NEW THIS MONTH
IN U.S. MUSEUMS

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Feb. 1-May 6, 2012
Presenting over 70 works that explore a presumably "modernist" interest in “close-ups,” including 45 of Van Gogh’s own paintings made between 1886 and his suicide in 1890, and 30 comparative works such as Japanese woodblock prints, drawings by Jean Corot and Camille Pissarro, and photographs by Frederick Evans, August Kotzsch and others
Curators: Joseph J. Rishel, Jennifer A. Thompson, Cornelia Homburg, Annabelle Kienle
Catalogue: National Gallery of Canada, 320 pp., $60
Funding: GlaxoSmithKline, Sun Life Financial, Robert Lehman Foundation, Annenberg Foundation Fund for Major Exhibitions, others
Tour: The show is co-organized by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, where it appears following its Philadelphia debut

Norton Museum of Art
Feb. 3-May 6, 2012
Lesser-known photographic works, based in found images, made during the past two decades by the British-born, Berlin-based film artist Tacita Dean (b. 1945)
Curator: Charles Stainback
Funding: Mr. and Mrs. William J. Soter, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Korman, others

High Museum of Art
Feb. 4-Jun 10, 2012
The first-ever museum exhibition devoted to the sport, organized with the National Galleries of Scotland and anchored by Charles Lees’ The Golfers (1847), features 90 works that trace the history of the royal game, from early-17-century Dutch landscapes and an etching by Rembrandt to paintings by Childe Hassam and Norman Rockwell and a screenprint by Andy Warhol
Curator: Julia Forbes, Dr. Catherine Lewis
Catalogue: 102 pp., $29.95
Funding: Lead Sponsor Sotheby’s, Imlay Foundation, Sara Giles Moore Foundation, Frances Bunzl, Marcia and John Donnell, Gayle Kennedy, others

Corcoran Gallery of Art
Feb. 4-May 6, 2012
Exploring the use of photography in documenting the Civil War via 36 works in tintype, ambrotype and carte-de-visite portraits, as well as a 2001 installation by American artist Whitfield Lovell that features a life-size portrait of an African-American soldier drawn on wooden planks, surrounded by objects and ephemera evoking the war
Curators: Philip Brookman, Kailtin Booher

Phillips Collection
Feb. 4-May 6, 2012
Over 200 photographs and 70 paintings, prints and drawings by seven Post-Impressionists -- Pierre Bonnard, George Hendrik Breitner, Maurice Denis, Henri Evenepoel, Henri Rivière, Félix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard -- who used Kodak’s handheld camera, invented in 1888, both to document their lives and make new art
Curators: Elizabeth Easton, Eliza Rathbone, Ellen W. Lee, Edwin Becker
Catalogue: Yale University Press, 248 pp., $50
Funding: John and Gina Despres, the Trellis Fund, The Florence Gould Foundation, others
Tour: The exhibition was co-organized by the Phillips Collection, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where it travels in June 2012

UCLA Hammer Museum
Feb. 5-Apr. 29, 2012
Co-organized with the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw and the Museum of Modern Art New York, the first U.S. museum survey for the Jewish artist (1926-1973) considered one of Poland’s foremost sculptors of the postwar era presents 60 sculptures and 50 works on paper from the last two decades of her life and career, as well as archival photographs on loan from the Alina Szapocznikow Archive in Warsaw and rare recordings of interviews with the artist
Curators: Allegra Pesenti, Elena Filipovic, Joanna Mytkowska
Catalogue: Museum of Modern Art, 216 pp., $45
Funding: Erika Glazer, Alice and Nahum Lainer, Herta and Paul Amir, others
Tour: The show debuted at the WIELS Centre, Brussels, in Sept. 2011, and travels to Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts, opening in May 2012, and the Museum of Modern Art, opening in October 2012

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Feb. 7-Aug. 26, 2012
Organized around London-based artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer’s 2006 film Flash in the Metropolitan, this 17-work show takes its title from Anaïs Nin’s 1954 novel and explores the “secret lives of museums” through photographs and videos by Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Sophie Calle, Louise Lawler, Thomas Struth and others
Curator: Douglas Eklund

Frick Collection
Feb. 7-May 13, 2012
Exploring Pierre-Auguste Renoir's engagement with full-length portraits, a format largely eschewed by his fellow Impressionists, from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, via nine major works on loan from international institutions, including La Promenade (1875-76) and The Umbrellas (ca. 1881 and 1885), seen in the U.S. for the first time since 1986
Curators: Colin B. Bailey, Peter Jay Sharp
Catalogue: Yale University Press, 280 pp., $65
Funding: Florence Gould Foundation, Michel David-Weill, Philip and Janice Levin Foundation, Grand Marnier Foundation, others

Museum of Arts and Design
Feb. 7-Aug. 12, 2012
Continuing the museum’s exploration of “unusual materials” -- in this case dust, ashes, dirt and sand -- via 34 sculptures, paintings, photographs, installations and performances made through the “reconstitution of ephemeral matter” by 25 international artists including Kim Abeles, James Croak, Andy Goldsworthy, Cai Guo-Qiang, Zhang Huan and Vik Muniz. “Swept Away Projects,” a series of “live” installations occurring during the show in which audiences interact physically with the works and their creators, begins at the museum on Mar. 6, 2012
Curator: David McFadden
Catalogue: 136 pp.
Funding: Inner Circle, Netherlands Cultural Services

Bronx Museum
Feb. 9-May 20, 2012
The first U.S. exhibition of the pioneering Chilean video artist (b. 1940-1993), who was trained as an architect in Chile and studied printmaking in Paris before settling in New York in 1965, brings together 100 works beginning with his early experimental videos of the ‘60s and concluding with his video art of the ‘70s-‘90s, and includes his drawings, paintings and photographic installations, as well as his never-before-seen notebooks
Curator: Valerie Smith
Catalogue: Bronx Museum/MIT List Visual Arts Center, 240 pp., $35
Funding: Andy Warhol Foundation, Martin E. Zimmerman, Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, others
Tour: The show debuted in May 2011 at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, its co-organizing institution

Seattle Museum of Art
Feb. 9-Apr. 29, 2012
Highlighting the complex relationship between post-Impressionism’s most infamous ex-patriate (1848-1903) and the art and culture of French Polynesia via the juxtaposition of 60 of Gauguin’s paintings, sculptures and works on paper -- from the early works he created while living in Brittany to his depictions of Tahitian women -- with 60 Polynesian sculptures
Curators: Chiyo Ishikawa, Suzanne Greub, Susan Brotman, Pam McClusky
Catalogue: Art Centre Basel, 399 pp., $49.95
Funding: JP Morgan Chase & Co., Microsoft, Robert Lehman Foundation, Kreielsheimer Exhibition Endowment, others
Tour: The show is co-organized with the Art Centre Basel and the Ny Carlsberg Glytotek in Copenhagen, where it debuted in Sept. 2011

Milwaukee Art Museum
Feb. 10-May 6, 2012
More than 200 paintings, drawings and objects by so-called “outsider artists,” including Henry Darger, Martín Ramírez, Bill Traylor, Adolf Wölfli, Anna Zemankova and Carlo Zinelli, drawn from a gift of more than 300 works by Milwaukee collector Anthony Petullo
Curator: Margaret Andera
Funding: Anthony Petullo Foundation, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, Einhorn Family Foundation, others

McMullan Museum of Art, Boston College
Feb. 11-June 3, 2012
The first museum exhibition to bring to light the lives of poor Irish country people living during the country’s Famine era presents recently discovered genre paintings of 19th-century rural interiors, seen for the first time in the U.S., and paintings borrowed from the National Gallery of Ireland, the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, the National Library of Ireland, the Ulster Museum and the National Gallery of Scotland, as well as examples of the household objects that are visible in the paintings
Curators: Diana Larsen, Vera Kreilkamp, Marjorie Howes, Claudie Kinmonth, Joseph Nugent
Funding: Boston College, Culture Ireland, Eileen and Brian Burns

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Feb. 11-June 3, 2012
Over 130 works made during that “tumultuous decade when the art world shifted between radical and conservative, lighthearted and political, sincere and irreverent,” divided into thematic sections and including contributions by Ashley Bickerton, Sophie Calle, Marlene Dumas, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Julian Schnabel, Robert Mapplethorpe and many more, as well as a program of gallery talks and performances. Each object in the show is accompanied by a catalogue entry written by Harvard University graduate students
Curator: Helen Molesworth
Catalogue: MCA/Yale University Press, 450 pp., $50
Funding: Harris Family Foundation, Caryn and King Harris, Katherine Harris, Toni and Ron Paul, others

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Feb. 12-May 6, 2012
Organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, this survey brings together five decades of work by the Ukrainian-born American abstractionist (1922-2007), presenting more than 30 monumental canvases including his maverick Color Field paintings, his Stain paintings, Spray paintings, Baroque paintings and High Baroque paintings, and concluding with his last series, titled “With Love and Disregard”
Curators: E.A. Carmean Jr., Alison de Lima Greene, Karen Wilkin
Catalogue: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 146 pp., $40
Funding: Mr. and Mrs. W.S. Wilson and Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff
Tour: The show debuted at its co-organizing institution, the Kempner Museum of Contemporary Art, in May 2011, and following its run at the MFAH travels to the Toledo Museum of Art and the American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center in Washington D.C.

New Museum
Feb. 15-Apr. 22, 2012
The second edition of the museum’s exhibition devoted to emerging artists, which takes as its theme the “urgencies of a generation who came of age after the independence and revolutionary movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s,” features 34 international artists, artists groups and collectives from around 20 countries -- only three are from the U.S. -- all born between the mid-‘70s and the mid-‘80s
Curator: Eugenie Joo
Catalogue: Skira Rizzoli, 256 pp., £50; Art Spaces Directory of 400 independent art space listings, co-published with ArtAsiaPacific magazine, 448 pp., $45
Funding: Joe Fres

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Feb. 17-May 20, 2012
Approximately 65 works in painting and sculpture that use color and form to represent a “metaphorical body,” including ceramic sculptures by Kathy Butterly, paintings by Sue Williams and piles of wrapped candy and plastic-bead curtain sculptures by Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Curator: Jenelle Porter
Funding: Boston Phoenix

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Feb. 18-May 28, 2012
Nearly 70 color photographs and five video installations comprise the first U.S. midcareer retrospective of the Dutch portraitist (b. 1959)
Curator: Sandra S. Phillips
Catalogue: Co-produced with the Guggenheim Museum, Thames & Hudson, 264 pp., $55
Funding: Linda and Jon Gruber, Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein, others
Tour: Following its debut in San Francisco, the show travels to its co-organizing institution, the Guggenheim Museum New York, in June 2012

Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Feb. 19-May 13, 2012
The first museum exhibition to trace the rise of a global sports culture in the 19th century via 100 photographs, moving images and television clips is organized around five themes including “Race” and “Spectacle,” and features work by Diane Arbus, Douglas Gordon and Phillippe Parreno, Andreas Gursky, Wolfgang Tillmans and Alexander Rodchenko, as well as Roger Welch’s OJ Simpson Project, which hasn’t been seen since its 1977 premiere
Curator: David Little
Catalogue: 304 pp., $49.95
Funding: Dorsey & Whitney LLP, Pohlad Family Foundation, the Star Tribune

Hirshhorn
Feb. 23-May 13, 2012
Reconsidering the role played by major Latin American artists in the development of installation art centered on light and color -- usually associated with the California-based founders of the Light and Space Movement in the 1960s-'70s, like Robert Irwin and James Turrell -- via five large-scale participatory works by Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto and Hélio Oiticica
Curators: Valerie Fletcher, Alma Ruiz
Catalogue: 96 pp.
Funding: Latino Initiatives Pool, Mandy and Cliff Einstein, Betye Monell Burton, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, others
Tour: The show comes to the Hirshhorn from L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, its organizing institution, where it debuted in Dec. 2010

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Feb. 24-May 13, 2012
The late artist’s first U.S. retrospective since 1986 comprises 100 works and encompasses his full range of sculptural production, from his earliest monochromatic iron sculptures and experiments in foam, Plexiglas and paper to his assemblages, his monumental car-part sculptures and his final large-scale foil pieces, which have never been seen in the U.S.
Curator: Susan Davidson
Catalogue: Guggenheim/Thames & Hudson, 248 pp., $65
Funding: Henry Luce Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art
Tour: After its run in New York, the show travels to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, where it is scheduled to open in March 2013

Museum of Modern Art, New York
Feb. 26-June 11, 2012
A retrospective tracking the career of the celebrated appropriation artist (b. 1954) from the mid-1970s to the present, organized thematically instead of chronologically and including 180 photographs from her key series, such as the “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80), the "Centerfolds" (1981) and the history portraits (1989-90), and examples from every other significant body of work, as well as the American premiere of her 2010 photographic mural, installed outside the galleries on the sixth floor
Curators: Eva Respini, Lucy Gallun
Catalogue: Thames & Hudson, 264 pp., $60
Funding: Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Modern Women’s Fund, William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund
Tour: Following its debut at MoMA, the exhibition travels to SF MoMA (July 2012), the Walker Art Center (Nov. 2012), and the Dallas Museum of Art (Mar. 2013)