to the fine art of the Pre- Raphaelites, a community of painters also based in Britain at that time. It will pair the photos of Lewis Carroll and Julia Mar- garet Cameron with works by painters such as William Hol- man Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But maybe the most exciting,
courageous thing we could do this season would be to leave be- hind anything at all that’s been hallowed by time, and head for the art of today. There will be lots of it on offer.
On Sept. 22, the Baltimore
Museum of Art is presenting a project by a New York duo col- lectively known as Guyton \ Walker. At the last Venice Bien- nale, they produced a room that was something like a cross be-
COURTESY OF GREENE NAFTALI, NEW YORK VIA BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
ROOM WITH VIEWS: Guyton \ Walker’s meticulous and zany installations arrive at Baltimore Museum on Sept. 22.
COURTESY OF FIONA TAN VIA FRITH STREET GALLERY, LONDON
RE/VISION: Dutch artist Fiona Tan’s 24-minute video, “A Lapse of Memory, 2007,” will be show at the Sackler starting Sept. 25.
tween a messy artist’s studio and a booth at a trade fair for ad agencies. Their work manages a rare marriage of the raucous and the slick, the zany and the calcu- lating.
On Sept. 25, the National Mu- seum of the American Indian will be pulling out its holdings in contemporary native art. At its best, the work of today’s aborigi- nal peoples questions every- thing we think we know about their culture and history — and some of what we think we know about ours. Launching that same day at the Sackler Gallery, some of those same questions of identity should come up in a major sur- vey of the Indonesian-born Dutch artist Fiona Tan. She of- ten works in video, usually pro- jected at a grand scale. Her slow- burn art is always subtle and of- ten moving. It has touched sub- jects ranging from archery and its meaning for young women in Japan to what’s left of the Asia that Marco Polo saw. On Oct. 17, the Baltimore Mu- seum of Art will take us back to a
crucial beginning for the art of today — to the work that Andy Warhol made in his last years. The rest of October takes the art lover even further afield, with a series of shows celebrating the little-known art scene in Argen- tina, a country that turns 200 this year. The main event launches Oct. 21 with the Hirsh- horn’s retrospective of the artist Guillermo Kuitca, whose attrac- tive map- and architecture- based paintings made a big splash in the 1990s but haven’t had as much play since. The Smithsonian’s Ripley Center will give context for Kuitca’s works by expanding our view to the art of 22 of his compatriots. And the Art Museum of the Americas will focus on just a pair of them: Cristián Segura, who still lives in his homeland, and Sergio Vega, who left in 1991 and has since been working in the United States. I can’t guarantee the quality of
any of this art, since most of it is new to me. That’s why I’m eager to see it.
gopnikb@washpost.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166