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art reviews from around new york

Not every artist is in search of her roots, but Muriel Hasbun has them abundantly. She can look beneath the surface to dental records from the past, because her father was a dentist. She can look deep into the earth as well, to seismic records, including from El Salvador, where she was born in 1961.

In her photography, they become part of a personal history, a family history, and a history of her time. They are testimony to her love, at the International Center of Photography through January 8. If they are no less shadowy for that, in several languages and in cryptic images, she knows the shadows as intimately as the substance. Together with past reports on family matters at ICP, it is also the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

One expects multiculturalism in art these days, but not often like this. Hasbun’s mother was Jewish, half French and half Polish, and was fortunate in escaping the Nazis—first to Paris from Vichy, then across the Atlantic. A photo shows her when she arrived. Hasbun calls it Je Me Souviens, or “I remember,” and surely she herself remembers as well. Her father was Christian, half Salvadorian and half Palestinian. Si Je Meurs Je Me Souviens, a later title runs, or “If I Die I Remember,” and she insists on memories, even in death.

She herself fled El Salvador in 1979, after a right-wing military coup soon embraced by Ronald Reagan’s United States—first to France and then to Washington, D.C. She could have been in search of her mother’s past as much as her own present, but these things for Hasbun are hard to pull apart. (She also has a degree in French lit.) All this could easily become a dry litany, but for her they are about not a cultural affiliation, but the family she knew. It is not so easy to make art about love without its becoming a record of loss as well, as in “Love Songs” at ICP just this year. But that, too, is a part of life.

The show itself has a multilingual title, “Tracing Terruño,” or home ground. “What are these roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?” For T. S. Eliot “a heap of broken images,” but exactly that makes “The Waste Land” a satisfying poem and Hasbun’s photography a satisfying art. Santos y Sombra from the 1990s mixes recovered and original images to evoke its saints and shadows. They run to tropical silhouettes against pale skies, at times with overlays added in the darkroom. They, too, are what a title calls Presencia, and Todos los Santos (Para Subir al Cielo), or “All the Saints (to Go Up to Heaven).”

Heaven may not be easy to reach, but it still comes down equally to family and art. She applies chemicals to photographic plates with her grandmother’s rags, so that they pay homage at once to May Ray in Surrealism and to home. The dental x-rays might seem to step away from anything at all familiar, but they, too, look in all directions. As X Post Facto, they might be pillars in a dry landscape or mathematical unknowns. They also simply come after. Yet they look all the more nuanced and colorful for their detachment.

Seismic disruptions enter with Pulse: New Cultural Registers starting in 2020. (An earlier Central American landscape did show a volcano.) Some prints have thick black frames, setting off the presences. Others look paler than ever, with physical layers like people in their clothing. Her grandmother returns in person, I shall guess to honor her death. The work has become more physical, but also more elusive and ephemeral. It is shaking things up.

Hasbun has had other work that does not quite fit, almost always in series. Still, this is enough for a sizable retrospective and a sprawling history. It also has resonances with “Immersion,” a three-person show on the same floor. It, too, is creating a sense of place, of home turf. It has the taller rooms, while Hasbun has the longer walls, in accord with her traditionalism and persistence. One can think of the entire show as her only installation and her only home.

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

Korea was changing fast back then, but not that fast. In his slideshow of life on the streets and in the news in Seoul, The Meaning of 1/24 Second, Kim Kulim does not come close to twenty-four frames per second. This is a photomontage, not a movie, and he knows it.

For all that, the world was spinning out of control, with only artists to give it substance and, just maybe, meaning. Does Kim exaggerate? Such is youth, and this is “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea,” at the Guggenheim through January 7, and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload. This was 1969, a time with a spectacular youth culture, the year of Woodstock and Abbey Road. Here in the West, too, late Modernism was coming under assault. If art in Korea from the 1960s and 1970s seems less familiar and less consequential, it more than kept up.

The very first work at the Guggenheim reels off the changes. Yet White Paper on Urban Planning, by Ha Chong-Hyun is neither white nor obviously urban. It is a colorful abstraction, on paper of course. It has no particular pattern holding together its soft curves, hard edges, and horizontal bulges, but then it casts doubt on the very possibility of planning. So does Kim, with The Death of the Sun and Tombstone. Someone must have planned for the future, but not for their thick, black, charred remains of vinyl, steel, and plastic.

Photographs next to both describe a newly westernized Korea, with only a touch of exaggeration, much like Kim’s slides. Fashionable young people crowd the streets, and black highways spin out from their intersection five ways. Whoever could plan for this? A Japanese invasion and World War II had left the peninsula divided, and the Korean War only confirmed the division. And those wars were only the start of an American presence. Global capitalism was bringing high rises, highways, industrial cities, and fashion.

Art responded, with its own scattershot attempt at organization. Movement after movement arose, with little to set off one from another. Kim helped found the Fourth Group, and I lost count after the Korean Avant-Garde Association, Space in Time, and whatever else. Their members made a point of not attending the official art show each year, although they had no qualms about exhibiting in biennials in São Paulo and Paris, where they made a hit. The madness leaves their retrospective with no clear themes or sequence. The curators, the Guggenheim’s Kyung An and Kang Soojung Korea of Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, have three tower galleries for eighty works by half as many artists.

Abstraction appears often, but as collage, like three rows of four creased circles apiece by Ha Chong-Hyun. Ha Chong-Hyun constructs his dense monochromes from acrylic, cigarette butts, and matchsticks. He also lays barbed wire over coarse jute rather like burlap. As art, it has its inclusions and exclusions, like the middle class, the Demilitarized Zone, or a barbed-wire fence. Kim makes his abstraction from rows of light bulbs that will never light up. As painting, these are forgettable, but the point is their tactile value and the remains of the day.

Can there still be a uniquely experimental art? Was there ever? Regardless, their interest in film anticipates younger Asian artists turning to video art, including Korean video. Credit them, too, with a fluid space between stasis and change, abstraction and performance. As I left, I passed Gego on the museum ramp, from Venezuela. In light of Korea’s experiment, half a planet away, her wire constructions seemed newly relevant.

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

Who owns European painting, and who owns blackness? Bob Thompson this fall was not the only one asking.

Barkley L. Hendricks returned from Italy in 1969 to recover his roots in Philadelphia and his practice as an artist. For the rest of his life, he could not leave any of those legacies behind. His portraits at the Frick Madison make clear how much he owed to them all. It accords him a space to himself, but he has no trouble claiming more—and I bring this together with an earlier report on Thompson as a longer review and my latest upload.

In a time of diversity in art and a heightened political awareness, one could easily dismiss European tradition as exclusive and exclusionary. Not this African American. Born in 1945, he studied at a bastion of conservatism, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and then at Yale. He taught elsewhere in Connecticut until a few years before his death in 2017. He did not lack for sophisticated understanding or technique. No wonder he liked to call the Frick Collection his favorite museum.

The Frick is my favorite as well, and Hendricks brings home why. A selection of fourteen works from little more than a decade seems larger than that, with nearly full-length portraits taking up a full two rooms through January 7. Out front, its earliest painting reminds me of so much more. Lawdy Mama has a tall frame with a rounded top, the same as a standing saint from Early Renaissance Italy by Piero della Francesca a floor below. Its gold background echoes still older Byzantine art on that floor as well. Hendricks spoke of the fragility and difficulty of gold leaf, and he embraced the challenge.

The title, though, quotes something else entirely, a song by Nina Simone. It pictures a relative of Hendricks, but he was always at home with family, friends, and the streets. He would ask strangers if he could photograph them, with no need to fall back on sketches or formulas. He painted a dancer in quite a step, “African brothers” in Paris, and hotel workers in Lagos, in Nigeria, where he attended a dance festival. They display not empty pride, but command all the same. That opening portrait sets the tone with one arm crossing her chest.

Yet they lean on much more. A triple portrait becomes the Three Graces out of art and myth. The curators, Aimee Ng and Antwaun Sargen, see other parallels in still more work in the Frick by Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt, Agnolo Bronzino, and Giovanni Battista Moroni, whom Hendricks had encountered at the Uffizi in Florence. His show hangs next door to standing portraits by James McNeill Whistler. And indeed the Frick has begun pairing its collection with work by contemporary artists—most recently with Rosalba Carriera at the center of an installation by Nicolas Party. I have my doubts about this use of its resources, but it helps that Hendricks has so wide a range.

Are the parallels empty flattery, of his own art and his sitters? Younger black artists like Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald have indulged, too, in casual portraits with elevated claims to greatness—Wiley with a direct steal from Jacques-Louis David at that. Still, Hendricks earned that flattery the hard way, with his ingenuity and technique. The rounded top of Lawdy Mama may suggest a saint’s halo, and so does her Afro. It gets along just fine, too, with psychological insight and the immediacy of the present. As for technique, gold gives way to monochrome in a stunning variety of juxtapositions.

A triple portrait’s black hat and blue coats have a paler background, while others set against yellow or white against white. A student in Connecticut adapts his street clothes to a jester’s party colors. Either the figure or the background may be flat or nuanced. At least one is seen from the back, neither hiding nor revealing what is at stake. The artist’s wife, Susan, stands in front of wallpaper, blue wainscoting, and a white floor as signs of home. It was not easy, she recalled, to pose in high heels with her eyes closed.

Hendricks, who died in 2017, appeared at the Whitney Museum nearly twenty years ago in a still-controversial show of “The Black Male.” Its curator, Thelma Goldin, gave him a 2009 retrospective as well at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she serves as director to this day. (She contributes the foreword to the Frick’s catalogue.) I leave a fuller account of the artist to my review then, so by all means check it out. It leaves me all the more surprised at how well he gets along with art history and the Frick. Not just those heavy coats and their backgrounds claim both black and white.

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