Art Roundup: Best Shows of 2012

Renoir's La Promenade (Frick Collection)

The Frick Collection

Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting brought together nine of Auguste Renoir’s largest canvases, like the Frick’s own La Promenade,  Chicago’s Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando and Washington D.C.’s The Dancer. Seeing these oversized Renoirs in a single gallery was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Antico: Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes, an exhibit of works by early Renaissance master sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi (known as L’Antico), housed intimately-scaled pieces so detailed as to invite exceptionally close viewing: particular gems were statuettes of Hercules and Venus and busts of Bacchus and Cleopatra.

The Frick Collection

1 East 70^th Street, New York, NY

http://frick.org

Picasso's The Milliner's Workshop (Centre Pompidou, Paris)

Guggenheim Museum

In Picasso: Black and White (through January 23), much of what’s on display is minor Picasso, but the variety is astonishing, showing yet another side of an artist with endless ones. Although mostly whites, blacks and greys, the works are not monochromatic; indeed, it’s amazing how much richness Picasso got out of this “limited” palette. Since many of the 118 works on canvas, paper and sculpture are from private collections and are on display for the first time (38 are making their U.S. public debuts), this is the most spectacular Picasso exhibit in years.

Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

http://guggenheim.org

Vuilliard's Lucy Hessel Reading (Jewish Museum)

The Jewish Museum

An enlightening exhibition of underrated French painter Edouard Vuillard was the first large show of his work here in 20 years. Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 showed a painter following his own path even as his work reflected people—often women, including Lucy Hessel, wife of a patron who soon became the central figure in Vuillard’s art and life—important to him at the time. Comprising a half-century of Vuillard’s art, the exhibit ends with a few late portraits, large-scale and undeservedly obscure: extraordinary paintings like Madame Jean Bloch and Her Children, a stunningly intimate work.

The Jewish Museum

1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

http://thejewishmuseum.org 

Bellows's Dempsey and Firpo (Whitney Museum of Art)

Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Two current shows give distinctive views of two 20^th century masters. Matisse: In Search of True Painting (through March 17) presents Henri Matisse’s art as an ongoing search for perfection, and the works on display show how he repeated compositions for comparison purposes; it’s a “new” look at a familiar artist. Similarly, George Bellows (through February 18) takes America’s most famous boxing painter out of that reductive box and presents a fearless artist on his way to greatness before dying prematurely at age 42. His graphic World War I canvases are striking enough, but to see where he might have gone next, a final room of mournful paintings of nudes and landscapes will stay with you as you ponder his early death. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

http://metmuseum.org

Pee-wee's Playhouse interior set

Museum of Modern Art

One of the most intelligent exhibitions mounted by a large museum, Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000 provided an impressive overview of designs for children and how childhood influenced art and architecture, from school and playground layouts to toys and animation. With pieces from architects Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Alvar Aalto to Disneyland and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, room after room is educational and entertaining—which is not something you say every day about museum exhibits. 

Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53^rd Street, New York, NY

http://moma.org

Chagall's Le Clown Vert (private collection)

Nassau County Museum of Art

Marc Chagall’s freewheeling, whimsical surrealist style masked a seriousness of purpose. Chagall was a wholly satisfying show about an artist who died at age 98 in 1985 with an amazing ability to breathe vivid life into standard Biblical subjects. The paintings and drawings on display were highlighted by many color etchings of Biblical stories that are seared in my memory months later. A new exhibit, Artists in America: Highlights of the Collection from the New Britain Museum of American Art (through February 24), brings together works by masters from Copley and Sargent to Whistler and Hopper, all from the famed Connecticut museum.

Nassau County Museum of Art

One Museum Drive, Roslyn Harbor, NY

http://nassaumuseum.org