By Maika Pollack 5/21 4:41pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy Bradley Robotham/The Jewish Museum)

‘Jack Goldstein x 10,000′ at the Jewish Museum

If you’re turned off by the bombast of infinitely escalating auction prices and big-tent contemporary fairs, take refuge in the elegant first American retrospective of Jack Goldstein. Organized by Orange County Museum of Art guest curator Philipp Kaiser, and in New York by Jewish Museum Assistant curator Joanna Montoya, the show is the gloomy B-side to the relentless pop staccato of blockbuster contemporary art. Yet artists today owe much to this cult figure. Read More

By Maika Pollack 4/23 5:00pm

On View

5 Photos

Installation view of 'As It Were ... So to Speak' at the Jewish Museum

‘As It Were … So to Speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue With Barbara Bloom’ at the Jewish Museum

Twelve historical glasses from Bohemia, England, New York and the Netherlands ring a table as if set for a toast. Each comes from a different century: the fifth, the 18th, the 19th, the 21st. These are the kinds of objects Barbara Bloom calls “ambassadors.” By placing them in proximity to one another, she creates dialogues across time and place.

Taking a page from Fred Wilson—and another from W. G. Sebald—Ms. Bloom has selected hundreds of objects from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection that speak to aspects of Jewish life—cups, ketubahs, amulets, Torah reading pointers—and framed them with quotations from figures as diverse as Leonard Cohen, Lou Andreas-Salomé (the first female psychoanalyst), Zola, Nietzsche, Woody Allen and Sigmund Freud. The installation transforms each arrangement of objects and texts into a conversation around a specific theme: luck, libraries, windows. The effect is an essayistic meditation on Jewish identity. Read More

By Maika Pollack 11/16/12 6:14pm

Review

7 Photos

Unknown, [Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders], ca. 1930

Slowstagram: The Met Reminds Us That Photography Has Always Been a Bag of Tricks

It’s easy to think of the ability to alter a photographic image as an achievement of the digital age, but “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, proves that recent innovations are only the tip of the iceberg. Tracing the history of doctored images through photography’s century-and-a-half-long history—and using several hundred examples to make her point—the show’s curator, Mia Fineman, argues that photographs and trickery have always gone together. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 9/28/12 2:50pm

human resources

Hoffmann. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Curator Jens Hoffmann Will Be Named a Deputy Director at Jewish Museum

Jens Hoffmann, the director of San Francisco’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, is set to become a deputy director at the Jewish Museum. We first caught wind of a possible move via the Baer Faxt newsletter, and a representative at the museum confirmed today that he will start by the end of the year. Details about his exact title and start date are currently being worked out. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 7/17/12 8:25am

Museums

6 Photos

Still of The Jump, 1978, 16mm film, color, silent, 26 sec.

Jack Goldstein Retrospective, Canceled at MOCA, Will Visit New York’s Jewish Museum

In 2010, after the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, hired Jeffrey Deitch as director, the museum canceled its planned retrospective of Jack Goldstein, a California artist who was central to the Pictures Generation in the 1970s and ’80s. The Orange County Museum of Art, in Newport Beach, Calif., then offered to host it, and it opened there last month. Read More

By Maika Pollack 6/05/12 5:17pm

Review

4 Photos

Edouard Vuillard, Misia and Vallotton at Villeneuve, 1899

Interiors: ‘Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940’ at the Jewish Museum and ‘Merlin Carpenter: Tate Café’ at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

IN THE PAST DECADE, there have been no fewer than three major exhibitions of Edouard Vuillard, starting with the Musée d’Orsay in 2003. France’s eccentric painter of wallpaper, his mother and fin-de-siècle interiors has, it seems, been making something of a comeback recently, and not just in museums; in January, Chelsea gallerist Andrew Kreps included a Vuillard painting in a four-person show, alongside pieces by Marc Camille Chaimowicz and William Copley. Now it’s the Jewish Museum’s turn, with an exhibition devoted to Vuillard and his patrons.  Read More

By Andrew Russeth 3/16/12 4:16pm

Museums

Lawrence Weiner, 'NO TREE NO BRANCH,' 2011/12. (Photo by Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum)

Trilingual Lawrence Weiner on View at the Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum just sent over this little Friday delight, a new work by Lawrence Weiner that will hang in the entrance lobby of the museum through May 13. It’s called NO TREE NO BRANCH (2011/12), and is based, according to the news release, on the Yiddish saying: “All the stars in the sky have the same face.” Mr. Weiner spelled it out in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and broke it into pieces. Read More