New York Winter Exhibition Preview

NEW YORK—From the first full-scale exploration of Gustave Courbet's body of work in 30 years to an explosive, museum-filling Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective, to a group show of underappreciated feminist art, there's plenty to see in New York this winter. Here are 12 of the best offerings of the season.  

"New York Winter Exhibition Preview" comes to ARTINFO from the winter 2008 issue of Museums magazine. Click on the photo gallery at left to see more images from the featured shows.

A Portrait of the Artist as an Independent Spirit
Most art historians regard Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) as the first truly modern artist. Certainly his conception of the artist as an independent spirit with significant comments to offer about society established attitudes that still hold sway today. remarkably, “Gustave Courbet,” the full-scale retrospective of his work, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 27 to May 18, is the first devoted to him in 30 years.

The hundred or so works on view prove how revolutionary the artist was in mid-19th-century France, when Neoclassicism and Romanticism dominated. To begin with, he was explicitly political: He once famously declared that “the people have my sympathies. I must address myself to them directly.” And at a time when polite society believed that only Paris enjoyed any cultural importance, he never played down his rural background or the mean circumstances in which many provincials lived. Then, he matched the roughness of his subject matter with techniques that led to accusations of deliberate ugliness. nowadays he is seen as the first realist.

Courbet was probably also the first celebrity artist in the modern sense. He thumbed his nose at the Paris Salon while accepting its plaudits, turned down Napoléon III’s offer of the cross of the Legion of Honor, repeatedly portrayed himself heroically in large-scale paintings, and courted controversy by creating paintings so sexually explicit that they still make some viewers blush today. He ostentatiously declared that he should be remembered as having “belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any regime except the regime of liberty.” To some, he was simply “the most arrogant man in France.” Either way, this is a fascinating show of a remarkable artist.

Southwestern Exposure
“Diebenkorn in New Mexico,” a rewarding glimpse into the development of one of America’s greatest abstract painters, comes to NYU’s enterprising but underappreciated Grey Art Gallery from the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico, Taos. Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) eventually became the inimitable exponent of disciplined, angular color abstractions (the best known of which constitute his quartercentury-long “Ocean Park Series”), but this show, on view from January 25 to April 5, focuses on the less celebrated, more fluid version of Abstract Expressionism that the artist developed while enrolled under the G.I. Bill in the University of New Mexico’s graduate fine-arts department from 1950 to 1952.

The 50 paintings and sculptures that come together here for the first time show Diebenkorn benefiting from both the very particular desert light he discovered on his Southwestern sojourn and the distance from the artistic forcing houses of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Significantly, Diebenkorn was anything but a beginner during this highly influential period: He had already studied art at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and, after his discharge from the Marines, the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), whose faculty he joined in 1947. He had already evolved a personal artistic style by the time he arrived in New Mexico, but it’s clear the lessons in color combination and composition that he learned there had a crucial effect on his mature work. This makes for a fascinating, often strikingly beautiful show.

More than Movies
This winter brings a treat for Milos Forman fans, which means pretty much anyone interested in intelligent popular cinema from the last 45 years. From February 14 through 28, the Museum of Modern Art is offering a complete retrospective of Forman’s oeuvre, including everything from the remarkable new wave movies that he made in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s through his most recent success, the 2006 release Goya’s Ghosts.