Female Images from Biedermeier to Early Modernism at the Leopold Museum, Vienna

 

In a prime example of a museum making excellent use of its extensive permanent collection, the Leopold Museum, Vienna’s pantheon of Germanic modernism, has dug into its own holdings and organized a thematic show around “female images.” While any mandate that sweeping runs the risk of falling flat, reassessing the evolution (or lack thereof) of depictions of gender feels timely.

 

The first part of the show is organized around themes (mother and child, young/old, formal portraits, etc.), while the latter part includes works created by female artists.

Female Images from Biedermeier to Early Modernism on view now through September 18.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Tate Modern, London
Perhaps it requires a British arts organization to truly interrogate what it meant to be a black American artist. This sweeping show—which includes work by Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Sam Gilliam, and more than 50 others—seeks to articulate a relatively fresh narrative from the race riots of the 1960s through the early 1980s and the establishment of the Black Power movement.

Equally refreshing, the show includes work from the birth of Black Feminism, along with less overtly political pieces, like the aesthetic photography of Roy DeCarava, the first black photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power opens July 12 and runs through October 22. 

Fred Forest at the Centre Pompidou, Paris
Fred Forest, a French artist born in 1933, became famous (or at least art world famous) in the 1970s for his conceptual, performative, and largely incomprehensible practice. Forty years later, the theory behind much of his art remains muddled, but his embrace of new technology—he was a leading practitioner of video art—has begun to appear dramatically ahead of its time.

Given that Forest has largely disappeared from recent contemporary discourse, the Pompidou’s show is part retrospective and part introduction to a younger audience that wasn’t alive when he was first scandalizing (or sending up) the art world.

Fred Forest opens July 12 and runs through August 28.