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HABER'S ART REVIEWS: RENÉ MAGRITTE AND SURREALISM In all these ways, Magritte's art already includes the illusion of art, and the illusion of art can be a dangerous game. The exhibition also describes a continuing refinement. The earliest compositions are often the most cluttered and the least polished. Magritte is not HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE MODERN STILL LIFE The show's theme, of painting as an evolving fiction, leads almost naturally to "postmodern simulacra"—art as willful fraud. I loved a stack of huge plates by Robert Thierren. They rise as formal as sculpture, but also as elegant tableware design. Fakery and reality,fine art
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: PIET MONDRIAN AT THE MODERN The painter known above all for his austerity has taken everyone by surprise, including the critics. They have found the exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art a little less deep, and a lot more fun, than anyone could have expected. Mondrian turns out to be as joyful and decorative an heir of Monet as anyone could want. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: WASSILY KANDINSKY HABER'S ART REVIEWS: WAYNE THIEBAUD HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE DRAWINGS OF PETER PAUL RUBENS Less of the richness of oil, its variety of color and light, the assured compositions meant for public display. But more of a revelation, the artist's first thoughts, private feelings, and hesitations. With the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens, one is in for a surprise. He never lets go, because he never has to. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: EDOUARD VUILLARD AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM He experimented more, though, from photography to murals, and he gave up worrying sooner over the claims of realism, symbolism, and abstraction. At his best, he is never sure just how close he can get. "Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940" ran HABER'S ART REVIEWS: "THE VISITATION" BY JACOPO DA PONTORMO The Nativity, or infancy of Jesus, is a public occasion, in which shepherds or wise men bear witness to a miracle. Like an Annunciation, a Visitation is more intimate, a one-one-one encounter with family and the divine—at least in theory. For Pontormo, it is not so easy or HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JACKSON POLLOCK AT THE MODERN jhaber@haberarts.com. The Jackson Pollock retrospective ran at The Museum of Modern Art through February 2, 1999. Its only other stop is the Tate Gallery in London. Pollock's studio in The Springs, then just on the wrong side of the tracks from East Hampton and now a study center, has become a national historic landmark. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: GIORGIO MORANDI It can pass for formalism, and his later, best work, from the 1950s, comes closest to abstraction. However, he is again at an opposite pole from the mainstream of Modernism. He is not exploring and dismantling space, and he is not insisting on "objecthood" as a property of theartwork.
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: RENÉ MAGRITTE AND SURREALISM In all these ways, Magritte's art already includes the illusion of art, and the illusion of art can be a dangerous game. The exhibition also describes a continuing refinement. The earliest compositions are often the most cluttered and the least polished. Magritte is not HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE MODERN STILL LIFE The show's theme, of painting as an evolving fiction, leads almost naturally to "postmodern simulacra"—art as willful fraud. I loved a stack of huge plates by Robert Thierren. They rise as formal as sculpture, but also as elegant tableware design. Fakery and reality,fine art
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: PIET MONDRIAN AT THE MODERN The painter known above all for his austerity has taken everyone by surprise, including the critics. They have found the exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art a little less deep, and a lot more fun, than anyone could have expected. Mondrian turns out to be as joyful and decorative an heir of Monet as anyone could want. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: WASSILY KANDINSKY HABER'S ART REVIEWS: WAYNE THIEBAUD HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE DRAWINGS OF PETER PAUL RUBENS Less of the richness of oil, its variety of color and light, the assured compositions meant for public display. But more of a revelation, the artist's first thoughts, private feelings, and hesitations. With the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens, one is in for a surprise. He never lets go, because he never has to. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: EDOUARD VUILLARD AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM He experimented more, though, from photography to murals, and he gave up worrying sooner over the claims of realism, symbolism, and abstraction. At his best, he is never sure just how close he can get. "Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940" ran HABER'S ART REVIEWS: "THE VISITATION" BY JACOPO DA PONTORMO The Nativity, or infancy of Jesus, is a public occasion, in which shepherds or wise men bear witness to a miracle. Like an Annunciation, a Visitation is more intimate, a one-one-one encounter with family and the divine—at least in theory. For Pontormo, it is not so easy or HABERARTS: NEW YORK ART REVIEWS BY JOHN HABER 1 day ago · A storm blew in from Brooklyn. It brought with it some hefty but fragile sculpture, some elusive imagery, and one of the few galleries anywhere with a commitment to digital media—and, for now, the only one in Chelsea. HABERARTS: NEW YORK ART REVIEWS BY JOHN HABER François Boucher and Edgar Degas might not have had a whole lot to say to one another. Boucher’s women were born to privilege, just as they seem to have been born into their stately gardens and luxuriantdresses.
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: RENÉ MAGRITTE AND SURREALISM In all these ways, Magritte's art already includes the illusion of art, and the illusion of art can be a dangerous game. The exhibition also describes a continuing refinement. The earliest compositions are often the most cluttered and the least polished. Magritte is not HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE POSTMODERN PARADOX It is not just his love of Edouard Manet's generation and a new French taste. No, he breathed the modern condition and its artistic form in the night air of the city. You may be suspicious of Postmodernism. Fair enough: if there is a postmodern condition, it cannot even be stated consistently much less cured. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: ACTION/ABSTRACTION: POLLOCK, DE Lee Krasner met Hofmann at the Arts Student League and introduced him to Pollock. Pollock, in turn, slighted Gorky, but de Kooning found an influence—and a friend. Naturally the critics again took sides, with Greenberg speaking up for Hofmann. Their choices say a HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JOOS VAN CLEVE AND THE PASSION FLOWER Review by John Haber of a Madonna and Child in the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts, its attribution to Joos van Cleve, a Flemish painter of the Renaissance and Mannerism, by Andy Haslit, the museum curator, and doubts by Michael E. Abrams of Florida A&M concerning the later addition a passion flower HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JANET SOBEL Janet Sobel. Janet Sobel would have had to wait more than fifty years for these shows. She deserves better. Her paintings make one wonder afresh at Abstract Expressionism and an almost forgotten woman's life. Or perhaps she deserves two concurrent shows rather than two wonderful shows three years apart, for the two versions of her that she left HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JEAN-JACQUES LEQUEU, BIBIENA DRAWINGS John Haber in New York City Jean-Jacques Lequeu and the Enlightenment Architecture, Theater, and Fantasy: Bibiena Drawings. You may have trouble seeing Jean-Jacques Lequeu, the French architect, as heir to the Enlightenment.Indeed, you may have trouble seeing him as anarchitect.
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE DRAWINGS OF PETER PAUL RUBENS Less of the richness of oil, its variety of color and light, the assured compositions meant for public display. But more of a revelation, the artist's first thoughts, private feelings, and hesitations. With the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens, one is in for a surprise. He never lets go, because he never has to. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: "THE VISITATION" BY JACOPO DA PONTORMO The Nativity, or infancy of Jesus, is a public occasion, in which shepherds or wise men bear witness to a miracle. Like an Annunciation, a Visitation is more intimate, a one-one-one encounter with family and the divine—at least in theory. For Pontormo, it is not so easy or HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JACKSON POLLOCK AT THE MODERN jhaber@haberarts.com. The Jackson Pollock retrospective ran at The Museum of Modern Art through February 2, 1999. Its only other stop is the Tate Gallery in London. Pollock's studio in The Springs, then just on the wrong side of the tracks from East Hampton and now a study center, has become a national historic landmark. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: GIORGIO MORANDI It can pass for formalism, and his later, best work, from the 1950s, comes closest to abstraction. However, he is again at an opposite pole from the mainstream of Modernism. He is not exploring and dismantling space, and he is not insisting on "objecthood" as a property of theartwork.
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: RENÉ MAGRITTE AND SURREALISM In all these ways, Magritte's art already includes the illusion of art, and the illusion of art can be a dangerous game. The exhibition also describes a continuing refinement. The earliest compositions are often the most cluttered and the least polished. Magritte is not HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE MODERN STILL LIFE The show's theme, of painting as an evolving fiction, leads almost naturally to "postmodern simulacra"—art as willful fraud. I loved a stack of huge plates by Robert Thierren. They rise as formal as sculpture, but also as elegant tableware design. Fakery and reality,fine art
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: PIET MONDRIAN AT THE MODERN The painter known above all for his austerity has taken everyone by surprise, including the critics. They have found the exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art a little less deep, and a lot more fun, than anyone could have expected. Mondrian turns out to be as joyful and decorative an heir of Monet as anyone could want. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: WASSILY KANDINSKY HABER'S ART REVIEWS: WAYNE THIEBAUD HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE DRAWINGS OF PETER PAUL RUBENS Less of the richness of oil, its variety of color and light, the assured compositions meant for public display. But more of a revelation, the artist's first thoughts, private feelings, and hesitations. With the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens, one is in for a surprise. He never lets go, because he never has to. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: EDOUARD VUILLARD AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM He experimented more, though, from photography to murals, and he gave up worrying sooner over the claims of realism, symbolism, and abstraction. At his best, he is never sure just how close he can get. "Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940" ran HABER'S ART REVIEWS: "THE VISITATION" BY JACOPO DA PONTORMO The Nativity, or infancy of Jesus, is a public occasion, in which shepherds or wise men bear witness to a miracle. Like an Annunciation, a Visitation is more intimate, a one-one-one encounter with family and the divine—at least in theory. For Pontormo, it is not so easy or HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JACKSON POLLOCK AT THE MODERN jhaber@haberarts.com. The Jackson Pollock retrospective ran at The Museum of Modern Art through February 2, 1999. Its only other stop is the Tate Gallery in London. Pollock's studio in The Springs, then just on the wrong side of the tracks from East Hampton and now a study center, has become a national historic landmark. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: GIORGIO MORANDI It can pass for formalism, and his later, best work, from the 1950s, comes closest to abstraction. However, he is again at an opposite pole from the mainstream of Modernism. He is not exploring and dismantling space, and he is not insisting on "objecthood" as a property of theartwork.
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: RENÉ MAGRITTE AND SURREALISM In all these ways, Magritte's art already includes the illusion of art, and the illusion of art can be a dangerous game. The exhibition also describes a continuing refinement. The earliest compositions are often the most cluttered and the least polished. Magritte is not HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE MODERN STILL LIFE The show's theme, of painting as an evolving fiction, leads almost naturally to "postmodern simulacra"—art as willful fraud. I loved a stack of huge plates by Robert Thierren. They rise as formal as sculpture, but also as elegant tableware design. Fakery and reality,fine art
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: PIET MONDRIAN AT THE MODERN The painter known above all for his austerity has taken everyone by surprise, including the critics. They have found the exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art a little less deep, and a lot more fun, than anyone could have expected. Mondrian turns out to be as joyful and decorative an heir of Monet as anyone could want. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: WASSILY KANDINSKY HABER'S ART REVIEWS: WAYNE THIEBAUD HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE DRAWINGS OF PETER PAUL RUBENS Less of the richness of oil, its variety of color and light, the assured compositions meant for public display. But more of a revelation, the artist's first thoughts, private feelings, and hesitations. With the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens, one is in for a surprise. He never lets go, because he never has to. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: EDOUARD VUILLARD AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM He experimented more, though, from photography to murals, and he gave up worrying sooner over the claims of realism, symbolism, and abstraction. At his best, he is never sure just how close he can get. "Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940" ran HABER'S ART REVIEWS: "THE VISITATION" BY JACOPO DA PONTORMO The Nativity, or infancy of Jesus, is a public occasion, in which shepherds or wise men bear witness to a miracle. Like an Annunciation, a Visitation is more intimate, a one-one-one encounter with family and the divine—at least in theory. For Pontormo, it is not so easy or HABERARTS: NEW YORK ART REVIEWS BY JOHN HABER 1 day ago · A storm blew in from Brooklyn. It brought with it some hefty but fragile sculpture, some elusive imagery, and one of the few galleries anywhere with a commitment to digital media—and, for now, the only one in Chelsea. HABERARTS: NEW YORK ART REVIEWS BY JOHN HABER François Boucher and Edgar Degas might not have had a whole lot to say to one another. Boucher’s women were born to privilege, just as they seem to have been born into their stately gardens and luxuriantdresses.
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: RENÉ MAGRITTE AND SURREALISM In all these ways, Magritte's art already includes the illusion of art, and the illusion of art can be a dangerous game. The exhibition also describes a continuing refinement. The earliest compositions are often the most cluttered and the least polished. Magritte is not HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE POSTMODERN PARADOX It is not just his love of Edouard Manet's generation and a new French taste. No, he breathed the modern condition and its artistic form in the night air of the city. You may be suspicious of Postmodernism. Fair enough: if there is a postmodern condition, it cannot even be stated consistently much less cured. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: ACTION/ABSTRACTION: POLLOCK, DE Lee Krasner met Hofmann at the Arts Student League and introduced him to Pollock. Pollock, in turn, slighted Gorky, but de Kooning found an influence—and a friend. Naturally the critics again took sides, with Greenberg speaking up for Hofmann. Their choices say a HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JOOS VAN CLEVE AND THE PASSION FLOWER Review by John Haber of a Madonna and Child in the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts, its attribution to Joos van Cleve, a Flemish painter of the Renaissance and Mannerism, by Andy Haslit, the museum curator, and doubts by Michael E. Abrams of Florida A&M concerning the later addition a passion flower HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JANET SOBEL Janet Sobel. Janet Sobel would have had to wait more than fifty years for these shows. She deserves better. Her paintings make one wonder afresh at Abstract Expressionism and an almost forgotten woman's life. Or perhaps she deserves two concurrent shows rather than two wonderful shows three years apart, for the two versions of her that she left HABER'S ART REVIEWS: JEAN-JACQUES LEQUEU, BIBIENA DRAWINGS John Haber in New York City Jean-Jacques Lequeu and the Enlightenment Architecture, Theater, and Fantasy: Bibiena Drawings. You may have trouble seeing Jean-Jacques Lequeu, the French architect, as heir to the Enlightenment.Indeed, you may have trouble seeing him as anarchitect.
HABER'S ART REVIEWS: THE DRAWINGS OF PETER PAUL RUBENS Less of the richness of oil, its variety of color and light, the assured compositions meant for public display. But more of a revelation, the artist's first thoughts, private feelings, and hesitations. With the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens, one is in for a surprise. He never lets go, because he never has to. HABER'S ART REVIEWS: "THE VISITATION" BY JACOPO DA PONTORMO The Nativity, or infancy of Jesus, is a public occasion, in which shepherds or wise men bear witness to a miracle. Like an Annunciation, a Visitation is more intimate, a one-one-one encounter with family and the divine—at least in theory. For Pontormo, it is not so easy orHABERARTS.COM
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* Two Coats of Paint * Where ELSE Is Art Online? 4.29.20 — THE HIGH LIFE AND THE LOW LIFE Topics: International Center of Photography,
James Couple ,
photography , Tyler
Mitchell , Visual
History of Hip-Hop
To pick up from _LAST TIME_, four opening shows , now shuttered for Covid-19, exploit ICP’s newfound flexibility while keeping things light. They are just introducing a brand-new museum, and it will take time to see how the galleries hold up. (Passage to classrooms and studios remains discreet.) The digital ingenuity and dystopia of James Couple may make more sense to fans of The Warriors. Otherwise, you are unlikely to find either your image or a plot in the 1979 cult film, which he has altered. Just trust him and the director, Walter Hill, that something profound is going on. Hip-hop accords with another embarrassing piece of the action, museums devoted to pop entertainment—like Tim Burton at MoMA, David Bowie and now yasiin bey at the Brooklyn Museum, or Leonard Cohen at the Jewish Museum. Still, it is effective not just because of Gordon Parks, but also because no one celebrity stands out. It shows a more collective culture, born in the South Bronx and, as Jamal Shabazz has it, still Flying High. It also shows a collective self-fashioning, in collaboration between the musicians and such photographers as Shabazz, Joe Conzo, Jr., Janette Beckman, and Glen E. Friedman. It takes them all the way from contact sheets to album covers, magazine spreads, and a wall like a hall of fame. Who cares if it is all about style, if that is their subject? If Tyler Mitchell extends their view of the high life, he is also its antidote. His sitters are content with anonymity and community, and his fabric wash is just hanging out to dry. Yet he also hopes for a whole new world, a “black utopia.” After the fabric comes a room empty but for soft music and a white fence along the walls, like the idyllic backyard that urban dwellers will never know. As he puts it, “I often think about what white fun looks like.” Still, he can never leave behind his forebodings, not even in the most serene of portrait photos—where heads are bent, women embrace for comfort, and a young man face down the ground holds his hands behind his back as if the handcuffs will never come off. “The Lower East Side ” is an escape, too, if only a tentative one. This is not the glamour and conflict on view out those glorious windows. It is not even what preceded that, in the Latinos that held on after East Village art had displaced poverty further north. It pays tribute to a deeper past and to ICP itself, in photos from the collection. It has implications for the place of immigration in America today. It also shows that, well before Diane Arbus , photography and photojournalism could be raunchy and in your face. It also shows a shifting neighborhood and shifting uses of photography, from the 1880s to 1950s. It opens with a name associated more with muckraking than photography, Jacob Riis, whose How the Other Half Lives appeared in Scribner’s magazine in 1889. One can see his agenda in a coal cellar—or hear it loud and clear in a title like The Children’s Only Playground. While Riis also photographed a sabbath eve, it took a new century to focus on immigrant groups and their aspirations, and many behind the camera were immigrants themselves. Weegee photographs a man delivering bagels, Andreas Feininger a Jewish barbershop, Dan Weiner a pushcart, and Arnold Eagle a yeshiva during the Depression. Eagle, on behalf of the Works Progress Administration, also captures a sign for housing with (wow) white sinks and hot water. Soon enough come the cold comforts and freak show of Sammy’s bar, but also something darker still. Lee Sievan has an aching family portrait, while a newspaper announces the Nazi drive to power. Still others display a more self-conscious artistry. Bill Witt adds touches of Surrealism, in the eyes of an optometrist’s shop sign or a pile of shoes. A man in a white straw hat looks up from the shadows of the el for Ilse Bing. Leaving ICP, one can only wonder at what will survive of their surroundings today. _READ MORE _, now in a _feature-length article_ on thissite.
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4.27.20 — WHERE THE ACTION IS Topics: International Center of Photography,
James Couple , TylerMitchell , Visual
History of Hip-Hop
_Last week I offered the museum starved a look at three of the great ones and their permanent collections. But did you know that there is a new kid on the block, waiting for you when things reopen? _ It has been a long journey, but the International Center of Photography has landed where the action is, on the Lower East Side. Its new building has all the flash of today’s art market. Still, it bows respectfully to high Modernism, and, at just three stories, has its eyes close to the ground—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.
It reunites its greatly expanded display space with ICP’s library, media labs, and school. It has more varied galleries as well, from a central room ready for a party to a slim mezzanine that takes one picture at a time. It also completes the transition from a home for photography’s history to a center for mixed media and “A Visual History of Hip-Hop .”Other
opening shows, through May 19, bow to face-recognition technology and the movies, with James Couple , and to sight and sound installations, with Tyler Mitchell . Still, it has not quite left its or the neighborhood’s history behind. Photos of immigrants complement “New York Stories ” at the Museum of the City of New York. Rather than “the action,” I might as well have called it what it is, gentrification. Opened January 25, ICP fits right into block after block of glass towers rising along Delancey Street. If it cannot quite compete with the new Essex Street market (or Market Line), what can? Besides, if you are drawn first to the food, fine. The view is better anyway from the sidewalk across the street. Look up and you will see a variation on the classic glass cube, but with a serious touch ofself-publicity.
Where the new Whitney Museum adds function at the expense of an institutional form, ICP’s façade stays sleek, simple, and welcoming. Gensler had a hand in the expanded Museum of Modern Art , but here the architect has the chance to design from scratch. Broad bands frame and separate the floors, as part of the exterior or visible within. That leaves broad windows for transparency and lightness. Through them, the top two floors display blown-up images from the exhibitions, facing onto the street. While they amount to billboards, they make a serious impression in black and white. In one, African Americans overflow a stoop in Harlem. Gordon Parks builds on his earlier group portrait of the jazz era —but hip-hop, he asserts, takes in a wider community. The other, by Weegee in 1944, shows a boisterous, overweight woman as “Sammy’s Mae West.” Sammy’s bar, “the poor man’s stork club,” attracted sailors and photographers like him and Lisette Model as well. (Did I mention that Model contributes a Gypsy Queen and Black Dwarf? ) If hip-hop can look back to art photography with Parks, the Lower East Side had its advertisements for itself all along. They mark the end of that long journey, with each stop along the way a bow to its time. I still miss ICP’s brick mansion on Fifth Avenue, when photography capped off Museum Mile. It moved to a midtown office building, just as art was becoming big business—and then the Bowery, just as art was moving downtown. If its basement gallery felt crowded and confining, it opened with “Public, Private, Secret ” about the surveillance state. Now James Couple updates the threat for the latest deepfake algorithms. If you pose at a lobby touchscreen, you may find yourself in chaotic and bombastic crowd scenes on wall-length projections back upstairs. Museums depend these days on t-shirts and tote bags, and ICP devotes its entire first floor to the bookstore and admissions desk—tunneling right along to a back entrance on Ludlow Street. Still, where too many museums, like MoMA’s 2004 expansion of the Morgan Library under Renzo Piano in 2007, can seem more concerned for lobbies and coffee shops than their collections, here the only atrium is integral to the display space. Part of the second floor lacks a ceiling, creating that third-floor mezzanine. From it, one can appreciate older photographs or take a second look down to hip-hop. The galleries vary further, giving the curators choices—and, like Maya Lin’s SculptureCenter , preserve a view of the infrastructure through steel mesh overhead. Unlike a true atrium, the space below the mezzanine accommodates partitions. Each display floor also has smaller rooms to the west. One might mistake colored fabric for more of the hip-hop show, in a corridor where black brick faces white Sheetrock. The hangings do, after all, bear black faces. They belong, though, to ordinary faces rather than celebrities, courtesy of Tyler Mitchell—and I pick up the story with a fuller review of the opening exhibitions _NEXT TIME_. _READ MORE _, now in a _feature-length article_ on thissite.
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4.24.20 — REFLECTING ON THE DUTCH Topics: Dutch painting , Metropolitan Museum, Rembrandt
_Seriously miss museum-going during the lockdown? Or too consumed with fears for the future , both theirs and yours? This week I attend to the former, with virtual tours of three major New York museums and their permanent collections. _ As with no other artist, light for Rembrandt seems to arise from within—within a painting and within its subject. How remarkable, then, that Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer is all about reflection. The philosopher is reflecting, and so is the light. It brings out his worldly and lasting fame and a wealth of materials, from his gold chain and white gown to Homer’s sculpted hair, which becomes a poet’s crown. The work itself has long been a showpiece, from its arrival in Messina in 1654 to its arrival at the Met in 1961, to unrivaled media attention for its time. And once again it stands apart, to open “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces ” through October 4,2020.
One need not recognize its subjects to join in the praise. Its initial owner did not, given the scant clues of a weighty pile of books behind the bust and a medallion of Alexander the Great, whom Aristotle taught, hanging on the chain. One may well, though, recognize many of the sixty-seven paintings. The museum needs a place for them while remodeling its rooms for European painting , most notably the skylights. It has already leased the Met Breuer as a kind of public warehouse while it (slowly) gets around to remodeling its galleries for modern art—and the Frick Collection will sublet _that_ building while it remodels, too. In choosing instead the Lehman wing, as with the show’s pompous title, the Met is also praisingitself.
It can get away with that, given eleven paintings by Rembrandt alone, not even counting his followers . (Far be it from me to review Dutch art of the seventeenth century, so apologies that I shall not even try apart from links to past reviews.) Besides, the work looks great. The curator, Adam Eaker, can borrow paintings from galleries devoted to a single donor that should never have stood apart in the first place, other than that money talks. The floor’s eight widely spaced walls also come as a relief from the usual. The Met got its share of publicity by rehanging the European galleries barely five years earlier, but every so often it, too, can stand a fresh light. It also offers a peek at changing scholarship. After Aristotle, the show ditches chronology in favor of themes. A wall for “masters, pupils, and rivals” may seem to look not forward, but rather back to Romantic ideals of clashing personalities. The remaining themes look back, too, to a focus on genres. “Eloquent things” move from reminders of human transience in skulls and spilled wine to the icier still life of the late Baroque, but genres are like that. Yet the display infuses each genre with a very contemporary politicalcorrectness.
Opening wall text even apologies for not showing colonialism, slavery, war, and painting by women. Not that art overlooks a woman’s work. It sees a girl asleep by Jan Vermeer , a woman peeling apples by Nicolaes Maes, or Rembrandt’s portrait of his second wife as “lives of women.” It sees everyday life, including wooing, as taking place “behind closed doors.” It sees women themselves, including Rembrandt’s Bathsheba and Bellona, as “contested bodies.” Paintings may land in one or the other almost at random, but they have a point. Politics enters the wider world with the Reformation and the war of independence from Spain. Gloriously austere church interiors by Emanuel de Witte and Hendrick van Vliet become “questions of faith” quite as much as a Holy Family by Jacob Jordaens (who, by the way, was Flemish and not Dutch).”Faces of a new nation” range from the Protestant spareness of Gerard ter Borch to the virtuoso grays of Franz Hals . And with landscapes, the show argues, that nation was “staking a claim.” Somehow that includes the cloud in the shape, I could swear, of a cartoon monster by Jacob van Ruisdael , a rutted road by Meindert Hobbema, and the placid sunlit grandeur of Aelbert Cuyp—while it excludes how they measure out distance through repeated horizontals and precise observation. After so many real and scholarly wars, Rembrandt’s reflections makea fitting exit.
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4.22.20 — IN FROM THE MARGINS Topics: permanent collection, Whitney Museum
If you miss the old building on Madison Avenue, the Whitney wants you to feel at home. Works from its collection unfold in a familiar order by movement, from the Ashcan school and the twilight zone of Surrealism to the glory of postwar American art. An opening room, hung salon style on deep blue walls, merely recreates the museum’s origins—beside photos of its precursor, the New York Studio Club. One may look to corridors on either side for the realism of Isabel Bishop, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles Alston or an abstraction by Hedda Stern. Are women and African Americans relegated to the margins to this day? Trust to margins, though, to reframe the center, and together with an earlier report on the Guggenheim’s collection it is the subject of a longer review, in my latestupload .
Yes, the
Whitney moved to the Meatpacking District to gain room for its holdings, and it took its time finding its way home. It reopened in 2015, with “America Is Hard to See ,” and it rehung the collection soon enough after, as “Where We Are .” Now the fancy titles are gone, and American art through 1965 must speak for itself. Clever pairings, like that of Early Sunday Morning by Edward Hopper with Three Flags by Jasper Johns , are gone, too, although both classics are back. So is Calder’s Circus, looking less klutzy and more colorful in a curved vitrine beside more blue walls. Still, the Whitney argues, it has sought the shock of the new all along, starting in Greenwich Village in 1930. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, it insists, was a sculptor as well as patron, and her Studio Club, opened in 1918 (with white walls), anticipates artist collectives and alternative spaces today. The show’s opening wall includes women along with George Bellows , and even artists as conservative as Thomas Hart Benton saw themselves as revolutionaries. When John Steuart Curry painted an adult baptism in Kansas, he was observing a religious revival but imagining a rebirth for America. When Florine Stettheimer painted the Statue of Liberty after World War I, she was picturing the nation’s entrance onto a world stage—and she remade lower Manhattan accordingly, landmarks only. And when Alice Neel created a style for routine portraits today, she was demanding actionin the Depression.
Even a little diversity can change the rules of the game. Painterly realism includes a buffalo hunt by Horace Pippin, a snowy alternative to stereotypes of African Americans. Both Stettheimer and Neel appear along with the crisp factory realism of Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler , and Precisionism. Earlier still, photos by Ilse Bing and Margaret Bourke-White (the very first cover for Life magazine) hang beside the West Side Highway for Andreas Feininger. Marisol, born to Venezuelan parents in Paris, claims Pop Art for women with her boxy wood figures—while Rosalyn Drexler rather than Andy Warhol paints Marilyn Monroe. The Rose by Jay DeFeo and a white shroud by Norman Lewis hang between Franz Kline in mostly black and Joan Mitchell in mostly white. For starters, they are changing the rules for others. A wall reprises the Whitney’s “Real/Surreal ” in 2012, but it faces a 1939 film by Mary Ellen Bute that looks more like today’s animation. DeFeo and Lewis bring out the black and white in color-field painting—although colors return in “Spilling Over ” just a floor away. Marilyn Pursued by Death brings out the death instinct in Pop Art , even before cigarettes and a colossal hamburger for Tom Wesselman . And yet their context changes the rules for them, too. DeFeo’s one-ton accretion becomes an exemplar of expressionism, rather than of Bay Area art or the bodily discomforts of Post-Minimalism. Three artists have alcoves of their own, including a black and a woman. Remember the “triumph of American painting”? Jacob Lawrence in tempera sees anything but a victory, even in 1947. His War Series shows the anonymity of massed soldiers, the loneliness of the letter home after a death in combat, and a head sunk as if for good in prayer. Georgia O’Keeffe paints music and a skull as if they were one—but then Hopper could change the rules, too. His naked wife facing the sun is not a virgin at the Annunciation, but a woman at seventy-eight who has known sex anddeath.
As so often, Hopper’s light belongs to the early hours or sunset. The longest moments in his art depict transience. The collection may look much the same as ever, but the curators, David Breslin with Margaret Kross and Roxanne Smith, see continual change. The show ends where it began, with a mobile by Alexander Calder —but also with a single work of contemporary art. An entire wall of mirrored panels by Nick Mauss turn its back on the collection, even as its stains extend Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Facing the terrace, it also reflects thecity.
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4.20.20 — BEGGING FOR ATTENTION Topics: Alberto Giacometti, Museum of Modern
Art
Alberto Giacometti is begging for attention. Or rather a woman is begging, in bronze and only just smaller than life. Should you proceed like most visitors to the new Museum of Modern Art , Giacometti’s nude woman will be facing you at the entrance to Surrealism, head on. Maybe you, too, insist that a visit to MoMA still begin with Vincent van Gogh and Starry Night. After an archival but passionate room for early photography and cinema, you will find rooms for Modernism’s founders, in Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse . You can step away from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , for a painting of riots in the 1960s by Faith Ringgold hanging nearby. She and Picasso look all the bolder for it at that—from her faces stained with blood and tears to his mask-like faces and the blue outline added to a woman’s leg as if in chalk. And then comes the largest room yet, for a newly diverse museum and the diversity ofmodern art.
Picasso is still present, and his Girl at a Mirror looks bolder, too, for a context in broader movements. She seems literally to embrace her mirror image while clashing with it, their faces divided like phases of the moon. Giacometti’s 1934 woman, in contrast, breaks symmetry only once—with her cupped hands held out slightly off the level beneath her breasts. She could be gesticulating like pretty much anyone making a point, much as a male figure from the 1940s points with an outstretched arm. She could be praying, and her knees are bent. She could be begging in desperation, and her eyes show herhorror or pain.
Alberto Giacometti knew desperation, with one gaunt figure after another, but not only that. The sculptor of Woman with Her Throat Cut and The Palace at Four A.M. knew danger and dark hours as well, but also daylight. This woman, his first on so large a scale, rests within a bronze frame. Does it provide support or confinement, a cage or a throne? Her long fingers could be piercing the void or defining a solid, and indeed he called her Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object). That dialogue between the space of the work and the unseen runs throughout modern art. It also runs throughout MoMA’s 2019 museum expansion , by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Gensler (also the subject of a fuller review at the link). It gives more attention to the permanent collection, and then it goes for more. Within Surrealism, you now have such women and cultural crossings as Leonora Carrington, a Brit born in Mexico. And once you leave the room, you have entered the new west wing, with choices in all directions. Much is bound to remain unseen on a given day, because only the most obsessive or determined could hope to see it all. Even that one room in subdued light is a bit of a maze. Obsessive and determined as I am, I returned in December, past the rarified atmosphere of an October press preview, to see how it is holding up. Hey, critics raved about the awful 2004 architecture by Yoshio Taniguchi before they caught on . Even in peak tourist season, it felt manageable. Either the maze dispersed the crowds or the lack of a blockbuster exhibition kept them away. It already felt more than halfway familiar as well. People still posed for idiotic selfies with Starry Night—although not, alas, half naked and arms akimbo with a Paul Cézanne bather afew paintings away.
I still felt the near absence of Georges Braque from Cubism, but then the display will change often. I still found the assignment of themes to each room rather forced, subsuming early Mark Rothko to war. But then Arshile Gorky , to his side, did survive the Armenian genocide before dying a suicide in New York. The hanging can try too hard at times as well, like the placement of an eye filled with clouds by René Magritte overhead. Then again, he had his head in the clouds, too. I still worry as well that the maze will discourage people from taking in much of the collection. I also still worry that downplaying movements in favor of diversity can miss something essential to modern art. Still, MoMA comes close enough to chronology as an organizing theme in itself. Leaps head in time, like that to Ringgold or, further on, Alma Thomas , the African American abstract painter, are rarer than you might think from the press—and visitors that day paid them no particular attention. Are they no more, then, than virtue signaling and token women, all but begging for attention? Perhaps, but a friend found a new favorite in Carrington’s The Minotaur’s Daughter. I find its hard-edged realism a bit airless and stifling, but it allowedher to dream.
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4.17.20 — AFTER THE CARNIVAL Topics: Curtis Talwst Santiago, Drawing
Center , Rachel Uffner _Allow me again to devote some of this sad, slow, crazy week to shows that had planned to close soon, but now already have. Of course, all the galleries and exhibitions still have Web sites. _ This may be the saddest carnival that I have ever seen. Curtis Talwst Santiago sure promises a celebration when he takes as his alter ego the J’ouvert knight, but can he? Together with a report from last time on poetry in translation thanks to Archie Rand , it is also the subject of a longer review in mylatest upload .
Its name, from a Caribbean carnival , translates literally as _I open_. It serves in common usage to denote a new dawn and a new day. It also serves as a vital connection to the past. Of Trinidad descent like Chris Ofili , Santiago is putting himself on the line, too, but then _ouvert_ in French can mean open in the sense of frank as well. He embraces the role on video, as a dancer and recording artist. But then one reaches him, at the Drawing Center through May 10, only through what could be a construction site or a disaster area, with his striped abandoned costume on the floor. Whatever is it, chain armor from the Hudson Bay catalog? A figure in a painting lies slumped as well, with a helpless or sheepish smile. Come to think of it, Santiago’s jumping and weaving can look a little pathetic, too. There is joy here all the same. The installation under construction is common enough these days, but it is still reliably funky and fun—and the artist throws in a second and third helping a few feet away and at Rachel Uffner , through April 26. Spray paint and charcoal impart a healthy cheer and a closeness to street art. They also place the knight in the company of a saint and a blue devil, a trickster worth heeding, too. The spray also includes white, so that everyone present emerges in a glow. The carnival may have departed, but one can still feel the energy. One can also confront a complicatedhistory.
The show’s title, “Can’t I Alter ,” could come as a demand, but it leaves open what he wishes to alter. The center devotes its back “drawing room” and downstairs “lab” to an older Chinese artist for whom nothing seems to change. Born in 1942, Guo Fengyi had to retire early from a factory job because of arthritis, but it did not keep her from the detailed weave of colored ink. The factory may have produced modern chemical fertilizer, but she bases her drawings from around 1990 on traditional Chinese medicine, wellness, and healing, as well as cosmology and myth. They serve her as private symbol systems, like those of Hilma af Klint in the early twentieth century, although on found newsprint. They sustained her even after her hands had failed her, until her death in 2010. Santiago has to explain himself, too, and the tale is a total mess, like his spray paint. But then, he implies, so is his background, starting with his birth in Canada, and he is all the happier for that. The knight took its present form in a seventeenth-century novel, but he also leans on a mural from thirteenth-century Lisbon and a figure in a public square in an early Italian Renaissance painting. Large hangings look like traditional quilting, but they derive from polychrome copper in a tomb in Ethiopia. Other pretend artifacts include silver jewel cases, modeled after saintly reliquaries from the Middle Ages. A craggy rock riffs on mesolithic ruins, but a more polished glass sculpture looks just as fragmentary and as ancient. It also looks like an enormous nose, and Santiago is thumbing his nose at history, at himself, and maybe at you. (Tomb robbers, he explains, used to steal noses from Egyptian statuary.) The show may not add up, not when it comes with such lengthy explanationss. Still, it speaks to the vitality of old stories and the need to question history. It places him firmly within the Afro-Caribbean diaspora as well. He is still discovering his ancestries and himself. _READ MORE _, now in a _feature-length article_ on thissite.
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