E-Mail This Article to a Friend Gauguin, Gardner, George, garbage, Greece, Giotto, and more A fine year of art BY JEFFREY GANTZ

The Museum of Fine Arts gave us Paul Gauguin, garbage from Tim Noble and Sue Webster, the Olympic Games, and Art Deco; the Isabella Stewart Gardner pitched in with a celebration of Isabella’s Venice and a recontextualization of its Giotto; and there was a lot more, including a centenary salute to George Balanchine. Here’s a look at what we got as seen by Christopher Millis and Jeffrey Gantz.

1) Proximate opposites

As a political work, Paul Rahilly’s The Belmont Women’s Club, which displays a lanky, handsome, full-frontally nude model in front of the title institution, offers up something to offend almost everybody. Liberals can cite its apparent objectification of women; conservatives can point to the painting’s pornographic immodesty. But its technical achievement is greater still. Rahilly’s other contributions to his "Figures and Still Lifes" show at Gallery NAGA were merely terrific, whereas The Belmont Women’s Club is something of a masterpiece.

2) Smash hit

The 18th (biannual) "Drawing Show" at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mill Gallery was the best we’d seen in years. What it had going for it above all was an openness of spirit, with no axes to grind, no statements to make about what drawing ought or ought not to be, no exclusions of a categorical sort, and no phony inclusiveness, either. The result was a full-fledged celebration of the Boston arts scene.

3) The paradise syndrome

"Gauguin Tahiti," which opened at the Grand Palais in Paris before coming to the Museum of Fine Arts, was a chilling portrait of the pursuit of a paradise that’s always somewhere else. It also reminded us what a polymath and a paradox Paul Gauguin was. The almost 200 items that make up the show included not just oil paintings but watercolors, drawings, lithographs, woodcuts, wood carvings, stone carvings, and all manner of accomplished experimentation from an artist who was largely self-taught. The paradox is that the man who was always moving on to the next utopia made art in which he kept retreating into his own fantasy world. In the end, that was the only paradise Gauguin found. The MFA’s traditional chronological approach didn’t require much imagination, but it worked to highlight the changes in Gauguin’s art — and his life — between 1891 and 1903.

4) Centennials

The Palazzo Barbaro was the Venetian base for Isabella and Jack Gardner, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum celebrated the tail end of its centennial with "Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle," which took in the likes of Henry James, Robert Browning, James Whistler, and John Singer Sargent. The show opened Isabella’s fourth-floor residence to the public for the first time, and it had as much to say about her and her museum as it did about Venice. As for George Balanchine, he didn’t live to celebrate his centennial, but the Harvard Theatre Collection did him proud with "George Balanchine: A Life’s Journey in Ballet," whose programs, letters, photographs and other memorabilia were often funny as well as touching.

5) Art junkies

Real Life Is Rubbish, which British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster installed at the Museum of Fine Arts, was one of those look-again occasions you can count on the fingers of one hand: a crisp, almost life-size silhouette of two youths created by a lit pile of twisted and torn refuse. At the same time, San Francisco–based artist Barry McGee was bringing to Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum crude junk that he transformed into poignant, theatrical orchestrations whose recurrent theme was the demise of art and the proliferation of brutality. Rarely does an exhibit ask with such intelligence and fervor what we’re really about.

6) Crowning achievements

The Museum of Fine Arts celebrated the return of the Summer Olympic Games to Greece with "Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit," a show that, culled mostly from the MFA’s outstanding collection of Greek and Roman artifacts, lived up to its title by showing us what the original Greek games (the Olympics and others) were like and, with the help of contemporary photographs, how Greek athletes did and didn’t differ from their modern counterparts. We got not just the art but the culture that created it.

7) We know it when we see it

The MFA’s "Art Deco 1910–1939" achieved what few exhibits of its kind even aim for, let alone deliver: it was smart, comprehensive, chock full of engrossing and sometimes bizarre objects, and, more remarkable still, historical. The voluminous (464 pages) catalogue was a show in itself, and its cover image of Gordon Buehrig’s hood ornament for his 1935 Auburn 851 Speedster epitomized Art Deco: more frieze than figurine, bright, stylized, sleek, suggestive of speed, self-consciously sexy, and yes, antiseptic.

8) Divine comedies

The Gardner Museum took down three of Isabella’s most important Early Italian acquisitions, paintings by Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Giuliano da Rimini, and installed them in its intimate Special Exhibitions room, where viewer could muse on the Thomistic notion of the Virgin as the material of the incarnation of the Word or simply on the intersection of the timeless with time. And at the Pucker Gallery, Samuel Bak’s images of the pear as representing our humanity and our mortality, part of his continuing dialogue with the God who sanctioned the Holocaust, showed him to be an artist with the intellectual and emotional equipment to duke it out with Augustine or Aquinas.

9) Party on!

The challenge of assembling a large group exhibit, especially one whose content spans centuries, styles, cultures, and æsthetics, bears some relation to the challenge of throwing a party. What made "The Amazing & the Immutable: Photography from the Collections of Robert Drapkin and Martin Margulies" at Tufts University more memorable still is that it never once called attention to its intelligence. Unfolding with frequently whimsical and sometimes unsettling juxtapositions of images, it was the rare exhibit that was bigger than the sum of its parts.

10) Best of the rest

"Cerith Wyn Evans: Thoughts unsaid, now forgotten . . . at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and "Cerith Wyn Evans" at the MFA; "Ranch ’50: Photographs by Barbara Gallucci" at Gallery Kayafas; "California Dreamin’: Camera Clubs and the Pictorial Photography Tradition" at the Boston University Art Gallery; "John O’Reilly: Panoramas" at Howard Yezerski Gallery; "Dense" at Genovese Sullivan Gallery; "Steve McQueen: Video Installations" at Wellesley’s Davis Museum; "Robert ParkeHarrison: The Architect’s Brother" at the DeCordova Museum; "Closely Focused, Intensely Felt: Selections from the Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art" at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum; "Joseph Sudek: Poet with a Camera" at the MFA; "Body Parts — A Self-Portrait by John Coplans" at the List Center; "Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective" at the Institute of Contemporary Art; the photographs of Harry Callahan at Gallery Kayafas; George Nick at Gallery NAGA; and Phil Bergerson at the Bernard Toale Gallery.