The New Republic

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The decorative arts have always been art history's attractive orphans. While many people have a great affection for certain textiles or ceramics, the scholarly world embraces such objects only fitfully, as if they were really somebody else's responsibility. And much of the attention that is given to the decorative arts—in the shelter magazines, in the auction catalogues, and in specialized studies of rococo hardware or medieval ceramic tiles—has an edge about it, a feverishness that can suggest overcompensation and even overkill. READ MORE >>

I. SEURAT AND THE MAKING OF LA GRANDE JATTE (Art Institute of Chicago) READ MORE >>

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Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life, Whitney Museum of American Art READ MORE >>

Èdouard Vuillard: Post-Impressionist Master (National Gallery of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) READ MORE >>

"Matisse Picasso," the exhibition that has now arrived at the Museum of Modern Art after packing in the crowds at Tate Modern in London and the Grand Palais in Paris, begins as a sort of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for culture vultures, a study in male bonding in the artistic stratosphere that features the somewhat older, more formal Matisse and the younger, unabashedly bohemian Picasso. READ MORE >>

If you take a close look at just about any period in the history of art, you will find an almost bewildering array of different styles or modes or manners flourishing simultaneously, and the middle of the twentieth century, the time that is in many respects the prologue to the time in which we live, is no exception. Certainly Barnett Newman, Joan Mitchell, and Edwin Dickinson, three painters who were active around 1950 and who have been the subjects of major retrospectives this spring and summer, could not have worked in more different ways or arrived at more radically different images. READ MORE >>

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"Thomas Eakins: American Realist," at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a blandly celebratory event. This artist, whose dark, vehement temperament and tough-minded verisimilitude made him an unsettling figure in his time, and who has continued to provoke contradictory reactions up till our own day, is given an evened-out presentation, as if he were a rather dull nineteenth-century worthy. READ MORE >>