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art reviews from around new york

Michael Armitage paints refugees on a dangerous crossing. Fortunately, they still have each other—unless that is the worst of the dangers.

For his latest work, he takes as his theme the passage from Africa, a theme that he must take personally. Born in Nairobi, he lives and works in London. Those who know his work will recognize the wild confusion of his narratives and the straight-on encounters in his portraits. More than before, though, that translates into political commitment and heart-felt sympathy, at David Zwirner through June 17. And I work this together with past reports on Elizabeth Catlett in black America and Jacob Lawrence, known for a very different Migration Series, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Armitage himself had a perfectly safe crossing—or as safe a crossing as an African can expect. He came to London to study at its finest art colleges, and he has made a successful crossing to America as well, appearing in a show of black artists at MoMA. He terms himself with a Kenyan Brit, and you can hear the confidence in his cultural heritage. Few are as certain that they can claim both Africa and the West. He paints on Ugandan bark and called his last show, in Germany, “Pathos and Twilight of the Idle,” challenging the uninitiated to spot the pun on Friedrich Nietzsche and Twilight of the Idols. If you feel a certain condescension, so be it.

The show is his “Crucible,” another boast. The Crucible is a play by Arthur Miller about the Salem witch trials, and Africans are dying because of prejudice now as well. Armitage asks to see a crucible as more than a watery journey. Its meanings broaden to the very concept of a dangerous passage and to metaphor. It returns the word to its more common meaning as a test or trial. People, he can hope, emerge stronger and more able to speak for themselves.

He calls a sculpture a near synonym, Trial, another boast of a European heritage. The Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka with a deadly ending, and here, too, individuals are caught in narratives that they may not survive and will never understand. I had not seen the artist’s sculpture before, but he places it first, with priority to its blackness. The cramped space of sculpture in low relief has its counterpart in the familiar space of his paintings as well. They include standing portraits and imaginings, in open waters, neighborhoods of London, and indefinite space. You may have to shift perspective after discovering which is which.

Three boys have found their way to shore at night, beneath turbulent clouds, stars, and artificial light. Should they take comfort in each other? Two of them hold the third, who can no longer to stand on his own—unless they are keeping him from finding escape. Friendships for Armitage are treacherous crossings, too. Sometimes small groups sit side by side, as eerie clusters of green, although flesh tones are normal enough. Shadows on naked flesh take an ominous shape, like skin that has away.

Distortions like these recall the agony in artists like Francis Bacon, R. B. Kitaj, and Lucien Freud. Armitage may have a British heritage after all. And that heritage extends to an all but exclusive focus on narrative and faces. I find that focus conservative and confining, like a test. Still, he has something that they do not, primary colors in daylight and blackness out of Africa. Just remember to rely on one another.

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

Ever wonder why pianos are black? Oh, sure, they come in white for the cheesiest of stars and Vegas acts, the kind that stop just short of dancing on the keyboard, but still with a touch of class. Julius Eastman was both cheesy and classy enough in his day to title a composition Evil Nigger, neither reigning in hell nor serving in heaven. He was, though, a serious avant-garde musician, and don’t you forget it.

Glenn Ligon, for one, remembers, and he builds an exhibition around that composition along with baby grand pianos and his own celebrated paintings, as the very image of blackness. If piano keys are mostly white, you will understand, at David Zwirner/52 Walker through March 22.

If you cannot decipher that image or pierce the silence, fine. These artists dare you to listen up. Both, too, know their way around jazz, where Miles Davis had his Live Evil. Ligon places a neon sculpture at the very center of the installation, with the opening syllable of Toni Morrison’s Jazz repeated and scrambled. Sth already sounds like a whisper akin to silence. But then his art often bears the marks of its own defacement or, deconstruction might add, erasure. The French for “under erasure” in Jacques Derrida is in fact sous rature, or scratched out.

Eastman’s composition sounds jazzy enough, too, when you can hear it. Just past the sculpture stand four pianos, with no performer in sight. Three, though, are Yamaha player pianos that kick in once a hour. It is worth the wait. Can music be at once lilting and brooding? His layered riffs on a single note sure is, and maybe a black artist has to be. As for the fourth piano, it is an antique for that touch of class.

The show also includes a print based a later composition, Thruway—where, you might say, the traffic barrels on through. Eastman’s rhythms guide a second neon as well, a wall sculpture, with the word speak blinking on and off in response. It appears a good dozen times within an oval, on top of the blinking, for repetition twice over. Ligon, now in his sixties, is a natural collaborator, who takes pride in his blackness but betrays uncertainty with each and every word. Ligon’s Whitney retrospective in 2011 seemed to grow out of a single text painting, Today I Am a Man. Rather than start over, allow me to refer you to my longer review then.

He was deceiving himself and no one. As an adult he was always a man, and white America could always deny it. He, in turn, could measure out the toll with repetition and erasure. A large text painting is pretty much illegible, and a still larger one approaches monochrome black. It effaces itself with coal dust, just as coal effaced working-class lives. The word America appears in large type upside-down, backward, and burnt.

Eastman, who died in 1990 at age fifty, gets a full wall for sketches and prints hung high and low. His words, too, could be confessional or a lie. If you cannot read them at that height and cannot make sense of what you can read, it happens. The score to Evil Nigger hangs by the front desk. It could serve as a score should, to lean on, or as just a teaser for his larger career as composer, pianist, vocalist, and conductor. Sth could also be the sound of words caught in his throat.

The gallery has featured blackness before in shows of Bob Thompson, Arthur Jafa, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Her title, “MASK / CONCEAL / CARRY,” could speak for them all. The space risks becoming making a ghetto for so prominent a Chelsea dealer, but I am not complaining. This is still Tribeca, and Ligon is exploring the limits of community and confrontation. He is also finding himself newly at home in collaboration. This is not one but two evil niggers.

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

It took Giorgio Morandi a long time to come into the light. He had to discover his subject, his palette, his brush, and his very detachment from what stood at only arm’s reach. The discovery stands out from a private collection on view in Chelsea, at David Zwirner through February 22—and one of two fresh looks at the foundations of modern art. I look at the second, Piet Mondrian in the Guggenheim, coming up.

Giorgio Morandi was anything but precocious. At least one might not think so from his holdings in the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, and it should know. Luigi Magnani was a friend and early supporter. In place of the sheer lightness of his better-known still life, early work runs to dark, heavy tones, often close to black. Black may have drawn him to prints and pencil drawings as well. It can give Morandi’s objects a history, too, of native instruments that can look both classic and quaint.

It may be his history as well, from an Italian painter in a modern scene increasingly centered on Paris, and he was fine with that, but he had to discover more. Born in 1890, he was adept from the very start, with the skills of an academic painter. That would explain the fondness for still life, darkness, weight, and those instruments out of the commedia dell’arte, much as for the Rococo and Jean Antoine Watteau. Yet it also had him thinking in the long term. If he was not precocious in the sense of child artist, he was in no hurry. He was in it for the long haul.

Early work also includes a landscape or two—and (surprise) a self-portrait. Already in his late twenties, he looks eternally young and slim, but still patient and secure. He is also testing the limits of time. Seated with a small, thin brush raised, he could be about to place the very next stroke, but he makes it hard to imagine his ever rising. An especially dark still life, encrusted with color, testifies to his admiration for Paul Cézanne, or so he thought, and its crust may reflect Impressionism. The curator, Alice Ensabella, sees just as much an older century and Jean-Siméon Chardin. He is still taking stock of his time.

Ensabella, a Morandi scholar, gives his early work the first of four large rooms, in a space usually reserved for the established and deceased. (Most recently it displayed a single large work by Richard Serra, curated by Hal Foster.) It can easily diminish smaller work, but here it allows a small retrospective. It comes seventeen years now after a full-scale Morandi retrospective at the Met. Rather than start over, let me ask you to read my longer review then. If he was slow becoming fully himself, he did live at home all his life.

What in due course changed him? Modern art, certainly, but also realizing his place in modern art. It was somewhat to one side, apart from Paris—but never all that interested in another Italian, Giorgio de Chirico, and Surrealism. As I wrote in the earlier review, he represents a third way to Modernism, neither Pablo Picasso nor Henri Matisse. Where Cubism had line and Fauvism had color, Morandi found weight and light. And he found them compatible.

That came with a serious departure. With a pencil or printer’s tool, he had used dense fields of parallel strokes to model his subject with precision and polish. He moved largely to paler washes, in the color of wood or plaster, often stopping short of the object’s edge. He could also stand household objects together, across the painting, each in front of or behind a wooden block. He was obliterating the distinction between the curve and the rectangle, foreground and background, home and studio, but also the thing itself and its space. The light belongs at once to the object, the painter, and the viewer’s eye.

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