haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

The man I knew only as a pilgrim has abandoned his pilgrimage. His portraitist, Rosalba Carriera, could have seen it coming—but not his place with Nicolas Party at the Frick Madison, through March 3. I also work this together with an earlier report on the wealth of “Tudor England” at the Met as a longer review and my latest upload.

Carriera entered the Frick Collection just this past year, with the Gregory gift, and her Man in Pilgrim’s Costume leaves a dark gray spot on the wall. Its companion, a female portrait, remains behind through the midsummer end of the gift’s display. So, too, does their shared spirit of Rococo excess. He might have claimed his luxurious surroundings, amid the decorative arts, as his own. He could also have scorned them, with pleasure, as impious and inferior—or was that just a pose? Scholars speculate that his costume merely alludes to his family name.

Perhaps, but art has a long tradition of titled wealth putting on airs of piety and humility. How better for the Tudor court in England to show its place among kings? How better for Pietro Aretino at the Frick, the author of lives of saints along with satires, to display his dignity. knighthood, and erudition, in a portrait by Titian. As I wrote about the gift, the man wields his pilgrim’s staff like a weapon. His identity remains unknown, but then Carriera could not pull off psychology or particulars. No wonder she appealed to collectors of ceramics, gilding, and privilege.

Is the pretend pilgrim also just plain silly? Party embraces silliness. His is the second pairing of historic work from the collection with contemporary art. The series began after the move to the former Whitney Museum and Met Breuer on Madison Avenue while the Frick mansion is closed for renovation. Dubious about the shift in great museums like the Met, the Morgan Library, and now the Frick to indulge in contemporary art? Party could well be satirizing it. He can also do a pretty good imitation of the old masters, give or take bright purple.

Carriera gives pastels the richness of portraits in oil, and Party does her one better. Born in Switzerland in 1980, he uses an alcove in a room for Renaissance portraits to give her portrait both its forebears and a place to itself. It hangs between facing waist-up portraits in the same high style. One has white hair, in accord with eighteenth-century fashion but as bushy as an afro. The other has black hair but flecked with white, to match the white spots of its outrageous clothing. The one with white hair is young and white, the one with black hair, sure enough, a bright purple.

They also have red lips and uncertain gender, like so much art today. (Your guess is as good as mine.) Their fancy dress approaches the decorative arts after all, but not nearly as much as the walls behind them. Party’s pastels extend to them. They blow up Carriera’s fluid touch to wallpaper. They also carry her realism to the illusion of fabric.

The wall behind her painting pictures folds upon folds of fabric, leaving the underlying folds and fringes in shadow. The one behind the purple person billows out, while the one behind the white person blurs away. Oh, and the latter wears a purple shirt and red tie to match its companion’s purple face and red-flecked top. Does all this pretence and patterning upstage a mere pilgrim? Maybe he would have said that he deserves the company. Or maybe he would have said that it shows his superiority and his piety.

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

When video art extends to nine channels and the breadth of a gallery, one can fairly call it an immersive experience. For Mary Lucier, it is Leaving Earth, but it is not transcendental. It is far too rooted in this world, at Cristin Tierney through March 2.

At age eighty, she is revisiting memories from before and after her husband’s death. It might be her return to earth after a forced absence. It makes her losses all the more telling and more real.

Lucier came early to new media, and she has been working in both single and multiple channels for some fifty years. (How could MoMA have left her out of “Signals,” its survey of video as installation and installation as video?) Earlier still she was a member of the Sonic Arts Union, and what could be more immersive than sound? Still, immersion suggests a single, unified experience, of a place and time, like LA for Cauleen Smith (at David Zwirner in Tribeca) or the Canadian landscape for Michael Snow. It suspends one between the space of the gallery and the artist’s vision. How could it ever leave this earth?

To be sure, a wide screen in a dark room can carry one into the sky and into the night, as with Buried Sunshine from Julian Charrière at Sean Kelly, also through March 2. It becomes a virtual hymn to creature comforts and convention. Lucier, though, provides scant comfort. She sets her monitors at varying heights and positions throughout the gallery. One on the floor could pass for a burial slab, and it does bear text. Only the lone monitor at your back confirms that you have in any way entered, and a place among the rest would be at best a tight fit.

If that were not worldly enough, they show her in a realm she calls home. She spends much of her time in Sullivan County a bit upstate, and these scenes are thoroughly rural—and maybe a bit cold. Monitors may at a given moment close in a red flower or pale stone, while one last monitor stands unused off to the side, like a deathly tribute to dated technology and her career. A gathering seems in progress, with younger guests, but without obvious signs of celebration. Lucier herself presides over all, with one monitor for her face alone. I hesitate to call it smiling.

The scenery includes a building at a precarious angle, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa for ordinary upstaters. It seems too grand for a shed and too modest for a home, but there it is, on the far side of a pond. If it is gray and falling apart, such is aging, but then she has always been aware of damage and decay. Dawn Burn from 1975 (also in “September 11” in 2011 at MoMA PS1) turned the camera on the sun, burning out its eye just as staring at the sun is blinding to humans. The images in Leaving Earth include burning branches. It is hard to say how much their fire brings warmth.

Lucier ticks off the lasting cost of damage and decay. Her husband, Robert Berlind, left this earth in 2015, and journals from his last illness supply the on-screen text. It too matter of fact to call it poetry, lamentation, confessions, or epigrams, but terse and telling all the same. A painter, he neither runs through his life nor dwells on impending death. Yet the words slip among all tenses, past, present, and future.

Images accumulate, like an unfolding portrait or a determined record, but they never quite cohere. The arbitrary can be deeply flawed, disrupting the immersion and lessening the art as for Smith. Lucier, though, has always been adding things up and taking them apart. If she loves her memories, it is with critical detachment. The words still speak, and the flames still burn, but they cannot exhaust experience. If she is left forever alone on earth, it is because there is nowhere else to go.

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

Elizabeth Schwaiger paints and paints again an interior teeming with art and, just maybe, life. To be sure, she hardly has room left for people. Paintings cover the walls and spill out into the entirety of the space, where they compete with sculpture. Furniture itself seems a mere luxury—or an additional work of art.

Still, she attests to the thoughts of a living artist—and the importance of art to her life. It has, as the show’s title has it, the urgency of “Now & Now & Now,” at Nicola Vassell through February 24—and I work this together with other recent reports on keeping painting busy as a longer review and my latest upload.

Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of “the fierce urgency of now,” and Schwaiger knows its fierceness. She knows, too, that what is fierce is not always comforting. One can hear the repetition of her title pounding in her ear. If the title seems at all superfluous, everything for her is more than halfway out of control. Oversized sheets of paper spread out on the floor. They could be sketches toward painting, but they have pushed her finished work aside, and they appear as nearly blank sheets.

Their white stands out all the more because art has taken over in another way, too. Schwaiger overlays each painting with color, almost always a single color. She quotes “Diving into the Wreck,” the poem by Adrienne Rich, and the monochrome ripples and obscures like ocean deeps. You might well be underwater, and the artist is in way over her head. So is the sole human presence that I could make out with certainty, a gaunt white silhouette. It could be her or yet another work of art.

Art appears, too, as a living tradition, that of the artist in her studio and of layered color. Henri Matisse and “The Red Studio” epitomize both, but examples are easy enough to find. The Met sets aside a large room for the genre in its new galleries for European art. (It displays Kerry James Marshall, the contemporary black artist, and Schwaiger, still in her thirties, has her show a black-owned gallery, although she is white.) It can serve as a statement of identity or a celebration of art, and she may use a second color for highlights on sculpture. She has also used the studio, in an earlier painting, as a meeting place for many more.

Diving into the wreck sounds grim, but it has its attractions. Think of the appeal for divers of the Titanic. She also proclaims her love of childbirth and scuba diving, as inspirations for her art. Both recall her joys, her pain, and her fears. Mostly, though, she misses the fierce urgency. Like Rich, “she came for the wreck and not the story of the wreck.” It is the age-old appeal, again quoting Rich, of “the thing itself.” It sounds ever so Romantic (or Kantian), but it survives in late Modernism’s plea for “art as object.”

It also sounds ever so important, and Schwaiger also quotes Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet, in case you missed the point. She is not, though, pedantic. She really is painting art as the thing itself, to the point that its subjects within her paintings are left unseen. She may speak of the wreck of her art and perhaps her life, but her studio looks great. It has the ornate mirrors and transom windows of a European palace or museum. For all her preliminary smaller paintings, she needs the overflow of art and color.

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

Summer is a time for getting out and doing things, when warmth welcomes you outdoors and sunlight tempts you to explore. So they tell you, but my most cherished memory of summer is lying on my back.

I remember myself as a child, my arms spread as if I could float or fly. Maybe you had those moments, too, when the grass to every side reaches up to the sun and the music in your head slows time. Call it dreamlike if you like, but everything in nature and in memory feels that much more real and observed. So it is, too, with Alexis Rockman in a cold New York winter, at Magenta Plains through February 24.

Rockman works in watercolor, a medium long used for precise observation, especially of flowers. As with Charles Burchfield or J. M. W. Turner, it also suits those moments when an observation is also a vision. Rockman relishes the paradox, and the gallery stresses his interest in nature while calling his work dreamlike. I vote for the first. Even in sleep, he could name the flowers to every side and the butterflies above. I took the first at times for mushrooms, from their shape, and the latter for birds, but then I could as well have been tripping or flying.

Rockman takes the perspective of someone looking up to the sky. It places the unseen observer at the center of the work. Not that such an observer lacks in feeling. Flowers seem to lean in, even as the eye insists that they are leaning away. The gallery calls the show “The Toxic Sublime,” but it seems healthy enough to me, and it stays close to the earth. It does not need an ode to a Grecian urn to evoke quiet and slow time.

For all that, everything is in motion, because flowers and insects have work to do. Again the medium helps, fluid and fast drying. So does the necessity of work to all sides without a narrative progression. Tiril Hasselknippe, too, invites one into his art, with sculpture as installation, but he means it as an entryway to a state of mind. He calls the sculpture Hyperstate and the show, which also includes a sketch, Portals. It brings light to a dark room, like the nightmare counterpart to Rockman’s sunlit daydream.

The gallery has settled into an entire building by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, like Pace gallery in Chelsea but with less arty neighbors and less costly architecture. On the ground floor, Jane Swavely sets painted verticals into slow motion. Rockman has the floor above, Hasselknippe, who appeared in the 2008 New Museum Triennial, the basement. He could be giving Rockman’s insects new life and translating Swavely’s deep red “zips” into tubes of light. They take the shape of arches or paired legs from a long, thin creature that I would rather not imagine. Either way, they serve as architecture, as company, and as a dream.

Hasselknippe updates light sculpture since Dan Flavin and James Turrell—in LED rather than neon and in PVC sheathed in black mesh. That makes it more flexible and contemporary but also more textured and physical. The arches hang at all heights and no particular intervals. They cluster where they will. They could be a maze without a beginning or end. If this is a nightmare, I am not trying to awake.

In “Love Songs” (at the International Center of Photography this past fall), photography was not just an expression of love or a record of love. It was an act of love itself. For Iiu Susiraja (at MoMA PS1), that love seems directed mostly at her.

Not for the photographers in “Trust Me,” who reach out to family, friends, romantic partners, and (lest that leave out anyone) “other networks.” It is about “forging connections,” but connections may prove fragile or elusive. It requires trust in others, at the Whitney through February 25, but can you look at a photograph and trust in what you see?

To Moyra Davey, reaching out is an ongoing project, and it keeps circling back to her. For the show’s title work, as curated by Kelly Long, she mailed identical envelopes to everyone she could trust, who handed them right back. Perhaps the differences never mattered much in the first place. Davey has taped a photo to each one, the tape as prominent as any connection. The subjects, from meds (lots of them) to trees, can seem revealing or remote. As she writes in black pen, “most people will divulge more than you would wish,” and that may or may not include her.

As Bob Dylan sang, “I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass and the ones I love.” Barbara Hammer presents Barbara & Terry, in the grass and in one another’s arms. A couple of mixed race, for D’Angelo Lovell Williams, reaches out across still taller and paler vegetation. It might almost be shredded paper from Davey’s envelopes. Mary Manning photographs friends just milling around, but also flowers, almost like a silkscreen for Andy Warhol. Jenny Calivas herself sinks into water or mud, perhaps never to return.

Shadow and light, too, provide a cover. Subjects for Muriel Hasbun hide not just in the reeds, but in a ghostly overexposure. Genesis Báez turns herself and her mother into multiple silhouettes and their shadows. Elsewhere she stays out the picture, connected to her mother by a thread. It might be all that remains of their love. Lola Flash settles for a single face lost in a glare, perhaps her own.

Maybe they are all simply overexposed, under photography’s harsh gaze. Still, they share strong feelings and a sense, however elusive, of place. It could be the return address on Davey’s envelope. It could be the sea off the coast of Florida, where Williams goes for a swim. Is that a wheelchair on the moon for Flash? No, it is a beach in Provincetown, on a sandy hill beneath a blistering sky.

Place may refer to ancestors, much as for Hasbun—who adds the words “all the saints,” both in Arabic and in the Spanish of her native El Salvador. Williams reenacts the final stage in a tortured African American journey from Nigeria to George. Place may also refer to gender and the body. After all, who can imagine connections apart from desire? Alvin Baltrop is once again cruising the Hudson River piers, like gay men in a time of Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. Dakota Mace makes her prints from chemicals on paper exposed to light, because her own body cannot tolerate photographic silver, and calls them Bonds.

Susan Sontag saw photography as, inevitably, exploiting what it claims to lament or to love. Not in this show, so modest that its eleven photographers (from the Whitney’s collection) could almost be one. Not when the self depends on others for its very identity and existence—and not when trust is so hard to sustain. Laura Aguilar poses with a cardboard sign, “Will Work for Axcess.” For Franz Kafka, “A book is an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Here art knows best the frozen sea.

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

What do you do as a follow-up after inventing modern art? Do you take the summer off or reinvent yourself?

Pablo Picasso pulled off both. He and his young family rented a villa in Fontainebleau, a privileged Parisian’s weekend or summer getaway. Kings had stayed at a palace still worth seeing and hunted in the forest nearby. This artist, though, never could stop working, and he turned out two of his most ambitious paintings, each in two remarkably different versions. Just to focus on them with a bit of context would be an excellent excuse for a show, and “Picasso in Fontainebleau” supplies it, at the Museum of Modern Art through February 17. It also offers the occasion to ask what had changed since Cubism and whether he was still breaking ground in 1921. Meanwhile the Met sees his breakthrough work not quite making it to Brooklyn, and I work an earlier report on that together with a longer and fuller version of this one as a longer review and my latest upload.

A lot had changed in ten years, since those designs for Brooklyn failed to cross the Atlantic. The artist whose shows had looked revolutionary but sold almost nothing now had a prestigious dealer, Paul Rosenberg. He had a young wife, Olga, who was nursing his first child, Paul (bottle fed, by the way). He had a summer rental in the land of kings. Paintings and drawings of home were a celebration. Compulsive sketches attest to a love of drawing and close observation, but surely they were a celebration, too.

And then there were the big paintings, nearly eight feet tall and six feet wide. MoMA does its best to recreate the space in which he worked, a garage, where the two versions of Three Musicians face each other down from opposite walls. They seem more playful and deadly serious every day. The three figures share flat, broken fields of color, like playing cards, and one shuffles the musical score like cards, too. They could be staring out from behind masks, except that they are too polite and too absorbed to stare. They are too busy playing music and at play.

Or are they empty masks? The threat of emptiness looms over them all, especially with the darker version in the museum’s own collection. Art, it suggests, is role play with no one left to play the roles, and these are old roles indeed. The three musicians are a Pierrot out of the Italian commedia dell’arte, a harlequin, and a monk. A fourth character lurks all the more in shadow, the silhouette of a dog. The second version, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum, is lighter in color and maybe in feeling, and the figures sport comic mustaches, but Pablo Picasso developed them together.

A third work should be familiar from MoMA, too, its version of Three Women at the Spring. Picasso was thinking in threes, for a binary choice was never enough. He has set the women at ease, standing, kneeling, and seated—if only you could altogether reconstruct their pose. They have all the space they need, but barely, for their rounded forms need plenty. Their six hands talk to each other as well, in a wild conversation. Their bodies have an earthy dignity, but their emotions do not so easily break through.

So where was Picasso headed, to a Cubism on overdrive or to a Neo-Classicism? As with Henri Matisse and his Red Studio last year, MoMA places an early modern artist in a new studio and watches the sparks fly. Both artists were looking back at their own work in new surroundings. Picasso knew that the collaborative spirit of Cubism was over, and he must have wondered if Cubism’s experimental spirit was behind him as well. Should he lend it a greater stability, mystery, and color or ditch it entirely—and could he reimagine the heavyset women of his Pink Period, too? Two pairs of two multiply the possibilities.

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