The Best Art Exhibitions of the Year

Here cometh for all ye faithful my fair and balanced assessment of 2021’s best exhibitions.

N o more jingling bells, our once-donned gay apparel back in the closet and Grandma now in traction — that reckless reindeer freed by a Soros-backed prosecutor. For the last few weeks, I’ve harked as the herald angels sang and wrote more in the spirit of Mr. Fezziwig than Mr. Grinch. No point during the Christmas season to be cynical, trenchant, and wry. Here cometh for all ye faithful my fair and balanced assessment of 2021’s best exhibitions.

First, a skunk or two interrupted Mommy as she kissed Santa Claus. I got to the Yale University Art Gallery in the nick of time to see On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale, the timely and beautifully presented exhibition on women holding degrees in fine arts from Yale. I’ll write more about the exhibition later but have to say I was astonished to read after my visit that Yale, once again, closed its art galleries to the public.

Using the Covid mass hysteria as an excuse, Yale, Harvard, Williams, and other chichi schools kept their art museums closed to the riffraff townies, alumni, and tuition-strapped parents as long as they possibly could. Most reopened only in September. Yale deployed the Omicron variant to plaster the front door with “Keep Out.” For these fat-cat, tax-exempt institutions, their art galleries are among the few free and open parts of the campus. Smithsonian museums, run by the Swamp politburo to which the norms governing the rest of us don’t apply, also stayed shut until this past fall. It was “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” 24/7, 365 days a year for the highly paid, pajama-clad, lockdown lazies running some of the best museums in the country.

The biggest museum scandal in my lifetime doesn’t involve a stolen Vermeer but a grandiloquent bird-flipping to the public by museum directors. With clean air, the easy ability to limit crowds, and guards trained to keep people apart, museums are just about the safest public spaces around when it comes to limiting Covid transmission. When it finally reopened this fall, Yale’s art gallery truncated its public hours. It condescended to open weekends only. Now, it’s not open at all. Shame on Yale for being the first museum in the country to close again. Museums in Covid-crazed Manhattan, London, and Paris are still open. I read the Yale alumni newsletter every day. Its writers obsess almost exclusively over race, climate, and Covid, in every respect taking a rigid, predictable party line. Isn’t there a single public-health guru there, buried in ivy in some campus nook, with views at variance with Fauci Thought? We have to get back to normal.

Enough on Yale. I looked at the close-to-100 stories I wrote in 2021 for NR. Taken together, they’re a rule book for how to make a good exhibition.

I won’t dive too much into the worst shows this year. Nothing I saw was without some high points. The worst exhibition I’ve ever seen, and the one with nearly zero pluses, is Posters from the 2017 Women’s March at Poster House in Manhattan, a new museum. I wrote about it in 2018. It was a bottom-of-the-barrel show. Not only was the art bad. A poster with text reading “our rights are not up for grabs and neither are we” and nothing else isn’t even art. The interpretation was vapid and incurious.

The exhibition celebrated an anti-Trump rally, and, regardless of our feelings about Trump, positive or negative, Trump isn’t engaging fodder for an art show. Art that screams “I hate Trump” or “I love Trump” is boring and one-dimensional. Far from inclusive, the march barred women’s groups that didn’t hew to the organizers’ ideological line. The 2017 march also was surreptitiously but intimately linked to the Nation of Islam and other anti-Semitic causes. Anti-Semitism repels me.

“Small is beautiful” best describes my take on the museum-exhibition scene this year. So does focus. The Dallas Museum of Art’s Van Gogh and the Olive Groves gathered the artist’s 15 or so paintings of humble, ubiquitous olive trees in Provence done in the last months of his life. “Less is more” seems hard these days. We’re in a blathering, unedited culture. But a small, tight show doesn’t mean a shortage of intellectual points. A visitor could look at these paintings for their brilliant technique, their palette, their place in Van Gogh’s biography, and as universal metaphors for life, death, and rebirth, beguiled by one theme or all three. It was small but elastic and rich.

Alonso Berruguete: First Renaissance Sculptor of Spain at the Meadows Museum, also in Dallas, was another one-artist show. I saw it in January. Berruguete is not a household name in America. Most of his painted-wood sculptures are still used as altarpieces in Spanish churches. Art by Berruguete either pried from churches or done as personal-devotion objects is in the sculpture museum in Valladolid.

Collaborations with Spanish museums aren’t easy. They take connections and persistence as well as the vision to do the show in the first place. The Meadows partnered with the National Gallery in Washington, which helped. Key, though, was the Meadows’s director, Mark Roglan, who grew up in Madrid and knew everyone in the Spanish museum world. The exhibition was a mini-retrospective for Berruguete with an important catalogue. Sadly, Mark died of cancer just months after the exhibition opened.

Poster House, mother of the dreadful Women’s March show, triumphed with Freak Power, an exhibition of graphics created when Hunter Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen in 1970. I had high hopes for Poster House and was demoralized when I saw its Women’s March show and its weak exhibition on Mucha a few months earlier. My faith was restored and confirmed by Freak Power. Thompson is a pivotal figure in journalism. His 1970 campaign advertising was buoyant and subversive, and the cast of characters was deliciously demented. No one had looked at the art for years, and it was in one gallery designed with élan.

Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet, was an exhibition of contemporary Iranian art at the Asia Society in New York. I consider it mid-size, with about 60 objects. Its beauty, and this seems rare, is in presenting art, artists, and ideas that, for almost every visitor, were fresh and new. I didn’t know a single artist in the exhibition, so it was a revelation. Exploring new artists, sad to say, is a risky thing to do. It was also a rare show without grudge or grievance. Many of the artists suffered from the extreme Islamic regime’s terror governance, and the exhibition explored this when appropriate. The curators were too reticent but, overall, let the art speak.

I loved the Clark Art Institute’s Nicolai Astrup: Visions of Norway exhibition for the same reason. Astrup was a Norwegian Symbolist whose best work was done in the 1910s. Yes, there’s a bit of Klimt, a bit of Van Gogh, and a bit of Puvis de Chavannes in his work, but Norwegian landscape is a thing of its own.

Weathervanes, as an art genre, aren’t new to me. I’m far from an art snob, and I find quality in nearly everything except brain-dead “our rights are not up for grabs and neither are we” posters. That said, I did think of old American weathervanes, charming as they might be, as aesthetically marginal, like duck decoys and Pez dispensers. Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds at the Folk Art Museum in Manhattan educated me in their design sophistication, social history, and sheer beauty. The galleries at the museum are spacious and comfortable but idiosyncratic. I’ve rarely seen a show designed so sensitively that the art, idiosyncratic itself, and the space seemed made for each other.

There’s no need, drawing from the dregs of my Christmas spirit, to revisit clunkers such as the Alice Neel and Jasper Johns retrospectives, the first at the Met and second at the Whitney. Both touted their subjects as our age’s oil-on-canvas Athena and Zeus. Neel is a very good artist but a limited one. There was no need for this seventh retrospective of her work in 30 years. A great exhibition has to have something new to say, which should be a given. Johns is a good artist, too, but one at his most refreshing and accomplished at one point in time, in the late ’50s and early ’60s. That Johns has, in a 60-year career, generated no circle, and that no young man or woman goes to art school inspired by Johns, are, together, signs that a 100-object retrospective and some minimal hagiography would have been appropriate.

We live in crazy times so “what’s old is new” and exhilarating and enriching  should not surprise us. The Torlonia Marbles at the Capitoline in Rome was majestic in every respect. The exhibition displayed the best, largest, and most elusive collection of ancient Roman sculpture in private hands. Assembled over a 100-year period beginning in the 1770s and involving two or three generations, the Torlonia marbles, both portrait and mythological sculpture, hadn’t been available to the public since the 1930s. These riches dazzled me, both as discrete works of art and as a group presented in galleries designed by David Chipperfield. I am normally against exhibitions designed by architects, as I believe art shows are best done by curators, who are suited to privilege the art, not the design or, worse, the architect’s ego. Applying Chipperfield’s genius, or that of his team, was worth the risk.

The Italian state and the Italian rich guardedly, resentfully, live together. The Torlonia family and Italy’s culture apparatchiks negotiated and sparred. The Italian prime minister and president were involved. Prayers were said. Even Santa and his elves were enlisted. That the exhibition happened is an early Christmas gift to Rome and to the world. The book is definitive on the subject of this particular group of sculptures and, generally, the connoisseurship of ancient Roman sculpture. The exhibition was to travel internationally, too, and this might still happen. But for now, Covid derailed the tour, alas.

After 450 years, it was long overdue for Titian’s Metamorphoses suite of big mythological paintings, done for Philip II, to be reunited. The show, Women, Myth, and Power, was a collaboration among the Gardner in Boston, the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Scotland, and the Prado. The Covid hysteria and lockdown nearly ruined the exhibition. The National Gallery in London closed two days after it opened. Spain was closed to most foreigners during its run at the Prado. I managed to see it on a one-day visa. Edinburgh museums were closed for so long, they lost their slot. I think I’m the only person who saw it in London, Madrid, and Boston.

Philip commissioned Titian in the 1550s to create six paintings on the sweet and sour of love, on seduction, loss, jealousy, and betrayal. They’re called Titian’s “poesie” and live at the pinnacle of Venetian Renaissance art. One picture left Madrid in the 1590s. Today, they belong to museums in London, Madrid, and Edinburgh.

The Gardner in Boston, which owns The Rape of Europa, led the charge on the exhibition. Though the exhibition was only six paintings, they’re six superstar paintings. Neither the Gardner nor the Wallace Collection in London had ever let their Titians out the door. The pictures, massive and old, had conservation issues. Each was cleaned and repaired to look its best. We won’t see these six pictures together again for many, many years.

It seems impossible to say anything new about Titian, but Nathaniel Silver, the curator at the Gardner, did a fantastic book. The fact is that great art always has new things to say. It’s a matter of letting it speak, which demands an open, fertile mind and eyes tuned to close looking. In Boston, where they looked the best, the six were displayed in an octagonal gallery, two for each wall with the fourth wall showing portraits of Philip II and his wife, Queen Mary Tudor. As in the Torlonia show and the weathervane show, good gallery design wasn’t decisive, since the art, good or bad, will always have the last word. Design in these three cases sharpened the visitor experience, which is the most it can do. The Gardner’s temporary-loan gallery isn’t big, but it has high ceilings. It’s designed for contemporary art, but the Titians were very much at home. That’s the architect’s savvy.

Metamorphoses, Ovid’s stories about the foibles of humanity, are always relevant. We are a flawed species. Today, this is no more the case than in any era, though our foibles are peculiar to us. Our peculiar notions of love inform what we see in Titian. The exhibition is interpreted in the most essential and helpful way. This invites Titian — and Ovid — to present their own trenchant take in return.

So, this most unusual year did manage to bestow the gift of good art. I hope 2022 sees Dr. Quack, a pint-sized prevaricator and menace to culture, hauled by Alvin and the Singing Chipmunks to the nearest coal pit for his present of choice, anthracite or bituminous. Fauci’s lockdown catechism closed every museum, theater, opera house, and symphony for months. This year, it’s the Omicron hysteria he’s hyping. Yale’s museums are buying his poison, sad to say. Most of America, though, isn’t listening. That’s a Christmas blessing in itself.