What's in Store
“Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” reinforces the International Center of Photography’s reputation for stimulating exhibitions that address the very nature of contemporary art. Brought together by ICP adjunct curator Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition takes as its relatively simple starting point the understandable interest that photographers, filmmakers, and other artists have in how things—including their own works—are stored, and how the works’ meanings might be changed as a consequence.

The show, on view from January 18 through May 4, includes a range of pieces by leading contemporary artists for whom archival documents have become a source of fascination. Some use archives to rethink what we mean when we talk about history or the significance of individual and collective memory; others investigate how this affects our sense of identity and what happens when things are lost.

Artists whose careers span the last 30 years—like Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Ruff, and Anri Sala—are included, and their work takes many different forms. There are actual archives sometimes arranged by peculiar cataloging methods, fantasized biographies of nonexistent individuals, wide-ranging collections of found and anonymous photographs, photographic albums rendered as movies, and photomontages and collages composed of historical photographs.

The show shifts widely in its tone, appearances, and subject matter, and is in turn thought-provoking, moving, and laugh-out-loud funny. What holds it together is the artists’ evident realization that there is a fundamental affinity between art forms that record the appearances of the world, like photography and film, and the sense that such recordings should be arranged in some logical order. The show intrigues with its suggestion that these art forms and their archives belong inextricably together.

The Short List
Lucian Freud is probably Britain’s most respected figurative painter. His painterly style and unforgiving observation have helped redefine possibilities for contemporary portraiture and nude figure painting. “Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings,” on view at the Museum of Modern Art through March 10, brings together some 70 of his etchings, dating from the 1980s on, and more than 20 of his paintings, exploring the relationship between these two very different mediums in his body of work.

A reconsideration of the art of ukiyo-e, “Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680–1860,” on view at the Asia Society from February 27 to May 4, combines more than 150 exquisite prints, paintings, and illustrated books with fascinating background information about the artists’ emerging role as entrepreneurs, their relationships with their studio teams, the roles of publishers, and the ways in which work was mass-marketed.

Monumental vessels celebrating military and political heroes sit alongside prosaic domestic objects in “Silversmiths to the Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808–1842,” the first exhibition devoted to the silversmiths, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 4. Working in Boston and Philadelphia, they produced silver remarkable for its ambition, quality, and display of young America’s national pride.

In the poignant “Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within,” the final part of a trilogy, on view at the Rubin Museum of Art through February 18, photographer Kenro Izo focuses on what he dubbed the “spiritual within,” or the pure religion of the people of Bhutan, a blend of indigenous beliefs and Buddhist thought. Izo brings a special empathy to his subjects, who embody the mystery and serenity of all deeply held religious belief.