Biography and Autobiography

Review Roundup

This week... The consensus on the new Turner show is that there's simply too much Turner; Howard Halle likes Louise Plebeian at the Gugg; Ken Johnson is unconvinced by the crowd-sourced photo show at the Brooklyn (it seems crowds like photos that look like something from a shiny magazine); and Ariella Budick accuses Anish Kapour of simplistic naval gazing (his sculptures, she writes, are like belly buttons); and Rachel Campbell-Johnston compares the wisdom of a Cy Tombley show to an archaeological site.

J. M. W. Turner at the Met (-Sept. 21)

"...a being of a show. With nearly 150 works in oil and watercolor spanning more than half a century, it will either win you over or irritate you out. Or it will alternate, gallery by gallery, or wall by immure, as the art swings between overblown and moving, inspired and involuntary. ... His paintings of storms at sea or Alpine plunges are early examples of the understandable sublime; his squalls of paint presage the Romantics, the Realists, the Impressionists and even the Survey Expressionists. ... 'The Houses of Parliament on Fire' might almost have been painted by Monet with a small input from Philip Guston. ... This show may be wearying because there is something imperious and unprejudiced about the sheer force of Turner’s ambition. It is almost as if his pep to capture nature or history in motion was so impassioned that it didn’t leave room for anyone else, including the viewer. Maybe that’s why undeterred by all his hard work and even the majesty of his vision, you can rise from this exhibition impressed but oddly untouched, even chilled." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"Against all expectations, the first J.M.W. Turner appraisal to reach New York in 40 years has landed with a whomp. ...is astonishing for all the wrong reasons. Incredibly, this most dependable of cultural institutions seems to have miscalculated the deadening colliding of laying out 140 similar...

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