Exhibitions

As spring nears, some European countries are seeing a small, if temporary, reprieve after months of strenuous lockdown. Museums in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and parts of Italy and Scandinavia, are again welcoming visitors to the shows that they’ve been planning, in many cases, for years.
Rifts in society and a still-raging pandemic have been difficult to process, but art—be it historical figures like the Belgian conceptual artist Jef Geys (whose work will be on view in Norway) or the long-overlooked Brazilian artist Leonilson (showing in Berlin), who both broke boundaries in distinct ways—can teach us how to think beyond the challenges of the past year. Newer artists, like Lydia Ourahmane, and intergenerational group exhibitions offer fresh perspectives on society, culture, and nature. And there is little that could substitute the visceral experience of standing within a triumphant installation like Phyllida Barlow’s at Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Here are nine exciting exhibitions in Europe that are—as of publication—actually open and worth a visit, so long as it is safe to do so.

Jef Geys at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway
Through April 5
Installation view of Jef Geys at Bergen Kunsthalle. Photo: Thor Brødreskift
The show is the largest presentation of the late Belgian artist’s work in nearly two decades, and the first of its scale since his death, in 2018, at age 83. Geys was a hero among the European avant-garde and never liked to define himself as an artist. His tongue-in-cheek practice often rejected the conventions that defined the art world. He responded, for example, to an invitation to a show with a threat to blow up the institution—which he did not do. He always abstained from attending his openings and declined interviews.
At Bergen Kunsthall, Geys’s survey shows the artist’s wit and the way he drew out wonder in the banal. In his “Seed Bag Series” paintings, for example, Geys rigorously painted large replicas of a packet of seeds that he planted in his garden once a year between 1963 and his death. In other works, he deals in humankind’s mundane desire to aggrandize itself. Corporeal-sized figures are perfectly covered in shiny auto paint manufactured for BMW cars, which, according to Geys, are “one of the most important extension pieces of our body.”

“Risquons-tout” at WIELS, Brussels
Through March 28
Tarek Lakhrissi, Sick Sad World (2020).
The title of this group show, which translates to “let’s risk it all,” is actually the name of a small town on the Belgian-French border that has been known historically as a through-point for immigrants of all sorts. Some 38 artists from the surrounding regions of the Benelux, including some of the most exciting artists based in and around Europe, are involved in this daring show that investigates ideas of “bridging, passing, translating, and transgressing.” That includes breaking through borders, but also tech-induced information bubbles, and safety nets.
Neïl Beloufa, Tarek Lakhrissi, Laure Prouvost, and Nora Turato are among those taking part in “Risquons-tout,” which occupies the whole of the WIELS building and extends into neighboring spaces around it, ultimately examining “how art challenges the homogenization of thought in the now-infamous echo chambers of our overcrowded info-sphere.”

Lydia Ourahmane, “Barzakh” at Kunsthalle Basel
Through May 16
Lydia Ourahmane during install of the exhibition “Barzakh,” Kunsthalle Basel, 2021. Photo by Dominik Asche / Kunsthalle Basel.
The Kunsthalle Basel has commissioned up-and-coming artist Lydia Ourahmane to create a new commission for its upper floor. For her first institutional solo show in Switzerland, the artist has placed new sculptures and sound works among a seemingly innocuous grouping of furniture. It all comes from her rental apartment in Algeria, which had been furnished by its deceased former occupant.
From photographs to dinnerware to chandeliers, the once private space is made public in this exhibition and, meanwhile, the space is rigged with bugging devices that record the visitors’ movements. Together, the installation probes notions of home, settlement, and claiming space, as well as discipline through regimes of surveillance, invoking at once histories of displacement and colonial systems of oppression.

Leonilson, “Drawn 1975–1993” at KW Institute, Berlin
Through May 24 More

Get ready for the world’s first NFT art exhibition, coming to the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens, are unique digital assets, individually identified on a blockchain, allowing one person to own a widely disseminated digital artwork.
The show, titled “Virtual Niche—Have you ever seen memes in the mirror?,” is being billed as “the world’s first major institutional crypto-art exhibition.” It will feature works by more than 60 artists, including newly minted market darling Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple.
The digital artist’s work Everydays—The First 5000 Days is currently for sale in the first-ever purely digital art auction at Christie’s, where bidding is live through March 11. The work currently sits at an astonishing $3.5 million.
The auction house previously auctioned its first NFT artwork, one of Robert Alice’s “Portraits of a Mind” paintings in October for $131,250. The piece, covered in 322,048 digits of hexadecimal code, will be among the works on view at UCCA.
Robert Alice, Block 21 (42.36433° N, -71.26189° E) from “Portraits of a Mind.” Photo courtesy of Christie’s.

NFTs have recently become a major art-market sensation, driven in part by tech investors in cryptocurrency. Last week, another Beeple NFT sold on Nifty Gateway, an online marketplace for digital art, for $6.6 million—1,000 times the $66,666.66 it previously fetched when it first went on sale in October.
“As generational tastes shift, we felt it important to support an exhibition that showcases a demographic’s interest that has had little previous institutional examination,” Elliot Safra, a partner at AndArt Agency, which helped organize the show, said in a statement. “We hope this exhibition will help propel the dialogue surrounding crypto-art from the fringes into the mainstream.”
UCCA is hosting its NTF exhibition through its UCCA Lab, which it describes as “an interdisciplinary platform for new kinds of art-adjacent collaboration.” Sun Bohan, CEO of crypto-art company BlockCreateArt, is the curator, and Digital Finance Group and Winkrypto are co-hosting the show.
Beeple’s “Beeple Everydays: The 2020 Collection.” Courtesy of Metapurse.

Among the other artists who will have work on view are DJ deadmau5, Mario Klingemann, Robbie Barrat, Pak, Fewocious, and Mad Dog Jones.
The biggest draw will doubtless be “Everydays — The 2020 Collection,” a selection of Beeple’s daily digital drawing series launched in 2007, on loan from Metapurse. The crypto-exclusive fund purchased 20 first-edition artworks on Nifty Gateway for $2.2 million in December, and is selling “tokens” for shared ownership of what they’ve dubbed the B.20 bundle.
“Virtual Niche — Have you ever seen memes in the mirror?” will be on view at UCCA Lab, 798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China, March 26–April 4, 2021.
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Desert X, the open air biennial staged in California’s Coachella Valley, has run into roadblocks with another one of its projects. The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert has cancelled plans to host a site-specific smoke sculpture by artist Judy Chicago due to environmental concerns.
Chicago planned to release plumes of colored smoke at the foothills of Mount Eisenhower on April 9. But the work, titled Living Smoke, raised alarm among some local preservation and animal-rights advocates, and the Living Desert, a zoo and wildlife habitat dedicated to preserving the desert ecosystem and its flora and fauna, decided to withdraw its participation.
“Huge volumes of colored smoke would obviously have a frightening and unpredictable effect on wild and captive creatures,” said Palm Springs arts and environmental writer Ann Japenga, who spearheaded opposition to the project, in an email to Artnet News. “Two prominent local wildlife biologists confirmed that the event could endanger animals. It takes some serious mental gymnastics to pretend otherwise.”

The decision to scuttle the work came as a surprise to Chicago, who said she had worked for months to address any potential safety issues posed by Living Smoke.
“Of course [the Living Desert] had concerns, which I respected,” Chicago told Artnet News in an email. “We spent a considerable amount of time discussing how to bring my work to that landscape without disturbing the wildlife or damaging the environment.”
Last month, when she learned of Chicago’s plans, Japenga sent a letter to the artist, the Living Desert, and Sabby Jonathan, a former Palm Desert mayor and current councilman, among others. (Johnathan previously voted against the city’s sponsorship of the exhibition, according to the Desert Sun, due to last year’s controversial Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia.)
Japenga suggested that the piece was unsafe and should be relocated to a more appropriate venue. She included quotes from two local wildlife biologists she consulted, who had raised concerns about possible animal safety issues, including 11 bighorn lambs recently born in the area.
Shortly thereafter, the Living Desert pulled the plug on the project.
Judy Chicago, Living Smoke (2021). Photo by Donald Woodman, courtesy of the Artist Rights Society.

“Desert X is committed to protecting the desert landscape and its wildlife. We work with experts and follow recommendations to ensure our exhibition leaves no trace,” Jenny Gil Schmitz, Desert X’s executive director, told Artnet News in an email. “We are deeply disappointed that the Living Desert has reversed its decision to host Judy Chicago’s work after months of research and preparation to ensure the safety of the animals and their natural surroundings.”
The Living Desert did not respond to inquiries from Artnet News, but Gil Schmitz told the New York Times that the organization pulled out because “they didn’t want to be part of a controversy regarding their environmental preservation.”
Chicago says that ecological concerns are at the forefront of her “Smoke Sculptures,” as well as earlier series, “which were rooted in my desire to create an alternative type of Land Art, one that—instead of uprooting or bulldozing the environment—merged color, wind and landscape in order to illuminate the beauty of the world in which we live,” Chicago said.
Judy Chicago, Immolation (1972); from Women and Smoke (2018). Photo courtesy of Nina Johnson.

The ephemeral works always use non-toxic smoke. For the Living Desert project, Chicago planned to use an electronic trigger, eliminating the loud ignition noise to avoid startling animals. The Desert X piece would have marked the Living Desert’s 50th anniversary, and was being funded by collector Jordan Schnitzer, who acquired Chicago’s print archive in 2020.
But Japenga remained concerned about the press release’s promise to “transform a 1,200-acre desert landscape.”
“When [Chicago] did these pieces in the 1970s, they were small, spontaneous, and bohemian. Wonderful for all involved, I’m sure. I wish I’d been there!” Japenga said. “Judy’s smoke show is now a large-scale, slick entertainment spectacle.”
“If you look more closely, there is a lot of money behind the event,” she added. “Money and publicity tends to make people look the other way.”
Chicago responded that the press release did not mean to suggest that the entire landscape would have been covered with smoke. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Rather, we were speaking aesthetically. That is, by releasing short-lived smoke into the large desert landscape—where it would move and mix with the wind—the visual environment would be transformed by color.”
Judy Chicago. Photo by Donald Woodman, courtesy of the Artist Rights Society.

Environmental concerns also led to the cancellation of an artwork that was intended as part of the 2018 edition of Desert X. At the time, he local bighorn sheep population was suffering an epidemic, so the biennial moved to cancel a Jenny Holzer light projection piece. And this year, the exhibition has had to relocate an installation by Serge Attukwei Clottey due to concerns that it exploited local issues with tainted groundwater. The event has also had to contend with ongoing objections to its Saudi Arabia connection.
Looking ahead, Desert X hopes to find a new home for Chicago’s work. “We stand by Judy and all of our collaborating artists and are actively seeking alternative sites so that Judy’s work may be enjoyed peacefully and safely by a global audience as planned,” Gil Schmitz said.
In the meantime, Chicago stands behind her record as a supporter of the environment. Her critics “might have good intentions,” she said, “but given my decades-long commitment to environmental justice and animal rights, I am the wrong target.”
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The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, will reflect on the death of Breonna Taylor—who was shot by police in the city a year ago next month—in a new exhibition.   
The title of the show, “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” came from Taylor’s mom, Tamika Palmer. 
“Early in the exhibition planning process, I had a conversation with Ms. Palmer, where I asked her to share what this exhibition meant to her and her daughter’s legacy,” says Allison Glenn, who guest curated the show. “From her response, I developed this three-word title that spoke to the spirit of her reply.”
Details about who—or what—will be included in the show have not yet been announced, but it will open across five galleries at the museum on April 7. Entry to the exhibition will be free thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation. 
Curator Allison Glenn. Courtesy of the Speed Art Museum.

Stephen Reily, the Speed’s director, approached Glenn, who is an associate curator at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas, about the show last fall. 
“We slowly started to think about how our museum, which is deeply committed to using art to serve the whole community, could respond,” Reily says. “What is the role of an art museum in serving a city and trauma? We had to ask ourselves the question: how would a museum even try to get this right?” 
In talking to colleagues and peers, Glenn’s name came up quickly, Reily says, noting that she’d previously worked with Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects in Chicago and Prospect New Orleans. “She’s someone who has deep experience working with great artists in response to real events in real places,” he says.
For this effort, Glenn convened a group of artists, scholars, and other experts to advise on curatorial decisions for the show. “I sought their consult on everything,” she recalls. “Everything.” 
Gates, who reinstalled the Cleveland gazebo where Tamir Rice was shot as a memorial in Chicago, was Glenn’s first call. Then came, in no particular order, artists Amy Sherald (who painted Taylor for the cover of Vanity Fair) and Hank Willis Thomas; multidisciplinary filmmaker and curator Jon-Sesrie Goff; art historian Allison K. Young; art strategist Mecca Brooks; art administrator La Keisha Leek, a cousin of Trayvon Martin; and retired military officer Raymond Green, who is a cousin of the late Alton Sterling. 
The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.

Together, they make up the show’s advisory panel, a group that Glenn likens to a “board of directors for the curatorial framework.” 
“These people really helped shape the truth of this all, which is that what happened is part of a national conversation,” Glenn says. “I really tried to make sure I was positioning myself in concert and conversation with many voices that I admire and respect before I brought any ideas to the museum or the local community.”
This, she added, was done out of “respect for the subject and respect for the year that Louisville had last year—and continues to have.”
Meanwhile, the Speed’s community engagement strategist, Toya Northington, convened a steering committee of Louisville artists, activists, mental health professionals, and other community members who serve as advisors on a local level.
“A museum like ours should never live in isolation from what’s going on in the city,” Reily says. “The killing of Breonna Taylor and the year of protests changed the course of our city. At the Speed, because we believe that great art and artists can help the city, we were hungry… to find a way to address it.”
“Promise, Witness, Remembrance” will be on view from April 7 through June 6, 2021 at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
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Angelo Plessas was doing plank pose in the narrow space between the foot of his bed and the hotel wall. Several of his quilted sculptures were spread out beneath him to soften the hard floor. Hotel staff dropped off warm meals several times a day.
“It is sort of like a residency,” the Greek artist told me over a WhatsApp call on day seven of his 14-day quarantine in an 18-square-meter room in Seoul. (The artist had been uploading the footage to Instagram as a kind of performative ritual.) Following his stay, Plessas planned to head to a sacred mountain to meet the South Korean shaman Dodam, with whom he is collaborating for the 13th Gwangju Biennial.
Production still from John Gerrard Mirror Pavilion: Leaf Work (Derrigimlagh) (2019). Courtesy of the artist.

It’s not exactly how Plessas imagined he would return to South Korea after an initial trip there in late 2019. Back then, a large group of international artists, shepherded by artistic directors Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, went on a series of site visits ahead of the esteemed exhibition—Asia’s largest and oldest. At the time, the virus was perhaps already somewhere in the world, but it was nowhere near their imaginations.
Since then, Gwangju’s organizers have had to delay, adapt, rethink, and rework to accommodate a constantly shifting public-health situation. After two postponements, the biennial is preparing, finally, to open on April 1. (South Korea has been praised for its response to the pandemic; its most recent seven-day case count came in at under 500.)
Yet the opening will look very different from the buzzy biennials of previous years. Of the 69 participating artists (who are responsible for 41 new commissions), only four individuals—including a two-person collective—were able to travel to South Korea to install their works in situ. 
Natasha Ginwala (R) and Defne Ayas (L). Photo: Victoria Tomaschko.

The challenges posed by the lockdown era have rushed the biennial circuit into a future that many were already discussing. Had the daring, female-led show in South Korea intended to be a spectacle reminiscent of biennials past, it likely would have been rendered moot by the pandemic.  
But neither Ayas nor Ginwala wanted to continue with “this machine of biennials,” as Ayas put it. Instead, they sought to offer an antidote to it, by exploring spirituality, resistance, and community healing. The events of 2020 gave those themes a new sense of urgency.
“We were ready to debunk the biennial format and stretch it, but we did not know we would be stretching it this much,” Ayas said with a laugh from her own room a few floors above Plessas. “The cracks we were looking into just got deeper.”
Video still from Theo Eshetu’s, Ghostdance (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

Hive Mind
The biennial, titled “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning,” comes at a moment when loss, grief, and separation are globally felt. And so the duo has gravitated toward two seemingly disparate themes: shamanism, a dominant form of spirituality in South Korea, and technology. A form of cosmic gravitas pulses through the exhibition’s preamble of essays, talks, and online programming.
The surreality of the enterprise was clear from conversations with a number of participants who traveled to Gwangju for the opening. All were performance artists whose works could not be presented remotely. Plessas, who came from Athens, shared his hotel wall with Canadian conceptual artist Judy Radul. They would see each other for brief moments when they picked up their food in the hall.
The show’s co-curator Defne Ayas, meanwhile, was in her room on video calls with Ginwala, who was already on the ground helping to install the show. It will be set across four locations over a now-shortened four weeks: a historic theater, a sacred mountain, a classical biennial hall, and the Gwangju National Museum. One could consider the Internet the fifth, unplanned venue.
Still from Judy Radul’s Good Night Vision (2013). Courtesy the artist.

Artists in Quarantine
For the artists who did travel to Gwangju, the mandated pause was surprisingly welcome. “There is something special about stopping just before you make an artwork and waiting for two weeks, having the time to just keep thinking about it,” Radul said. 
Ahead of the trip, she worked closely with two South Korean musicians on her eerily prescient commission. With help from Gina Hwang, who plays a geomungo (a plucked guitar-like instrument), and Hannah Kim (who plays the more percussive janggu drum and gong), Radul created a psychedelic, folkloric soundscape that she plans to record live inside a historic theater. 
To film it, she long ago decided to use heat-tracking cameras—a medium she began exploring in 2013—that will record the heat imprints created by the musicians. Another camera will be pointed at the audience, should there be one come April. There is, of course, a certain irony to preparing this work in a world where free movement is contingent upon body temperature. (Radul was having her temperature taken at the hotel every few hours.)
“Proximity, touching, creating sound in a room together—all of this has shifted,” she said. “The questions around biennials, where we just drop in and drop out, have been posed for years now. It does make you wonder what you will do for art. We are finding out right now what artists actually bring to a scenario when they show up or don’t show up.”
∞OS Session, 2019, V.A.C. Foundation, photo: Marco Franceschin.

Participation in the show has been challenging even for artists who could not show up in person. Korakrit Arunanondchai’s new video, Songs for Dying, reflects on his own losses this past year, including the death of his grandfather. It pairs footage drawn from pro-democracy protests in Thailand (where Arunanondchai moved from New York at the beginning of the pandemic) and the 1948 Jeju Island massacre in South Korea with the minutiae that comes from witnessing the death of a loved one. His incisive editing—moving between surrealism, the news cycle, and a very personal narrative—feels fluid and familiar after the past year.
The artist directed the South Korea portion of the video—which captures a shaman conducting a ritual for the dead on Jeju Island—remotely after it became clear he would be unable to travel. “It was hard,” he said. “I work with hidden narratives to begin with. And often, the thing that pulls you in is not what you can find on the internet.” (The film’s second chapter, Songs for the Living, will be shown at the Migros Museum in Zurich in September.)
Video still from Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for Dying (2021). Courtesy the artist

The Future Forum
While the biennial plays an important role in the region—it was created to process and memorialize the Gwangju Uprising in 1980—attendance will necessarily be limited. Then, there is the so-called art world to consider. The traveling band of curators, writers, collectors, and art dealers that would normally attend will also be in absentia. Even the participating curators and artists will have packed up and left.
That’s where the fifth venue, the online forum, comes in. Artists have generously shared their processes and created new online commissions. The catalogue chronicles a year-long conversation that was once meant for Gwangju, but which has now become more global. 
Ayas spoke of a “mad loyalty” that the artists and curators have for one another and for the project. All that matters, she says, is that it “installs itself” in people’s minds in some important way. “Small is beautiful, and more meaningful,” she added. 
Emo de Medeiros, Kaleta/Kaleta (2016). Courtesy of theartist.

Her conviction begs the question: how much did we really see of these massive shows when we were running around previews trying to take it all in? Perhaps the slow and virtual drip of “Spirits Rising, Minds Tuning” offers a teachable moment. Maybe we do not need to see the whole in order to be touched by a part. 
“This biennial was prophetic, in a way, because it was predicting the penetration of the virtual and this post-human feeling of virtuality,” Plessas said from his hotel room. “It will be interesting to see how it will be remembered.”

The 13th Gwangju Biennale is on view from April 1 to May 9.
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The Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland is magnifying and aiming to rectify its own “anti-Black practices” in an exhibition that opens this week.
“Imagine Otherwise,” organized by LaTanya Autry, a curator-in-residence and co-organizer of the Museums Are Not Neutral advocacy group, takes place at MoCA and two Black-led Cleveland spaces, Third Space Action Lab and the Museum of Creative Human Art (MOCHA). On the roster are four artists: Imani Dennison, Amber N. Ford, Shikeith (who goes by one name), and Antwoine Washington, who is also MOCHA’s co-founder.
Remarkably, the museum’s own description of the show points an accusing finger at itself.
“Autry envisions possibilities beyond MoCA Cleveland’s consistent anti-Black practices by partnering with Black-led and centered organizations that regularly care for Black residents and others while challenged with far smaller budgets than many area white-led and centered arts institutions,” says the webpage devoted to the show.
It will be a “limited, yet hopefully, significant prodding for an authentic, community-led institutional reckoning of MoCA Cleveland.”
The Cleveland art world, Autry told Artnet News in a phone interview, is like “an apartheid system in a Black city. It’s outrageous. White institutions have multimillion-dollar budgets, and there are Black-led organizations that have zero dollars.” Her work, she explained, was a way of sharing the wealth.
The show owes its inspiration to Christina Sharpe’s acclaimed 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.
“I read her book a couple of years ago and thought right away I’d like to do an exhibition exploring the ideas in the book,” Autry said. “Though the show ended up changing with Covid, I love what we did because I ended up thinking more deeply about what Sharpe calls ‘wake work’ in terms of the curatorial practice.”
Shikeith, still waters run deep (2021). Courtesy the artist.

Shikeith’s art forms the core of the exhibition’s concept, and gets the largest gallery, for an installation dealing with “Black queer re-making” as a sacred space. Dennison will show a film shot in Johannesburg presenting an Afro-Futurist vision.
Ford’s photographic work, meanwhile, expresses “the vast geography of Black ways of being,” and Washington will show an installation that uses sculptural table settings to comment on the promised, but not always delivered, “seat at the table” offered to Black people in America.
The exhibition comes during a nationwide reckoning in which art museums are being called to account for their histories, including being led and staffed overwhelmingly by white people and neglecting the work of Black artists. Autry herself is the first on-staff Black curator organizing exhibitions in the history of the institution. (There was previously a Black curator of public programs, Deidre McPherson).
MoCA occupies a prominent place in that very reckoning. In June, very shortly after the police killing of George Floyd ignited protests worldwide, it emerged that the museum had canceled an exhibition of works that depicted police brutality by the Afro-Latin artist Shaun Leonardo.
The museum indicated that some Black staff and Black community members had opposed the show, and Samaria Rice, whose 12-year-old son Tamir was killed by police in Cleveland in 2014, sent Leonardo a cease-and-desist letter demanding he not show drawings of Tamir. The current presentation of the show, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, does not include those images.
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Few art critics can afford to seriously collect art. And those that do don’t collect like Leo Steinberg did. The Russian-born writer, one of the most influential of his generation, amassed a trove of some 3,500 prints before his death, in 2011—a time when the medium was often overlooked, undervalued, and ripe for reassessment. 
Steinberg’s contributions to art history wouldn’t have been the same without his hobby, argues a new exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. It’s through this conceit that the show, “After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints,” seeks to unpack the tricky legacy left behind by the era-hopping thinker, outsider academic, and iconoclastic critic with an artist’s eye. 
Steinberg donated his extensive inventory of prints to the Blanton in 2002, and it’s from this collection that the show was culled. On view is a smattering of prints stretching from the Renaissance to the mid-20th century, including examples by Federico Barocci, Albrecht Dürer, Henri Matisse, and Chuck Close. The breadth is jarring, to be sure, but so were Steinberg’s interests.
Paolo Toschi, Descent from the Cross after a painting by Daniele da Volterra (1843). Courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art.

Steinberg moved to New York from Russia in 1945 and earned a living teaching art history and reviewing shows, quickly making a name for himself among the preeminent critics du jour. (Author Tom Wolfe would later dub him and fellow critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg the “Kings of Cultureburg.”) But his purview was more expansive than his peers.
By the dawn of the 1960s, he received his PhD in renaissance studies. It was around this time, too, that Steinberg began to collect prints—the only type of art he could afford at the time.
“He did not start with a lot of money in the bank,” says Blanton curator Holly Borham, who organized the show. “[He would] poke around in frame shops and bookstores and print galleries in New York and what he found there was that you could buy really beautiful, original works of art for a few dollars a piece.” 
What Steinberg realized at the time, which now seems obvious, was that, for centuries, prints provided a connective tissue around which the body of European art history could form. “He was prescient in understanding and describing the ‘circulating lifeblood of ideas’ in prints that we are now so used to with the internet,” Borham says. “He was drawing attention to this image revolution and charting some really specific chains of transmission early on.”
Hendrick Goltzius, The Farnese Hercules (c. 1591-92). Courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art.

Steinberg’s interest in how prints enabled art’s evolution is evident in the show, which includes numerous examples of lesser-known Old Masters recreating or otherwise reinterpreting important works of art: There are several takes on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, for instance, and Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. Steinberg understood, the curator notes, that artists have always learned through copying what came before them. 
Which is why, for all the Renaissance maestros and modern titans in the show, perhaps the most interesting artist included is Steinberg himself. Indeed, says Borham, that’s what most distinguished the critic from his peers: that he was trained, first, as an artist. It’s a foundation that shaped his entire relationship to art.  
The exhibition opens with a handful of Steinberg’s unremarkable sketches and figure studies, an exercise he would practice throughout his life. “He was always drawing the human body and figure; he was fascinated by that,” says Borham, adding that “abstraction constituted but a “tiny portion” of what he collected. 
And like his heroes, Steinberg was an enthusiastic copyist, sketching any work of art he studied. On this point, Borham recalls a famous quote from the man which perhaps best sums up his walk-the-walk approach to everything he did. It went something along the lines of: “I don’t trust a critic who can’t draw or dance.”

“After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints” is on view now through May 9 at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin.
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With 2020 in the rear-view mirror, we hope health-related exhibition delays and cancellations are a thing of the past (though you never know).
Below, take a look at our picks of US shows opening in the early part of 2021 you won’t want to miss.

“David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History“High Museum of Art, AtlantaFebruary 6–May 9

David Driskell, Homage to Romare (1975). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment.

Before his death at the age of 88 in April, David Driskell earned respect as a versatile artist and curator who helped raise the profile of African American artists and those of the African Diaspora. This first exhibition since his death is also the first to bring together his works on paper with his paintings.
The High Museum of Art is located at 1280 Peachtree St NE, Atlanta

“Goya’s Graphic Imagination”The Metropolitan Museum of ArtFebruary 12–May 2

Francisco de Goya, Bullfight in a Divided Ring (1825). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This broad, chronological exhibition of roughly 100 works delves into Goya’s graphic works and explores how he used drawings and prints to elaborate complex ideas, as well to document his responses to turbulent social and political events occurring around him. It is in these works that Goya’s political liberalism, disdain for superstition, and opposition to intellectual oppression shine through.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York

“KAWS: What Party”The Brooklyn MuseumFebruary 12–September 5

KAWS, WHAT PARTY (2020). © KAWS. (Photo: Michael Biondo).

The artist’s 25-year career has made an indelible mark on the contemporary art scene (and the market) and this year’s KAWS célèbre (had to) is surely his debut museum survey. Artnet News’s Gray Market scribe Tim Schneider even predicts KAWS’s works will outsell most every Old Master work by value in 2021.
The Brooklyn Museum is located at 200 Eastern Parkway, New York

“Hockney–Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature”Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonFebruary 21–June 20 More