(Bloomberg) -- No one sets foot in an art exhibition with a completely open mind. There are always preconceptions, expectations or doubts.
The key to putting on a good museum show—and what unifies the most interesting ones we saw in 2024—is to make the viewer reconsider whatever they thought they knew. It doesn’t matter if the work is a thousand years old or made last week; and it’s immaterial if the visitor thinks they’re an expert on the topic or is coming to it a total naïf. There’s always the chance to rewrite an art historical narrative or reintroduce a much beloved (or loathed) artist.
Check out the shows that did this best below, several of which are still on view.
Steve McQueen: Bass
Through May 26 at Dia Beacon
McQueen is best known for his films, both artistic (he won the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded to British artists, in 1999) and commercial (14 years later, he won the Academy Award for Best Picture with 12 Years a Slave). So this massive light-and-sound installation in Dia’s 30,000-square-foot basement is therefore a departure of sorts—there are no images or projections of any kind. Instead, visitors are bathed in a gradually changing spectrum of light, while a soundtrack of bass instruments serves as a subtle, shifting accompaniment. The word “immersive” is thrown around a lot, most of the time incorrectly, but here McQueen has created a full-body sensory experience that heightens visitors’ awareness of space and movement.
Olga de Amaral
Through March 16 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris
Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of Amaral, a nonagenarian Colombian textile artist. Despite being represented by the prestigious international Lisson gallery, she wasn’t exactly on the tip of the contemporary art world’s tongue, at least not until the opening of this retrospective. Now of course that’s changed, thanks to her startling inventiveness—using yarn and paint and occasionally gold leaf, she creates abstract, colorful tapestries, totems and installations that play with and expand the language of 20th century modernism. I named it the best exhibition of the year.
Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350
Through Jan. 26 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
This was the most anticipated show of the fall season. Even so, it somehow managed to exceed expectations. The premise is simple: Using revolutionary visual and technical techniques, a small group of artists in Siena, Italy, planted the seeds for the High Renaissance, which bloomed in Florence a half-century later. It’s the dazzling virtuosity of the artists themselves and the show-stopping loans the Met managed to obtain—including a towering altarpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti, lent by the Tuscan city of Arezzo—that clinch this exhibition’s place in the history books.
Caillebotte: Painting Men
Through Jan. 19 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris
Gustave Caillebotte is one of those painters you think you know inside and out. Certainly, his image of a rainy Parisian streetscape at the Art Institute of Chicago is as famous as it gets. But there are hidden gems here, many of them lent from private collections, that will come as a true, delightful surprise. The room filled with outdoor scenes was a particular hit, but so were the informal portraits dotted throughout. French critics have sniffed at the exhibition’s insinuation that the portraiture is proof of the committed bachelor’s homosexuality, but the subtext inherent in the glistening nudes and depictions of cozy male intimacy is secondary to the power and beauty of the paintings themselves.
The Atomic Age: Artists Put to the Test of History
Through Feb. 9 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
It’s very hard to pull off large thematic shows; oftentimes, the artworks enlisted to do the heavy lifting end up falling flat. (Is that painting really about the self in society? Or is it just a pretty landscape? Etc. etc.) So it’s particularly impressive to see a grand show such as this stick the landing. It turns out the age of the atom is a rich artistic vein to tap. Divided into themes—artistic representations of matter, the atom bomb, the nuclearization of the world—the exhibit uses superb works from stars including Francis Bacon, László Moholy-Nagy and Hilma af Klint, lent from institutions as disparate as the MoMA in New York and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.
Lumen: The Art and Science of Light
Ran from Sept. 10 through Dec. 8 at the Getty, Los Angeles
This lovely historical exhibit was part of PST ART, a huge 70-institution exhibition series in Southern California dedicated to the collision of art and science. Focused on the so-called Long Middle Ages, (800–1600 C.E.) but also including a few contemporary pieces, the Getty’s show was ostensibly about how scholars, philosophers and artists understood and expressed the science of light. More than that, it attested to the sophistication and complexity of Christian, Jewish and Muslim understanding of the natural world. From thousand-year-old, delicately wrought astrolabes (a model of the night sky often used for navigation) to a silver-and-glass model of an eye made before 1700, the show’s many priceless treasures and oddities told a very complex story in a very (forgive me) lucid way.
Pierre Huyghe: Liminal
Ran from March 17 through Nov. 24 at the Punta della Dogana in Venice
Most exhibitions in Venice have an inevitable interplay between the city and the subject matter: Paintings are hung in palazzos underneath ornate frescoed ceilings; foundations will add contemporary works amid their renaissance holdings. But in this former customs house, whose 2009 renovation by starchitect Tadao Ando was commissioned by billionaire Francois Pinault, Venice is out of sight and mind. Visitors entered into Huyghe’s world—so dim you needed a flashlight to walk around—where rooms featured several of his haunting and oddly compelling videos and sculptures, grappling with humanity’s uneasy relationship with technology.
Bonnard-Matisse, a Friendship
Ran from June 29 through Oct. 6 at the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence, France
Perched on a hillside in the South of France, the Fondation Maeght is possibly the loveliest private foundation in the world; and the expansion of its Josep Lluís Sert-designed building completed this year was certainly the most subtle of any in recent memory. (The new galleries, dug into the hillside, leave the original building seemingly untouched.) In celebration of the project’s completion, and to commemorate its 60th anniversary, the foundation put on a comprehensive exhibition of artworks that highlighted the dialogue between Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, a relationship that the exhibition called “friendly and respectful.”
Dan Flavin: Dedications in Lights
Ran from March 2 through Aug. 18 at the Kunstmuseum in Basel
In theory, Flavin, who died in 1996, was a minimalist, using his signature neon lights to create austere (if colorful) sculptures. In practice though, as this major exhibition demonstrated, his art fills a room like no other. In a refreshing turn, this wasn’t a mere retrospective; curators chose pieces that Flavin made explicitly in reference to other artists, people and events. There’s sculptures dedicated to fellow artist Donald Judd; another work is dedicated to the Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern; and, perhaps most movingly, a hallway includes a beautiful green and fluorescent work dedicated to his beloved golden retriever.
Klimt Landscapes
Ran from Feb. 15 through May 6 at the Neue Galerie in New York
Gustav Klimt is known for his swirling, highly decorative “golden style,” which reached its arguable apex with his 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I, which is in the Neue Galerie’s collection. But, as this pleasantly compact show demonstrated, his landscapes deserve their own place in the sun. Admittedly lacking the glamour and bling of the portraiture, the works on view were enchanting cacophonies of color evoking the stillness and beauty of summer in the country.
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