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art reviews from around new york

“Monet is only an eye—but what an eye!” Paul Cézanne may have offered a left-handed compliment, but it rings true.

It also sums up the experience of art. To earn it, Claude Monet had first to translate his vision into paint, for all to see. When you enter a museum of Impressionism, it becomes your vision, too. One can almost hear him sing, “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

Care to sing along? You are here, and so am I—and so are at least a dozen others in a 2012 video by Doug Aitken (and I work this together with an earlier report on networking in new media as a longer review and my latest upload). The classic song gets them through a lost moment, a lonely night, or a repetitive job. You will not hear a popular version by Art Garfunkel or the Flamingos (and you will not miss it), only them. Just when you think that you have pinned one down, another begins, and then they all disappear from view. Although a night-club act comes first and returns later on TV, others must sing to themselves, and they can count on only the artist’s gaze and yours.

They could not count on you for long, at 601Artspace online through July 25. At a time of museum closures and “virtual exhibitions,” the gallery gives just four days each to a single video, as 601TV, and it is hard to single out just one. The pace approaches Aitken himself, in the video’s constant reinvention. Song 1 starts with a click, as reel-to-reel tape sets in motion and the camera closes in, and it ends with a firmer click on those same reels, like a pair of enormous eyes. Still, it takes a few moments to guess at its subject, past a motel strip and a hand striking a match. And then one catches that club act, on stage amid a circle of candles—and the song.

The moon may be high, but I can’t see a thing in the sky—and no wonder. It is out of reach, beyond artificial lights in an endless night. It lies beyond taillights on a highway, factory workers, and a cook in a diner that Edward Hopper could only admire. Aitken is searching for art and love, but also the sleepless underside of America, as with Sleepwalkers in 2008. In place of continuity, he finds only disruption, much as he did with a wrecking ball in Chelsea in 2013. A young woman turns from behind the wheel of a car to meet your eyes, and you should be flattered, though you may wish she kept her eyes on the road.

He finds, too, a sleepless rhythm. The clink of factory equipment and the bell of diner orders could almost conform to the song. Other red cars join the young woman’s in synchronized driving. Aitken divides many a scene into two or three images, for video or audio counterpoint that his subjects never saw or heard. He is not above manipulating images either to create his own high-tech rhythms. Playing cards or letters from the lyrics tumble through the air, and the factory becomes a kaleidoscope.

His actors are complicit, too, for all their felt isolation. They snap their fingers and move their lips, and it is hard to know which are lip synching and which are singing along. Just when you think that you are back in the parking lot with that young woman, you discover an older blond standing alone. They may not find company, but they may yet find relief. When a rumpled man in an empty station returns beside a huge bay window, he looks less weary, more collected, and downright rich. Still, they only have eyes for you.

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

Paul Signac had few equals as an artist, but Félix Fénéon was something else again. For Signac he was nothing less than a magician—and, together with an earlier report on Alfred Jarry, it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

Signac in fact painted him as one, in 1890—only he had pulled out of his hat not a rabbit, but Post-Impressionism. He even gave the movement its name. If Signac helped take art from Impressionism to Modernism, Fénéon did so as well, but as a writer, editor, and dealer. For him, the avant-garde was nothing less than a revolution, with humanity at stake. Does that sound downright quaint, all the more so with museums shuttered for Covid-19? The Museum of Modern Art hopes to recover its urgency, through July 25.

The portrait by Paul Signac depicts quite an act. If it is in landscape rather than portrait mode (and cuts off the top of its subject’s head at that), Fénéon looks no less commanding. He merely commands a wider stage. Unsmiling and in profile, he holds out his right arm and cocks the other at his elbow, with all the seriousness of art and the confidence of a star. He also dresses as one, in a dark vest and high collar—and with a dandy’s pocket handkerchief and cane. The gilded inside of his magician’s hat all but matches the yellow of his long jacket.

He has indeed plucked from it not a cute and cuddly circus animal but a new art. He holds out a single flower, its frail petals and slimmer stem finding their echoes in the pointed wisp of his beard. He has produced just as much the swirls and stars of color filling and flattening the painting as they fan out behind him, but this is no mere trickery. It is painting’s future. Credit the artist, but Fénéon pushes his envelope as well. As usual, Signac employs the tiny dots of Pointillism, but he never again came so close to decorative art or abstraction.

A lengthy title pushes the envelope, too, Opus 217, Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints. You may associate art of its time with silence, like that of Paul Cézanne and a still more imposing Pointillist, Georges Seurat. Yet Seurat had his own Circus Sideshow as a metaphor for his art, and Fénéon championed him as well. Signac was not often verbose either, but all Fénéon had was words. Félix Vallotton shows him at his desk as editor of La Revue Blanche, working well into the night. The green glass of a desk lamp and its artificial light supply the sole splashes of color.

Like any magician, he would have known that the appearance of magic is only an illusion, and modern art took special pleasure in piercing illusions. Within just a few years, abstract art was to dispense altogether with illusion, although Fénéon never quite went there. Still, his commitment to painting rested on a commitment to bursting social conventions as well. As the show’s subtitle has it, it is the story of “The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde.” The French even rounded him up along with the usual suspects after an Italian anarchist assassinated the French president, Sadie Carnot, in 1894. He looks almost as magical if more brutal in a mug shot.

Is art, then, for the future or for the ages, or must it speak most of all to the now? That very question gets at the birth of Modernism, but not even Fénéon could reconcile political and artist revolution. Part of him was always the anarchist toiling away in the French war office, and then he withdrew. At his retirement at age sixty-three, he had nearly twenty years more to live, but he seems to have sought only idleness. As the most bitter irony in an anything but bitter soul, the champion of art and anarchy died in 1944, in a France still lost to fascism. It was to recover its greatness, but never again its central place in the avant-garde.

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

It has taken a global disaster, but I have become respectable. Even Chelsea dealers and curators have been stepping out from the back room or from behind the desk to talk about the art they love. As galleries reopen (cautiously), they ask if I have any questions and even thank me for coming.

And well they might after months of silence, for they must be as restless as you and I. Well they might, too, for I could still have many an exhibition to myself, even on an opening day. It is a welcome experience, but it brings home the uncertain fate of art.

Not everyone, I realize can expect the same warm welcome, even with an appointment. Not that I have become any more respectable as a critic. (Oh, if only I had overcome my shyness to promote myself in the 1990s, when I was the only arts Web game in town.) I am, though, a white male with increasingly white hair, enough to pass without trying for a buyer. Diversity has become a priority for the arts, but stereotypes persist. Black lives matter, but racism is by no means a thing of the past.

Not that dealers are wrong to hope for collectors. Who without a passion for art would hit the galleries in the heat of summer and the depths of a pandemic? And the same reasoning should have anyone fearful for the months ahead. The Met in July announced its reopening in late August, but will anyone come? When I reported on gallery failures and museum finances back in April, I never dreamed that the country’s health crisis would only deepen come summer, and one can only imagine the toll by now. This is not just a global disaster, but a national one, and its name is the party of Donald J. Trump.

Maybe some will come, but can they expect to get in? The Met may be negotiating with New York behind the scenes, and it may count on its weight as a huge and beloved institution. Still, the state has shown not a hint of opening indoor spaces or loosening restrictions. An upscale gallery welcome is just as likely to include taking your temperature and asking whether you have shown symptoms or had contact with the virus. Never mind that temperature is a poor indicator or that those who go outside with the disease are not heading for art. They are far more likely to be impoverished workers and people of color afraid of losing their job.

Many other galleries just take your name and how to reach you, and why not? Contact tracing is badly needed, and America is once again behind the curve. Still, you may object, busy stores do not take anywhere near the same precautions, and galleries really are empty—although evening openings as social events are a thing of the past. You may be tempted to wave your arms in front of the dealer to show how well you two are social distancing. Even the Met was always much like an outdoor public space, where people pass for barely a moment, and it will be again when museums reopen. As for smaller institutions, like the Bronx Museum or SculptureCenter, you could have them to yourself any day of the week.

I suspect that public officials just plain have little experience with the arts, as opposed to sports and mass entertainment. I suspect, too, that they fear for bad press—just as New York City’s mayor threatened to close parks after a single embarrassing photo in May. (Now the governor has shut down drinks without food, even alone at tables, after some young adults made a block in the East Village into a block party.) I hope that the arts can extend that warm welcome. Still, the plight of galleries, museums, and artists is going to get a lot worse before, if ever, it gets better. Will restrictions that seem so easy to meet in summer mean long lines and missed exhibitions this fall?

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

Rarely is a saint’s body such contested ground. Saint Sebastian dominates his painting, but not by much.

He dominates because this is, after all, his martyrdom and because Kyle Staver zooms right in, making his wounds impossible to overlook. Yet the executioners press in as well, plenty of them, their bows and arrows only inches from his flesh. Above their heads, angels sweep in from both sides, too, for a closer look if not to save him. Good and evil each have their say, but just what they are saying differently may take some thinking.

Saints are always in the right, of course, with a nation, a family, or its painter eager to claim them—but martyrs are always contested ground. Believers make a point of their suffering, because victimization can justify all sorts of things. (Think of the fan base for Donald J. Trump now.) For Staver, though, contested voices have a way of filling the air not with certainties, but with their cacophony. Her bright colors and skewed perspectives bring them all close to the picture plane, but in a richly uncertain depth. She is drawn to old myths, but updated and skewed for the temptations of life today.

Another set of bodies is often contested ground, too, women’s bodies, and Staver’s new work gives them pride of place, at Zürcher through July 24. Swans lean over a drowning Ophelia, either to lick her wounds or for one last bite, while Venus swaps her clam shell for an octopus. Death and the Maiden continues the theme of sex and death, and it is hard to know who is more alive—the maiden or the skeletons. If that puts women one step ahead of their oglers, Susanna lolls in a hammock on a summery afternoon, with not one of the elders in sight. She is plumper and older than they might like anyway. With his long blond hair and flaccid anatomy, Sebastian looks ambiguously feminine, too.

Sebastian became a popular figure in Italian art, as a study in male anatomy. He comes with that quarter turn at the waist, or contrapposto, that brought the heroic nude into three dimensions for the Renaissance. Piero del Pollaiuolo surrounds him with a circle of executioners, to display a mastery of geometry in perspective. Andrea Mantegna lashes him to the ruins of an ancient column, to underscore his roots in classical art. Staver, though, has no heroes, only temptations. Who could miss adding another arrow to the flurry, one right through Sebastian’s neck and not one of them fatal?

George de La Tour in the Baroque showed his survival, with Saint Irene caring for his wounds by candlelight. (He was later clubbed to death.) Staver, though, shies away from austerity and silence. In her last show, sailors and the sirens tempting them to their death seemed both just short of song. The latter, in fact, looks very much like Sebastian. Now, though, women plainly have their say, including older women.

I would not normally review an artist again so soon, if at all, but the newly gendered paintings all but demand a correction (and anyway it is just too much fun to watch galleries reopen after the lockdown). Her media have broadened, too. Bright colors remain, sometimes close to comic, but conflicting planes have given way to that dark uncertainty. She is more likely to smudge her colors as well, akin to another painter of summer and women, Katherine Bernhardt. She has also added etchings, but with fresh pools of ink, and unglazed clay, somewhere between low relief and full sculpture. They feel preparatory, toward canvas, while looking ahead to the painterly and physical potential of oil and myth.

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

A little of this, a little of that, and before you know it you have everything. Richard Rezac collects fragments of art and life the way others collect comic books or cherished memories.

They might be panels from paintings that never came to be. They might be sections of low, thick fencing, like police barricades at a parade or demonstration, pressed against each other so that they could no longer conceivably fence anyone in. They all look familiar enough, only he has made them all himself and labored over them to the point of perfection. Nothing seems to stand alone, and yet nothing is left to chance.

If anything goes, can that include Minimalism? In a hyperactive art world, it takes a certain restraint. In an art world also rich in surfaces, do not be surprised if much of that restraint is on the surface, and I have added this to an earlier report on Jan Tichy as a longer review and my latest upload. Rezac works in plain or even plane geometry, give or take odd lumps and unsettling colors. If his scale and surfaces take him closer after all to painting and sculpture, the work also has some subtexts that Minimalism might never abide. It also earns him a closer look to ask why.

Rezac relishes a fine finish and a precarious balance, at Luhring Augustine through August 21. He paints on cherry wood or aluminum so that it glistens, but thick and matte enough that it cannot reflect its surroundings or the viewer. He places half cylinders of brass beside white squares the way that Robert Ryman treats the bolts holding a painting to the wall as essential elements. Neither the brass nor the square, though, is the primary or supporting element, not when either may top the picture plane and neither may lie straight. Flat-bottomed yellow lumps rest on a tilted plane overhead, like eggs about to slide off, perhaps onto you. And yet they never will.

Even when metal has coarse outlines and a coarser finish, rusted beyond repair, it is going nowhere fast. Rezac draws readily on both household objects and abstraction the way art of the 1970s lay between Minimalism, readymades, and conceptual art. Balancing the yellow ovoids, striped fabric hangs from the other end of the titled plane like a scrap of cloth from the same kitchen table. A diamond pattern looks like bathroom tiling, in his signature orange and lime green, but with grouting so white that no amount of cleaning in your apartment would suffice. It recalls wall coverings by Richard Artschwager for elevators at the new Whitney Museum, much as the fencing recalls a playpen for Robert Gober. Rezac, though, seems incapable of function or irony, not when there is much left to do.

Art like this can feel stifling, trapped in its private allusions and public perfection, so give it time. The overhead piece turns out to allude to a prominent Baroque family crest, with those lumps (which also help support the playpen) the hills of Rome. Rezac, though, has only four, not seven, because everything remains unfinished—in concept if not in composition. If it seems so precarious an unfinish, he knows what it is like to be accomplished but marginal himself. A successful Chicago artist, he will be new to many in New York. His cross between abstraction and furniture may come closest to Donald Judd, but without emptying or taking over a room.

California, too, treated Minimalism as wrapped up in itself. Planks by John McCracken leaning against the wall became gallery fixtures difficult to tell apart. Sound and light installations by Doug Wheeler invite one to participate, but also to relax. An entire wall of light, glowing at the edges, becomes enveloping wherever in the room one chooses to stand, to dance, or to sit, at David Zwirner through July 17. Was art in New York in your face, no matter how distant? Count on the West Coast to make it a spa.

Of the “Light and Space” artists, none was as translucent but predictable as Larry Bell. His familiar glass cubes put light and space literally on a pedestal. Who knew that he was also moving mountains? Large works all but unknown here, at Hauser & Wirth through July 31, amount to entire mountain ranges, more angular and more colorful the more one walks around them. Accompanying smaller works embrace diffraction, for prismatic colors, although his prism is again a cube. They make the case for a more varied and impressive artist, but look to Rezac for a more perfect last word.

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

More than a century ago, Hilma af Klint devised her own higher mathematics on her way to modern art. With her cryptic and colorful symbols, she may have created the first abstract paintings.

Fifty years later, Modernism was dominant but aging, and Minimalism at once affirmed the norm and challenged the very idea of heroic abstraction. What you saw was what you got, and it might not look like art. And Ida Kohlmeyer responded with a symbol system of her own. Was she abstract painting’s future or looking for a way out?

Both were looking to their own future as well, as women and as artists, at the price of standing apart. Kohlmeyer called several works Cloistered, but the term could apply to both. For many, af Klint’s 2019 Guggenheim retrospective came as a revelation, and Kohlmeyer appears at a gallery that specializes in overlooked artists with roots in Abstract Expressionism—at Berry Campbell through July 2 (and apologies for the late review, but reopenings after Covid-19 left little time to catch up). Not that Kohlmeyer was unaware of the “New York School,” only not in New York. She studied with Hans Hofmann in his last years in Provincetown, Massachusetts, well after he taught Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock here in the city. Mark Rothko became a mentor, while finding a studio in her New Orleans garage.

Born in Louisiana in 1912, she pursued an MFA only in her forties, and she moved back to her hometown as a professor and an older woman. No wonder she falls just outside the textbooks. She did not make a point of gender, but nuns live in cloisters, too. If that invites religious readings, af Klint had described her more ambitious work as a temple. Still, like so much of her time, Kohlmeyer seems anything but mystical, even in her visions. Circles, stars, and arrows are what they are, although seemingly in motion. Arrows point outward, bursting the confines of the canvas while affirming art as object.

The show sticks to work from the late 1960s, when the art object was on the spot. She could treat painting itself as sculpture, with stacked cubes and a four-pointed star in wood resting on its two-point base. She had adopted cloud-like colors, under Rothko’s influence, but she dropped the soft edges in favor of a clear, hard geometry. At the same time, she was turning her back on Minimalism. Rather than flatness and denial of illusion, she favored overlapping forms and shading. Whatever it was that she had discovered, one can almost touch it.

Was it a woman’s body, with symbols for its felt sensation? af Klint, who had her own Star, also called a work Eros, but one may never know for sure. Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein argue that there is no such thing as a private language—in the sense of a language accessible to oneself alone. Art is unique though, in being both public, because others can see it and give meaning to it, and private, because someone made it. You may find it fussy, but she may not care. It can seem derivative, in its insistence on abstraction, or merely obscure, but it was increasingly her own.

Symbolism in the nineteenth century was something of a misnomer, for dark narratives by Gustav Klimt and others with little in the way of writing. af Klint worked her way out of it by taking the term literally. Symbols appear as signatures and as gestures in Abstract Expression as well, as in Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, or Bradley Walker Tomlin. Kohlmeyer simply foregrounds them and gives them a life of their own. These days, one may associate them with the breakdown of language in outsider art, while artists like Karla Knight can treat outsider art as a playground. Kohlmeyer, who died in 1997, takes her symbols seriously indeed, and it is up to you to decide whether the arrows will pierce your heart.

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