By Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter and Jason Farago |
The art critics of The New York Times tell you what rocked their worlds this year: notable art events, works in museums and galleries, emerging artists and how they found beauty in unexpected places. In highlight:
8. The Chosen People
Two excellent shows timed to the Soviet Union’s centenary have explored the dreams and nightmares of Jewish artists of the left, and what became of their utopianism after 1918. “Comrade. Jew. We Only Wanted Paradise on Earth,” at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, offered a hundred-year survey of the art and literature of Jewish Communists, from Moscow to the gulag and into exile. And “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich,” seen at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and currently at the Jewish Museum in New York (through Jan. 6), vibrantly restages debates about a new Communist art at one revolutionary academy in Vitebsk.
