OUR CURATED LIST OF THE SEASON’S MOST NOTEWORTHY MUSEUM MOMENTS STARS DIVAS, ACTIVISTS, A MASTER OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AND MORE
By Christina Rees
As the summer sun stretches our days and leaves some heat for our nights, we turn our minds to travel, group outings and a shake-up of business as usual. Art museums the world over understand the seduction of a great summer exhibition and have frontloaded their programming to give visitors from near and far an art experience to remember. Here, we present some summer exhibitions that will take you places you may not have expected: through midcentury New York City, the culture clashes of the late 1960s, onstage with your favorite performers and along the Seine outside Paris in the 1880s.
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Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Through September 17
There are two museums in the United States that have collected the work of Ab Ex great Robert Motherwell so deeply that they’re the default authority destinations for the extraordinary painter’s oeuvre. One is New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The other is the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which as early as the 1960s started acquiring Motherwell’s works (works on paper at first) and has, over the decades, amassed a collection of more than 70 of them, including some of his most important paintings. Motherwell’s works on canvas, including some from his best-known and powerful Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, are the focus of this summer-long exhibition. The youngest member of the New York School of Post-War painting luminaries (most were Europeans fleeing the conflict), Motherwell is, like Pollock, the quintessential American Modern and a seminal master of a whole genre that’s arguably, thus far, America’s most bracing contribution to art history. Motherwell may have characterized his work as a “barbaric force,” but the sands of time have softened his paintings into the most familiar, reassuring and beloved hits you could hope to catch in the coming weeks. A great reminder of why we still love painting. themodern.org
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Richard Avedon: MURALS
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Through October 1
Walking into the Richard Avedon capsule exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is like walking into a dizzying cocktail party assembled by Robert Altman. The room is narrow, the ceiling is high, and you are surrounded by larger-than-life Americans who shaped the tumultuous and crucial late 1960s and early ’70s – an era during which the nation struggled to absorb cultural shifts coming at it like a freight train. You enter the fray: To your left, gazing straight down at you is the Vietnam War’s General Creighton W. Abrams flanked by his Saigon Mission Council cronies; a few feet away the Chicago Seven’s world-weary Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman stare back. A rake-thin, black-clad Andy Warhol leads a line of his Factory pack through the proceedings (some, including Candy Darling and Joe Dallesandro, shed their clothes along the way) while leaders of the Young Lords – agitating for Puerto Rican independence – return your gaze with a smirk that belies their determination. These extraordinary and confrontational portraits, massive in black and white with subjects so disconcertingly present you swear they are about to speak, are from Avedon’s series of photos of the world-makers of the late 20th century. Putting all these very real characters in the same room – conservative war hawks, art and sex pioneers, activists and agitators – facing off (with you in its anonymous middle) feels surprisingly and extremely summer of 2023. metmuseum.org
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DIVA
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Through April 7, 2024
London’s Victoria & Albert Museum knows how to please big crowds with blockbuster shows focused on design, fashion, pop culture, performance and more. Past headline-making V&A exhibitions have included ones for Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen, David Bowie and Vivienne Westwood. This summer’s entry, titled DIVA, celebrates “the extraordinary power and creativity of iconic performers.” The exhibition is packed with photography, costumes, concept art, paintings and props; the “divas” here are the iconoclasts of the past century. The history-spanning list of luminaries comprises stars of stage and screen: Theda Bara as Cleopatra in 1917, Maria Callas in La Traviata in 1958, Grace Jones wrapping up a London show in 1981, Lizzo modeling Viktor&Rolf in 2021. Highlights include Elton John’s wildly imaginative 50th birthday get-up by famed costume designer Sandy Powell, sketches of Tina Turner’s stage wardrobe drawn by Bob Mackie, Vivien Leigh’s Dior-designed costume for the play Duel of Angels (a hidden message in many of these entries may be “collaboration”) and photography of Billie Holiday at her only London appearance at Albert Hall. The V&A has a tremendous knack for creating rich and inviting environments that pay homage to the people, designs, and overall visual and creative history that have shaped our modern world, and this one is no exception. vam.ac.uk
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Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape
Art Institute of Chicago
Through September 4
Vincent van Gogh greeted the Industrial Revolution with a keen curiosity and interest in the visual and aesthetic shifts it introduced to Paris and the city’s surrounding areas, and he responded with shifts in his art. As the Art Institute of Chicago notes: “The area’s visual vocabulary – its bridges, embankments, factories, parks, and villages – along with its sunlight, water, and brilliant natural color prompted intense experimentation.” The Art Institute’s summer exhibition Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape follows Van Gogh and fellow painting greats Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard and Charles Angrand as they responded to a changing social and material landscape with fresh new pictures that echoed the feel of such burgeoning novelty, thus creating Pointillism, Cloisonnism and Divisionism. The show is made up of more than 75 paintings and drawings “from this intensely creative period – many from private collections and rarely publicly displayed” and includes 25 works by Van Gogh. As the artist wrote in a letter dated 1886: “How the bringing together of extremes – the countryside as a whole and the bustle here [in the city] – gives me new ideas.” As contemporary artists and museum visitors alike grapple with our current digital revolution and the cultural explosions it sets off, Van Gogh’s thoughts about that earlier crucial revolution follow us through the galleries. artic.edu
CHRISTINA REES is a staff writer at Intelligent Collector.