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art reviews from around new york

To wrap up my year-end review from last time, diversity itself has a diversity easy to overlook. Does it call for other cultures, as a good in themselves, or will it remember the rifts in a life?

Pepón Osorio recreates the communities he knows in packed, vivid installations, but with real doubts about who bears responsibility—and for what. Also at the New Museum, Tuan Andrew Nguyen cannot exclude the United States from his account of Vietnam. Unexploded shells still litter the landscape. They also serve as the material for sculpture modeled after Alexander Calder and ring out as bells.

Diversity calls for attention to women, past and present. Does that mean mythmaking after all and felt bodies? David Zwirner presented the latest mythic narratives and wild casts of characters from Dana Schutz, among the year’s very best. At the Guggenheim, one could head up the ramp from Gego to Sarah Sze, where sculpture in suspension becomes chaos—or head down to the Whitney for another abstract sculptor in wire, Ruth Asawa, and a different kind of inheritance. Or check out the Jewish Museum for Marta Minujín, like Gego a South America who left her mark elsewhere. Here the collision of cultures leads to everything from soft sculpture to a night in Central Park.

Black artists showed a still greater diversity. Sure, there was portraiture as personality and politics, in the work of Henry Taylor at the Whitney and Barkley L. Hendricks at the Frick. A two-gallery show of Bob Thompson, one of my top picks, made that a claim to the entirety of western art. Yet Sam Gilliam in his last years revisits both his past work and black abstraction, at Pace. And the Met situated a black artist fully in art history. Juan de Pareja, the slave who sat for and traveled with his master, Diego Velázquez, becomes a leading painter in his own right in Madrid.

Does that entail looking beyond the hype after all, to a wholly new history? For truth to the past, look to museums that remain true to themselves. While blockbusters can put money above mission, the Frick does not. It has its shares of bows to contemporary art, but its finest loan goes back to the Renaissance discovery of painting in oil. Three Philosophers by Giorgione hangs across from the Frick’s own Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini, as it may have in a Venetian villa five hundred years ago. They become dual enigmas and dual studies in Italian light.

The Frick must still rethink its mission, as it wraps up its time at the Frick Madison and prepares to return to its mansion, renovated and expanded. Other institutions must do so with every show. The Morgan has no qualms about contemporary art, although I have my doubts. Still, two shows focus on its founder, J. P. Morgan, as a collector of Bibles and an heir to medieval money. That may not say everything you need to know about money in art today. Yet they sure come close.

The Jewish Museum must feel the need even more, with a new director and a contested conscience. Can it be both a museum of Jewish heritage and of cutting-edge art? This year it displayed the Sassoons, a family of collectors divided over both. Minujín, for that matter, is the daughter of Russian Jews in Buenos Aries and a self-styled citizen of the world. She also has enough irony to cast doubt on them all. Like diversity and trends, identity is a challenging and changing thing.

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To continue my year-end review from last time, how then, to go beyond the blockbusters? Of course, the answers are clichés, which means that they are obviously correct and obviously wrong, but start with what they get right.

For starters, look beyond the trends. Not all painters today are into mythmaking and their own bodies. Geometric and gestural abstraction still matter. I did not find the words to review Gallagher, Judith Godwin from postwar years at Berry Campbell, David Novros with his still bold Minimalism at Paula Cooper, or Allison Miller with colliding conventions at Susan Inglett—but I did keep returning to what in such variety will last and what will end up in the trash, and I shall let you follow the links to see.

Then, too, look beyond the hype. That can be especially important with new media, which boast of the latest. At times it could seem that technology is taking over from the artist, like AI for Refik Anadol at MoMA. Video also has the advantage of shouting the loudest and flashing the most lights, like Jacolby Satterwhite in the Great Hall of the Met. Yet Satterwhite and “Signals” at MoMA showed only how much their own narrative leaves out. Artificial intelligence, like the natural kind, can look awfully dumb.

Third, look beyond the times, places, and cultures you know. The Met exhibits both early Buddhist art and Byzantium. In the process, it challenges not just Europe, but the very choices that western art has made. With Byzantium, it relocates the time between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance to Africa and the Middle East, as an evolving dialogue between cultures. Realism or the inhuman, the dark ages or light? Who cares?

Last, look beyond today’s favored media. Not everyone is competing with the past in oil or claiming the future for computer art. What about, say, photography? The fall art fairs added Photofairs New York for just that. The Met followed Berenice Abbott to a city of skyscrapers that you may never have known. Galleries challenged New York to integrate the strangeness of Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander as well.

Duane Michals, too, flourished in an empty city, but a city of artists. His portraits of Andy Warhol and René Magritte at D. C. Moore had me wondering if he had substituted actors, but no. Warhol looks young and unfamiliar because he was—and still creating his image. With excursions into photography by Jay DeFeo at Paula Cooper, a time and place proved as elusive as abstraction. The International Center of Photography was at its best, too, with the one-on-one between a photographer and a sitter. It sang of “Love Songs” and the artist portraits in “Face to Face.”

ICP ended the year with “Immersion.” It takes an artist’s residency abroad as neither home nor away. Is this the immigrant experience? Yes, but only in part, and that shows the limits of my own clichés. After all the art of immigration and displacement is fashionable, too. My very call to look beyond the trends is a call for diversity, which is trendy as well, and I continue next time with just that.

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To continue my year-end review from last time, blockbusters always come with hype and hokum, and why not? Shows like these are costly to put on, while bringing in big money, and “van Gogh’s Cypresses” is no exception.

Does it really matter that some pictures include a certain tree? Maybe not, but the Met looked freshly at not just Starry Night, but the fatal last years of Vincent van Gogh. It also brought home his close connection to his brother, Theo, a dealer and his greatest supporter. Never mind that it came with an upbeat ending that no amount of great art can warrant.

And then in no time the lines were back for “Manet / Degas.” Can even a blockbuster sort out two creative minds and big egos? Maybe not, but it could still begin with Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas on their meeting in the Louvre and end with their envisioning Paris and politics through the lens of old masters and present-day ideas. It should have anyone continuing on to the Met’s galleries for European art, open again after the “Skylight Project.” It, too, comes with hokum, between loaded themes and forced interruptions for contemporary art. Still, this is the heart of a great museum.

Down in the Lehman wing, the Met jumps ahead to Fauvism and “Vertigo of Color.” It, too, has a dubious narrative, of just two artists and one summer—and it, too, is an all-male preserve. Still, if you never understood what brought Henri Matisse and André Derain together and how they differ, here you can. The show also returns to the role of painting out of doors in the creation of modern art. So, for that matter, did “Into the Woods,” French landscapes at the Morgan Library. Whose woods these are I only thought I knew.

Same goes for whose Modernism. Can Manet, who stood just outside Impressionism, and Degas, often seen as Post-Impressionist, point ahead to modern art and Pablo Picasso? As it happens, this was an anniversary year for Picasso, and museums all over the world competed to give him a really big show. So did at least one posh gallery, Gagosian, with documentation to match. The celebration included some lemons, like a comedian’s put-down of Picasso in Brooklyn, and revealing sidelights, like his early days in France at the Guggenheim. Yet they should already have one looking beyond the blockbusters.

My own favorite sidelights told of how Cubism never made it to a townhouse in Brooklyn—and how a stay in Fontainebleau led to two of Picasso’s most famous paintings. Like Matisse’s Red Studio last year, they suggest the importance of place—and a decent place to work. They also continue an exploration of when to declare art modern and what it took to get there. So did a show at the Morgan of Blaise Cendrars, a French poet, and his collaborations with modern artists. Oh, and how did America enter the picture, and when did Modernism become abstraction? MoMA looked for answers to both to Georgia O’Keeffe.

Is a return to so popular a painter just more of the same? Up to a point, although it stuck to her drawings. Besides flowers, it also held patterning for its own sake and views from an airplane window onto the earth, with its rivers, roads, and fissures. Like a true American, O’Keeffe took to the highway, only from above. I could not shake it out of my mind when I caught Chris Gallagher this fall at McKenzie on the Lower East Side. He does not need to look past the window itself for abstract art—and I continue next time with how to look beyond.

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With art, it always pays to take a second look—and to keep looking. That means looking beyond the hype, and this site looks again along with you. My 2023 year in review goes beyond the blockbusters, to look for more.

Criticism, I like to think, can be about more than judging, and I take that seriously in offering reviews. Still, a year’s best entails quick picks. That is why I am embarrassed yet again to attempt one. And some of the year’s best were blockbusters, with lines to match. I waited over an hour for “van Gogh’s Cypresses” and yet another look at Starry Night, and it was worth it. So start with the obvious, before looking deeper—to the birth of modern art, what the quick picks miss, diversity and history, and the institutions that sustain it all, and I feature them each in turn all this week, starting with an extra post tomorrow for (sure enough) the Met’s blockbusters.

So happy holidays, and happy last week in 2023, a time for looking ahead and looking back. Enjoy time with the ones you love, be it family or art. Think what your own highlights might have been.

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Pablo Picasso did not come easily to New York. He had a solo show in 1911 at its most innovative gallery, but it sold all of two drawings—one of them to the dealer himself.

Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, had opened his gallery in Greenwich Village six years earlier, but for Americans, it seems, that was just not long enough to grow accustomed to modern art. Two years later, Cubism made a sensation, but not with Pablo Picasso. Its appearance in the legendary Armory Show provoked outrage and enthusiasm, in the form of Nude Descending a Staircase, by Marcel Duchamp. Before both shows, though, Picasso found a buyer not on Fifth Avenue, but in Brooklyn. Now the Met tries to recreate the 1910 commission, through January 14.

Modernism’s shocks are easy to remember, but harder over time to explain. Picasso has become a fixture, loved and hated, and an earlier show looked at nothing but his impact on American art. For years before its repatriation to Spain, Guernica seemed inseparable from New York and the Museum of Modern Art. As for Nude Descending a Staircase, it was not even a nude. Maybe that is what shocked most. Yet it had nothing on the radicalism of the work destined for Brooklyn.

Hamilton Easter Field asked for eleven paintings, for the library of his townhouse in Columbia Heights. They never made it across the Atlantic. Field, who had met him not long before, died before the job was done. The Met claims to have identified six completed paintings, on view with eight drawings, but who is to say? It does not have much to go by, beyond the dimensions of the library. Field gave detailed specs for the room as a whole and where paintings would fit, at least two of them over doors. This was site-specific work, but not a mural or, for that matter, a single work.

Picasso had mixed feelings work on commission, if not America itself. In a letter to Gertrude Stein, he dismissed the whole project as mere decoration and something he just had to do. Yet he dug right into it. He began with sketches on vacation in Cadaquês, the coastal village just outside Barcelona. He was happy enough with the surviving paintings to have signed them, and why not? This was the very height of Analytic Cubism, and Field had given him the chance to push his limits.

Would the American (himself an artist, dealer, and critic) have known what he was getting? He was that second buyer for Stieglitz, and he bought an accomplished nude (on display here) from around 1905, in Picasso’s eminently accessible Pink Period. By 1910, Cubism was dismantling not just the human figure, but painting itself. Pen and oil hatching plays against the white of canvas and paper. It allows brown and blue to play against one another as well. Picasso would never work so densely or so close to abstraction again.

Two of the six paintings are nudes, standing or reclining in accord with the library’s available space. Two are still life, and two are women playing the mandolin or guitar (possibly Marie Laurencin, whose paintings stood out this fall at the New York art fairs, in the Independent)—but just try to envision their subject. Just last year the Met claimed Synthetic Cubism for trompe l’oeil painting, but this is a radical assault on illusion. Nor is it, in a clichéd view of Cubism, a compendium of optical points of view. It is a compendium of ways to look and ways to think about painting. That is why Modernism is still a challenge for Postmodernism and art today.

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New Yorkers know irony. Detachment, not so much.

We have irony in the very air we breathe, with or without haze from Canadian wildfires. We value a quick mind, even as we know that everything we know is wrong. We know the city’s pace and passion, too, and Ed Ruscha opened to members at the Museum of Modern Art right after Labor Day, the same day as the Armory Show. He has the entire top floor, through January 12, and yet no artist speaks so deeply of and to LA. When he paints maple syrup or screen-prints chocolate onto all four walls, he is dripping with irony. As for detachment, you bet.

I have climbed the Pepsi sign in Long Island City, because a New Yorker takes nothing for granted as just part of the neighborhood. Ruscha paints both sides of the Hollywood sign, front and back, as if each were equally iconic, and perhaps it is. He photographs Every Building on the Sunset Strip, for an artist’s book. Where a New Yorker would look around to cherish small differences and to remember the haunts that fate has left behind, he loves their collective anonymity, or does he? A retrospective teases out what drew him to California and what he fears for today. It asks where he enters the work and when he vanishes—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

That first accordion book, from 1966, folds out impressively, to almost twenty-five feet. The Strip runs just a mile and a half, but the act of photographing was impressive, too. Ruscha shot from a flat-bed truck. Was he erasing differences or asking one to discover them for oneself? He is not saying, but he returned to the medium to photograph LA apartment complexes and their architecture. He also paints a popular restaurant, on La Cienega south of Sunset Boulevard, as if it were on fire.

He paints LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also up in flames. Is he mocking its status, fearing its demise, or celebrating a city on fire? He could be deriding its pretension, soon after its construction in 1965, but not its art, right? Was he himself still making art? Hostile critics were asking that about an entire generation, and he was among its instigators. He seems to place everything in quotes, and the quotes are not just his alone.

Still, this is Hollywood, and so is 20th Century Fox. Ruscha paints it in 1963 as The Big Picture, and it is another breakthrough—clean, clear, bright, and big as its name. He shows the film studio’s logo with projection beams behind it, crossing one another against a dark sky. The text in text painting has grown and entered three dimensions. Its overall shape tapers off behind the logo, facing front at left. Hollywood is myth-making, and so is he, while claiming the myth for himself.

The curators, Christophe Cherix with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi, present his career in sequence, but every step brings a change in theme. Ruscha does not give up a single motif. He just revisits it askance and afresh. Norm’s restaurant, LACMA, and the very sky are on fire, a word that enters text painting as well. A C-clamp tugs at the text of another painting, while other text takes on the illusion of muck and goo. He backs off painting entirely for a few years, with such media as tobacco stain, blood (his own), whisky, and gunpowder.

I prefer the deadpan optimism that brought him halfway across the country from Oklahoma City to the Sunset Strip. (He took the same highway to revisit family now and then.) It infiltrates even his chocolate room from 1970. Its wall covering, printed on paper, does not so much as stink. A New Yorker’s hopes may lie elsewhere, and so may many a history of postwar art. Still, most of all in the 1960s, he keeps you guessing as he carries Pop into conceptual art.

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