Picture this

Art - Year in review

by Jeffrey Gantz and Christopher Millis

1. Isabella! With two paintings by Titian and two paintings and one drawing by Rubens, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's "Titian and Rubens: Power, Politics, and Style" must have been the smallest show of 1998, but it may well have been the best, too. It paired Titian's 1562 masterpiece Europa with the loving copy that Rubens finished in 1629 as The Rape of Europa, and Titian's 1537 Portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino with the 1629 Rubens portrait it inspired, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. And as if getting to see these paintings at ground level and in good light weren't enough, the Gardner threw in a superb catalogue and a DVD-based interactive kiosk that illuminated Europa's details. We got everything but Sister Wendy -- and she showed up in November to address a packed Gardner house, combining insight with wit (including a remarkable analysis of Europa) and proving she could have made it as a stand-up comedian.

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the year in review

art - classical - dance - dining - fiction
film - jazz - local music - news - non-fiction - 1 in 10
rock - styles - television - theater - wine

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2. Out-of-town news. As usual, there were plenty of reasons for art lovers to hit the road this year. The Worcester Art Museum's "Winslow Homer: By Land and Sea," which focused on that painter's watercolors, joined the Gardner's "Titian and Rubens" in proving that small can be sublime. The Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover gave us "Arthur Dove: A Retrospective," in tribute to that pioneer of American abstraction. And the DeCordova Museum's Annual Exhibit of New England artists brought us 10 New England artists, from traditional painters and sculptors to untraditional photographers and illustrators, who were never less than intelligent and playful.

3. Local heroes. Two Boston institutions also rose to the challenge this year. The Institute of Contemporary Art's "Transience and Sentimentality: From Boston and Beyond" drew shamelessly on Boston artists, in the process undermining the received "wisdom" that ours is a city where art visits, not where it's born. The result was one of the unlikeliest, sexiest, and most energetic exhibits we've seen in Boston for a long time. And the Boston Center for the Arts' "Material Force" was a lighthearted show whose rewards had nothing to do with the hard stare of the conference room or the similarly hard stare of the dark corner. Provoking, intriguing, teasing, chortling, it was out not for money but for delight, and delight it delivered, from Taylor Davis's large untitled floor piece to the sensuous John Hughes work that looked like a bagpipe at Madame Tussaud's.

4. You can go home again. In a show of new paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, David Hockney depicted his native Yorkshire with a dreamlike manipulation of perspective, as if we were seeing through God's eye. These six landscapes were like childhood paradises, with their rolling, sheltering swells of field and forest and their outburst of bloom and harvest: lavenders, heather purples, poppy vermilions, primrose yellows and wheaten golds, peaty browns, cerulean blues, and innumerable greens: apple, hedgerow, evergreen, moss, teal. Reinventing his childhood, and his art, he challenged us to see the world in a whole new way.

5. Casper the friendly artist. Forget the Pats moving to Hartford -- the deal of the year in Boston was Harvard's lending a worthy but expendable Gauguin to Berlin in exchange for Caspar David Friedrich's mystical, magical Moonrise over the Sea. Not just because it's a stunning work by the greatest of German Romantic artists, but because the opportunity to see a Friedrich is so rare: none of his paintings is a permanent US resident. Together with Adolph Menzel's The Petition (1849), which made its first foray ever outside Germany, Moonrise over the Sea introduced two superb shows, the traveling "Fuseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe," at the Sackler, and "Classicism -- Romanticism -- Realism: German Drawings from Mengs to Menzel in the Harvard University Art Museums," at the Busch-Reisinger.

6. Get out your slingshot. Boston's geography of art has long been characterized by the comfortable midtown concentration of boutique-sized galleries along Newbury Street -- but periodically a handful of the more adventurous dealers look to trade costly and convenient if claustrophobic spaces for cheaper, more expansive, less centrally located ones. Thayer Street, in the formerly industrial section of the South End, is now home to the Bernard Toale Gallery, the Clifford-Smith Gallery, the Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, and the Kingston Gallery, enterprising Davids ready to take on the Newbury Street Goliaths. Highlight of the Thayer Street year was sculptor Past Keck's Big Head, at the Genovese/Sullivan, a disturbing hydrocephalic construction that was nothing short of a brainstorm.

7. Seventysomethings. This fall on Newbury Street three septuagenarians proved that you can arrive at old age in a state of grace, good-humored, frequently celebratory, as cerebral and skilled as sensual and expressive. Holographic pioneer Harriet Casdin-Silver (at Gallery NAGA; she also had a career retrospective at the DeCordova) offered an homage to imperfection and idiosyncrasy, a counterculture, anti-mainstream celebration of everything we're taught to despise and avoid about our bodies: old age, decrepitude, awkwardness, and fat. Ceramicist Tatsuzo Shimaoka (at the Pucker Gallery) belongs to a folk movement begun at the turn of the century whose aim was to restore hand-crafted beauty to utilitarian objects; his pieces all seem to have an inner as well as an outer life. Painter Steven Trefonides (at the Creiger-Dane Gallery) is a long-established and underappreciated Boston artist with an unmistakable expressionistic style, light as Renoir, bold as Chagall. These artists shared with us the weight of a lifetime, the lightness of unencumbered vision, and an exquisite serendipity.

8. On the Monet. The Museum of Fine Arts' latest blockbuster, "Monet in the 20th Century," revealed to us an artist who could have spent his last 26 years resting on his Impressionist laurels but instead journeyed deeper into the heart of reality, probing the relationship between time and light, reproducing creation atom by atom, confronting the Deity. Practically every one of the show's 86 canvases was new to Boston: the two highlights were the room full of huge, strident studies, canvases measuring two meters square that Monet never meant to exhibit, that don't even look finished; and the last room, with its panels that ran two by six meters, a horizontal reality that was all time and yet no movement. This was the most-comprehensive late-Monet show ever. And, yes, it was a Mega Commercial Event, but also a Mega Artistic Event, even a Mega Life Event.

9. Pucker up. The Pucker Gallery was on a roll again this year. Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak's "In the Presence of Figures" attested not only to the abominations of the Nazis but to the divine light of the communities they extinguished. Tragic and also transcendent, his paintings remain unyieldingly Jewish even as they reach out to embrace the world -- their ultimate triumph over evil. In her "Tuscany" show, Vermont artist Mallory Lake went beyond the usual bright sunlight and hard edges and brick and terra cotta of central Italy to discover ineffable subtleties of form and light and shade; she's to pastel what Michelangelo Antonioni is to film. And then there was ceramicist Tatsuzo Shimaoka (see above, -). Throw in ceramicist Brother Thomas, mobile sculptor Mark Davis, and the pencil drawings and engravings of Gunnar Norrman and you can make a case for the Pucker as Boston's best gallery -- though it's really more like a wonderful miniature museum.

10. Eternal lights. The Mercury Gallery celebrated the historic achievements of "The Ten," that group of American abstract expressionists -- Ben-Zion, Ilya Bolotowsky, Lee Gatch, Adolph Gottlieb, Louis Harris, Yankel Kufeld, Mark Rothko, Louis Schanker, Nahum Tschacbasov, and Joseph Solman -- who mounted group shows beginning in the '30s and later set up an exhibit at the original Mercury Gallery, across from the Whitney Museum, to protest the museum's notion of who and what mattered in American painting. You could move through this show as if in the midst of a charged conversation among artists who were as involved with the world as they were with painting and one another -- a world that, on the brink of imploding into World War II, had not yet been sanitized, shrunken, and fit into an electronic box.