haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

In 1953, when so many Americans completed their artistic education in Paris, and so many European refugees powered a new art in America, Beauford Delaney left New York for Europe. He had spent a life in motion, the perpetual outsider, but somehow it always kept him near the center of the action.

It had him, too, perpetually struggling for recognition and simply to survive. When he received an urging from James Baldwin to join the writer in Paris, he welcomed it, and he never turned his back. Not that the black artist’s emotional and financial struggle got any easier, not even when he discovered postwar abstract art. Yet he was, says the Drawing Center, all along “In the Medium of Life,” through September 14.

He had been through enough as it was. Born in 1901 in the Jim Crow South, he left Tennessee for art school in Boston, and he never entirely outgrew the past. He could literally not afford to do so. In New York since 1929, he made a living from portraits, on commission. It left him broke, but proud enough to turn his skills to those he knew best, including himself. An opening self-portrait shows him with a fleshy face and a cigarette, in early modern color, in a white work shirt. He was suspended between art’s past and future.

The young Beauford Delaney leaned to profiles, including a charcoal of an athlete in the illusion of the embossed image on a coin. Friends appear looser and more accomplished, and he had a gift for hooking up. He sketched leading black artists like himself, including Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden, but also Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and, in prose, Henry Miller. It did not make the struggle any easier. He mingled with the Harlem Renaissance but lived on the southern fringe of the West Village. He seemed to delight equally in being accepted and ignored.

The Drawing Center sets off a room for documentation. It includes a note from Al Hirschfeld, who became popular in the Sunday Times as the entertainment world’s contribution to art. The cartoonist does not sound like it here: tried and tried with no success. He could be speaking for Delaney. Still, the African American keeps turning up in all the right places.

He is in Yaddo, the artistic colony, and on Greene Street, in today’s Soho, checking out the traffic lights. He adopts fields of opaque color central to art from Stuart Davis to Pop Art. Yet he must have been looking by now not so much for success as for pure escape. He must have envied Baldwin’s ability to make a sensation. He must have identified with Baldwin as a gay male as well. They had been in touch ever since 1945.

Delaney did not remain altogether an outsider, serving as a professor in Paris. Just as important, there he adopted black abstraction. He approaches monochrome, in dabs of intense color though with one or more more peeking through—only one thing. He still makes portraits, especially self-portraits. There, too, he stays constant in his jowly features and sharp color, in pastel, watercolor, and gouache. He might have become two artists, competing to define African American art.

Far from New York, he explores African American identity as well. He experiments with mud color and red on bark. He studies African figuration. The more he turns to himself, the more, too, he approaches cartoons. He is still looking to what he had learned from Hirschfeld, but also from modern art. Just try to separate the impulses.

He was not altogether a failure, and he knew it. Someone flouting convention like Miller admired him no end. The survey gets the entire Drawing Center, including the back room and the basement lab. With today’s erosion of the separation between representation and abstraction, he has a new claim to relevance as well. His depression, though, only deepened after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., and at his death in 1979 he was still on the outside looking in. Maybe that is the place to be.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on weaving and abstraction, that opening tells the story pretty well all by itself. Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a painter, puppeteer, and performance artist, while Sonia Delaunay was a dressmaker as well. Throw in “personal uniforms” for Andrea Zittel, and painting has become design for art and life.

The exhibition will never be half as coherent again, and its unraveling could be the real narrative of modern art. What, though, holds its threads together? It depends on the weaver.

The show can hardly claim a history of weaving, through millennia of human experience. Neither does it ask why Modernism adopted weaving and what that changed. Nor does it tell of weaving’s growing claim on art today. The few exceptions, like Zittel, seem like fortunate mistakes. Nor, too, does it present weaving as “women’s work,” given at last its due. Restricting things to women would be a shame, but that still leaves the question of who makes it through the door.

The Modern does not present weaving as a particular practice. A large last room leaps from fabric to basket weaving—and from delicate materials to sculptural mass. Martin Puryear cultivates smooth surfaces with a vengeance. Basketry also sacrifices abstraction to functionality and human form. The show does not so much as stick to weaving. Painters include Jack Whitten, the African American, his only weave the cuts of his razor through thick oil.

Perhaps the only weave that matters is the weave of history. Or could it be the rectilinear weave of geometric abstraction? One sees it in the visually charged surfaces of Agnes Martin or Jeffrey Gibson with their debts to Minimalism and to Native American rituals. Right at the start comes Fire in the Evening, oil on cardboard by Paul Klee. And the greatest unraveling comes from Ed Rossbach, whose lace and bleached cotton seem to come apart before one’s eyes.

I thought back to Beatriz Milhazes, whose “pattern and decoration” I had seen only just before at the Guggenheim Museum. Surely if anyone has the weave of abstraction at its wildest, she does. Its patterned circles and the symbols they contain evoke the rhythms and colors that she knows so well from Brazil, where they enter the movements of bossa nova, the Carnival in Rio Tropicália, or just daily life. Her materials came to her from home as well, including shopping bags, chocolate, and candy wrappers. Woven textures enter her work quite naturally, as she layers acrylic on plastic as a medium for transfer to be peeled away. And yet it is only paint, through September 7.

I thought back, too, to an artist whose weave I had seen just days before in Tribeca and again amid the weavers at MoMA, Ellen Lesperance at Derek Eller through May 24. Her fine grid takes on imagery from the changing density of fabric and paint alone. It may hint at faces, totems, or the artist’s hand. It may never reach the edge of her paper, as if set against the sky. But then abstraction is still an experiment.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Who needs painting anyway? Who, for that matter, needs paint? Maybe no one, but you can still be grateful for “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” at MoMA through September 13. And I work this together with a review of weaving for Jovencio de la Paz as a longer review and my latest upload.

The question has come up again and again, from the moment Robert Rauschenberg found the materials of a “combine painting” in the debris of art and life. It came up when Tristan Tzara could endlessly repeat Dada and refuse to call it art. Denial could itself be art, by the very definition of conceptual art. It could also be an imperative, as long “pure painting,” some said, refused to ask who gets to exhibit painting in the first place, baring his (male) art school credentials and his soul. Wall paint still had its uses, for how else could a curator keep the wall clean enough for erudite text, damning or explaining it all. Postmodernism and diversity insisted on it.

Painting’s very life came for a while to reside in its material being. And its material being, it often seemed, came to reside in anything but paint. Still enough of a Luddite to resent weaving by anything but by hand? As recently as twenty years ago, I could not help noting just how often artists treated craft as testimony to traditions as diverse as a day in the galleries. The weave of fabric could play the role of drawing and colored threads the part of paint. Refuse to stretch a canvas and it becomes a hanging.

My own encounters with tapestries has all but lost its novelty, and allusions to East Asian, African, Islamic, Native American, and Latin American craft have lost much of their specificity as well. That is not to say that the art fails—or fails to address a real need. A snip here and a loop there and you have a curtain, a carpet, a tablecloth, or a home. MoMA, though, has in mind something else. It pushes weaving not to its origins, but back to the future. It sees a new beginning where people have long looked for one, in modern art.

It is not the first show to interweave history and contemporary art. Museums everywhere feel the pressure these days to include new voices, because museum-goers want what they know and what patrons can afford—not dead people, but the living. Just last year came “Weaving Abstraction” and “Crafting Modernity“—and I dare you to remember which is which. The first looked to the Incans for Minimalism’s grid. If its handful of contemporaries included Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, and Olga de Amaral, well surprise, for here they are again at the Museum of Modern Art. Suffice it to say that none of them is Incan.

Puzzled by the promise of “Modern Abstraction”? Was there a premodern abstraction, and can MoMA quit before things get too postmodern? Try not to split hairs or unravel all the threads. The curators, Lynne Cooke and Esther Adler, proceed more or less by artist. If the working compromise between chronology and motif breaks down now and then, it has a point. It is asking just what holds weaving and abstraction together.

So who needs painting—and, for that matter, who needs weaving? The show has no apology for reweaving history. It is finding a place for craft in the austerity and creativity of modern art. It can then discover a greater role for women. Curators have been out to recover the female half of couples that changed the face of art, including Anni Albers (apart from Josef Albers) in Minimalism, Sonia Delaunay (apart from Robert Delaunay) in Orphism, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp (apart from Jan Arp) all over the map. They get things off to an impressive start, but can the momentum last—and I answer with what the exhibition really shows next time.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Everyone is a photographer now, but when did photography become for everyone? Was it when an “art photographer” like Walker Evans started collecting postcards—or when he made a penny photographer’s studio an image of America? Was it when the Kodak Instamatic made it easy or when cell phones and social media, like the Brownie more than half a century before them, made it affordable?

Or how about in 1863, when a mother of six received her first camera for Christmas? If the Met was right in 2013, Julia Margaret Cameron became “one of photography’s early masters,” but only by defying a common idea of what counted as halfway decent photography. “Not from the Life,” as she wrote in her notebooks, “but to the Life.” She was speaking of her wish to make photography more vivid than ever before—and her need to do it by mediating reality through fine art. She kept good company. She had the house next door to Alfred Lord Tennyson and photographed the likes of him and his elevated subjects.

As the Morgan Library makes clear more than a decade later, through September 14, she could hardly distinguish the two, no more than family and friends from the Bible or myth. Women for Cameron cast their eyes to the heavens or modestly toward earth. The eyes of men run wild. High Victorian madness or modestly was required, because only the “beauty of the world” suffice. Rather than start from scratch, let me share with you an updated version of my past review of Cameron as a longer review and my latest upload. I work it together with a review also from 2014 of Charles Marville, who became the official photographer of a great city coming to be, with a mission—not to celebrate the new, but to chronicle what was passing away.

With a woman’s face, enlarged on the wall by the exhibition entrance for Cameron, one might wonder if one has caught a glimpse of the photographer herself. It shows a young woman, that much more real and more ethereal thanks to her mute expression and the light that bathes her cheeks, picks out her eyelids, softens the wall behind her, and leaves the rest a shadowy blur. Actually, it is Cameron’s niece posed as “the lovely lady Christabel,” out of the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (“Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark.”) The photographer turned forty-eight the year of her Christmas present, and she was known as the plain sister in a family of beauties.

The temptation to see her there is telling all the same, long before Walker Evans, his postcards, and his penny photographer’s studio. It speaks to a still-new medium’s promise to capture the present moment and to freeze its immediacy forever, as past. It also speaks to Cameron’s wishes, in that unforgettable quote. The Met divides her work into three groups, with portraits of genius, women as subjects from literature and legend made “great through love,” and staged scenes. In practice, the groups are not so easy to tell apart, and the Morgan proceeds by date. Her subjects all belong to much the same world, the world of Victorian poetry and art.

She photographs the Tennyson family at home on the Isle of Wight, right down (the poet complained) to the bags under his eyes, and then illustrates an edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. She portrays John Herschel, the astronomer who coined the term photography, without literary “properties,” but with the same deep highlights and loose hair as for her Christabel, Sappho, or Circe. She presents her husband, a jurist, as King Lear, while framing a seemingly frank female portrait in dark hair and a circular frame, like the Medusa. She turns two young women into an early Renaissance Annunciation, with Perugino’s angel as a badly behaved child. When she photographs Alice Liddell at age twenty, she takes the woman that Lewis Carroll immortalized as a child and returns her to the course of time, but as a goddess. And the imagery, the upturned and downcast eyes, and the light all have their roots in a single movement in English painting, the Pre-Raphaelites.

So do David Wilkie Wynfield’s photographs of William Holman Hunt and George Frederick Watts, the painters, and William Frederick Lake Price’s posed image of Don Quixote in His Study, all also on view at the Met. With Price, a living man has become a character out of Miguel Cervantes who aspired to a myth—and, in turn, the character has become an artist. A dashing young couple as photographed by Oscar Gustav Rejlander would look quite at home half a century later, in the silent movies. What Cameron adds is her own way of bringing living subjects alive and into high relief, through overexposures. She is mediating between the present and literary time by a further adaptation of oil on canvas, in a softer focus and a deeper light.

Cameron’s accounts of technique’s discovery conflict, as a lucky accident or a deliberate effect. Maybe she herself was conflicted about her amateur status and her artistry, much like Alice Austen in America. She did not keep a portrait studio, in the sense of welcoming sitters, but she did have a studio in which to work, and she upgraded to a larger camera in just three years, in 1866. Her “out-of-focus . . . celebrities” won her sales, but also some nasty criticism. They marked her work as somehow both too artsy and just plain sloppy, but the trap was not hers alone. In bridging the conventions of painting and photography, Cameron found herself caught in long-raging battles over both.

The Met restricts itself to some three dozen prints, all from its collection, and the Morgan needs little more for a fuller picture, and anyway Cameron worked for barely a decade. Born in Calcutta, she returned to Ceylon in 1879, when her husband had property—and the window in time is revealing. British painting was trapped between realism and Romantic longings, until Claude Monet and John Singer Sargent brought “the Impressionist line” to England, where Sargent’s portraits ruled. And meanwhile photography, thanks to Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot, could only recently boast of a deep focus even in exposures under ten minutes, in contrast to streets in earlier French daguerreotypes that appear empty, because moving traffic has vanished into long exposures and the light. At a time when reports from the battlefield in Civil War photography were shockingly new, Cameron’s washed-out details must have seemed both a throwback and a deliberate affront. Long before Alfred Stieglitz in America insisted on the products of a black box as fine art, she must have reminded photographers of something they wished to forget—their debts to both.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

In reviewing “Vermeer’s Love Letters” at the Frick Collection, I tried to stick closely to the exhibition’s three paintings. I had written often about Jan Vermeer, a favorite, in the course of thirty years, including a review of his 1996 Washington retrospective, so I kept focused on the exhibition, relying on past reviews for a fuller picture. Allow me here to except from the first and longest as a brief guide and a teaser.

So little seems to be going on—a woman alone in a private room, few props, no motion, no overt emotion, the letter itself a slim ribbon of light. Jan Vermeer makes no fuss about what she might be reading, what it means to her, and why it deserves to be painted. He seems to lavish all the subtleties of a great colorist and observer on next to nothing.

I keep looking for meaning in Vermeer’s gestures. And I keep returning to the same characteristics—reflected light, intricate but confined spaces, and the slow movement of the eye across a flat surface. He captures only the nuances of reflected light, the edges of a stark room of indefinite dimensions, and a surface almost compulsively divided by a window pane and green curtain. Its implied grid calls to mind the explicit cast-iron grid of the window. In his Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a blemish in the wall captures the light. In room after room of his retrospective, they have filled a museum with clarity and light.

It is an old debate: is art best defined as symbol making or as something that resists interpretation? Does its allegory have a subtext? Has contemporary art triumphed over old narratives with “pure painting,” or is it telling new stories entirely? Do true artists never explain their work, or are they the only ones with the right to try? Both sides beg for the vast institution called art history, and neither side is ready to ask how uniform and coherent that institution really is.

But can labels begin to explain a painting that will not let anyone read its letter? No wonder Jan Vermeer is known as the painter’s painter, the one who most avoids associations with the transient and the insignificant. For many modern admirers the word anecdotal, mere storytelling, is an insult—and an allegory a thing of the distant past. A nearby Dutch interior by another fine artist, Gerrit Dou, could indeed be the anecdotal version. I can enjoy it, but I could stare far longer at Vermeer’s warm, even light. I could feel time pass as it slips from window to wall to her face, then back again to her reflection in the window.

Vermeer keeps returning to women awakening to adulthood. They all struggle to manage their sexuality, self-esteem, and some dubious male propositions. A woman at a window raises her pearls or turns her gaze toward the warm, enveloping light. Another woman hides her face in a drink. I do much the same at parties now. In a later painting, a man again leans over a woman’s shoulder. She looks out, toward the viewer, with a grin somewhere between dazed, ill at ease, and inane. And still they retain that sense of wonder behind the apparent reserve.

Maybe Vermeer is the ultimate postmodernist. His women hold a letter the way a saint might hold the instrument of her doom or her miracle. Like a saint, too, she is left with the same demand to think about her virtue and her fate. Religious painters had used props to evoke texts that had already become canonical. Vermeer creates an artistic canon from a fictitious text and makes that text emblematic of his art.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To wrap up from last time on Vermeer’s love letters, plainly Jan Vermeer does not like to repeat himself. Any artist’s studio is a confined space, with luck big enough for whatever is needed. And buyers often push for repetition, so that they know what to expect.

This painter, though, makes each painting its own variant on a woman, a letter, and her maid. Each is a study in uncertainty, hopes, and fears. Each could belong to a larger story as well, without so much as the need for a maid.

Three paintings can take you only so far, even from someone with so small and so stunning an output as Vermeer. Think of them, though, as just three scenes in lives awakening to adulthood and to love. Women keep reading a letter over and over, like the woman at the window in Dresden, long after the servant who delivered it has gone. The man who sent it appears at last, the cape of a gallant or soldier fully framing her as she turns away, uncertain whether to take pleasure or to flee. He embodies a wider world that she cannot fully enter, much like a map on the wall behind them both. He may have fought for the very city in Vermeer’s light-filled view of Delft.

The three paintings on display put her through her paces. She prepares for the worst, hand to her chin, as the maid delivers the goods. She accepts the letter while still at her music, sign of love. She begins her reply. She bathes in sunlight from a visible stained-glass window. She lets the light define the interior, a woman’s place, the window unseen.

She dresses as a lady, but she sits with a broom, a basket of dirty clothes, and a darker room to the side with a cabinet and linens. After all, she commands a wealthy household, but a woman’s field of command includes cleaning house, and the maid is her intimate. She commands lavish pictures on the wall as well, including fertile Dutch landscapes that Vermeer would have known from his day job, as a dealer. The largest painting within a painting, The Finding of Moses, tells of an infant left to die in Egypt and his rescue by women. Who knows how far sexually Vermeer’s woman has gone? Who knows, too, whether the fruit of love will lead the Jews or the Dutch to piety or to freedom?

Who knows anything for certain? As I wrote after his 1996 Washington retrospective, I may believe in Vermeer’s perfection, but I want to imagine his doubts—or are the doubts my own? The letter is often the brightest spot in a painting, but one cannot read a word of it. Nor can one quite read the women’s faces. As the curator, Robert Fucci of the University of Amsterdam, argues, they always look away. Look again, though, and they are questioning, smiling, angry, or close to tears.

Look again, too, at the woman already intent on writing, a draft crumpled on the floor. Maybe the soldier’s letter angered her, and she rushed to begin a more disillusioned reply. Or maybe she thought that she would never hear from him again, only to begin a more hopeful letter before it was too late. Look again, too, at the woman already intent on writing, a draft crumpled on the floor. Maybe the soldier’s letter angered her, and she rushed to begin a more disillusioned reply. Or maybe she thought that she would never hear from him again, only to begin a more hopeful letter before it was too late. Whatever the truth, Vermeer creates the space of a woman’s world. He trusts to an economy of vision that for many a modern viewer nears abstraction. He leaves everything uncertain except for the light.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.