1. Good Impressions. If you’ve got it, you might as well flaunt it. The Museum of Fine Arts played to its strength with "Impressionist Still Life," some 90 works by the likes of Manet, Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne. More focus would have helped, but shortcomings didn’t matter when you got to the final room, which was given over mostly (should have been entirely?) to works by Paul Cézanne, and saw the likes of The Kitchen Table and Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants. Then this month, the MFA followed up with "Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Monet," which actually delivered more than its title promised: not just the development of Impressionism in the course of the 19th century but, in the wake of the French Revolution, landscape painting as a whole new way - actually many whole new ways - of looking at life.
2. On and off the street. "Aaron Fink: New Paintings" at the Alpha Gallery celebrated the sumptuous new book that chronicles this artist’s career, Aaron Fink: Out of the Ordinary. The Pucker Gallery upheld its usual high standards with shows for Gunnar Norrman, Enrico Pinardi, Ken Matsuzaki, and Mallory Lake, but the highlight of its year was the two-part Samuel Bak show "Return to Vilna I and II," in which he recorded his return to the city of his birth, a city whose Jewish inhabitants were almost all exterminated by the Nazis; it was accompanied by the books Painting in Words: A Memoir and Samuel Bak: Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001. Other Newbury Street notables this year included Valerie Claff and David Prifti at Gallery NAGA; the "Crossroads" show of artists from Australia and New Zealand at the Chappell Gallery; "Embody: Inference in Figurative Photography" at Howard Yezerski Gallery; "Summertime: Joe Kievitt, Christina Lanzl, Whitney River, and Henry Samelson" at Miller Block Gallery; and "Flat/Not Flat: Four Sculptors Confront the Wall" at Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art. Off Newbury Street, there was "Accumulation" at the Clifford*Smith Gallery; "Fred Tomaselli: Editions" at Bernard Toale Gallery; David Sullivan’s "Cézanne" drawings at the Genovese/Sullivan Gallery; "Jewelry from Painting" at the Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge; and the "Lingo Show at Oni Gallery.
3. Great art is timeless. "The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt" was an extremely attractive and impressive exhibit, with a lot more breathing space here at the Museum of Science than it enjoyed at Washington’s National Gallery (which had neither an Imax film nor a real mummy). The museum brought back Mysteries of Egypt, the enjoyably silly Imax film with Omar Sharif debunking the myth of curses falling upon Egyptian archæologists, and it added Stars of the Pharaohs, the Hayden Planetarium’s re-creation of ancient Egyptian skies, plus a short film, "The Quest for Immortality in Ancient Egypt."
4. Holding up its end. The MFA may not have snagged "The Quest for Immortality," but it didn’t just sit on its Impressionist laurels, either. "Building a Collection: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art" reminded us that the language of contemporary art is apt to feel more immediate than the historical language of painting and sculpture to a society that routinely watches TV, views icons on its computer screens and at international airports, and experiences photographic imagery in a jillion forms constantly and simultaneously, without batting an eyelash. The show attested to the MFA’s commitment to acquiring art in new media (there have been forays into minimalism and installation) and supporting emerging artists, as well as to the efforts being made to fill some of the many gaps in the museum’s collection. For "The Poetry of Everyday Life: Dutch Painting in Boston," the MFA drew exclusively on 17th-century paintings from private collections in the Boston area; the result reminded us that if there can be poetry - or redemption - in a flayed carcass, the Dutch will find it. And "Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections," a greatest-hits compilation featuring high-profile art luminaries who were at the height of their fame in the star-studded ’80s, traced the origins of Pop, the roots of Conceptual art, and the emergence of photography as a fine-art medium.
5. Holding up their end. The rest of Boston’s usual art suspects didn’t have such a bad year either. The Institute of Contemporary Art contributed "Artists Imagine Architecture," where sculptures made of plywood, cardboard, plastic drinking straws, and scotch tape are on view alongside works incorporating rainbow-colored slinkies and rubber bands, and the Chen Zhen installation "Inner Body Landscapes." The Boston University Art Gallery weighed in with "The Visionary Decade: New Voices in Art in 1940s Boston," which conveyed a sense of the religious and spiritual foment that informed so much Boston artwork in the decade that included World War II. "The 17th Drawing Show," at the BCA, was like an oversized party, but if you talked to the right "guests," the art broke through as intimate and convincing. And in "Mirror Mirror," at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, AA Bronson examined death as it defines existence and spurs creativity.
6. More perfect pictures. The camera was once more in focus this year. The ICA’s "Chic Clicks: Creativity and Commerce in Contemporary Fashion Photography" showcased photographers who have worked simultaneously in commercial and fine-art contexts, and it was structured so that viewers could compare and contrast the artists’ work in these two areas. The Worcester Art Museum’s "Weegee’s World: Life, Death, and the Human Drama" put the spotlight on an "artist" who, if not the world’s greatest photojournalist, is still enjoyable character; the show was well worth the trip. The Photographic Resource Center had a mixed success with its September 11-themed show "6 Months: A Memorial," but "There Is No Eye: Photographs and Stories by John Cohen" looked back at the mid-century’s off-cultural elite. The Addison Gallery’s "Louis Faurer Retrospective" showcased one of the lesser-known masters of the "New York school of postwar street photography," an artist whose work transcends simple documentation. The Fitchburg Art Museum came up with "Adams and O’Keeffe on the Road," a collection of informal shots taken by Ansel Adams during a month-long camping trip he and Georgia O’Keeffe took through the Southwest in 1937. And the MFA chipped in with both "Lens Landscapes," which balanced traditional and untraditional approaches to photographing nature, and "The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist," which reminded us how 20th-century photography changed the way we look at life.
7. Cape-able. This year on the Cape saw the opening of the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port: a museum devoted to the prolific author, artist, and illustrator of comic and macabre stories that’s located in the 200-year-old house where he spent the last 14 years of his life. And summer in Provincetown brought "Richard Baker: New Work" at Albert Merola Gallery and "Anna Poor, Tabitha Vevers, Daniel Ranalli, and Danica Phelps" at DNA Gallery.
8. Getting into the act. Kudos to one of Boston’s newest (and arguably most ambitious) art spaces, Art Interactive, which has committed to showing bold, technologically inventive work with little (foreseeable) commercial potential. Art Interactive’s first exhibit, "Time Share: Interactivity and the Perception of Time," presented sound and video and multimedia installations whose sophistication outstripped their strangeness; it was both daring and deliberate.
9. Tura! Tura! Tura! The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum added another jewel to its crown of small, exquisite, educational special shows, and this one was a diamond, "Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara." The Este court in the mid 15th century may have been overshadowed by Medici Florence, but the Tura that the Gardner gave us turned out to be the David Lynch of the Renaissance, the twisted cousin of Botticelli and Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca, and the worthy predecessor of two future Ferrara greats, writer Giorgio Bassani and filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni.
10. Places in the heart. Last year the Forest Hills Educational Trust invited artists’ proposals for site-specific work responding to the trees in the Forest Hills Cemetery sculpture; this year’s result was "Spirits in the Trees," 22 installations executed in materials ranging from recycled metal cans to gold leaf that focused on the ephemeral in contrast to the permanent, and on transitions and passages in contrast to immutable states.
