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art reviews from around new york

I shall never forget the great age of postwar abstraction—and a pressing need for diversity. I sought out abstract painting when I began this Web site nearly thirty years ago, from the Upper East Side to Staten Island. And I keep returning to galleries that recover women artists from a time when they thrived, suffered neglect, or both.

Could, though, those imperatives collide head on? At least one Chelsea gallery thinks otherwise (and apologies that my obsessions so often bring me there). It opens the new year with women who endured, as “Perseverance,” at Berry Campbell through February 3. The show cannot avoid colliding with itself, but you can feel the impact in your gut. It is also just part of the give and take within abstraction today, and I round out the story next time with Zipora Fried just a few blocks away, as also part of a longer review and my latest upload.

But does it bring what you could never have seen when the work was made—or just another day in the galleries? You know the narrative. A world war brought artists to America and unleashed the pent-up energy of New York City. (Not all that long before Mark Rothko created his dark or luminous abstraction, he painted the subways.) Yet it brought, the story continues, a stifling uniformity. Postmodernism and critical theory spoke often of hegemony, a white male hegemony.

Stories come all too easily. What if there were no typical days in the galleries? Most were showing other things entirely, like portraiture and prewar art. Others were moving on to challenge abstract art—in the name, at times, of its hottest stars and guiding lights. When it comes down to it, the narrative reads today’s scene into lonelier days. Who back then could have imagined countless art fairs, endless money, and the dull uniformity that they, too, so often demand?

The dealers behind “Perseverance” do their best to keep up while looking back. Both are women, but then so were Betty Parsons and Peggy Guggenheim, who encouraged Jackson Pollock to break, literally, through old nostrums and new walls. They include the occasional younger artist, like Susan Vecsey, whose colors of sky and sea bring out the vertical weave of linen. They cannot make space for more self-reflective styles bubbling up when, wise men insisted, painting was dead. But how could they, without spoiling a show of women under the influence? I had to go to Staten Island in the 1990s for the sequel, to Snug Harbor, before a still more eclectic view of abstraction took over in Brooklyn, on the Lower East Side, and in Tribeca today.

The collision of ideals remains. Do these artists bring a near uniformity of gestures or something else again? Were they neglected because they accepted the hegemony, at the cost of originality, or because they refused? Postwar art itself was about the refusal of uniformity, and that brought contradictions, too. It called for not just gestures but signatures, like drips and floating rectangles. Is that because signatures help art stand out—or because they make it easier to sell?

The most memorable painting in “Perseverance” gets along just fine without a unique motif. Gesture for Perle Fine and Sonia Gechtoff brings a depth of color on a grand scale, and Judith Godwin calls her explosive gestures Wham. Not that a more obvious focus is altogether absent. Vivian Springford surrounds fiery pinks and yellow with a loose dark circle, like a nova, while more bright stains spread outward. Alice Baber piles on loose circles of color beneath her white ground, like a lonely crowd. There is more to art than making history.

The show has familiar names here and there, like Lynne Drexler and Helen Frankenthaler, neither with major work. Others seem largely indifferent to standing apart. Mary Abbott and Ethel Schwabacher set their forms in depth in wide-open fields of color that recall Arshile Gorky. Dorothy Dehner gives the steel of David Smith the dignity of true sentinels, while Claire Falkenstein treats his sheet metal, suspended within a cube, almost like tissue paper. If this is derivative, so be it. Connections were what gave the New York School its life.

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J. J. Manford combines a dedication to neatness and order with an almost comic excess—of sunlight, color, and art-historical references. It is enough to put a fashionable property owner and follower of fashion to shame, at Derek Eller through February 3.

Someone like that surely owns the interiors he depicts, at least in his imagination, but could easily run out of space. No wonder, then, that his scene has expanded, a few steps outdoors to survey the property or halfway inside to a greenhouse not for plants but for relaxing in the company of pets and possessions. If that amounts to a transitional space between inside and out, it suits objects that move casually between cultures. It suits, too, objects that may leave you wondering whether to call them posters and replicas or thefts from museums and other collections on behalf of some wealthy customers or the artist himself.

As ever, Manford works in a mix of oil stick, oil pastel, and Flashe, the vinyl-based paint, for tactile surfaces and clashing colors. Paintings within paintings let in the imagined sky, while glimpses outside could just as easily be works of art. Sculpture within a painting includes a colorful African god or warrior that has marched onto a coffee table where a proper collectible could hardly belong. As for the figurine on the sofa behind it, it could be part of a matched set or an intruder in disguise, but it owes just as much to Disney as to the Third World. Is this a sneak attack on the class that buys work like Manford’s or a wish to have it all? Is it a model or a parody of “intersectionality”? I leave the rest of the story to my review from his last show, in 2001, and to an excerpt following here.

As I wrote then, Manford’s painting can change before your eyes from obsessive order to an unholy mess. These are interiors, from people with a sense of propriety and exquisite taste. They would never let ornamentation stand in the way of clean lines and New England wood. They would never overfurnish or leave a dirty dish on the table. Nor would they intrude on a painting like his, not at the risk of upstaging the decor. Even their pets sit or stand on alert.

From there, things do not so much fall apart as burst wide open. In another artist, such alignments could flatten the living quarters into formalism or the decorative arts, calling attention to their cleverness along the way. Manford is not so much punning on life and art as allowing their full colors to show. Abstract paintings within his paintings throb with the light and color of the setting sun. The view out the window becomes a painting in itself. If his compositions grow claustrophobic, one can feel the claustrophobia in the pit of one’s stomach and right between the eyes.

The interior’s collectibles become hard to recognize amid the overflow, but this is not a quiz. He is just admiring how much art can encompass and sharing his own tastes. They are eclectic tastes at that—and more than real-life inhabitants could likely afford. Feel equally drawn to Max Ernst between Surrealism and abstraction, Niki de Saint Phalle with her sexually charged childishness, Mose Toliver with his African American folk art, and Elizabeth Murray with painting flying off the wall? Ready to throw in a vase in the shape of a toucan, a rug with phases of the sun and moon, and a Tibetan tapestry? Make yourself at home.

Home has some other unlikely guests as well. A baby giraffe, poised beneath a painting by Alexander Calder, looks out upon a sun deck, lush grass, a dark mountain, and the throbbing sun. A stegosaurus the size of a puppy, a giant red hand, and a parrot claim the floor. They are just sculpture, right? No doubt, but then the stairs glow with a deep red that must be only natural, too, unless it is not. Paint itself can feel like a murder weapon or startling intruder. As Manford drags his brush across burlap, it brings out a stretch of blue, burning like fresh blue blood.

How can the wood of a chair have deep blue underpainting? Paint’s sheer intensity matters more here than illusion. It could almost be bleeding out from within. Manford works on linen as well as a coarser ground, in oil stick, oil pastel, and Flashe, a still novel rubber-based paint, for their color and raw texture. You may have your reservations about the melodrama of crowded surfaces. Still, animals and abstraction here are equally fierce, in the space of the interior and in its art.

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Around 1730, Giambattista Tiepolo took up Punchinello. Halfway through his thirties, he knew all too well the follies of youth and age, much like the buffoon in Italian puppet shows. And his countrymen loved them all—the puppets, the show, and the follies.

His Punchinello catered happily to their taste for moral judgments and for comedy, and in no time he found himself their go-to artist. He painted the ceilings of palaces and churches not just in Venice, but across Italy and Europe. Still, his work is just half the story of “Spirit and Invention” at the Morgan Library. Drawings and occasional oil studies by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo trace the course of a dynasty. Can you tell father and son apart? That is the challenge and temptation, through January 28—and I work this together with a past review of Tiepolo as a longer review and my latest upload.

The older Tiepolo died in 1770, but his spirit lived on, and so did his projects. He was still a fairly new father in 1730, and his son joined his workshop as soon as the boy was able—and inherited it as well, with commissions and assistants to spare. Late in life, Domenico turned back to Punchinello as well, with new stories to tell. His clowns encounter an elephant, ride an ass in a comic ritual procession, and enter the ebb and flow of Venetian life. They go to the barbers and watch a carpenter and glass-blower in their busy workshops. At last, too, Punchinello is laid to rest. Had the son put his father’s legacy to rest at last as well?

Giambattista Tiepolo all but reversed the old aphorism nothing in excess. (He might have related to another line often attributed to Terence, the Roman playwright, nothing human is alien to me.) He could not stop with one Punchinello when he could cover a sheet with at least ten of them, united in folly and in their conical hats. He may not tell them apart or give them all that much to do, but they are only puppets, after all. For him, too, much the same cupids accompany Greek gods and heavenly angels. They are all, as the titles of many a ceiling work have it, caught up in a tale of triumph and ascent.

New York has had no shortage of Tiepolo, just as Tiepolo had no shortage of ceilings and clowns. It has seen Giambattista Tiepolo in retrospective, Tiepolo in Milan, Domenico Tiepolo, and late Baroque Italian drawings—and it hardly hurts that the Morgan Library owns hundreds of drawings by both father and son. Allow me then, to direct you to past reviews for more. As I wrote back then, Veronese and others in his native Venice composed a world of gods, beyond ordinary human perception. Tiepolo has taken his place wholly in this world, while ennobling it. The wealthy institutions that he served, the church and nobility, saw themselves as similarly fervid and triumphant.

This show adds the restriction to father and son, together and apart. It also has room that a retrospective did not for the years that got things going. Giambattista when young cared as much as any Renaissance model for anatomy, and the Morgan opens with heroic males nudes in parallel strokes of black chalk that define every muscle. Even as Tiepolo came to rely far more on ink washes, an undercurrent of classicism remains. He also cared as much as his predecessors for foreshortening, only directed to new ends. A sketch for a ceiling painting shows its framing walls as well, pointing perilously upward.

In another commission, the heavens take on greater motion as one ascends the stairs below. Yet times have changed, and architecture for figures in flight should make you think of something far lighter in weight, period rooms at the Frick Collection for François Boucher, a close contemporary. Times have changed, too, in bringing things back to earth for contemporary life and comedy. Neither Tiepolo can disentangle the two. For Giambattista, portraits and caricatures are much alike. For Domenico, a monkey looks like a friendly devil.

The son does bring changes. Sketches by the father close in on arms raised and legs thrust out. Figures gesticulate, at rest on a cloud, while the younger artist focuses on floating and flight. Washes intensify, poses look more solid, and stage sets, like those for his late Punchinello, have a clear ground. His belief in human folly looks ahead to the next century and Francisco de Goya. All the same, they crossed Europe together, and the finished ceilings were a product of both.

Domenico never could bury his father’s legacy, because he saw no reason to try. He just happened to have thirty-four more years to discover where that leads. Where he cannot, he just changes the subject. Their shared ceilings carry out Giambattista’s design—and then come only scenes from life, dancing dogs, and the puppet show. In Punchinello Carried Off by an Eagle, the actors ride a boat that the father had used for the Holy Family, but nothing lasts forever, not even the human comedy. With Punchinello’s burial, was Domenico anticipating his own death instead?

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

Martin Luther King, Jr., took his case to the people. He could not have inspired so many had he not, but who knew that he was such a regular guy? Who knew that he was just another part of the black community and its local heroes?

At least he is in memory for Taking a Pass. The civil-rights leader stands beneath the trees in a place that you, too, might like to call home, with a clunker of a car that could not quite bother to fit into the picture. The kids beside him see nothing out of the ordinary in his presence—or in the football in his hand, winding up for a pass. If the March on Washington had not been so huge, the Mall might have made a terrific playing field. For Taylor, the real black heroes are always with him, waiting for him and you both to receive their greatest gift, at the Whitney through January 28. But then a self-portrait can be England’s Henry V from the Tate.

Born in 1958, Taylor painted King only recently, but every inch of his life is as vivid as yesterday. Did he number King among his heroes? Surely, but also the Black Panthers and others who turned to confront a violent nation. And do not forget artists, friends, and family. Besides, like David Hammons, they were often as not one and the same. Taylor’s brother was active in the Panthers in Oakland, before retiring to his family’s home state, Texas, to breed dogs.

They demand a great deal, much as King wears a suit just to play football, and one of the kids shows up in a tie. The car is a spotless white. Huey Newton of the Panthers sits, armed and enthroned in a peacock chair, as in a well-known photograph—and the artist often works from photos in search of heroes, much as in 2010 at MoMA PS1. He also works from paintings, much like Bob Thompson and Barkley L. Hendricks at home in a museum, and he cites as models the social satire of Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, and Francisco de Goya in his Third of May. He poses Eldridge Cleaver after Whistler’s Mother and adapts a portrait by Gerhard Richter to Cassi Namoda, an artist from Mozambique. He numbers whites among his artist portraits as well.

King with a football notwithstanding, Taylor cannot take his heroes off their pedestal. Still, he is not just rubbing it in. He is not, like Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley, making strangers and street people into icons. If anything, work from the 1990s mocks icons and their pedestals, with found sculpture and painting on the likes of malt liquor and cereal boxes. He can face the darkness, in black skin or in death at the hands of the police, and discomfort. A little girl dresses up for her mother, but The Dress, Ain’t Me.

At times he seems almost determined to fit in. The curators, LA MOCA’s Bennett Simpson with Anastasia Kahn, call the show his “B Side,” the more experimental side of the record, but do not believe it. He grew up in California and studied at Cal Arts, where he sketched skillfully and well. He comes closest these days to the casual realism that has become the mainstream thanks to Alice Neel. Still, he comes by his caring naturally. He worked ten years at a state mental hospital, on the night shift.

He has his own way with Neel’s style, too. He makes maximal use of white with seemingly accidental traces. He also keeps his sense of humor. He calls one champion athlete See Alice Jump. Darker, flatter colors pull a painting from 2017 close to abstraction, because (in full caps) The Times Thay Aint a Changing, Fast Enough! Frowning or grinning kids can look sullen or sinister.

He has a knack for taking heroes as friends and friends as heroes. Still, he cannot avoid the temptations of either one. A man at the grill for the Fourth of July is barely an individual, much less a shock. The exhibition stopped me in my tracks just once, with a whole room for the Black Panthers as store mannequins, like a revolution’s empty suits. Still, you can always be grateful for cornbread fresh from the oven. Taylor’s mother made it herself.

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

Where would environmentalism be without architecture? Nowhere, of course, when so much depends on building for a sustainable future.

Nowhere, when planners can build away from endangered species, burning lands, and rising seas. Nowhere, when they can capitalize on urban density to fight suburban sprawl. Nowhere, when everyone deserves easy access to mass transit, parks, wilderness, and gardens, for greener cities in a greener nation. Nowhere, too, when buildings themselves can reduce their carbon imprint and their shadow. It could have the added payoff of more affordable housing without cookie-cutter houses. They could become responsive to nature, responsible to nature, and self-regulating.

Well, surprise, for environmentalism is not just a vision of the future: it is a vision of the past. The Museum of Modern Art finds “Emerging Ecologies” going back at least seventy years—and peaking long ago. Yet it stakes that claim on ignoring almost every one of those needs for the future. But then it is really asking a different question altogether, through January 20. When it sees architecture as essential to environmentalism, it means to the birth of environmentalism and its very existence, not its potential.

The curator, Carson Chan, takes the long view. A time line starts with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the New Deal program that provided electricity, flood control, and economic recovery—and, as its next date, the dropping of the atom bomb. If that already sends mixed messages, “Emerging Ecologies” ends soon after 1970 and the first Earth Day. It has no room for stronger federal regulation, greener lifestyles, cleaner skies, and a growing recognition of climate change today. It has no room, too, for the grayer architecture that long ruled. It has no time because it looks back to an alternative that barely existed.

Did environmentalism really peak long ago, and did architecture inspire it rather than the other way around? A show subtitled “Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism” opens with Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright, although almost all their urban visions never came to be. It can hardly help doing so, because the public cannot get enough of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum and Fuller’s utopias. It can hardly help it either because they were on to something, and others knew it. Aladar and Victor Olgyay, who used vents to ensure a “comfort zone” of temperature and humidity, worked in 1956, just ten years after Fuller’s Dymaxion Dwelling Machine. Eleanor Raymond and Mária Telkes designed a glass Sun House, a fitting sequel to Wright’s 1937 Fallingwater.

Still, that is slow progress, and it should set off alarms. Wright had designed a unique luxury home in western Pennsylvania that few will ever see. Fuller’s proposed machine depends on a mechanical nightmare within a harsh aluminum dome. Soon enough, his more inspiring geodesic dome became the U.S. Pavilion to an international exposition, Murphy & Mackey were adapting it to a Climatron in Saint Louis, and Eames Office with Kevin Roche and John Dinkaloo were constructing a National Fisheries Center in the nation’s capital. They, too, though, can seem more a self-indulgence than a model for today. When the Cambridge Seven imagine a rain-forest pavilion like a tropical snow globe, they are not preserving nature but enclosing it.

When Fuller himself proposes a glass dome over Manhattan, it looks merely silly. When a group called Ant Farm hopes to open a “dialogue” with dolphins, it may sound like fun. When Michael Reynolds conceives of a six-pack as the “basic building block” of a beer-can house, it is simply chilling. It is nothing less than marvelous when Carolyn Dry designs a port city close to dolphins, based on coral’s natural growth. It is nothing less than essential when Wolf Hilbertz outlines the restoration of a coral reef. Still, sometimes humans should know when to leave nature well enough alone.

Environmentalism thrives on data, and architects can help collect it. Ian McHarg and his students make a long-term study of the Delaware Upper Estuary, and Willis Associates has its Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis (or CARLA), while Fuller’s World Game is no more or less than a world map. Still, that map takes up as much space as a football field. Environmentalism also thrives on science, and NASA or Princeton’s G. K. O’Neill has every reason to think about space colonies. Discovering the laws of physics will take long observation up close. Still, can taking the human footprint into space seriously reduce it on earth?

The problem is not an excess of idealism. It is what counts as environmentalism. The story really does end too soon. Other shows have called for “Space Between Buildings” and garden cities, but not this show. If anything, it calls for suburban sprawl. James Wine does with his Forest Building, and so does Malcolm Wells in going underground, even if he covers his suburb with soil. Protests have their place, like those of Anna Halprin, a choreographer, but they are not green architecture.

Maybe the problem lies in taking them too seriously. These are indeed idealists, and their environmentalism has less to do with design for a healthy future than with inspiring. Eugene Tssui creates images worth remembering with his wind-generated dwelling. So do Ralph Knowles with his “solar envelope” and Glen Small with his “green machine,” of trees on a tiered roof. I have never seen a model of Fallingwater as large as the one at MoMA. More than anything that came after, it takes my breath away.

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Why did J. P. Morgan assemble the Morgan Library? It was not just because he liked to read—although the three-tiered shelves and walkways of his private library, still a highlight of the larger public institution today, could make anyone a reader without so much as opening a book.

He collected to show his humble deference to scholarship and art. He could show his piety as well in just what he collects. At the same time, he was boasting of his wealth—a wealth of knowledge, power, and cash. How appropriate that two shows now focus on Morgan’s Bibles and “Medieval Money.” They and a smaller show of “Early Modern Herbals,” or age-old guides to the healing properties of plants, also single out a century or two when all these things came to be. “Morgan’s Bibles” takes special pride in them all, with an emphasis on Morgan himself, through January 21.

Of course, the same questions arise with collectors today—all the more so when museums (yet again) exhibit a private collection. (Yes, that means a gift coming up.) How are collectors, even one as savvy and sensitive as Spike Lee, distorting the role of museums and the art scene? That includes the Morgan’s own turn to recent art. How refreshing, then, to return to a time when J. Morgan was just getting started and could not stop. “Morgan’s Bibles” sticks largely to what he himself collected and its role in the collection to this day.

Not exclusively, mind you, and the Morgan (which has previously displayed The Crusader Bible) does not make it obvious when his choices end and others begin, but close enough. It also has an expansive view of the Bible. It includes psalters, of course—not just the Psalms and prayers taken from the Bible, but also a setting to music on behalf of John Calvin. Who knew that the stern Protestant preaching original sin wanted you to sing? It has drawings and prints merely because their scenes draw on the Bible, but then how much older art does not? A fine porcelain of the Holy Family comes close to the viewer in proximity and scale—enough to put anyone in the place of the shepherds or the wise men.

Artists as different as William Blake and Filippino Lippi depict Job close to despair. His “comforters” gesticulate cruelly for Blake, dutifully for Lippi. A drawing by Anthony van Dyck displays his command of anatomy and vitality, even as Jesus is as grisly as death. The show has among the largest of Rembrandt prints. He bathes the crucifixion in a shower of light, even as the thieves on the cross and the mob on the ground sink in darkness. He shows the mocking of Jesus as a multi-tiered display of statues, spectators, heroism, and terrible abasement. Rembrandt’s scratchy, compulsive line has never been more evident.

Still, an expansive show makes sense given the roles of the Bible in real life. Morgan had more than one role as well. Even while he nurtured his library, he served as president of the Metropolitan Museum, doing far more for its growth than many a curator today, much less than the work of presidents overburdened with fund-raising today. He also considered himself a devout Episcopalian, which did not in the least stand in the way of showing off his love of wealth. Some books are leather, enhanced with clasps, crystals, and other finery, some embroidered. Here you can tell a book by its cover.

His scholarship appears from the start, with a Bible that divides its pages into blocks for Hebrew and other languages. Scholarship appears, too, in German and English editions. The Morgan has famous translations by William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale in the 1500s, the Great Bible commissioned by Thomas Cromwell for Henry VIII, and a King James Bible first edition. They testify to two more roles for the Bible as well, reaching our and reaching kings. Embroidery was largely limited to a guild with privileged status, but not entirely. Anyone with a needle and thread could, at least in principle, give it a go.

Like other illuminated manuscripts, these also testify to a role in art history. The delicate realism of a Bible from Tuscany dates to the 1490s, before a Renaissance in sculpture and painting. As late as Peter Paul Rubens, artists were still copying miniatures as well. Always, though, Morgan was out there collecting. Photo shows him in Egypt’s desert sands and taking lunch in a Persian temple. Whether the message of the Bible reached him I leave to you.

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