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art reviews from around new york

Guadalupe Maravilla grew up in the aftermath of earth-shattering events, and then he went through a few of his own. An exhibition at follows him into both, at the Brooklyn Museum through September 18, but with a heavy dose of pop psychology that might embarrass almost anyone.

As a child he took Mayan pyramids as a playground, with the volcano that disrupted Mayan civilization in the fifth century not just ancient history. Its eruptions continued until the 1960s, earning it the nickname of Lighthouse to the World. Now it supplies the title to his exhibition, “Tierra Blanca Joven.” Can it still hold out the promise of young white earth? Today the site of a lake, it suggests the prospects of renewal for a war-ravaged nation and an artist at risk of death. Together with past reports on David Alekhuogie and Remy Jungerman, who encompass deep cultural and personal histories themselves, it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

Maravilla did not need an active volcano to shatter his childhood. Born in 1986, he never knew El Salvador without civil war, and right-wing death squads made him an illegal exile in New York at age eight. (He mapped his movements for “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay” at the Whitney in 2018.) Against the odds, he managed a green card, citizenship, and an arts education at Hunter College, when something shattered his adult life as well. Cancer struck, and he sought out whatever treatment he could—in modern medicine, ancient arts, and his own. He calls his sculpture Disease Throwers, leaving open whether it spreads death or gathers it in order to throw it away.

An artist in need of healing, he brought a herbal garden, a gong, and a purifying fire to Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in 2021. That show had the theme of “Monuments Now,” but is his sculpture monumental? The child who clambered over pyramids must know the limits of the monumental. If anything, his work looks like scraps of a life best forgotten, with a sticky, grotty overgrowth that anyone would fear to touch. Yet it aspires to something regal. Maravilla opens with what might be royalty or the throne itself, and he tosses in a king- or queen-sized bed.

After the throne’s resinous white and the bed’s sinister black, color comes as a relief. Maravilla collaborates with a maker of retablos, the devotional paintings of Latin American art. (Historians still refer to Renaissance altarpieces as retables, from the French.) He himself supplies the imagery, which unfolds against a backdrop of that volcano. As it recedes into the distance, its slopes start to resemble a two-lane highway to nowhere. The actors, though, are fanciful and fun.

Text across the bottom of each painting fills in the background, including a troubled visit to his homeland as an adult. Paired with the images, it also brings them both closer to a comic book than to Christian dogma. The museum’s supporting pillars bear still more cartoonish gestures. All is dangerous and all is in fun. It is also filled with music, linking the work that much more to folk tradition—like music on video set into the sculpture. Gilded circles occupy the head of the thrones, like halos behind an enthroned god, but they are gongs as well.

Will they ring out? Maravilla sure hopes so, but neither he nor the curator, Eugenie Tsai, will settle for earthly music. After all, who knows how much time he has left on earth? More to the point, the museum takes all too seriously his claims to transcendence and folk healing. The modest exhibition belongs to a series, “Mindscapes,” on the theme of mental health, with other installments in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Japan. It does not, though, seem to take its subject in the least seriously. Off it goes to physical illness, political threats, ancestral cultures, and spiritualism.

It is also irresponsible. Mental illness is real and not an artifact of cultural hegemony, colonialism, or anything else. It is just as irresponsible to delegate an advanced stage of cancer to shamans—or to talk of civil war without mentioning that Ronald Reagan backed the death squads. An artist who can make such bright objects look dangerous has to know better. A “healing room” behind the exhibition offers “teen zines,” throw pillows, and a book in which to leave your message. Take your time, but return on your way out to the art.

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

Muhammad Ali had not yet begun to fight. Getting set for the title match against Sonny Liston, he could barely restrain his anticipation, and he saw little need to try.

One can see it from his signature dance as he spars with the air. One can see it only moments before, still seated. He must have felt his heart beat as the trainers applied a stethoscope to clear him for combat, and they must have barely heard it above the noise of the crowd. Soon enough he is back on his feet and the scene shifts again to marchers for civil rights. Is it still the same movie? It is just one step in a world in motion, in photography and film by William Klein, extended through September 15 (and lucky me on the new date, as I did lose access to my site for nearly six days).

Start anywhere you like at the International Center of Photography, which devotes both floors on Essex Street to the exhibition, a first. How else could it keep up with Klein, who managed twenty-seven documentaries, three feature films, and TV commercials on top of his stills? It seems only fitting, though, to start at the top and work down against the tide, for an artist who always went his own way. That lands you in a makeshift theater, with no telling where a film begins or ends. It may come as a mere footnote to day jobs in fashion and celebrity photography, with street photography in abundance on the side. But Klein’s photographs, too, are motion—and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

In fact, they began that way, although he himself began as a painter, with a story that sounds deceptively familiar. Born in 1928, a white on the edge of Harlem, he moved with his wife to Paris, like Stuart Davis and others before him and for much the same reason—to be where the action is. Barely twenty, he worked with as modern an artist as Fernand Léger, but with an instinct for boldness, in thick crossings of black, white, and red. It caught the attention of an architect, who asked him to translate his design sense into something firmer still, panels for a home. But then his wife took them for a literal spin, and he knew that he needed to capture the changes. He made thousands of photograms in short order, by cutting circles and diamonds out of paper, moving them across photosensitive paper, and exposing them to the light.

Photograms most often mean placing a solid object on paper, as for May Ray. Yet here nothing is solid and everything is in motion. The image itself may pulse like an EEG or blossom outward like flowers. The panels alone look in motion at ICP, tilting into the space of the gallery. Before one writes off Modernism, though, as old school, Léger himself told Klein to give up painting for photography—just as he told Louise Bourgeois to give up painting for sculpture. Klein did not have much of a track record, but Alexander Liberman at Vogue spotted him as well land lured him back home to New York.

He still lived in Paris until his death, the very weekend that the show prepared to close, but the sophisticated European reclaimed his roots as a street smart New Yorker. His eye went everywhere, and what he saw was moving, too. Blacks dressed for the jazz age take their Moves and Pepsi. A man in the shadows of an elevated train steps toward the light. If Klein and his subjects share a Pop Art sensibility before its time, he also shoots a tabloid headline, Gun Gun Gun. Photography here emerges out of the barrel of a gun.

It had to, for his politics alone cannot leave him at rest in the present—or any one place in the world. He photographs black marchers for justice, a gay pride parade, a dance festival in Tokyo or Brazil, and a pan-African celebration of West African independence. Once in Algiers he met Eldridge Cleaver, the exiled “minister of information” for the Black Panthers and, in no time, immersed himself in Cleaver’s life for three days and nights on his way to another movie. He had met Malcolm X as a seatmate on the plane, who took to him easily and introduced him to Ali, then Cassius Clay, for Cassius the Great. Another film became Mister Freedom, including a poignant shot of Mister Freedom dying. For Klein, freedom is always dying and coming again to life.

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

Yes, I haven’t updated or posted a new review in five days. I haven’t had access to my own Web site.

But there’s a ray of hope. Wish me luck for tomorrow.

For just four years, from 1958 to 1962, Rick Barton allowed others into his private world. His pen adapts easily from the outline of a nude to crumpled linens on an unmade bed.

Others let their guard down as well, like a man in Barcelona who treats a cathedral like a barstool set aside each evening for him. Objects have lives of their own, too, like the coffee cups and ashtrays that over his bedroom—or the gay desiring that spills out from drawings within drawings on the wall. And yet intimacy for Barton was hard to find, and his own history is little more than a blur. One can hardly call his return to New York a retrospective, at the Morgan Library through September 11, not when so much remains unknown.

Barton grew up just blocks from the Morgan, where not everyone shared in J. P. Morgan’s luxury. A self-proclaimed “dead-end kid,” he joined the Navy in 1945, late enough that his war record is a cipher as well apart from service in China. Yet it got him looking beyond New York, and he relocated to San Francisco in the 1950s, just in time for his drawings to begin. What of the ten years after the Navy or the remaining thirty years of his life? Aside from a move to San Diego, no one knows. If art today makes a point of diversity and rediscovery, there is little more to discover—but what there is shows a restless eye and, if only briefly, an unceasing pen.

At the exhibition’s center is a pair of sketchbooks, on two sides of the sole display case. That already presents an enigma. A sketchbook is so often a private affair, meant for the artist alone. Yet these are accordion books, a form of book art for presentation to others, from an artist who thought of himself as a writer. He was not drawing, he said, but “writing a chrysanthemum.” And he shared his artist’s books with Etel Adnan, a more serene spirit who had seen nothing like them.

I have seen my share of fold-out books before, but never on a scale of thirty pages. As one walks alongside, the images keep coming, especially male faces. They could be his circle of friends, an evolving self-portrait, or a single obsession. His pen keeps coming, too, like a single ever-twisting line. It reduces a nude to eyes, brows, nipples, thick lips, the width of a chin, and the turn of a butt. The Morgan sees a soul mate in early Andy Warhol, whom he could not have known, but something was in the air.

It also spots a parallel in Henri Matisse, a precursor to his botanic drawings. And those, too, have a fascination with outlines and a nervous energy. A vine spirals upward to the point that it crosses onto a second sheet. Barton also copied Japanese drawing and Albrecht Dürer, another obsessive draftsman. And yet, for all that he reveals, Barton can never overcome years of disguise and reserve. He adopts backward writing and rarely appears in his drawings apart from that unceasing line and, barely within the frame, the artist’s hand.

If he holds back, so do others. Individuals rarely share a scene, except when they barely acknowledge each other. In jail for dealing drugs, he sketches fellow inmates, one looking through bars with the persistence of a surveillance camera. Back in his room, Barton lies in bed afraid to look past the covers. A second man looks out the window, his back to the observer, but he could equally well be preening at a bathroom vanity. As one title has it, Alone Again.

For all that and years of mental illness, he is not friendless. He found fellow Beat poets and strangers in and around North Beach, like a bagel shop, Foster’s cafeteria, and a jazz club, The Black Cat. He enjoyed public spaces, like that cathedral in Barcelona and many more in Mexico City. He frequented a bookstore, whose owner, Henry Evans, founded Peregrine Press. Evans became his collaborator and supporter. Thanks to him, there survives a small window onto a short, perplexing career.

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

Raphael Montañez Ortiz was not the first to destroy a grand piano, but he was surely the most determined. There he is, in performance at the Whitney, more than twenty years after his first act of destruction in 1966, still wielding his axe. The video opens his retrospective at El Museo del Barrio, through September 11, on just the right note. Meanwhile in Tribeca, Christopher Myers singles out activists from many nations as prophets and storytellers—and I bring a much more in-depth version of this review together with an earlier report on Myers as a longer review in my latest upload.

Ortiz was determined in his approach as well. Harpo Marx destroyed a piano from sheer Romantic fervor, in one of the most triumphantly funny scenes in film history. Not Ortiz. For Harpo in A Day at the Races, pounding the keyboard releases his inner Rachmaninoff, and the Russian composer does the rest. White keys fly upward, and black keys sink inexorably below. The back end of the piano crashes down, and the strings slip to the floor—just in time for Harpo to rescue them, to stand them upright, and to continue his performance on them as a harp. The Marx brothers had already destroyed a theater and Verdi’s La Traviata, in A Night at the Opera, so what else could a music lover do?

For Ortiz, nothing comes easily. Destruction takes work and the weight of an axe. Blow after slow, repeated blow barely makes a dent or a sound until, finally, the piano’s bare, ugly remains leave a dark pile on the floor. Ortiz himself neither breaks a sweat nor cracks a smile. As a founder of El Museo, he has all of western culture to penetrate—as he liked to say, to release the evil. Only thus could he give Latin American art and history their due.

It takes commitment to rescue an artist better known for his activism and the museum that he helped bring into being in 1989. His art can easily seem a one-note affair. Search the Web for images, and you are likely to see little more than the piano man. Think of it, though, as determination. Born in 1934, he wrote to advocate “destructivism” while still a student at Pratt. He was a student, too, in 1961 when he began to make sculpture by crushing and salvaging old clothing and chairs, blackened and browned by paint and by fire. He called them Archaeological Finds.

Commitment means political commitment as well, and it can make for some awfully solemn art. Ortiz and perhaps Fluxus aside (which had its debut in 1962 with a destructive performance in Berlin), piano destroyers have been composers or comedians, including Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies, and Harpo. No one would accuse Ortiz of an ear for music or a sense of humor. His most recent and striking sculpture amounts to a large cabinet, its sides hinged to open like the wings of a painted triptych. He called it The Memorial to the Sadistic Holocaust Destruction of Millions of Our Ancient Arawak-Taino-Latinx Ancestors Begun in 1492 by Columbus and His Mission to, with the Conquistadores, Colonize and Deliver to Spain the Wealth of the New World No Matter the Human Cost to the New World’s Less Than Human Aborigine Inhabitants. Well, sure.

He also keeps asking: “for who does art exist”? And that points to another reason behind the stops and starts—collaboration with others and respect for their agenda. The show includes another Puerto Rican American, Rafael Ferrer, but Ortiz is an active listener, and he listens to others as well. Born in Brooklyn, Ortiz grew up on the Lower East Side, where Puerto Rican families lived at odds with or close to orthodox Jews. He made his early black assemblages of nailed marshmallows and burnt shoes in remembrance of Treblinka.

The triptych itself is less dogmatic and discouraged than its title. Its skeletons are colorful to the point of cheerful, and a leopard prowls on top. The retrospective begins and ends with a less dour sort of destruction as well. As far back as 1957, Ortiz cut up cowboy movies and reassembled them without the heroism. More recently, he has added stuttering stop-action to family films. Is his art capable of planting a bomb? Maybe not, but a little girl leaves something dangerous behind in the living room.

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

Henri Matisse and his wife left Paris in 1909 for the same reason that many find it a challenge to remain in New York today, quite apart from sunshine on this last weekend in summer. He had landlord problems.

Never mind, though, for they found a place to die for in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, on the outskirts of the city. He also found a studio to die for, nestled in the trees. He took it as his subject as well—more than once at that. The largest version, from 1911, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, which recognized it from the moment it became available as among the most luxuriant and radical of his works. It was not, though, a quick sale. Now MoMA builds a show around The Red Studio, the studio itself, and the color red, and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

When Matisse paints his studio from his house two years later, he leaves it barely visible through the trees. He also allows the trees to grow out of sculptures on the window sill. This was a new start for him, but all his. He built the studio from scratch, but with its place in nature. Nature has its place, too, but within art. And that same dynamic offers insight into The Red Studio, the trouble it caused him, how it became a landmark, and how it came to be.

The answers, as you might expect from a great painter, turn on everything he valued in life and in art (and I invite you to read past reviews of Matisse and Picasso, Matisse and textiles, Matisse cutouts, and Matisse in retrospective for more). He could not leave Paris altogether behind, not when he and those sympathetic to him were creating modern art. Take it from Gertrude Stein, who should know. “The grounds were large and the garden was what Matisse between pride and chagrin called un petit Luxembourg,” after the Luxembourg Gardens, between the Pantheon and Montparnasse. Henri Matisse must have walked there often from his previous studio near the Seine. Now he could have his own Paris, an ideal Paris in the suburbs, as a place to work and a work of art.

With The Red Studio and at MoMA, through September 10, color changes everything. Another painting has wood so rich that a table becomes good enough to touch or to eat, and he started the same way. But then he painted over the whole, with no break between walls and floor. The yellow outlines of furniture seem incised in red. It goes beyond the green and blue of Dance, from 1909, as the only hints of grass and sky. It looks ahead to the flatter colors of his late work, Matisse cutouts.

The rare object in The Red Studio that Matisse did not design, a wine glass, has its natural highlight, too, in white, but it is visible only against red. A curtain covers the single window, although an unseen fourth wall was mostly glass. It modulates the light while isolating the studio from the vagaries of this world. It also places the painting in a long line of representations of the artist’s studio—just as Joy of Life and Dance place him in a long line of pastoral landscapes, from Jean Antoine Watteau to the nineteenth-century picturesque. In depicting painted nudes in a painted studio, Matisse merges both genres. The work becomes a part of art history, but with a time and place in the present.

Does color change everything but the works of art? Even those undergo changes. The scene recapitulates his career to date, but with updates for all that Matisse has learned. His Fauvist scene, a mill in Corsica, loses its dappled stone and broad sunlight in favor of two mere splotches of color. A third sculpture, hacked in wood, acquires a garland of flowers. Background clashes intensify, and the naked flesh in Le Luxe, its sole natural colors, become tinged with Venetian red.

Matisse may sound complacent or sexist, obsessed with nude women and cheap pleasures. Yet his women act very much on their own, in a world both present and apart. One of the three bathers in Le Luxe holds a beachball that I kept mistaking for a bouquet of flowers. Then, too, Matisse may be acknowledging his own weakness, by drowning his pleasure in red. He himself has nowhere to stand. The wonder is that he can still paint.

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