Jene Highstein, 1942-2013

An artist best known for refined post-Minimalist sculptures, Jene Highstein died at age 70 in New York on Apr. 27 after a brief battle with lung cancer. Soft-spoken and admired for his intelligence and humor as well as his work, Highstein developed, over the course of a nearly five-decade career, a spare and evocative sculptural language. He favored monumental forms and was adept in a wide range of mediums, including stone, metal, wood, glass, concrete and resin. His work is related to Minimalism but is distinctive in its sensuousness and its use of curving lines and organic shapes inspired by nature. Read More

African Baroque: The Sculpture of El Anatsui

Arguably Africa's most important and influential contemporary artist, El Anatsui is the subject of a spectacular retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum (through Aug. 4), his first New York museum solo. To coincide with "Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui," Icarus Films recently released the hourlong documentary "Fold, Crumple, Crush: The Art of El Anatsui" on DVD. Directed by Susan Vogel, the founding director of New York's Museum for African Art, the film lacks much in the way of insight into the artist's private life. However, it provides a useful complement to the museum show and helps explicate the artist's studio practice as well as the technical intricacies and conceptual nuances of his work. Read More

Piero's U.S. Solo Debut

Paintings by the early Renaissance maestro Piero della Francesca (ca. 1413-1492) are fragile and scarce. Most are held in Italian churches and European museums that almost never lend them for exhibition, especially abroad. So this gathering of seven key examples of his work at New York's Frick Collection ["Piero della Francesca in America," on view through May 19] is a unique event. Though modest in scale, it constitutes the first-ever monographic Piero show in this country.
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Top 10 from the Sao Paolo Bienal

This spring in São Paulo a number of prominent exhibitions are invigorating the art scene. A Caravaggio show generates daily lines around the block at the São Paulo Museum of Art downtown ["Caravaggio and his Followers," through Sept. 30]. The first-ever museum survey for Rio-based art star Adriana Varejão currently fills the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art in Ibirapuera Park [through Dec. 16.]. And the highly praised 30th São Paulo Bienal, "The Imminence of Poetics," recently opened in the adjacent Oscar Niemeyer Pavilion and the other sprawling galleries of the Bienal Foundation building plus a number of off-site venues [through Dec. 9].
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