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art reviews from around new york

Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas met in the Louvre, and why not? How many artists today first met at a gallery—or at the Met? But of course there was more to it. There always is.

“Manet / Degas” at the Met describes an extended meeting and a falling out. It has more than enough room for both figures—their habits, their families, and their friendships as well, and it is also the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload. And then you, too, can start asking questions. Just how close were they over more than thirty years, and what took them their marvelously separate ways? What were they doing in the Louvre to start with? Degas still had trouble putting his finger on it in looking back.

The, Met, twice over, quotes him from after Manet’s death (from syphilis at just fifty-one): he was greater than we thought. That may sound like a left-hand compliment, but it came with real regrets. They had pursued together the working class, the still-new bourgeois interests that it served, the delights that it found for both, and the cruelty that kept breaking out along the way. The show’s greatest rarity, Olympia, on its first visit to the United States through January 4, depicts a courtesan with the implied customer as you. How, then, did each artist’s fascination with past art get along with the urge to make it new?

Set Raphael’s nude in a park in France, on an outing with bourgeois young men, and you have a scandal. Make that a triple scandal if the trees are as raw as sunlight and their depths as unexplained as death. Set Titian’s nude in a brothel or not much better, with her black servant gaping out at you, and artists will be revisiting it to this day (at Columbia’s Wallach Gallery for “The Black Model” in 2018). The bouquet you brought seems as flat as a postcard but costly as can be, the linens so textured, the brushwork feathery but bold, that you touch at your own risk.(“Manet / Degas” has a large oil study for one painting and the original of the other.) It takes Manet to see women, without condescension or approval, as black and white.

Not that they settled for private gatherings and public fictions. They went together to the track, the dance, the music hall, the cafés, and the clothiers. Yet their temperaments diverged along the way. Manet shows riders racing headlong, Degas a fallen jockey and the long, slow preparations for a race. It anticipates his focus on dancers testing themselves for an unseen instructor. It parallels, too, Manet’s catching you in the action, from sex to the park. It took a very different kind of detachment from Claude Monet by the Seine or Paul Cézanne facing his wife.

They differed, too, in their space between subjects. Manet finds café society in a woman alone with a plum brandy. Degas finds it in a couple who cannot so much as look at either other, while the frame cuts off whatever the man sees. Both nurse a liquor that everyone knew was poison. Of the two artists, Degas sees human psychology in more explicit terms and measures every drop of it in physical distance. You can construct a history of his Bellelli family, a group portrait in black, in just who turns to, who commands to, and who clings to whom. Every inch counts.

Textbooks may label Manet as Pre-Impressionist and Degas as Post-Impressionist, although the first was just two years older. It makes one artist a mere precursor and the other a footnote. Think of them instead as parallel roads to Modernism and modernity. Degas paints casual poses with a dour precision. Manet paints modern life in all its intricacy, as if he had laid it on that minute. The world for Degas is in progress, and you may not know where it will end up. The world for Manet is a drama, only not the one you wanted to see.

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

“This is a new world order. . . . This is a brand new day.”

It is also a run of clichés, in the Great Hall of the Met, but Jacolby Satterwhite means them seriously, and he may yet get away with it. He takes almost every bit of wall space for four huge projections—including above the cloakroom, itself closed since the start of the pandemic. Maybe museums after Covid-19 will never return to normal, but Satterwhite does not believe one bit in normalcy. As the soundtrack and subtitles continue, you will all be changed. But will you, and what about the museum? Are new media helping them launch a brand new financial model as well?

The whole production risks cliché, through January 7, while demanding change. A landscape basks in sunlight or fire. A stately city lies in ruins while refusing to go away. Its glittering highlights accord with its upbeat message, as do sleek bodies, still sleeker outfits, and constant motion. They include dancers and what might be paramilitary on the move. They look like nothing so much as a perpetual commercial, without an ad blocker in sight.

For all that, do not dismiss Satterwhite out of hand, and many do, without so much as looking. This is a tough space for art. Two years ago, Kent Monkman used two equally large murals for the first encounters of Europeans and Native Americans, and visitors pretty much tuned them out, too. They are on their way somewhere else, in a crowded, confusing entrance hall. Not even the 2019 MoMA renovation could altogether redeem its entrance from Yoshio Taniguchi in 2004 and museum traffic. No wonder the new Whitney reserves its lobby for the gift shop, and the Morgan Library reserves its atrium for coffee and pastry.

The Met makes things harder still. It now requires timed tickets—and puts them all but out of reach. Those willing to pay in full can do so online, and it is not cheap. Locals out to “pay what you will,” and that includes young people who might form a life-long interest in the arts, must join a line that twists and turns forever. It may seem odd that those coming in from New Jersey must pay a lot, while upstaters do not, but I can hear the Met thinking. No, we cannot eliminate the break for you New Yorkers without losing state funding, but we can sure make your life miserable in return.

If visitors ignore two carvings in the lobby, a pharaoh in the round and Mayan rulers in relief (both from the collection), they can ignore anything. Satterwhite, though, is not giving up. Online he promises a personal introduction to a global museum—just as Refik Anadol promised an AI tour of the Modern in that museum’s lobby. If both are awfully bland, so be it. In practice, though, Satterwhite almost transcends the blandness. Still in his thirties, he has been mixing media and identities now for years.

He let loose on video in 2001 for a created environment with a wild and crazy cast—a lecture hall with clay models for lecturers, monitors for students, and a pulsating soundtrack. Here hell is not other people, but the people telling you so. He appeared in 2013 with black performance art at NYU’s Grey Gallery and emerging black artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Just months later, he returned to Harlem for the projects in “Shift.” Born in South Carolina and based in New York, he was also ripe for a show of the Great Migration north. He went on to spotlight the male body in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and just this summer in a confluence of art and dance, as well as in the confluence of art and music at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall.

The extravagance continues, and so does the collision of media, minds, and bodies. The music goes live on weekends. The title, A Metta Prayer, reads like a typo for “A Meta Prayer,” a prayer reflecting on prayer. It refers instead to Buddhism and, says the artist, a queer black take on Buddhist art. The soundtrack does insist that all this can change you and cut through your disbelief—much as Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke of a reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” Now if only I were a believer.

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

Cecily Brown should have learned her lesson. She has been staring at her reflection in a mirror for thirty years now and seeing only a temptress, a crone, a death mask, or a skull.

She cannot help looking, though, for she is only human. Besides, she is a woman and an artist, and this is a savvy woman’s art, at the Met through December 3. It should have you looking, too, but you will not see anything as dreadful as death. This is painting so lush that it keeps coming back to life.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and a striving after fame and fortune in art. Brown came to New York in the 1990s, with the much hyped Britpack (or Young British Artists), only she chose to stay. I caught her in 2000 as an emerging New York artist at MoMA PS1 (then just P.S.1), again with a growing approach to Abstract Expressionism, and in 2020 with her aspirations to the Old Masters. In between she brought her torments and seductions to the Drawing Center. (I cannot repeat all that here, so by all means follow the links for more.) As a postscript, George Condo, too, takes pride in faking history, at the Morgan Library, but with a greater Postmodernism and a great deal less thought—and I bring this together with my report on Condo as a longer review and my latest upload.

Surely Brown is due for a retrospective, and surely she is the last person to need one. The Met keeps its aspirations modest, in the long central room of its wing for modern art. It can handle just fifty works, about half of them preliminary sketches, but it can make almost anything look like a blockbuster. It does not need a monster of a mural that dominates, for now, the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum with its elusive subject matter and lavish red. It does not even need much in the way of Brown’s development as an artist. She began with lighter backgrounds and sketchier subjects, adding denser subjects and more colorful brushwork, and finally veering toward monochrome, but she is still a woman staring at her reflection while daring you to stare at both.

What you see may depend on you. Will you find the corpse in Blood Water Fruit Corpse—and is that paint blood and water or the thing itself? Will you find corpses everywhere else? Or are they even corpses, for white spirits rising and pink flesh in ambiguous poses close to the floor could be very much alive? You may need a hint to spot a cat hiding under a table, but it has no fear of death. And yet Brown’s titles allude to a long tradition of fearing death in life.

Vanitas long attached to a woman at her mirror, for youth will fade, and fruit are still life—in French dead nature, or nature morte, like Brown’s Lobster, Oysters, Cherries, Pearls. Skulls are momento mori, or remember death. Hers arise as if of their own accord from girls in frilling dresses, for the skull’s eyes and nose, and an arch, for its top. (A smaller scene serves as its mouth.) Rooms for still life have the grandeur and luxury of aristocratic Europe, with other reminders of the past on its walls. A table spread for a picnic could be a banquet or a mad tea party, awaiting Brown in her madness or you.

The show’s title, “Death and the Maid,” positions her as forever between life and death, old and young. So does a brushy painting called BFF. The term is up-to-date, but paint itself (an older artist advised her) will always be her best friend. And that could be her real theme, for all the heavy titles. Still life can morph into interiors, into bodies in an unstated narrative, or abstraction. Painting is like that these days, shifting among genres, but she was among the first in making it so.

The overtones do get in the way. Death and the Maid alludes to Death and the Maiden, the maid bringing flowers in Olympia by Edouard Manet, and (gulp) a woman’s role in the workplace today. A shipwreck with no visible ship may allude, tenuously, to Théodore Géricault—and Willem de Kooning and his women hang over them all. Another still life is after Frans Syders, the Flemish painter, because what still life is not? One might do better to treasure the ambiguity and forget the details. Or treasure a world well lost and the paint.

For all the moralizing, Brown traffics in pleasure. When she riffs on The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, by Pieter Bruegel, she has not made up her mind. The picnic table has an ashtray, because she has any number of bad habits, and she is in no hurry to give them up. But then neither was Snyders. The freshness of this world accounts for his appeal, too. Brown’s art may lie first and foremost in seeing through the excuses to make art.

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

As a title, “Tree and Serpent” is less an umbrella than a teaser for six centuries of early Buddhist art. And the Met opens with a limestone slab carved with just that—a tree, its branches like a sea of umbrellas in the rain, and, below, a coiled snake.

As part of a stupa, or burial mound, they would have brought enlightenment and protection to pilgrims, just as they did to Buddha himself. He might have sought a tree for protection from the elements, much as one seeks a tree or an actual umbrella today, but he found something finer—the inspiration to change his life. The serpent in turn then promised its protection. But then Buddhism, like its predecessors, teems with nature gods and goddesses, at once fiercely demanding and bringers of life.

What you will not see is Buddha himself. That makes sense if you remember that the stupa held and protected his remains. The very first one did upon his death, although the story changed soon enough so that the kings of the earth each took some of his bones. In due time, pretty much any local culture could have its stupa as a destination and common ground. The Met, in fact, constructs a replica for anyone to enter, holding precious stones and other relics. A burial mound may call to mind a makeshift pile of dirt, but a proper one would have had a dome covering two tiers of a circular walkway, its guard rails and pillars as intricately carved as the serpent and the tree.

Absence makes sense, too, at the Met through November 13, if you bear in mind what had changed. The young Siddhartha very much needed enlightenment if not protection, as a profligate and a prince, and nature delivered. It taught him to scorn the body, as the awakened one, or Buddha. Enlightenment may have come more than two centuries before the show’s starting point in 200 B.C.E. or far earlier still. If the stories keep changing, with a huge gap indeed after his death, such is myth. If tales of a prince of power renouncing everything but contemplation has its echoes in Chinese art at the Met a year or so ago, such is myth as well.

I knew little enough coming in, but I had to forget everything I knew. Think of fat enthroned Buddhas and bodhisattvas, his attendants in enlightenment, like a TV Buddha for Nam June Paik? Cast or carved, Buddhas turn up only in the Met’s last room. Think of Asian art as a world apart? Routes opened between East and West earlier than you ever knew—for trade and, in centuries to come, European empires. A room for the interchange has a miniature Poseidon, the Greek sea god but here from India, not wielding his trident but leaning forward with just one armed raised and one foot on a stoop, in no need of asserting more. Two carvings of a robed Buddha in the last room have repeated folds like those in ancient Greek and Roman reliefs of women.

Then, too, you can forget what you knew about western art. That may go without saying in approaching the East, or does it? Surely art after classicism became sterner, more frontal, and inhuman, like those seated Buddhas but flatter and bearing no weight at all. Then came the Renaissance, the story goes, with humanity in every way in the round. The East could only choose one or the other, right? While Siddhartha lived in Nepal, the Met sticks to the south of India, with support from India’s minister of culture. That could only bring it further from the fluid line and feeling of not just European realism, but Chinese art as well.

So you may suppose, but Buddhist art never had to make a choice. It had something very different all along—extravagant and in low relief. That matched its view of nature as superhuman but a giver of life. That also matched its symbolism. Think of the seeming umbrellas and the serpent. Its coil becomes a wheel, shorthand for Buddha’s teachings, a perfect circle driving ahead. Its dangers and protections extend to a winged lion on a pedestal high above one’s head.

The curator, John Guy, opens with stupa and their carvings. Many center on figures, twisting and gesturing, surrounded by plants. Their mask-like features only add to their vivid expressions of pleasure or disgust with, say, you. Buddhism may preach asceticism, but panels teem with nature, and their figures feast on it, swallowing it whole—unless, of course, it is emerging from their mouth. Relish the contradictions, and relish, too, the presiding deities in the next room. Relish as well the signs of Buddha’s absence, including a footprint, a flaming pillar, a riderless horse, and the relics.

Over the centuries, as happens, the reformers become the establishment and the artists servants to power. The wheel turns beneath charioteers, and the horse without a rider gives way to royalty atop elephants. More than one sculpture is gilded. Carvings become still more varied and intricate, akin to crowd scenes. They adopt compositions in rows, to bring order to this newly embraced chaos. Even before Buddha’s first appearance, his teachings acquire narratives beneath the tree of life.

Like those robed Buddhas, figures also have an ambiguous sexuality. They do come gendered, like nature gods as Yakshas and Yakshis. The first demand offerings of wine and blood, while the second return the offers many times over. Yet they, too, are rich in contradictions. I cannot claim to have mastered their history from a single show. I can, though, see how much I have missed.

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