Fall Art 2012: Pre-Renaissance at the Getty, Warhol at the Met, Picasso at the Guggenheim

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Daddi's 'A Crowned Virgin Martyr'

Spawning the Renaissance

'Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination 1300-1350'
 
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 

Nov. 13-Feb. 10 
 
How well do you know your Giotto? The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles spent years lining up the art loans it needed to mount "Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination 1300-1350," its blockbuster look at how a few 14th-century Florentine artists like Giotto di Bondone paved the way for the Italian Renaissance by painting saints who looked reassuringly human.

The show features a wide-ranging group of artists with colorful names like Bernardo Daddi but Giotto is the runaway star of this show. Everyone from "Divine Comedy" writer Dante Alighieri to painter Cimabue hailed Giotto for grounding his religious figures in naturalistic poses and architectural landscapes that felt real, rather than floating in gilt backdrops like the Byzantines had. The Getty doesn't own a Giotto, but for this 90-work exhibit it borrowed seven—more than audiences in America have ever seen in a single show. (At right, Daddi's 'A Crowned Virgin Martyr.')

The museum also tracked down two dozen surviving pages from the era's best-known illuminated manuscript, the Laudario of Sant'Agnese, an ornate book of madrigal-style hymns paid for by a fraternity of Florentine merchants who rose to the highest ranks of banking and trade in Europe. (The Medicis were later members.)

Art history tends to place Renaissance painters and manuscript illuminators into different leagues, but this exhibit proves such distinctions didn't matter back then. The Laudario manuscript was created by a pair of artists—Pacino di Bonaguida and the Master of the Dominican Effigies—famous for deftly toggling both art forms. Getty researchers also X-rayed the book's pages, which were ripped out and sold separately throughout the 19th century, to discover a hidden numbering system; now, the Getty aims to display the Laudario in its original order.

The same artists illustrated copies of Dante's best seller and the Getty will put a few of these books on view. "Dante wrote it in exile, so the artists had to work from the text and invent a lot of visual details," said Christine Sciacca, assistant curator of manuscripts. "They had a field day with Hell."

—Kelly Crow

Marilyn Monroe, Meet Paris Hilton

'Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years' 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Sept. 18-Dec. 31
 
Museums tend to give Andy Warhol a fresh look every, oh, 15 minutes, but on Sept. 18, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art plans to explore the Pop master's influence on contemporary art—in an ambitious, definitive way—by pairing his works with dozens of artists who have come since. It's a bold move for the Met, which is still better known for showing art older than 20th-century masters.
Some of the pairings in "Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years" make easy sense: Early on, Warhol scoured newspapers for banal advertisements and gory stories to silk-screen into fine art, a move quickly picked up by German artist Sigmar Polke. (Polke's 1964 work in the show, "Plastic Tubs," still feels catalog cheery.)

The museum also explores Warhol's Popsicle-colored self portraits, below, as well as portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. A few of them will hang alongside photographer Cindy Sherman's glossy self-portraits and painter Karen Kilimnik's portrait of real-estate heiress Paris Hilton. In a wry twist, Ms. Kilimnik titled her 2005 work "Marie Antoinette Out for a Walk at Her Petite Hermitage, 1750."

Other sections of the 145-work exhibit look at the sexuality and gender politics enveloped within Warhol's cryptic persona. By donning that silver wig and making films with a Factory full of friends and lovers, he arguably convinced a cloistered art establishment to take in all comers. That includes British painter David Hockney, whose "Boy About to Take a Shower" from 1964 will get matched with Warhol's 1977 "Torso from Behind."

The museum will also make the case that Warhol's fondness for papering gallery walls with repeated images of his art helped usher in the wall-to-wall installations so popular today. At the least, Polly Apfelbaum's flowery floor piece from 2007, "Pink Crush," could be the coolest thing the Met ever laid down.

—Kelly Crow

Art Under Assault

'Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962'| 

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 

Oct. 6-Jan. 14
 
The premise of a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is deceptively simple: The show surveys nearly 100 canvases that have been assaulted, creatively, by their makers—either by scarring, ripping, cutting or burning—during the unsettling years after World War II.
The museum says that by upending the traditional idea of the canvas as a window-pane-like portal into a faraway world, these artists collectively transformed painting into sculpture—a mixed-media move that artists have been grappling with ever since.
Expect plenty of unusual materials to pop up in these pieces, including the canvas, welded steel and wire constructions that animate Lee Bontecou's abstracts, such as the above untitled work from 1962.
There are also smashed glass bottles embedded in Shozo Shimamoto's lime-colored "Cannon Picture" from 1956 and bits of fur stuck within Kazuo Shiraga's red 1963 abstract, "Wildboar Hunting."

—Kelly Crow

Picasso Without Color

'Picasso Black and White' 

Oct. 5-Jan. 23 

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
 
How many Picasso shows can there be?

New York alone, in recent years, has seen major exhibitions dedicated to single-museum Picasso collections ("Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," 2010); the artist's printmaking practice ("Picasso: Themes and Variations," Museum of Modern Art, 2010); even his relationship with his guitar sculptures ("Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914," also at MoMA, 2011).

"Picasso Black and White," opening Oct. 5 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, considers another lesser-studied aspect of the artist's work: his use of black, white and gray.

"Black and White" traces Picasso's engagement with this limited palette in paintings, sculptures and works on paper from 1904 to 1971. "There's not a period of black and white"—like the artist's more readily identifiable Blue or Rose periods, said Guggenheim curator Carmen Giménez. "There's black and white from beginning to end."

Many of the 118 works in "Picasso Black and White" are lesser known, including 'Mother with Dead Child II, Postscript to Guernica, below. Some 32 have never been seen before in the U.S., and six have never been exhibited at all. Many of the works are on loan from the Picasso family. One previously unseen work is "Boat and Figures" (1938), a pencil-on-plywood drawing that recalls the iconic war tableau "Guernica," with a baby and a reclining figure's outstretched hand.

By working in black and white, Picasso—who, reportedly, once said color "weakens"—joined the Spanish tradition of artists like El Greco and Goya who used black heavily, said Ms. Giménez.

"[People] see so much Picasso," said Ms. Giménez. "This is a new way to see Picasso. When he paints in black and white, he goes to the essential. It shows how much you can say with little."

Given past attendance figures for Picasso shows, people are likely to turn out again: The Met's 2010 Picasso show, for example, drew more than 700,000 visitors. The show travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in February.

—Kimberly Chou

'Map of China'

'Ai Weiwei: According to What?' 

Oct. 7-Feb. 24, 

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington
 
Artist Ai Weiwei has become exponentially visible in recent years for his social activism, amplified by his well-documented travails with the Chinese government. But opportunities to actually see the art by which Mr. Ai first made his name have been limited.

"According to What?," the first major survey in the United States of Mr. Ai's work, opens Oct. 7 at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The show later travels to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Pérez Art Museum Miami and Brooklyn Museum.

"According to What?" originated in 2009 at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, curated by chief curator Mami Kataoka. It includes early work of Mr. Ai's, such as his "New York Photographs" (1983-93, shown at the Asia Society in New York last year); and signature pieces where he reinvents Chinese relics as art objects by destroying them ("Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn," 1995/2009, "Coca-Cola Vase," 2007). There's also new work made since the Mori exhibition.
His prolific blog and Twitter activism have raised the ire of the Chinese government. But Mr. Ai's art work also frequently engages with contemporary Chinese social and political issues, (see 'Map of China,' right), commenting on government corruption or mismanagement through metaphor, such as the installation piece "Snake Ceiling," composed of varyingly sized backpacks to represent school children crushed by poor school construction during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

"By doing this retrospective we hope to draw attention back to the art work itself," said Kerry Brougher, Hirshhorn deputy director and chief curator, who organized the Washington show with assistant curator Mika Yoshitake. "It's a real mixture of traditional concepts in Chinese art mixed with contemporary issues that only Ai Weiwei can do."

The Mori and the Hirshhorn began talks about bringing "According to What?" to North America in 2009. By the time Mr. Ai was arrested and detained for 81 days last year by Chinese authorities, the Hirshhorn had already mapped out a floor plan for the exhibition, Mr. Brougher said.

Mr. Ai was prohibited from traveling outside Beijing for a year after his detention. While the probation was lifted earlier this summer, Mr. Ai has said that he is still unable to travel due to further investigations. The Hirshhorn said the artist and his assistants have been asked to come to Washington for the installation of "According to What?"

—Kimberly Chou


Bellini-Ricciotti/Louvre Museum/Philippe Ruault
 
The new space will allow the Louvre to display a far greater proportion of the 18,000 works in its little-seen Islamic collection.

Illuminating Islam

Departements des Arts de I'Islam
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Opens Sept. 22
With a gold-and-silver glass roof reminiscent of a magic carpet or a sand dune, the Louvre's new wing for Islamic art is the museum's biggest construction project since the 1980s: more than 32,000 feet of gallery space carved out of what had been a palace courtyard.

The new space will allow the Louvre to display a far greater proportion of the 18,000 works in its little-seen Islamic collection. Culled from the Islam-dominated world, from Cordoba to Samarkand, the works include a collection of ancient calligraphy books, which will rotate, and a rebuilt 15th-century porch from a Cairo residence that had been languishing in boxes for more than a century.

"We want to focus on what is common in Islamic art, from the Alhambra to the Taj Mahal, as well as its extreme diversity," said Sophie Makariou, who oversees the new wing.

The exhibition is displayed in roughly chronological order: The oldest objects, dating from the early Islamic expansion after the death of Muhammad in the seventh century, are on the ground floor. They include objects from the courts in first caliphs in Cairo, Baghdad and Cordoba.

The exhibition continues in the basement, which displays works from later periods, such as ancient tapestry, pottery and jewels from the Ottoman, the Safavid and Mughal Empires.

Among the most prized objects on display: an 11th-century ewer, or ornamental pitcher, made from a single block of natural crystal and brought to France in 1152 by Crusaders.

For the state-owned museum, the €100 million ($125 million) project is in part aimed at making a friendly gesture toward Muslim countries. Government and foundation money from Saudi Arabia, Oman and Morocco, among others, helped fund the wing.

By blending nonreligious Islamic artifacts alongside devotional works, the museum is also making something of its own political point, too. Ms. Makariou says that mixture of works "is fundamental to giving back Islam its greatness, and not leaving it to jihadists and those who sully it."

—Inti Landauro