Gallery Listings

Betty Cunningham Gallery, New York City

“Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades,” a show juxtaposing the veteran realist Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924), best known for his tough nudes, and Al Held (b. 1928), with geometric images in strong colors. Through February 13, 2010.

DFN Gallery, New York City

“New Landscapes,” a group show featuring Jane Bloodworth-Adams’s tonalist waterways and hills, David Mahler’s reflections of clouds in rippling streams and Mary Reilly’s detailed graphite studies of wildflowers and dunes. December 9, 2009–January 20, 2010.

Fischbach Gallery, New York City

“Night & Day, Day & Night,” a group show exploring the idea of the temporal effects of light and dark, featuring paintings by Alice Dalton Brown, Glen Hansen, Meg Shields and Lowell Tolstedt, among others. January 7–30, 2010.

Forum Gallery, New York City

“(No) Man’s Land,” landscapes with a melancholy greenish-yellow cast by the Romanian-born painter Peter Krausz, who applies pulverized pigments in an egg-based emulsion to dry plaster surfaces, in the secco technique. Through January 16, 2010.

Hirschl and Adler Modern, New York City

“Take Five,” a group show welcoming five contemporary realists, previously associated with Hackett-Freedman in San Francisco. Particularly interesting are the still lifes of David Ligare, a neoclassist with a lovely sense of light, and Jeffrey Ripple, who paints fruits and flowers with old master meticulousness on gold grounds. January 7–February 12, 2010.

Robert Mann Gallery, New York City

“Venezia,” photographs of one of history’s most evocative cities, in anticipation of an upcoming book. Michael Kenna uses very long exposures, as nineteenth-century photographers did, and his black-and-white prints have a tonalist quality reminiscent of Whistler. January 14–March 13, 2010.

Spanierman Gallery, New York City

Picturesque landscapes by Charles Warren Eaton (1857–1937), European and American scenes by a solid, middle-of-the-road artist with a nice sense of tonalist color. December 8, 2009–January 16, 2010.

Gallery Bienvenue, New Orleans

“Encounters in the Bone Garden,” recent paintings by neo-Baroque artist Ray Donley, whose fictional portraits of commedia dell’arte and other traditional character types are deeply shadowed with modern angst. Through January 2010.

Frey Norris Gallery, San Francisco

“Beyond the Esplanade: Paintings, Drawings and Prints from 1940 to 1965,” works by the Surrealist artist and writer Dorothea Tanning. November 19, 2009–January 31, 2010.

Klaudia Marr Gallery, Santa Fe

One hundred drawings by John Nava, a contemporary realist best known for his championship of tapestry as a still-viable artform. December 11, 2009–January 11, 2010.

Museums

Alexander Hogue Gallery, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma

“Personal Interiors,” a joint exhibition by Lani Irwin and Alan Feltus. Feltus’s paintings combine an early Renaissance vocabulary of gestures with modern sensibilities. Irwin uses geometric space in a more esoteric way, developing a rich personal iconography. November 5, 2009–January 7, 2010. Travels to the Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, D.C. (January 23–March 14, 2010) and George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia (April 5–May 7, 2010).

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

“Chicago Cabinet: C. D. Arnold Photographs of the World’s Columbian Exposition,” documenting the quintessential event of the American Renaissance and City Beautiful movement. Through February 28, 2010.
 
“Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago,” with furniture, textiles, ceramics, metalwork and documentary photographs. The belief that household objects should meet high standards of craftsmanship and mesh with a utopian vision of simple beauty, developed by William Morris and Charles Ashbee in England, was enthusiastically taken up by Americans Frank Lloyd Wright and Gustav Stickley. November 7, 2009–January 31, 2010.

Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Museum,” 200 works, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, including Trumbull’s famous scenes from the American Revolution. October 3, 2009–January 10, 2010.

Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

“Anna Hyatt Huntington: A Collecting Eye,” with works selected by the sculptor and Brookgreen founder, including pieces by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Harriet Frishmuth and Paul Manship. January 30–April 25, 2010.

Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York

“James Tissot: The Life of Christ,” with 125 of the artist’s small-scale, excitingly composed watercolors. This highly successful visual narrative, purchased largely by public subscription for the fledgling museum a century ago, had enormous influence on cinematic iconography. October 23, 2009–January 17, 2010.

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

“Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889,” a partial re-creation of a significant exhibition, featuring ceramics and carvings as well as paintings, by an avant-garde master whose myth-making is as original as his color palette and compositional strategies. October 4, 2009–January 18, 2010.

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

“Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum, Wales.” Works by Monet, Manet and van Gogh are also featured. January 30–April 25, 2010.

Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware

“Maxfield Parrish: Illustrated Letters” and “Fantasies and Fairy Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print,” two shows exploring the fertile imagination of this eminent illustrator. Through mid-January, 2010.

Frick Collection, New York City

“Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection,” also including works by Fragonard, Delacroix, David and Ingres. October 16, 2009–January 10, 2010.

Flagler Museum, Palm Beach, Florida

“New World Eden: Artist Explorers in the American Tropics,” with works by Frederic Church, Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness and Thomas Moran. January 26–April 18, 2010.

Getty Center, Los Angeles

“Drawing Life: The Dutch Visual Tradition,” with works from the Getty’s collection, includes genre scenes of peasants, merchant enterprise and ice skaters as well as landscapes, starting in the seventeenth century and continuing through the nineteenth. November 24, 2009–February 28, 2010.

Getty Villa, Los Angeles

“The Chimera of Arezzo,” the three-headed beast slain by Bellerophon, through five centuries of classical art. The star attraction is an Etruscan bronze presented in partnership with the National Archaeological Museum, Florence. July 16, 2009–February 8, 2010.

Guggenheim Museum, New York City

A retrospective of works by Wassily Kandinsky, one of the museum’s star attractions. The most spiritual of the great twentieth-century modernists, Kandinsky began with magical illustrations of Russian folktales and drew on icons and hermetic mandalas for his later cosmic compositions. September 18, 2009–January 13, 2010.

High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia

“Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of Genius” considers the relatively under-examined subject of the master’s interest in sculpture, with examples of his own work, supplemented by material from his teachers and students. October 6, 2009–February 21, 2010. Travels to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (March 23–June 20, 2010).

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

“‛The Artful Disposition of Shades’: The Great Age of English Mezzotints.” Before the era of photographic reproduction, mezzotints—with their painterly lights and shadows—were the preferred way to disseminate artistic images. Examples here include works by Reynolds, Turner and Constable. January 19–March 15, 2010.

Huntington Library, San Marino, California

“The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection,” with 200 examples, including posters, color-plate children’s book illustrations and advertising prints. The color lithography process, invented in 1790, had an enormous influence on visual culture. Through February 22, 2010.

John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida

“Venice in the Age of Canaletto,” vedute—scenic views of the Grand Tour’s iconic sights—by eighteenth-century Italian artists. Canaletto’s luminous skies and lively urban detail lift his paintings far above the category of tourist souvenir and were much admired by the English Romantics. Through January 10, 2010.

Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York

“Bold, Cautious and True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era,” a show focusing on the visual culture of the conflict, with works by Frederic Church, Winslow Homer and John Kensett, among others. Through January 24, 2010.

Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth, Texas

“From the Private Collections of Texas: European Art, Ancient to Modern,” with 100 works by, among others, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Gauguin, van Gogh and Matisse. November 22, 2009–March 21, 2010.

Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida

“Regional Dialect: American Scene Painting from the John and Susan Horseman Collection,” exemplifying the early-twentieth-century taste for genre and narrative. November 14, 2009–February 7, 2010.

Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

“Body in Fragments,” a theme exhibition drawn from the museum’s diverse collections. Examples range from Egyptian and African sculpture to a medieval finger reliquary, to paintings by Picasso and Magritte. August 21, 2009–February 28, 2010.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915,” with 100 works emphasizing genre subjects and visual narrative. Artists include Copley, Bingham, Homer, Sargent, Chase, Sloan and Bellows. October 6, 2009–January 24, 2010.
 
“The Drawings of Bronzino,” the first monographic show of drawings by the Mannerist painter, court artist to Cosimo de’ Medici, with sixty sheets. Agnolo Bronzino (1503–72) was a remarkable stylist. January 20–April 18, 2010.

Morgan Library & Museum, New York City

“A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.” The Morgan has the world’s largest collection of Austen (1775–81) manuscripts and letters. The show includes first and illustrated editions of the novels, contemporary drawings and prints, and responses from later writers, such as Auden, Nabokov and Woolf. November 6, 2009–March 14, 2010.
 
Three in-house exhibitions demonstrating the Morgan’s splendid specialties. “Demons and Devotions: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves,” with 100 miniatures from the disbound masterpieces (1440), and “Flemish Illumination in the Era of Catherine of Cleves,” showcasing eighteen manuscripts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Both on view January 22–May 2, 2010. Eighty drawings from Renaissance and Mannerist artists will also be on exhibit in “Rome after Raphael.” January 22–May 9, 2010.

Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York

“James E. Freeman 1808–1884: An American Painter in Italy,” the first retrospective for this expatriate who worked in Rome. The twenty paintings on display are mostly “fancy pictures,” a now largely forgotten genre of costumed peasants and street urchins. Through January 17, 2010.

Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

“Glackens as Illustrator.” One of the Eight, a group of artists associated with the Ashcan School, Glackens combines social observation with graphic energy. September 5, 2009–May 3, 2010.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

“Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800.” A strong selection of 120 works on paper; artists include Claude, Watteau, Fragonard and David, as well as other lesser-known but skilled draftsmen. October 1, 2009–January 31, 2010.

New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut

“John Haberle: American Master of Illusion,” a major show devoted to the late-nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil artist, accompanied by a catalogue. December 11, 2009–March 14, 2010.

Newark Art Museum, Newark, New Jersey

“Small but Sublime: Intimate Views by Durand, Bierstadt and Inness,” from a fine collection of Hudson River School paintings. These artists, known for their attention to natural detail, didn’t need epic scale to find remarkable landscapes. Through February 28, 2010.

Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

“Gaze: Portraiture after Ingres.” In homage to Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845), on loan from the Frick Collection, 150 works by nineteenth-century and modern painters, including Bonnard, Modigliani and Picasso. October 30, 2009– April 5, 2010.

Onassis Cultural Center, New York City

“The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete,” around forty paintings, including early works by El Greco. With the fall of Byzantium, Crete became an influential conduit for the Greek tradition. Cretan icon painters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were celebrated for their skill in shifting from Western to Eastern idioms, to suit their clients’ needs, and El Greco absorbed these lessons to forge his own style. November 17, 2009–February 27, 2010.

Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida

“Nature and Spirit: American Landscape Painting from Florida Private Collections,” with works from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, including the natural history images of Audubon and O’Keeffe’s quasi-abstractions. January 9–March 21, 2010.

Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

“Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings from the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonaroti.” Michelangelo burned many of his drawings, to preserve the mystery of his creative process. This selection from the small museum in Florence includes striking examples of his draftsmanship, along with documents and decorative objects. October 15, 2009–January 31, 2010.

Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio

“Drawn by New York: Watercolors and Drawings from the New-York Historical Society,” an interesting selection from one of the nation’s oldest collections. November 20, 2009–January 17, 2010.

Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, Florida

“Ships and Shorelines: Nineteenth-Century American Marine Painting,” including works by William Bradford, a fine documenter of ships, and the Luminists Fitz Henry Lane and Martin Johnson Heade. January 30–May 30, 2010.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction.” The line between abstraction and representation is often more fluid that some partisans suggest, and O’Keeffe’s organic forms, even at their most stylized, remain rooted in nature. September 17, 2009–January 17, 2010.

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts

“A Strong Impression: William Morris Hunt’s Niagara,” a detailed artistic and cultural examination of the monumental work, with the artist’s studies, along with photographs, books and films. Running concurrently is “William Morris Hunt and the French Tradition,” exploring Hunt’s connections to the Barbizon School. Through January 31, 2010.

Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts

“Intaglio: Italian Etchings and Engravings,” featuring master prints by the Carraci, Rosa, Tiepolo and Piranesi. Through March 7, 2010.