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21.12.04

Ionarts Top Ten Art Lists 2004

In response to Tyler Green's call for this year's Top Ten Lists at Modern Art Notes (see Tyler's Top Ten and his catalogue of links to other Top Ten lists, which kindly included mine), here are the exhibits I enjoyed the most this year. Bear in mind that I do not spend nearly as much time as Tyler in galleries and museums.

  1. Annette Messager, Sous vent (translated by the artist as "wind back") at the Couvent des Cordeliers in Paris
  2. In Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite, at the National Museum of Natural History
  3. Verrocchio's David here in Washington at the National Gallery
  4. Milton Avery at the Phillips Collection (reviewed by Mark Barry and yours truly)
  5. Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum at the National Gallery
  6. New French photography museum opens in the Musée du Jeu de Paume with Éblouissement and a Guy Bourdin retrospective
  7. Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Gallery
  8. American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection at the National Gallery
  9. Moi! Autoportraits du XXe siècle (Me! Self-portraits from the 20th century), at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris
  10. Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera at the National Gallery
There is also this list of the top ten shows I read and wrote about but did not actually see:
  1. Caravaggio, l'Ultimo Tempo 1606–1610, at the Museo di Capodimonte, in Naples
  2. Aurélie Nemours retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris
  3. Nan Goldin, Sœurs, Saintes et Sibylles (Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls), in the Chapelle Saint-Louis of the Salpêtrière, Paris
  4. Luc Tuymans at the Tate Modern, in London
  5. Sén'Art en Forêt, a modern art installation in a French forest
  6. Giuseppe Penone's tree carvings at Versailles
  7. Bartholdi: Les bâtisseurs de la Liberté (Bartholdi: the builders of liberty), photographs of the creation of the Statue of Liberty, at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris
  8. New Works by Panamarenko (b. 1940), in the Antwerpse Luchtschipbouw, in Anvers, Belgium
  9. Fernando Botero: Œuvres Récentes, at the Musée Maillol in Paris
  10. Roy Lichtenstein—All about Art, a major retrospective at the Museum for Moderne Kunst in Louisiana, Denmark, which never came to the United States is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until February 22, 2005 (thanks, Tyler!)
Finally, you may be interested in looking again at my Top Ten favorite art stories from the year gone by:
  1. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture in American Art
  2. The Artothek, a sort of lending library of paintings and other artwork: we need them here in the United States (follow-ups here and here)
  3. The Salvador Dalí Year as celebrated in Perpignan, France, which the surrealist painter proclaimed the "center of the universe" after an ecstatic vision in the train station there
  4. Plans by artists to transform the the Volkspalast, the seat of the Communist government in (formerly East) Berlin into a "second Centre Pompidou"
  5. Psychologist tries to save outsider art by sanitarium patients in Scotland
  6. Large Statue of Philip the Arab discovered in the ocean off Corsica
  7. Chinese sculptor sets a new world record for largest statue in the world, a vast reclining Buddha figure in Guifeng
  8. In realization of Tyler Green's dream, stolen PandaMania panda sleeps with the fishes
  9. Imre Makovecz's new building, The Stephenaeum, an auditorium and the cultural heart of the Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem [Péter Pázmány Catholic University] of the Sacred Heart's faculty of humanities at Piliscsaba, some 20 km north of Budapest. It looks like "two circular buildings, one adopted from the form of a traditional Magyar jurta (yurt), the other a Renaissance tempietto, crashing into one other."
  10. Norman Foster's Viaduc de Millau finished in central France
Honorable mentions include:You should also take a look at Jens's list of the Top Ten Best Recordings in 2004. Happy New Year!

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