Is Summer Going Faster?

As I enjoy the last days of summer and the morning frost that is already on the pumpkins up here in southern Vermont, I'm still in summer mode, but starting to get excited about the fall art shows.

Kandinsky has always been well represented in the Guggenheim Museum's collection. From September 18 to January 13 it will host the first full-scale retrospective of Kandinsky's career in the United States since 1985. I plan to be at the preview and will post my thoughts and pictures. Also there will be Anish Kapoor's Memory, a newly commissioned Cor-Ten steel sculptural installation that made its debut at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Fall 2008. The exhibition opens at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21 and will remain on view until March 28, 2010.

Hey, Hot Shot! 2009 First Edition at the Jen Bekman Gallery is an ongoing series of exhibits that's always a great opportunity to check out a new batch of photographers (opening September 10). Matt Held has gotten a fair amount of attention for his Facebook portraits: he's having a show at Denise Bibro Fine Art/Platform in Chelsea (opening September 10). An American original for sure, but the Whitney Museum wants to remind us that Georgia O'Keefe was also one of the first abstract painters with Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction (opening September 17).


If you haven’t seen the James Ensor exhibit at MoMA, you only have until September 21 to take advantage of this rare opportunity to see so many of Ensor’s paintings in one place. It's one of my picks of the year, not to be missed.

Hurry -- only a few remaining days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for The Torment of Saint Anthony, ca. 1487–88, the first known painting by Michelangelo Buonarroti, painted at the age of 12. From the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the painting has been at the Met for restoration. While at the Met, don't miss Roxy Paine’s 130-foot-long by 45-foot-wide stainless-steel creeping-crawling sculpture on the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, my favorite use of the space yet.

Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection, at the Frick, brings together more than sixty works including drawings and watercolors by well-known masters of the French School -- Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Edgar Degas (opening October 6). And more amazing drawings at the Morgan in Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings.

October 25, back in Baltimore, an exhibit called Matisse as Printmaker will unite works from the Baltimore Museum of Arts' great collection of Matisse prints with a traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. The exhibit includes 150 of Matisse’s prints created between 1900 and 1951. Also, Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon will showcase works by some of the greatest artists of the 19th and 20th centuries who were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling and unforgettable tales.


At C Grimaldis Gallery, SUBLIME STRUCTURE, a multi-media thematic exhibition, will feature artists possessing distinct approaches to the body as their subject. With references to science, sexuality, gender, spirituality, performance, and technology, each artist brings a unique and heightened sense of physical being into their work (opening September 2).

Enjoy the Labor Day weekend and the new season of art viewing!

Update: I've gotten several more suggestions via email. If you have any favorite exhibits coming up feel free to leave them in comments.

• Icons Of The Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings From Papunya, (Sept.1 to Dec.5), NYU's Grey Art Gallery.

Bonus Museum Picks from Charles for the fall:

• Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection (October 8 to January 3), Hirshhorn Museum
  
• Vermeer's Milkmaid (September 10 to November 29), Metropolitan Museum of Art
  
• Sargent and the Sea (September 12 to January 3), Corcoran Gallery of Art
  
• Lands of Enchantment: Australian Aboriginal Painting (October 9 to January 10), National Museum of Women in the Arts
  
• Opening of the new Public Observatory, National Air and Space Museum