Reviews of art reviews

Every week, I get The Week, which describes itself as an aggregation of "The Best of the U.S. and International Media." It's basically a cheat sheet to what's been going on in the world in the past week. Their Arts page highlights three exhibits, two of which sound enticing. There's Courbet and the Modern Landscape at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD (through Jan. 7); Yayoi Kusama at Robert Miller Gallery in New York (through Nov. 25; warning: you have to click through a couple of screens to get to see images of Kusama's work); and Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, at the Brooklyn Art Museum, NY (through Jan. 21).

The Kusama show sounds intriguing. Here's the writeup: "Lines, dots and circles have long fascinated Yayoi Kusama, says R.C. Baker in The Village Voice. The Japanese artist made her mark and people with networks of dots and dashes. Later, mental illness limited her output. But her latest works explore old preoccupations in novel ways, fusing fiber-optic cables, reflective orbs, and silk-screened canvases into 'a river of graphic energy.' The Passing of Winter, for instance, reflects the influence of her friend Joseph Cornell--literally. Look into this mirrored box and 'your reflection is bounced around a dizzying matrix of suspended and fallen reflective balls.' Geometry has rarely seemed so appealing." For some truly out-there color photos of dotted assemblages of people and things, check out some other Kusama work here.

As a less-than-stellar student of math, and I'm being kind to myself here, geometry and appealing are two words I have never before used in the same sentence. But I'm planning to take a look at this exhibit. The link in the graf above goes to the wikipedia entry on Kusama, which notes that she left Japan "at age 27 for New York City, after years of correspondence with Georgia O'Keefe" and that "she has experienced hallucations and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood, often of a suicidal nature." It also shows a photo of her work painting trees with polka dots, which looks very striking.

The other interesting exhibit noted is the Courbet one. To quote from the review of the review by New York Times critic Roberta Smith [what's next? A review of the review of reviews?]: "By taking his palette and paints outdoors, Gustave Courbet revolutionized his art form, opening the door for everyone from Claude Monet to Jackson Pollock...The secret to his lasting influence? An 'uncanny fusion of realism and absraction that derived from the muscular way he dispached paint onto canvas." Often, Courbet disposed with brushes entirely, slathering on colors with his palette knife, fingers, or scraps of fabric."