Museum And Gallery

2009: The year in art

Saints, sinners, paint

By GREG COOK | December 30, 2009

The year started off with a kick in the teeth when, in January, Brandeis University announced plans to shutter its Rose Art Museum and sell off its masterpieces. Leaders of the Waltham school pled "historic economic recession" and then kinda, sorta retreated over the ensuing months as the entire art world declared they had shit for brains. Numerous administrators — among them President Jehuda Reinharz and financial chief Peter French — subsequently announced they were leaving, but the threat has not been outright rescinded. Stay tuned.

Three major local painters passed away: Henry Schwartz, Michael Mazur, and Hyman Bloom. And after 10 galleries closed last year, two more shut down in 2009: eight-year-old OH+T Gallery and Nielsen Gallery, which was founded in 1963. But several local artists had break-out years, and new energy came with the opening of Fourth Wall Project and Gallery Benoit in Boston, Meme Gallery and Gallery 263 (technically at the end of 2008) in Cambridge, and Hallway Gallery in Jamaica Plain. Which leads me to our annual rundown of the best art of the year.

• THREE GENTLEMEN OF VENICE
The marvel of the Museum of Fine Arts' "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice" was 1) the amazing loans the MFA secured (rumored to be Italy's thanks for the MFA's return of Italian antiquities) and 2) curator Frederick Ilchman's crackerjack organization of the canvases. Telling face-offs of the 16th-century titans depicting the same Greek deities or Catholic saints made it plain to experts as well as average Joes how the three artists developed in relation and competition with one another. But there was nothing plain about the glorious art, devoted as it was to the sensual pleasures of red velvet, gold, and rosy naked flesh.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | next >

Topics: Museum And Gallery , Barack Obama , Entertainment , Massachusetts College of Art , More

| More

Featured Articles in Museum And Gallery:

A REALLY BIG SHOW! | May 21, 2013
This showcase of tomorrow's-art-stars-today is both invigorating and overwhelming, with work by 194 students.

CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN | May 13, 2013
What does it mean to be a man? That's the question at the heart of this smart, sumptuous exhibit — one of the best shows in the region this year.

MERRY PRANKSTERS | May 07, 2013
Parked out front of Brown University's gray modernist Granoff Center on a recent sunny morning were one of those 15-foot-tall inflatable rats that unions install in front of businesses they're protesting and a limousine sloppily painted to resemble a yellow and black school bus.

ALTERED IMAGES | April 30, 2013
Among the handsome Washington Street storefronts of AS220's renovated Mercantile Block building, with their neo-old-timey signs, is the residents' entrance to the building. It is against AS220's religion to leave any space empty that can be filled with art. So the lobby is the AS220 Resident Gallery, which occupants of the building take turns filling with their stuff.

IN THE CITY | April 23, 2013
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Providence art scene is how the city itself has been such a rich subject. A decade ago, the city became a galvanizing topic as artists fought to protect the old mills that served as their homes and studios from demolition — with mixed success. But lately, the community's industrial architecture itself has attracted artists' attention.