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Massimiliano Gioni is busy. Besides serving as associate director of the New Museum, he has in recent months discoursed on Alighiero Boetti at MoMA; juried the Victor Pinchuk Foundation’s Future Generation Artist Prize; published catalog essays on Pier Paolo Calzolari and Victor Man; worked as creative director of the Fondazione Trussardi in Milan; and co-founded the gallery Family Business. Did I mention he’s also putting together the 2013 Venice Biennale?

Gioni is the Biennale’s youngest director in 110 years, and speculation on his plans runs rampant, although few will prognosticate publicly. Nonetheless I managed to strike up a lively conversation with Legier Biederman, a curator herself and an historian of annuals, biennials, triennials, quadrennials and art-world festivalism generally. She noted first the vogue for oversized shows that feature record numbers of artists and exhibition venues. “Just the sprawling nature of the biennial can be both a point of attraction as well as contention,” says Biederman. A participant in this maximalist trend, Gioni can be expected to put together one of the most Brobdignagian Biennales yet.

Biederman notes next that Gioni will naturally be judged against the past Biennale directors—Harald Szeeman, David Birnbaum (himself the youngest director of his time), Robert Storr, Bice Curiger, Rosa Martinez, Maria de Corral, Francesco Bonami, et al. Will he play it safe, favoring the A-list art stars to whom he now has more access than ever? Or will try to upend the hierarchy? “In many ways, that’s kind of always been an attraction in the contemporary art world, the contention between inside and outside and where that line is and when one crosses it,” says Biederman.

Or will Gioni split the difference? It’s tempting for a curator to include some, but not too many emerging artists, to rely, as Legier puts it, “on the inclusion of the standard artists, for the legitimacy. There is this kind of monstrosity on the biennial circuit as it exists today. There are the individual biennials, that are tied to the specific locations and the specific histories, that have informed the biennial, but then there is this larger global art market that defines in many ways what Caroline Jones calls ‘biennial culture’. There’s always this push and pull between these two realms, of being cutting edge but still maintaining their identities as global biennials that established what contemporary art is today.”

Even the biggest risk-takers often follow well-worn paths in Venice. Biederman does expect Gioni to be adventurous in his selection of new media, but would be surprised if he broke out of the usual geographic proportions. The last Biennale, curated by Bice Curiger in 2011, was a typically Western-centric one, with 68 out of 82 artists born in the West. The largest nationality represented was American, with 14 artists; the next largest was Italian. Biederman suspects the major biennials will continue to be slow to internationalize. “The recent inclusion of non-Western artists began not too long ago. The Venice [Biennale], being the oldest and divided by national pavilions as well as prizes, has a longer history to break, [unlike say] the Havana Biennial, which focuses strategically on ‘non-Western artists’ or artists from the Caribbean or Latin America [or] Central America,” she says. Internationalizing efforts are routinely beaten to a pulp. Witness Storr’s “African Pavilion,” or Okwui Enwezor’s “Documenta 11.” Enwezor’s show, though praised for its novel structure and diverse media, was accused of didacticism and inauthenticity (many of his non-Western artists resided in Western countries). As reported in an interview with Enwezor in Nka, it was called “cumbersome”, “humorless” and “the least arty Documenta yet.”

With Gioni, there’s even less reason than usual to expect a truly international roster. Gioni’s shows, despite their maximalism and unpredictability, typically lack major geographical diversity. His 2009 ‘Younger than Jesus’ show, for instance—which declared its intention to feature the best artists around the globe under the age of thirty-three—drew more than half its artists from the West. A third were American. Artists from Africa and South America made up 5% each. Gioni resists the idea of consciously correcting such imbalances. When The New York Times asked him how he chose artists for another show, he said, “I don’t ask to see their passports.”

My editor and I requested an interview with Gioni for this article, which I originally intended to be a more general overview of his current activities. Gioni originally assented (through a representative). However, when he stipulated he must be allowed to “review the transcript and make necessary edits prior to posting,” and we declined to agree, our emails stopped being returned. Refusing subjects a sneak-peek is standard journalistic practice. But you can’t blame a Venice Biennale director for not playing by the rules, now can you?

Adam Budak, Melissa Ho, and Mika Yoshitake have been hired by the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Budak will be the new curator of contemporary art after serving at the Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria. Ho, an art historian from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Yoshitake, a programmer from the West Coast, will both serve as assistant curators. Kriston Capps at The Washington City Paper writes:

The hires are welcome—and long overdue. Associate curator Kristen Hileman left the Hirshhorn in 2009 to head up the contemporary art department at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her departure left a huge void in the D.C. gallery scene, where she was greatly loved for her enthusiastic participation in juries, panels, and artist talks. Few other curators from Federal City—the National Portrait Gallery’s Anne Goodyear being one of them—show the same spirit of volunteerism in D.C. I’ll put the question to Budak, Ho, and Yoshitake now—can any of y’all fill Hileman’s shoes?

The Tate Modern has appointed Dr. Achim Borchardt-Hume as head of exhibitions. Borchardt-Hume is currently the chief curator at the Whitechapel Gallery and was previously curator of modern and contemporary art at the Tate Modern, director of the Barbican Art Gallery, and exhibition organizer at the Serpentine Gallery.

Deborah Cullen has been appointed the director and chief curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Cullen director of curatorial programs at El Museo del Barrio. The Gallery will move in 2016 from Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus to the Lenfest Center for the Arts at the Manhattanville campus.

Sonya Rhie Quintanilla has been named the new curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Quintanilla was previously curator of Asian art at the San Diego Museum of Art and will succeed Stan Czuma who retired after 33 years in 2005.

Barbara Buhler Lynes has resigned from her position as curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and director of the Museum’s Research Center. Lynes is a foremost scholar in the life and art of Georgia O’Keeffe, publishing many books and essays related to her work. Prior to her tenure at the museum, Lynes was a Professor of Art History at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Montgomery College, Dartmouth College, and Vanderbilt University.

Carol Robbins has retired after 47 years from the Dallas Museum of Art. During her nearly 50 years at the museum, Robbins has served as Curator of Textiles, Curator of New World and Pacific Cultures and in 2006 was appointed the Ellen and Harry S. Parker III Curator of the Arts of the Americas and the Pacific.

Art Historian Daniel H. Weiss and current president of Lafayette College, has been selected as president of Haverford College starting July 2013.

Margi Conrads has been named the Deputy Director of Art and Research at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Conrads is currently the Samuel Sosland Senior Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. Conrads received her doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center and is the editor and primary author of the catalogue of the museum’s American painting collection.

The Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, MI has named Lisa Melandri as the director. Melandri graduated with a degree in art history from Harvard University and previously served as artistic director for the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design of Philadelphia and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California.

English art critic, scholar and painter, John Golding has died at 82. Formerly a faculty member of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Golding is possibly best known for his influential book, “Cubism: A History and an Analysis 1907-1914″ first published in 1959. Though he was a leading scholar in Cubism, he was quoted in 1994 in The Guardian as saying:

I continue to enjoy looking at Cubist pictures as much as I ever did. But I have come increasingly to realize that I do not really understand them, and I am not sure that anyone else does either.

Paola Morsiani, currently curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has been named director of the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College. Morsiani was born in Venice, Italy and received her Laurea in art history and criticism from the University of Padua in Italy before continuing on for a MA in Arts Administration from New York University.

From Despina Stratigakos at the University at Buffalo:

Justine Price, associate professor of art history at Canisius College, died unexpectedly of natural causes on October 24, 2011 in Buffalo, New York. She recently had been tenured and named director of the college’s art history program. Price’s knowledge and love of art were limitless, and her professional accomplishments extended beyond academia to the worlds of publishing and museums.

Beginning her art history studies at Bryn Mawr College (B.A.’92), Price earned a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Her dissertation, supervised by Richard Shiff, was titled, “Abstraction, Expression, Kitsch: American Painting in a Critical Context, 1936-1951.” Her work on American artists was published in edited volumes and catalogues. New scholarly directions focused on contemporary Polish photography, including recent collaborations with the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and a 2009 exhibition of Polish contemporary photography at Canisius College.

Before joining the faculty at Canisius College in 2005, Price had been engaged in curatorial and publishing pursuits. From 2001 to 2008, Price was a tireless researcher for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in New York, contributing to the catalogue raisonné under the direction of Jack Cowart, director of the Foundation. She also contributed to an exhibition on Roy Lichtenstein’s American Indian Paintings, and worked as an editor and director of photography for Bill Smith Studio in New York.

Price’s death at such an early stage in her career is an incalculable loss. A much beloved teacher at Canisius College, Price supervised dozens of undergraduate theses and internships. Students flocked to her classes and her reputation as a teacher led many on the college’s ice hockey team, the Golden Griffins, to enroll in her courses. She, in turn, found time to attend their games as one of their most devoted fans. At her memorial service at Canisius College, one of the team’s members remarked that since Price had not known much about hockey and the hockey team had not known much about art, “it proved to be a good relationship.” In the summer of 2011, Price led a group of Canisius students on a service mission to an orphanage in Zmiaca, Poland, where she made many new friends among the children.

Price leaves behind her mother, father, stepmother and younger sister as well as friends around the world who were nourished by her vitality, humor, and warmth. She also leaves a legacy and a challenge: a life well lived, in service to the things and people we love.

Now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Matisse. Paires et séries is a small jewel box of an exhibition, studded with fifty-four paintings, thirty-four drawings, and five collages. Rich, intelligent, and uncluttered, it is that rare understated blockbuster that encourages close looking and deep thinking about the creative process. I left it inspired to view my world as openly as Henri Matisse did his.

Matisse. Paires et séries eschews dense texts in favor of subtle installation techniques to activate the works’ mysteries. The walls provide just a short chronology, two quotations from the artist, and three explanatory panels, with no interpretation of individual works. The works seduce the eye, while their careful juxtaposition encourages thought. The viewer is invited to participate in the task Matisse set for himself early on—to merge sensation and cognition. “What I am after, above all, is expression. … Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings,” Matisse wrote in his 1908 “Notes of a Painter” (Translation Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, 1973).

In the first rooms, paintings treating the same subject are hung in two and threes. The paintings’ labels, which indicate studio locations and months or seasons, suggest that Matisse worked on these groups simultaneously or in rapid succession. The variety within themes is striking and instructive. The busy detail in both facture and narrative of the gray Pont Saint-Michel, Paris, Effect of Snow (c. 1900, Stiftung Sammlung E.G. Bührle, Zurich) seems downright Impressionistic compared to the roughly scumbled azure and turquoise sky that dissipates to gessoed canvas in the right edge of Pont Saint-Michel (c. 1900, Centre Pompidou, Paris) or the geometric planes of vivid color in Pont Saint-Michel (c. 1901, Santa Barbara Museum of Art). Clearly, something more than a simple recording of the changing seasons is at play here.

Matisse’s paintings, particularly their colors, lose much in reproduction. Seeing both versions of Le Luxe (1907; version I: Centre Pompidou, Paris; version II: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) illustrates his power to use color to express divergent visions of the same composition, as do the two versions of Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” (1912; version I: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; version II: Pushkin Museum, Moscow). Other pairings demonstrate how deeply Matisse engaged the issue of pictorial depth. The Cubist-inspired geometry and insistent flatness of Goldfish and Palette (1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York) complicates the seemingly comfortable perspective of Interior with a Goldfish Bowl (1914, Centre Pompidou, Paris), and vice versa. Witness the way Matisse scratched away paint with a wood brush-handle in the New York picture, revealing a literal and illusionistic depth in its multiple layers.

Many of these paintings were never exhibited as pendants, but as Matisse. Paires et séries unfolds, it provides evidence that at least by the end of his career, Matisse wanted to reveal his creative process. The exhibition next turns to drawings that Matisse expressly created in series and published in the 1943 book Dessins: Thèmes et Variations. It reproduced seventeen series—eleven of women, six of still lifes—that Matisse made in the Hotel Régina in Nice during 1941 and 1942. The drawings are complete works of art in their own right, lyrical meditations on a theme. In series F, Matisse depicts a reclining woman from multiple angles across ten drawings, alternately zooming in and pulling back, even depicting her twice in one drawing. From the spare lines of the initial charcoal drawing, the artist adds detail in his arabesque-like pen and ink variations, before returning to an economical but energetic line in the final pencil drawings.

Matisse. Paires et séries presents the original drawings from series F, H, and M. They benefit greatly from their display on the gallery walls, uninterrupted by the act of turning the page or the need to rotate the large folio as the drawings’ orientations change. (A photograph reproduced in mural scale in the exhibition tellingly shows the original drawings tacked in neat rows and columns filling the walls of Matisse’s studio-apartment.) Seen here, the drawings seem much closer to the non-linear experience that Matisse must have had as he was creating them. The result suggests an artist constantly moving around his motif, responding to it differently, and changing his mind about how he sees and feels it. These suites of drawings read as poetic explorations of the world in all of its variations rather than strict progressions toward an ideal.

In the 1930s, Matisse began employing photographers to document the unfolding of his paintings. In December 1945 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, in addition to drawings and sculptures, Matisse exhibited six paintings, each surrounded by framed photographs of the various ‘states’. It seems certain that Matisse wanted to grant his audience a glimpse of his artistic process.

Matisse. Paires et séries reunites four of the Galerie Maeght paintings and reproduces the documentary photographs in a format that I found frustrating at first. Postcard-sized and displayed in a glass-topped table, they are difficult to see when the gallery is crowded. Worse, only two of the completed canvases are exhibited in the same gallery as the photographs. Yet the close looking borne of this situation ultimately led to discovery. Forced to rely on my memory to make comparisons, I examined the preparatory photographs carefully, marveling at the variety they divulged. The fourteen photographs chronicling Matisse’s process of painting The Romanian Blouse (Centre Pompidou, Paris), from 11 December 1939 to 23 April 1940, show a fascinating trajectory. It began as a representational, floridly detailed portrait in contours, until Matisse added and subtracted detail en route to the elegantly spare final version. When I finally looked at the completed canvas in the subsequent gallery, the experience was intense. It looked less like a static resolution than a pulsing, almost living entity. I could no longer see the earlier layers (although in other canvases, pentimenti do exist), but my memories of them indelibly infused its current incarnation. The constant balancing act Matisse waged between sensation, cognition, and expression—between seeing, thinking, and feeling—was palpable. The artist’s desire to “reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting,” suddenly made thrilling sense.

Matisse. Paires et séries concludes with a series of gouache cut-outs, Blue Nude I-IV (1952, version I: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; versions II and III: Centre Pompidou, Paris; version IV, Musée Matisse, Nice). No label need tell you that the “fourth” version was made first: the flurry of partially erased charcoal lines on its support, as well as the many fragments of cut and layered paper composing the figure, betray a complex distillation of a motif, which is then subtly adapted in the other three variations. This final moment in the exhibition is both visually and intellectually powerful. It suggests that for Matisse, artmaking was not just teleology, a series of steps toward a beautiful picture, but also a deeply personal coming to terms with a world in flux. In his words, “I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.” By inviting us to look carefully at Matisse’s art, and to reflect on the personal quest it conveys, Matisse. Paires et séries gently encourages us to open our eyes and minds to new perspectives on our own experience.

Matisse. Paires et séries is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through June 18, 2012. It will travel to Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst (July 14-October 28, 2012) and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (December 2, 2012-March 17, 2013). A richly illustrated, 288-page French-language catalogue accompanies the exhibition in Paris. Edited by exhibition curator Cécile Debray, it includes short essays by scholars including Yve-Alain Bois, Éric de Chassey, Anne Coron, John Elderfield, Jack Flam, and Rémi Labrusse, as well as two conservation notes, on Le Luxe I and II and Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” I and II. An official iPad application devoted to the exhibition is also available for download.

Expect long lines and crowds. I recommend buying and printing tickets online in advance, and the evening viewing hours—it’s open until 10:50 p.m. Thursday to Monday. What better time to emerge from this exhibition than on a weekend night, when after-images of Matisse’s bright canvases will illuminate your dark walk home?