Category: visual

As Modernism and its proponents continue their slow and steady creep back to respectability, some critics wonder if it wasn’t the unfortunate results of the postmodern backlash that allowed Modernism to return so strongly decades later. “We have all but forgotten and forgiven the way Modernist ambitions for social housing and skyscraping – trumpeted by Le Corbusier and his allies – ended in a shockwave of disastrous tower blocks and alienating estates born of necessity in the 1950s and ’60s. The reactive postmodern excesses of the 1980s and ’90s, meanwhile, already look more dated than anything the heroic Modernists produced.”

There may not have been a more overexposed dead artist in the last decade than Goya, whose work formed the backbone of one of the early “blockbuster” touring exhibitions. But Robert Hughes says that not only is all the attention justified, but a closer look at Goya’s later works shows that this was that rarest of artistic geniuses who never lost his passion, his creativity, and his will to innovate.

“It is a simple fact that artists influence artists. But an artist overwhelmed by another’s influence is far less interesting than one who makes use of the first artist’s influences to develop his own individuality. Looking at this issue is ‘Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art,’ an exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London until June 18. It takes a quiet master of 20th-century art, Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), and places his oils and etchings – still lifes and landscapes – next to more recent works of notable originality that may be connected in various ways with Morandi.”

This year’s Berlin Biennale has apparently outgrown any single venue, and organizers are using the city itself as the staging area for the 8-year-old event. “Visitors were not simply making their way to and from a museum or some smartly retrofitted warehouse, the usual location for a big contemporary art survey. They were waiting in the cold spring air to enter private apartments, an office, a ballroom, a shuttered school, a former horse stable, the church, the cemetery and the white-walled galleries of the Berlin Biennial’s organizer, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art.”

A new exhibition of work by the Russian abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky will include a collection of letters and poems written by the painter, none of which have ever before been published in English. Curators say that the written materials will “shine a light on the painter’s path to abstraction.”

Renzo Piano’s Morgan Library extension is a major addition, writes Nicolai Ouroussoff. “A sublime expression of the architect’s preoccupation with light, the design transforms the world of robber barons and dust-coated scholars conjured by the old Morgan into a taut architectural composition bursting with civic hope. His triumph at the site, where order is brought to a jumble of buildings collected over nearly a century, should temporarily allay complaints that New York’s cultural institutions shrink from a high level of architectural innovation.”

Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Brazil has won the 2006 Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the profession’s highest honor. “Mr. Mendes da Rocha, 77, is best known for his Brazilian Sculpture Museum in São Paulo, where he is considered the unofficial dean of the city’s Brutalist movement.”

Richard Dorment wasn’t expecting much of this year’s Whitney Biennial after reading all the bad reviews. “Certainly the squalor and violence about which American critics complained is everywhere in evidence, but I can’t think of a greater contrast than between the Whitney’s direct, visceral response to what is happening in America today and the tepid, neoconceptual navel-gazing going on at Tate Britain.”

A tour of Iraq’s greatest art treasure – the Nimrud gold – will begin an international tour next February in Washington DC. “There are likely to be around ten venues, after Washington, and these will probably include museums in Berlin, London and Paris. The tour of ‘The Gold of Nimrud’ should raise around $10m for Iraq’s National Museum.”

Being a serious artist in Cuba is no easy matter, even though dictator Fidel Castro has made a point of using Cuban culture to soften his government’s image abroad. “Throughout the city, museums have been refurbished, and installed with many politically charged works that speak both for and against the revolution, displays that seem to demonstrate the government’s tolerance of dissenting voices.” But beneath the surface, artists struggle for approval of their exhibitions, shows are canceled without warning, and the shadow of El Presidente looms large over every new work.