John Baldessari, God Nose, 1965, oil on canvas, 68 x 57".

John Baldessari

TATE MODERN
LONDON
Through January 10 2010
Curated by Leslie Jones and Jessica Morgan

“Pure Beauty” seems a funny name for a retrospective of an artist who cremated all his paintings in 1970 and voided the photographed faces of dozens of Hollywood starlets with signature colored spots, but of course an unsettlingly ironic humor runs through Baldessari’s career. This expansive exhibition should connect the proverbial dots with more than 130 works from five decades of collage, video, installation, and—yes— painting. In Los Angeles the artist’s influence looms (conspicuously) large. Accompanied by a catalogue with essays from Bice Curiger, David Salle, and ten others, Baldessari’s first British retrospective should reveal how far his pioneering brand of California Conceptualism extends.

— Michael Ned Holte

Ed Ruscha, Oof, 1962/1963, oil on canvas, 71 1/2 x 67".

Ed Ruscha

HAYWARD GALLERY
LONDON
Through January 10 2010
Curated by Ralph Rugoff

For the cover of the catalogue of his first retrospective, at SF MoMA in 1982, Ed Ruscha chose to reproduce a 1979 pastel that bore the inscription I DON’T WANT / NO RETRO / SPECTIVE. Obviously, no museum director took him at his word. Ruscha’s latest career survey concentrates solely on painting, allowing viewers, easily mesmerized by the artist’s extraordinary inventiveness in a variety of media, to reflect on the particular flavor of his pictorial output. Ruscha’s work has evolved at great speed since his 2005 Venice triumph, and this show of nearly eighty canvases (accompanied by a substantial catalogue with essays by Hayward director Ralph Rugoff and others, and a new interview with Ruscha) invites us to consider his current work in the context of his half-century-long love affair with paint.

— Yve-Alain Bois

Wolf Vostell, Coca Cola, 1961, décollage on paper and Masonite, 82 1/2 x 122".

“Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures”

DEUTSCHES HISTORISCHES MUSEUM
BERLIN
Through January 10 2010
Curated by Stephanie Barron and Eckhart Gillen

During the cold war era (or even to this day, some would argue), no country embodied the fissure between East and West like Germany. And with the contemporary resurgence of Berlin, there’s no better time to reexamine this historical rift. “Art of Two Germanys” takes a comprehensive look, through a vast assortment of artworks produced on either side of the wall—some three hundred paintings, sculptures, multiples, photographs, videos, installations, and artist’s books. An accompanying catalogue, with essays by Diedrich Diederichsen and Andreas Huyssen, among others, furthers the effort, asking how the country’s torn identity unwittingly disguised an otherwise unified past.

— Colin Lang

Markus Lüpertz, Judith, 1995, cast bronze, 10' 4" x 4' 5" x 4' 7".

Markus Lüpertz

KUNST- UND AUSSTELLUNGSHALLE DER BUNDESREPUBLIK DEUTSCHLAND
BONN
Through January 17 2010
Curated by Robert Fleck

Markus Lüpertz has invited misunderstanding for nearly half a century. Never mind the figuration: The East German iconoclast’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures undermine rather than confirm what they mean through images that do not stand for what they seem to say. Accompanied by a hefty catalogue (in German and English editions), this retrospective of some 130 works from 1963 to the present offers an important overview of Lüpertz’s sustained stylistic invention born of the artist’s ongoing dialogue with disparate traditions of picture making. Across Europe, the Albertina in Vienna (in cooperation with Galerie Michael Werner, Berlin) broadens the picture with a simultaneous look at some eighty drawings (October 16, 2009–January 10, 2010).

— Pamela Kort

László Moholy-Nagy, Komposition A 19, 1927, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 37 3/4". © 2009 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

László Maholy-Nagy

SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT
FRANKFURT
Through February 7 2010
Curated by Ingrid Pfeiffer

Marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Bauhaus, the Schirn Kunsthalle presents a major retrospective of Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, featuring prominently among its 170 individual works Raum der Gegenwart (Room for Today)—a large space animated by projected images, kinetic walls, and undulating sheets of glass. Although conceived in 1930, the installation could have easily been taken for the latest offering on the global biennial circuit when it was executed for the first time this spring at the Kunsthalle Erfurt in collaboration with the Schirn, where it will be reinstalled this fall amid paintings, film, fonts, stage designs, sculpture, and photographs—the dizzying range of aesthetic endeavors Moholy-Nagy engaged. This survey of the artist’s work will reveal a figure richly deserving of the epithet “avant-garde”: As Room for Today attests, while very much of his moment, Moholy-Nagy was also clearly ahead of his time.

— Margaret Sundell

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 95".

Jack Goldstein

MMK MUSEUM FÜR MODERNE KUNST
FRANKFURT
Through January 10 2012
Curated by Klaus Görner

For decades, the reception of Jack Goldstein’s work has followed a cyclical pattern, whereby the complexity and wide-ranging influence of the artist’s practice snap into focus every few years, only to fade back into relative obscurity soon thereafter—a fitting pattern, perhaps, for a man who staged his own disappearance in various ways throughout his life. Starting as a post-Minimal sculptor based in Los Angeles during the early 1970s, Goldstein quickly moved into performances and films. The latter were initially made within the confines of his studio but by 1973 incorporated Hollywood techniques, with the artist’s own hand giving way to a producer’s cool attitude, which extended as well to his work in installation, sound, painting, and text. Later, such withdrawals became more literal: Shortly after his first full-scale retrospective at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Canada, in 1991, Goldstein abandoned the art world; his work generally ceased to be exhibited until another survey was organized, at the very end of the decade, by Fareed Armaly at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Around that time, Goldstein initiated a tentative comeback culminating in his largest retrospective to date, in 2002 at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble (Le Magasin) in France. Within months, a second, smaller exhibition of his films opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, immediately raising his profile in the United States. (Helping to that end, he restaged a 1979 performance between two boxers under strobe lights in tandem with the show.) But this moment in the public eye would be Goldstein’s last: The artist took his own life the following year, and presentations of his work, in both institutional and commercial settings, have been erratic and partial ever since, usually focusing on a specific medium or a single body of work.

The diverse Goldstein retrospective that appears at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst this fall, by contrast, seems uniquely positioned to inscribe Goldstein’s multifarious work once and for all into the art world’s collective consciousness. The moment is ripe, for two reasons. First, as is often cruelly the case, the artist’s cult status has grown exponentially since his death. (Unfortunately, this posthumous recognition has been accompanied by a dubious mythologizing of his life and tragic end, which has dampened much of the radical yield of his artistic posture as both elusive artist and producer.) Second, we are now witnessing a definitive institutionalization of those artists associated with the “Pictures Generation”—to borrow the name of the exhibition recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—to which Goldstein inescapably belongs. Indeed, he not only participated in key exhibitions and events for what seems (to some) the last coherent neo-avant-garde movement of global significance to come out of New York—including the original “Pictures” show curated in 1977 by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space—but helped an entire generation of politically engaged critics to gauge the terms of American art and, more important, to make a general prognosis on the fate of modernity in the artistic field.

Regarding the latter, it bears noting that Goldstein occupied something of an embattled, if emblematic, position. For instance, Crimp, writing in 1977, would place the artist foremost among those concerned with “the structure of signification, with that distance that separates us from the world and that constitutes our desire,” suggesting that he “maintains an allegiance to that radical aspiration that we continue to recognize as modernist.” But merely five years later, Craig Owens, writing in the pages of Art in America about Goldstein’s forays into painting, would suggest that Goldstein and his colleagues were complicit when it came to the reactionary forces in media they purported to critically engage. And this damning judgment would be echoed a decade later by Hal Foster, who, taking up Goldstein’s late “abstract” paintings, would see in them not any “cognitive mapping”—as advocated by Fredric Jameson—of advanced capitalist systems, but rather an endgame scenario: a full capitulation and awe before the effects of a capitalist sublime.

Today, such debates are receding from immediate memory or, more accurately, are as much in the process of becoming historicized as are Goldstein and his paintings’ cold-war, McLuhanesque phantasmagoria of foreboding cataclysm. One should also bear in mind that new generations of artists—many based in New York—have lately been seeking to redefine models of signification in our image-based sociopolitical reality. Many of these individuals do not so much build on the theoretical underpinnings of the Pictures artists as they profoundly displace the earlier presuppositions. In this context—and given this retrospective’s broad offering of twenty-five films and twenty-one canvases, along with drawings and records—it will be interesting to see what new Jack Goldstein emerges.

— Fabrice Stroun