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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.

Well, okay, one more review that somehow slipped through the cracks this fall. Mire Lee does everything she can to turn you away. Elevator doors at the New Museum opened not long ago onto barely enough room to exit and the face of a seemingly unfinished wall.

On my first attempt to get past, a curatorial assistant turned me away. She said that the installation was not quite ready, and it does depend on a messy assemblage of motors and materials to set it in motion. Still, could it have fooled even her? Lee has many more deceptions in store, and she is out quite literally to take you in, with Black Sun through September 27.

Just for starters, what looked like bare Sheetrock and metal studs is anything but. It is complete enough, thank you, and of materials better suited to retain raw feelings, moisture, and the smell. What promised a partition, waiting to display and beyond it to disclose her art, is just one wall of a tarnished shelter filling much of the museum’s top floor. It has ample room for museum visitors, but it is stifling enough all the same. The skylit floor that so opened up last year for Kapwani Kiwanga has become confining, doubling the museum walls and then some. Just entering, through two sets of vertical plastic blinds, should let you know.

Once inside, you may have an overpowering urge to leave. Two pits in the floor hold the very blood and guts of art. One sculpture, like her Endless House at the Venice Biennale, looks like oversized intestines starved for a meal. It really might take you in. The other could be a whole body, threateningly large, but flayed and left to die. I thought that I could make out a penis, but after that you are on your own.

Each sculpture is also part of or subject to a machine. It drips its thick white goo into the pits, where small rods at the edges churn the mixture as best they can. It leaves its dark stains on the slick walls and its odor of gelatin, silicone, plaster, and oil in the air. It may have you in need of fresh air not because it is all that intense, but because it is gross. Then again, you may hesitate to leave, despite yourself. This is after all material for thought and for art.

Like Sue de Beer before her, the Korean artist takes her title from a book by Julia Kristeva that gives voice to depression, the French writer’s included. As a theorist with roots in psychoanalysis, she has much in common with Jacques Lacan, but with less post-structuralist jargon and a greater openness to art. Art, she writes, can “bypass complacency,” and beauty can be sad, because it “is inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning.” (Think of the ephemeral in, say, the constant motion of a machine.) It returns her to the tradition of Sigmund Freud—for whom depression was “melancholia,” the body was inescapable, and disgust was a way of distancing oneself from desires and fears. Kristeva gives her longest chapter to the stark nudity of Hans Holbein and his Dead Christ in the Tomb.

Minimalism this is not, but it does have Post-Minimalism’s bodily presence and fears, from Eva Hesse to the present. Is this pretentious as well as disgusting? Maybe so, but the machine and the body take many forms. Off to the side, a video has abstract shapes, artificial materials, or bodily forms in motion, and I hesitate to say which. (I thought first of walruses.) But then I was inside, where the remaining were at least in part my own.

Lee’s environment is hardly paradise, but then what is? A seventy-foot mural in the lobby gallery shows Eden itself as an unruly place—enough to accommodate Lilith, Adam’s first wife in myth. A “she-demon” who raised his children while refusing to grant him supremacy, she has no place in the Bible, but she does turn up in The Original Riot, by Wynnie Mynerva. Born on the outskirts of Lima, in Peru, Mynerva relishes a spoiled paradise, with lush brushwork to match. Not that one can make out a story or, for that matter, count the characters. But, hey, it’s a jungle out there.

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

Once again, allow me to use a holiday week to catch up with some posts that never made it to the blog. It has been a busy fall.Tuan Andrew Nguyen knows for whom the bell tolls. He has sculpted an impressive one out of unexploded weaponry, the kind that still covers 80 percent of a province in Vietnam. Yet it tolls not death, but a healing note in Asian tradition—and who can say which will be his inheritance?

In “Inheritance” at the Whitney Museum, an artist’s inheritance is a simple matter of pride. How does that apply to a country after nearly fifty years of Communist rule and, before that, thirty years of colonial and civil wars? Nguyen still asks for healing in a divided nation. Born in Saigon in 1976, barely a year after the city fell to the north and the last Americans were airlifted out, he lives and works to this day in what is now Ho Chi Minh City. Yet he cannot forget what he himself never knew. It has become, in the exhibition’s title, his “Radiant Remembrance,” at the New Museum through this past September 27.

It is a show of shared memories and contested ground, going back to the first Indochina war, from 1946 to 1954, when the French conscripted men from its colonies in Senegal and Morocco as tirailleurs—riflemen, sharpshooters, or snipers. The word sounds ever so quaint for forced labor in a deadly modern war. The soldiers brought death to families like those in documentary photos covering a wall at the show’s entrance. Some still seek acceptance and forgiveness. To judge by Nguyen’s videos, it will come willingly but not easily. The very titles speak of little else, as The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, and Because No One Will Listen.

Taken together, the three add up to the length of a feature-length film, and one can only wander among them as across unexploded mines, wondering what one has missed and who will survive. In the longest, a man begs for a young woman’s understanding, and she herself comes under harsh questioning from others. In a four-channel video, speakers at a microphone speak for the resented and forgotten while rapt faces take in the broadcast. In the last, a woman recites a letter to her lost father, while the images speak to a treacherous landscape of soothing waters and bare, twisted trees. Not everyone would want to claim this inheritance. Many have no choice.

For Americans, the Vietnam War is something to forget. Back then, it was either a brave fight against world communism or the arrogance of a global empire, with little to say for the Vietnamese themselves. For Nguyen, America’s incursion was only a blip in a longer domestic conflict. His videos never once mention it, although its impact is everywhere. He is hardly the only one to have “repurposed” mines and bombs. As art, though, they take on unexpected resonance. They ring out with allusions to the United States.

Unexploded Resonance recalls the Liberty Bell in its scale and wood armature. It might also look at home at the Isamu Noguchi Museum were the found wood not so ornate. Other ordnance has become simulated Calder mobiles—or what Alexander Calder might have produced had he cared for polished metal and reflected light. Nguyen has an eye for beauty, just as he has an ear for shame. Is he also taking a shot at those Americans who never seem to know how to listen? Maybe, but he alludes to Vietnam as well.

As curated by Vivian Crockett with Ian Wallace, the sculpture could serve as props for the videos. They continue the story as well. The mobiles hint at celestial bodies, with titles like A Rising Moon Through the Smoke, Firebird, Rolling Thunder, and Starlite. A Buddhist god in carved wood has golden prostheses for Nguyen’s shattered arms. Can the bell really sound a healing note? Across from video, it is notable for its silence.

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

Once again, allow me to use a holiday week to catch up with some posts that never made it to the blog. It has been a busy fall.Tracey Rose loves a pose. Her work at the Queens Museum takes no end of pleasure in putting on a show, but the actors and their roles are not so easy to pin down.

Women put on makeup and snarl for the camera—one, a title explains, on behalf of the KKK. Others dress up a bit much for propriety or not at all. The camera may close in a standing figure or step back, to reveal a stage set or forest landscape as welcoming and puzzling as they. Just do not expect this notably political artist to score much in the way of political points, through September 10.

Rose plays her part in a costume drama that is itself hard to pin down. One may not even guess correctly where it begins or ends. She gets the central open area for an enclosure that might be left over from Xaviera Simmons the season before, give or take a fresh, seriously bright paint job. She shines brighter still on surrounding walls. So which belong to Ciao Bella, which sounds like a love song, and which to Lucie’s Fur, which puns on Lucifer? No matter, with so content an all-woman cast.

Naturally the woman from the KKK, in whiteface but with a black eye or two and badly smeared black on her lips, belongs to neither one. Naturally, too, one cannot exactly enter the enclosure for a place to call home. Could that leave one in the forest, along with a woman on horseback with a preposterous top hat and another woman gesturing toward nothing that one can see? Could either be Lucie, which also puns on Lucy, the prototypical human being? One dare not call them primitive or in need of fur. They generate their own warmth, for those willing to play along.

One of two side galleries has room for work from twenty-five years, enough for a midcareer retrospective. Rose calls it “Shooting Down Babylon,” a bit odd, perhaps, for a show that cultivates voices. There the South African artist turns down the poses just a notch and admits men. There, too, the story coheres even less, except when it is too obvious for words. The white train of a bridal dress stands tall, but for what ceremony? A loose knit in the colors of the African National Coalition covers what might be black tomato with text that she alone can read.

In the show’s earliest photo, a man in performance etches his words into the wall of an arts institution that long barred blacks. Here the text is more cryptic still, and he might be sentenced to write it out like a schoolchild in need of a lesson. But then a biracial couple enacts The Kiss, after the sculpture by Auguste Rodin. There the lesson is clear—all the more so because the couple departs from Rodin’s pose to become intimate but relaxed. Is Rose too politically correct or not nearly enough for a modicum of coherence? Either way, these could be fragments of a story waiting for her to find an ending.

Either way, too, this is one politically correct museum, which has its uses. It devotes its other gallery to Aliza Nisenbaum, who has had a residency at the museum and a commitment to teaching art to the Mexican American community in Corona. Indeed, the show’s hanging and bright colors can suggest a schoolroom. (It adapts its title, “Queens, Lindo y Querido,” from a pop song in which the beautiful and beloved is Mexico, not Queens.) It also depicts members of the community, including workers at a food pantry and LaGuardia airport—a taxi driver and security guard included, along with pilots and flight attendants. A couple shares the Sunday New York Times.

The large paintings run to a loose perspective that enhances its diversity and color. Like poses for Rose, that has its pleasures. Both are well-intentioned, and their intentions can still get in the way. Rose speaks of her art as about the body, performativity, post-colonialism, healing, and rituality. Have I left anything out, and has she? Maybe it would work better as a photograph.

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

Allow me to use a holiday week to catch up with some posts that never made it to the blog. It has been a busy fall. When the Philadelphia Museum of Art called Emma Amos in retrospective “Color Odyssey,” it meant hers, of course, as a woman of color and an artist. Still, nothing for Amos is just about her.

It is about friends, and the museum went big on her portraits. It is about family and race, and ten monoprints follow them both from the end of slavery to the present. Now in Chelsea, that series is about western culture as well, black and white, and she named it after a truly classical legacy, The Odyssey. Do not be shocked, though, if it concludes with her.

Amos created Odyssey in 1988 for a museum in Atlanta, the city of her family. A series that begins with an open book by Zora Neale Hurston (a family friend) cannot be just about her—although it contains her personal mark-up, in red pen. But then her family made history. Her grandfather became the state’s first black pharmacist, and a spread from The Dixie Pharmaceutical Journal (ouch) shows him amid white professionals, who made a pilgrimage to see him. Her father took up his father’s business, and her mother, with a degree in anthropology, managed the store. Still, a black family knew exclusions, and it is up to the artist to make them visible and to set them free.

Just eighteen months after her retrospective, the series emerges for the first time in roughly thirty years—the first since it showed here in New York at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Its recovery cannot match her retrospective (and I shall leave a proper appreciation to my past review, so do take a look). It can, though, supply an enormous missing piece. Odyssey has the front room, so that the additional work, much of it from the same years, comes as context. It includes what she called “Falling Figures” and the gallery “Classical Legacies.” Still, the prints cannot help standing out, at Ryan Lee through September 9.

While the images are not life size, the prints sure are, with an overlay of paint and glitter. They can be as colorful as the early portraits in Philadelphia. Here, though, her colors shine brightest when casually applied. Photo transfers attest to a large family, seated and most at home with one another. In between, figures float freely in the indefinite space of memory. That includes Amos in a flowing dress, looking younger than her fifty years.

That spatial motif recurs often in paint, and so do the classics. Billie Holiday swims toward Leda and the swan. In the show’s largest painting, Flying Circus (also from 1988), acrobats command the sky while a swimmer goes deep, perhaps too deep. A singer plays the lyre, like Orpheus in myth, and white horses charge forward, as if at ancient Rome’s Circus Maximus, leaving their only rider behind. Two figures, black and white, stand in uneasy proximity on an imagined Grecian urn. Amos did start as an abstract painter, but who knew that the transition to realism would come in 1960 with coarse black marks after the ruins of Pompeii?

Amos spent due time in Europe. For her, though, the classics need be neither ancient nor white. Homer had his Odyssey, but then so did Romare Bearden, whom she knew well from Spiral, the African American collective. Then, too, it is hard to think of a black odyssey apart from the Great Migration—or the Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence. As James Joyce put it in Ulysses, “Longest way around is the shortest way home.” Amos is always heading home.

She may be dense with allusions, but not as a burden on the viewer. By the very nature of memory, one need not pin them down. They float freely much like her colors, between high and low culture and between real and imagined space. The next-to-last print in Odyssey contains cop cars and the KKK, and her ancestors surely knew them both all too well. Yet she ends hopefully with Freedom March—here not a collective act, but Muhammad Ali standing alone. The artist herself is walking her dogs and striding high.

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.