Jonathan Kamholtz reviews the recent exhibition Small Paintings from the Taft Collection at the Taft Museum of Art.

Kamholtz writes: “As the exhibition notes suggest, there are all sorts of reasons for paintings being small. Some were originally devotional objects where it might matter that you can form an intimate attachment to an image. Some are sketches, allowing the artist to work out formal problems on the fly. Many are designed for the marketplace where there will be works designed to fit many different sizes of domestic spaces—and many different sizes of bank accounts. A show of small paintings is partly going to be a show about middle class tastes and middle class fantasies, including the most fundamental fantasy—that of ownership.”