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.

Along the way, Forman has produced some of the most memorable—and diverse—movies of the contemporary period. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) not only won all five of the major Oscar categories and drew from Jack Nicholson what many regard as his finest screen achievement, it also established in many viewers’ minds the definitive perception of a mental hospital in all its horror. Utterly different is Forman’s 1979 reimagining of Hair, which, partly because of his brilliant filming of Twyla Tharp’s choreography, gives the rather lame flower-power paean that was the original Broadway show a genuine political edge. And different yet is the sprawling epic Ragtime (1981), one of the best historical movies of the late 20th century and the catalyst for the legendary James Cagney’s emergence from decades of retirement.

Forman’s great strengths are his accurate observation, his unwaveringly intelligent scripts, and his ability to populate the screen with utterly plausible human society. And underpinning these are his black humor and, most important, his politics, in which the liberty of the individual is paramount. Audiences find themselves cheering on the iconoclast in the face of dumb authority, a remarkably constant thread running through a body of work that is otherwise so diverse. 

An Explosive New Experience
Many New Yorkers will recall Cai Guo-Qiang’s remarkable summer 2006 piece Clear Sky Black Cloud, in which a solitary black cloud appeared above the Metropolitan Museum of Art precisely at noon each day.

Now this most unconventional of artists offers “Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe,” a museum-filling retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from February 22 to May 31. Designed especially for the museum’s unique architecture, the exhibition features works from the 1980s to the present and offers a stylistic and chronological survey of his career.

Cai’s key mediums—gunpowder drawings, site-specific explosion events, large-scale installations, and social projects—are explored in depth here, and he emerges as an artist who has evolved a bizarre artistic language. real cars pierced by flickering neon tubes, Socialist realist sculptures that crumble to dust over the course of an exhibition, and a man-made river that visitors navigate on a raft are typical Cai works, but this show is like nothing that the Guggenheim—or the average visitor—has experienced before. As one might expect of an artist who takes his exhibition title from The X-Files, Cai is fascinated by what he calls the “unseen world,” and much of his work focuses on metaphysical explorations of cosmological energy. (These interests led him to give up control of his art making and to use explosives in his work.)

This summer an estimated four billion television viewers will see Cai’s work as art director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing. The Guggenheim exhibition is much more intimate in scale, of course, but it feels like a real extravaganza nevertheless.

Who’s That Girl?
“Parmigianino’s Antea: A Beautiful Artifice,” on view at the Frick Collection from January 29 through April 27, presents only one painting, but it truly lives up to its billing. Parmigianino’s portrait of a young woman known as Antea, circa 1531–34, is one of the most beautiful and haunting pictures of Italian Mannerism.

As one might expect of such a scholarly institution, the Frick pulled out all the art-historical stops in trying to solve some of the mysteries of the work, on view in the United States for the first time in 20 years, thanks to a special loan from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. To begin with, nobody knows for sure who Antea actually was. Her name is that of a celebrated Roman courtesan, and many believe she was Parmigianino’s mistress. Others say she was his daughter or perhaps his servant, while still others—basing their argument on the resemblance of her face to that of an angel in the artist’s Madonna of the Long Neck—suggest that she was a member of the Baiardi family, commissioners of that work.