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art reviews from around new york

New York’s largest museum just got bigger, a lot bigger. The Michael C. Rockefeller wing has returned after a long and splendid renovation. Newly designed and opened to the public June 1, it brings to New York the very origins of civilization and the very idea of art—and I offer review and a tour for the test of this week.

It displays more than seventeen hundred objects from three continents and six thousand years—and that only a fraction of its founding contribution from Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former governor of New York and vice president of the United States. (It initially refused his gift.) With art of Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas, it now represents over a third more of planet earth. Maybe you never knew it existed, even before it closed in 2001. Even if you were old enough, fewer approach the wing for modern and contemporary art from Greco-Roman antiquities on the first floor, rather than Impressionism in France a floor above. Now, though, the invitation is hard to refuse.

Is Africa the dark continent? Here all three continents are swimming in light. After the ordinary grid of modest rooms with perhaps an atrium for other wings, like a sales destination or a maze, this wing has tall ceilings that ease the flow from one room and one continent to the next. Broad entrances from room to room, some with arched tops, ease the transitions. The entire south wall is tilted glass, creating vistas and pulling in the light. Glass partitions with short white stripes help to define divisions while visually eradicating them.

Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture, working with Beyer Blinder Belle and the Met’s design department, enable all sorts of transitions. You may run up against the glass, but you can always start afresh. To mix things up further, the arts of Oceania resume to the south after a break for the Americas. And that raises another tough question: what are these continents doing together? Is this simply the Third World, stuck in a Cold War past? Is it more than a wealthy donor’s tribute to his son Michael, likely lost at sea or killed on an expedition to New Guinea?

Then, too, is the matter of time. A wall of contemporary African photos by Samuel Fosse faces the modern wing directly. Fosse packs his portraits with no end of dignity, whether in dress uniform or bearing the numbers of a criminal. The curators integrate other recent work throughout—including El Anatsui, known for his “metal tapestries” of colorful liquor bottlecaps and sheer scrap. They dip back to the nineteenth century now and then as well. If you had any doubt of the ancient world’s influence on the present, you can check them at the door.

The architects set a small gallery aside for temporary exhibitions as well. “Between Latitude and Longitude” brings Iba N Diaye of Senegal together with the European painting that influenced him, through next May 31. He admired equally the fraught expressionism of Francis Bacon or Francisco de Goya and the classicism and introspection of Rembrandt. In his own paintings, fields of color pour into one another—applying Abstract Expressionism to African sandstorms and African politics. But would he have agreed with the Met’s selection? He died in 2008.

Back in 1996 the Guggenheim Museum presented “The Art of Africa” as the dark underside of Europe, a place of primitive discord. The Met puts that and indeed its own past practices to shame. A video shows an ancient wall painting—in southern Africa and not in the caves of Spain. Actual objects pick up the story on the Nile, just as a show at the Met of African American artists placed them in context of Egypt and Sudan. If you are left with questions, be grateful for them. I know something about non-Western art and the world that spawned it, but nothing like this.

All I can do is to share the bare facts and my own very personal impressions. You are left to the curators and on your own. The Met, though, has some hints to get you started. If, like me, you are nothing short of overwhelmed, the cultures here took that as a necessary function of art. And they felt an imperative to provide continuity over the centuries—to bring ancestors and dependents fully into the present. The very first human, they say, was an accomplished carver, and I believe them, and I continue next time with the hall’s unifying features and the art of Oceania.

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

Is photography an art? Well, if not, what is it? Ask a country known for the spirit of innovation and experiment, the United States.

If not art, photography might be photojournalism as a record of its time, literally making history. It might be the portrait you once kept in your wallet before you had a smart phone, to remind you of what it means to love. It might be social media or a science experiment. Photography has taken pride in making an influencer, even as it struggled to be more than a meme. It has been struggling in much the same way since well before there were digital media to influence. Now “The New Art: American Photography” heads back to its origins, through July 20.

The art of photography was not always new and not often American, but it was always an experiment. The Met draws on a single, mammoth body of work, the William L. Schaeffer collection, which it already calls its own. Selections run from the birth of photography, in 1839, through groundwork for the first New York subway, shortly before 1910. Just outside is a pale, piercing blue that photographers today would hardly recognize. And right at the entrance is an enormous camera. Experimenters had a lot to carry and a lot to learn.

There will be other devices to come, a touch more manageable, in an exhibition divided by competition to define the medium. They differ only in the metal, glass, or paper that offers support and the light-sensitive emulsion that coats the support and makes it work. That includes first daguerreotypes, then ambrotypes and tintypes, which conquered the unreality of reversing right and left. Albumen prints on paper combined portability and a finer resolution soon enough. And that blue is the color of cyanotypes, which anticipate photograms in placing their subjects on photosensitive plates without a lens. If photographers experiments extended the process from direct impressions to street scenes with a subway soon to come, experimenters were ingenious.

Just how much did the experiments differ? Less than you might think, for many a print lost its characteristic color as photographers touched them up with a brush. They were artists after all, just good or bad artists. Alice Austen nurtured the artistry of staged portraits, much as the young model for Alice in Wonderland pouted and posed for Lewis Carroll in England. Yet others scorned Victorian artifice, like Matthew Brady during the American Civil War. War photography offered no escape from dead bodies or marks of the lashes across a slave’s back. Just the facts.

Questions have dogged photography ever since, all the more so today. By the time of Modernism, including abstract photography, photography need no longer make excuses to make art. And Postmodernism’s critique extended to artistry of all sorts, wherever institutions and collectors cast their eye. The beauty of surfaces and mind games were two sides of the same coin. It was about time someone asked what purposes photography serves, no? But did that lead to acceptance or dismissal?

Some, like Carleton Watkins, cultivated the greatness of the American West and the shimmer of its waters. Josiah Johnson Hawes and John Moran insisted on their work as American and as art. Others saw potential in cities and towns. Every shopkeeper, photographers imagined, deserved a personal record. Group portraits could find an audience with families and communities. Other demands were eminently practical. It was just a short step from the first small paper prints to cartes de visite or “cabinet cards” for businessmen and gentlemen.

That still leaves something closer to home—pets, children, and other cuties. The types of photographs truly were social media, long before that had a name. Is it art after all or the antithesis of art? Is it a social or scientific experiment? How about a dog trained to stand with its front paws on the top steps of short platform or ladder? Like a successful posting, it was preaching to the crowd.

Caspar David Friedrich would never be alone as long as he could journey to the forest and the sea. They were all the company he needed, their bare trunks gathering the darkness in winter, their foamy crests the turmoil in his soul. When he faces waters and distant hills, there is literally no looking back.

He could have found his double in many another painting as well—or in the companions his doubles took with them to catch the rising moon. In 2001, the Met had a focus exhibition on Friedrich’s Moonwatchers (in the plural), not its last show of German Romanticism, and I excerpted my reviews of both just this week for you. Rather than start over, then, let me turn briefly to an ample retrospective, again at the Met, through May 11.

Friedrich will never be at a loss for company, but it will never be enough. The men here are anonymous, not the celebrated poet and painter doubling and redoubling the very notion of Kindred Spirits for Asher Durand in America, in 1849. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog , dressed in black and hand on one hip, faces down what he sees, apart and alone, even as his gaze reaches out to infinity. The earth replies with the chilliest of white and uniformly cool colors. Where many a Romantic captures motion and the light, gestures and colors here are barely natural. And their dangerous infinite makes this the Romantic sublime.

Friedrich belongs to a long tradition in German art, going back to pale flesh and moist flowers in late Renaissance nudes and Baroque still life. Friedrich took nature as his subject, but not as a naturalist. Unlike John Constable or Beatrix Potter, he left few quick studies of clouds or botanical species. Like a proper student, he built a reputation in drawing before he even approached painting. The Met opens with local scenery and familiar faces in works on paper, including his a self-portrait. Only then could he test the limits of observation and human understanding.

As curators, Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein make a point of that slippery contrast between the visible and the infinite, the known and the unknowable. For Friedrich, it is also a struggle for the meaning of vision, between the seen and the imagined. And the imagination wins out. A cross set again and again on a rock in early work, much like the wanderer’s tall crag, looks out on a full moon. Sands at sunset become the stage for an allegory of the stages of life.

But what is imagined and what lies just next door? What of a the portal of a church or the western façade of a cathedral? What of an equally grand stone arch? Friedrich keeps you guessing. Facing each, one can feel the same ever-present chill. The show proceeds chronologically and by motif, but Friedrich found his subject and style early on, apart from mistier early skies and the more explicit Christianity, and never let go. So, too, did fellow Romantics like Johan Christian Dahl and Carl Gustav Carus, and their works, a handful also on view, are hard to distinguish from his. For all his virtues, sameness means predictability.

The familiar experience has made him a crowd pleaser. Who can resist warm associations and stark feelings? Who can resist knowing what to expect? Still, Friedrich darkens and colors both brighten and deepen in late work, as if the foreground were itself layered over the whole. His studio window becomes as prominent as what he found on the other side of the glass. The infinite begins with the picture plane and with you.

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

Infinite longing. One expects a decidedly romantic idea of Romanticism or nature after a stop for Caspar David Friedrich and lost souls. It also just happens to define Romanticism for Anita Brookner.

Brookner’s Romanticism and Its Discontents puts the emphasis squarely on the discontent. Her introduction to nineteenth-century French art and letters comes off all too pat and Romantic itself. Still, Romanticism truly deserves a survey as heartfelt and concise as this one. Last time I drew on past reviews of Friedrich at the Metto prepare you for its full retrospective, through May 11. Let me now place him in context of French and German Romantics, with an invitation to read more.

A movement so epoch-making may sound like an easy success. For Brookner, though, Romanticism means dealing with failure—and failing badly at the attempt. Her creators represent as many ways to cope with uncertainty. Some escape into idealism, art, and the Classicism of their teachers. Others look to determinate causes in science and humanity. Most found a hero in Napoleon. Each ends up with hardly more than a struggle, fatigue, and fancy ideals to which he himself puts the lie. Or so goes Brookner’s chilly romance.

Modern critics have opposed Classicism to Romanticism, using more contrasts than I care to remember—linear versus painterly, theater versus absorption, wilderness versus culture, primitive versus pastoral, authority versus community, aristocracy versus big industry, villa versus garden, and goodness knows what else. Perhaps only manifestos, historians, and art critics believe in periods anyway. Rebels against Jacques-Louis David, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot kept the revolutionary ideals of the first, the skepticism of the second, and the irony of the last. Nicolas Poussin and Poussin’s landscapes take Classicism into the Baroque with all its temptations intact, Delacroix paints like a Romantic while proclaiming his classicism, and J. D. Ingres echoes David’s line and idealized virtues while adding electric colors and an arm that manages to grow out of a sitter’s chest. One could debate forever whether Modernism ever outgrew Romantic individualism and a culture of capitalism.

Look again at Friedrich’s lunar vistas or the sea, with a dark clarity still visible in landscape art today. He and his countrymen celebrated not the unattainable, but a world newly at hand. One enters past maps of the lunar surface of incredible precision and beauty. Friedrich knew a little astronomy, too, when he included a ring around the moon. Earthshine, reflected light, makes visible just slightly more than half the moon. I imagine that scientists then would have told me just how much more.

Whatever the world, Friedrich invented it at its most luminous. He takes in a river or harbor scene around 1805—at age thirty-one, with a finely wrought view from the artist’s studio. Later a ship’s mast belongs to Woman at a Window, a painting of his wife from 1822. The mass reinforces the stasis and geometry of the window, shutters, and wall. Nothing else comes close to the deep red and green streaks of her dress seen from behind. Somehow she stands out from the same colors and handling, slightly toned down, in her surroundings.

Is that mix of public and private worlds what really drove Friedrich’s men to the woods? Nature lay close by, even to a city boy—too close by. Progress threatened to uproot nature, just as a massive tree trunk stands torn from the ground and erosion has left a protruding rock to survive the elements. It threatened to break forever the intimate link between humanity and nature. Fortunately, one still has artists and the imagination.

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

Have you missed the lavish retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich at the Met, through May 11? Me, too, until just days ago. If you follow my peregrinations regularly, you know that I have been laid up with ankle surgery since before it opened. I can only hope that I still have time to see a selection of the drawings that made his reputation and the paintings that make him a popular favorite.

I have, however, reviewed him more than once at length in the past. Nearly twenty-five years ago, the Met focused in on just two paintings, including Moonwatchers. I placed them in context of the very meaning of Romanticism, as seen in Romanticism and Its Discontents, by Anita Brookner, the novelist and art historian. And he was a man of his time. A decade later, the museum had an extensive survey of German Romanticism in works on paper, as seen through an open window—or, in the spirit of reflection, the subject of an open window. Allow me then two posts excerpting past reviews, with an invitation to follow the links to more.

Two men gaze through a wood at the moon. They may have turned to the forest for a connection to the night or for the sounds, smell, and light of nature buried in the sweat and toil of day. They could have sought each other’s intimacy, in the quiet of the night—apart from conversation that hardly knew when to stop. They have no weapons, but they could have sought adventure, swaggering in their broad hats and capes, confident in their powers to bring down their prey.

It hardly matters. Earthly quarry come way too easily. These men are in fact students—of the physical universe and the soul, the painter himself and a friend. They have stopped in their tracks, because they seek something farther and less attainable.

Instead of a fox, an idea, or the earth, they have gained clearing, and the moon stops them dead. The painter, Caspar David Friedrich, exaggerates a rise in the wood and distance to the sky with a low vantage point. He heightens the ghostly light with a color and shadow almost out of forest scenes in Bambi, if not out of a German tradition going back to at least the Northern Renaissance and Matthias Grünewald. Like the men but more literally, Friedrich steps quite out of physical space. He puts their motives aside, turning their backs to the picture plane. Now only the painter’s feelings count.

The painting appears in a haunting, well-chosen concentration. To help celebrate a new acquisition, the Met assembles two paintings by the German Romantic, several drawings, and a handful of other work showing his influence. The Frick Collection has shown repeatedly how much more a small show can bring home than many an overblown retrospective, and the Met’s restraint makes a familiar but elusive image fresh and intelligible. It may still run to hard-edged emotional overkill, but it is impossible to forget. If any painting could represent longing for the unattainable, this must be it.

Perhaps it makes sense that Friedrich often looks quaint or cartoonish these days, for all his broad appeal. The Hudson River School artist he most influenced, George Inness, can similarly look visionary or simply escapist. Friedrich did understand aspiration and failure. He knew personally Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who retold the Faust legend. Like Michi Meko today, he felt at home in the dark woods and a stranger in the urban wilderness. Life after Romanticism has had to battle the same issues of public identity and personal perception—with considerably less confidence in humanity and nature.

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

Does a dog have a Buddha nature? A Zen master’s no was brief and clear, but then who knows what else a dog might smell on a street near you?

Then, too, nothing is unequivocal in a koan—or in a thousand years of Japanese art from the Mary and Cheney Cowles collection at the Met. Its real and promised gifts are substantial enough to fill ten rooms off the museum’s Asian wing and its Chinese art, space enough to give a folding screen, a book, or a single scroll an alcove to itself. Sculpture alone could make you feel that you have entered a darkened temple or a tea house, with nowhere to stand apart from its guardians. An arrangement without regard for chronology may make you wonder if anything has changed or can ever change, until, that is, you stumble onto the present.

The show opened just days after a rehanging of the galleries for Chinese art right next door, to feature painting and calligraphy—often as not meaning poetry, and I work this together with my earlier report on that art as a longer review and my latest upload. And the show’s title promises to separate the three, as “The Three Perfections,” through August 3. Yet nobody’s perfect, and the Japanese insist on it. Think of Buddhism as the way to peace? Here the very first sculpture, a god, bears a sword to protect enlightenment from the likes of you. Another deity has a “wisdom fist.” And yet wisdom itself cannot transcend human imperfections, for all its resounding no.

Seekers of enlightenment still debate Zhaozhou’s no. For the Met, no means no, but could the Zen master have meant only the common image of a dog as a lowly creature? For a believer, everything in this world has a Buddha nature, and a dog has only to realize it. No wonder the sternest of guardians have a wider nature. In statues, the gods frown, but their robes flow freely, and gold enhances every fold. Nothing here is immune to delight, where even a stone for the artist’s ink may bear gilding.

Zhaozhou himself says nothing in what I hesitate to call a portrait in the Cowles collection, nine hundred years after his death. In a screen to his left, a bird rests on a tree looking gloriously upward. To the right, more lowly birds seem almost comic figures—but then the sage looks eccentric, too, with his scraggly beard and a knife, perhaps a writer’s tool, fallen to the ground. Here no means yes, and yes means yes to the world you know. Chinese art flaunts its connection to the past, with reverence. Here everything enters the present.

A black stone fountain, set on white pebbles, conveys a felt peace and physical motion that even the ancients rarely knew. It is not a recreation of a long-ago tea garden, but sculpture by Isamu Noguchi from the Met’s modern wing. Calligraphy itself looks to the past for an artist’s present impulse. Japan adopted Chinese writing for a phonetic alphabet of less detailed, freer marks, and an artist had to learn both. Wall text displays a poem as thirteen Chinese characters and again phonetically, from the Japanese, as two full lines. But then, as a translation has it, “our joy is limitless.”

The Japanese writing system may appear separately, in graceful curves or as little as three letters and a spot of ink. Or the systems may blend into one another and into realism. Those curves adapt easily to stones, streams, and flowers. A single scroll may combine writing, patterning, and flowers. One god rests on a lotus, where attendants bring their presences and shadows as well. Who needs another wooden god with eleven heads?

When China enters the eighteenth century, its nods to the West speak of an empire’s decline. Japanese art is just getting going. A scroll of “immortal poets” gives them individuality and a sense of humor that Chinese art never felt. A growing emphasis on color allows trapezoids that add perspective, although not Europe’s linear perspective. It also allows a story, like the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, to unfold in an enormous folding screen. Like views of Edo from Hiroshige, at the Brooklyn Museum, it could take place in a far older landscape or in Tokyo today.

Noguchi himself invites contemplation of both past and present. Water Stone could be a found object or painstaking carving, with an eye at once to tradition, Modernism, and Minimalism. Water from this fountain does not spout up but rather ripples off the black tabletop onto white stone. A blond wood screen descends to maybe shoulder height. It sets the space of the ceremony apart from the viewer, who can nonetheless linger and belong. The work presents a complementary view from the other side, obliging a second encounter after a prolonged exposure to Japanese art.

I shall never get over my suspicion of a museum’s catering to collectors in exchange for gifts. I cannot easily explain this show’s arrangement—or a title that its wealth of materials hastens to ignore. It also includes a glass deer from Kohei Nawa in 2011, an oversized paperweight that I should just as soon had never appeared. Then, too, there is no challenging Chinese painting, calligraphy, and poetry. That is why Japan took it as a model. Still, neither is there challenging Japan’s thoughts of transcendence and its all-too-human refusal.

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