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art reviews from around new york

In October 1849, a smart young Parisian set out to see the world. Then twenty-seven, Maxime Du Camp got himself a camera and learned to use it from the best of the best, Gustave Le Gray.

Then he grabbed a close friend, Gustave Flaubert, and headed for Egypt and the Middle East. He returned after a year and a half with two hundred negatives of pyramids, ancient temples, mosques, and now and then signs of life. The oldest of the old and the newest of the new, in technology and in art—what could better suit a man confident in his talents and eager for attention. He might not mind one bit to see it all again as “Proof: Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa,” at the Met through January 21, and I work this together with an upcoming report on the ancient Near East, Byzantine art, and Africa as a longer review and my latest upload.

What, though, was Du Camp after, civilizations or something larger than life? What, for that matter, was a camera to him, the latest art form or a tool of scientific clarity? He had no shortage of support for them all. He had the encouragement of France’s Minister of Public Instruction, who urged him to remember photography’s “uncontestable exactitude.” Once back home, he got to work with Blanquart-Evrard, France’s first commercial photographic press. Its crisp, cool shades of black and white echoed both that exactitude and a popular art form, lithography.

But then why choose? Just a generation after Napoleon’s aspirations to empire and so soon after the invention of photography, the pyramids and the camera alike still felt novel and still inspired awe. Critics dismissed the prints as “vaporous” or derivative of contemporary prints, but the public disagreed. A publisher selected more than half the images for a book, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine, et Syrie—the first in France with photographs as illustrations. Du Camp’s career as a writer and journalist was off to a good start, and he never looked back. He traded the camera for a decent sofa.

Not that everything went smoothly. Chemical salts on paper negatives could not stand up to a long journey and desert heat. Fortunately, the same wet treatment that produced those cool tones also revived the negatives. Fortunately, too, they did not stop Du Camp from making his own “proof prints,” possibly in conjunction with Le Gray. They have entered the Met’s collection, which naturally prefers them. It relishes the greater warmth of their pale yellow-gray.

You can decide for yourself, for the museum displays both versions of quite a few. I like both the sharpness of black and white and texture in yellow-gray skies—even while knowing that they may have come about in the darkroom by smearing more chemicals over the skies to remove signs of contemporary life. The exotic for its own sake was just too appealing for Du Camp to pass up. People appear only as props to set off the amazing scale of temples, pillars, statues, and windswept sands. Flaubert himself shows up just once, and he seems to have slouched onto the scene rather than posed for the camera. The novelist had his own uncontestable exactitude in prose, but Du Camp never so much as mentions him in an account of their journey.

Not that the Met withholds criticism. It sees the photos as condescending to a foreign culture, but I am not so sure. If anything, Du Camp seems largely indifferent to culture, whether ancient or Islamic. The show has just a few prints by others, and he just cannot match them. They bring their structures closer to the viewer, for a sense of art and life. He has something else in mind—density, detail, and mass.

He likes a residential neighborhood in Cairo for its balconies and box-like gardens, not its inhabitants at work, at prayer, or at play. He likes scenes divided between bulky structures and utter ruins, but without a moral. He likes to center a panorama on an ancient dome or minaret, but they pop out of nowhere, more as landmarks than signs of foolishness or faith. One might never know that anyone saw the Middle East as a holy land. As he travels down the Nile to what was then the Nubia, in present-day Egypt and Sudan, he finally gets fully into ancient ambitions, but he wants them all for himself. He alone holds the proof.

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

Crown Heights lives in the shadow of present-day gentrification, its former glory, poverty, and art. The Brooklyn Museum stands just blocks away. But who knew that, well before, it was the first free black community in the United States?

An artist remembers, and a video looks to this past Juneteenth, when, in celebration, skywriting traced its borders. Their five hundred acres look still more evocative in prints. One could mistake their white arc against the blue of the sky for abstract painting. Sandy Williams IV calls his installation, more modestly, 40 Acres, and it also includes a display case for the broken promises of Reconstruction—not to mention General Sherman’s promise to freed slaves of forty acres and a mule. A lot of voices are talking, all at once—part of the cacophony in the 2023 “Open Call” at the Shed, through January 21. For all its pleasures, it could have one longing for the clarity and quiet of open sky.

An open call should mean other voices, and the clamor of this one is welcome. Amid the ghastly luxury of Hudson Yards, it brings almost exclusively people of color, roughly half of them women. The Shed is finally learning how to use its cavernous spaces for art. It does not always have exhibitions rather than performance, apart from the art fairs, with their endless partitions and limitless display of cash. Here it sets out all but one work in a single wide-open floor, well lit and without boundaries, so that the artists really do speak to one another. Sill, as with Sandy Williams, a more confusing clamor arises from within.

Sometimes it arises from the demands on the artist, in trying to find herself. When Cathy Linh Che looks to Vietnam, she sees her parents after the fall of Saigon. Many refugees ended up in camps, where, improbable as it sounds, Francis Ford Coppola hired them as extras for Apocalypse Now. Che’s video, in conjunction with Christopher Radcliff, has three channels for three sources—her parents, the movie, and a documentary recreation. The sources and channels almost never line up, adding to the din. Still, family voices speak directly to you.

More often, the clamor arises from the demands of history. Minne Atairu places a bronze figurine, after West African art, on a mound of red soil with more red circles around it. The bronze refers to the looting of antiquity by British colonists, the circles to ones that surrounded an entire community, Benin, in present-day Nigeria. Yet Atairu relies on 3D printing, and the work stands poignantly on its own. So much for history. The show has long labels for each artist, and you will need them, but you may also wish that you could throw them away.

With Atairu, the labels deepen the work. That is not always the case. One hardly needs to know more when Bryan Fernandez paints Dominican refugees at home in Massachusetts, with spacious interiors and wide streets. Now if only immigrant life were always so sunny. One hardly wants more when Jake Brush runs on about his obsession with a pet-store owner on TV. A little goes a long way.

At times the demands feel more like a homework assignment than art. Lizania Cruz supplies a weighty one at that, about American plans to invade Spanish territory in the Caribbean, with Frederick Douglass the commission’s assistant secretary. A chandelier topped with orchids hangs close to the floor for Jeffrey Meris. Now if only I believed that its flowers stood for bullets and its lights for fireworks after the killing of George Floyd. An open wood frame with suggestive additions could pass for a dome by Buckminster Fuller shorn of its top. I shall just have to accept that Armando Guadalupe Cortés replicates an arena for cockfighting and masculinity in Mexico.

As so often, some of the best art leaves one uncertain how to take it, with or without words. I may never know for sure how a box of black leather, a wall of white fabric, and an empty coat rack for Calli Roche relate to death, ecdysis (or a casting off), and “the birth of the self.” I shall, though, remember a figure emerging from or sinking into the blackness. I could never have known that Luis A. Gutierrez reproduces a worker’s strike and a corporate massacre at United Fruit nearly one hundred years ago. After all, the screenprints bathed in paint attest to forgetting. And yet the three rows of unstretched canvas will catch anyone’s eye from anywhere in the room.

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

“Manet / Degas,” this past year’s blockbuster at The Met, shows two great artists learning from and struggling against each other. Even more, it shows their course from the Louvre to modern life.

What would it take to go the rest of the way, from Post-Impressionism to modern art? Could it have taken two more artists working side by side? “Vertigo of Color,” in the museum’s Lehman wing, follows Henri Matisse and André Derain to a fishing village in France for a single summer. It marked a powerful convergence, celebrated or derided as Fauvism, but just as interesting is what it leaves out, through January 21—and I work this in with my recent report on “Manet / Degas” as a longer review and my latest upload.

Just who were the Fauvists, or wild beasts? That fishing village, Collioure in 1905, looks remarkably serene. Sailboats lie still at their berths, their masts dipping like bridges across white, untroubled waters. Fishermen go quietly about their work, leaving deep blue traces on the shore. One can see why Henri Matisse called his most ambitious painting back then Luxe, Calme et Volupté (after Charles Baudelaire), with an equal emphasis on all three terms. His wife, Amélie, sits in a blue and white kimono beside the water, as if the drama of life had come to a perfect rest.

Or were the beasts the artists themselves, and was the wildness their art or the light? “The nights are radiant,” Derain wrote, “the days potent, ferocious, and victorious. The light bears down on all sides with its immense shout of victory.” The show’s title puts Matisse first, because he will always come first, but the show itself opens with facing walls for André Derain. Daubs of red, yellow, and orange daylight cover the ground and a wild green enters the sky, like Pointillism for an artist too amazed to connect the dots. Yet he seeks stability as well, in the horizontals of the horizon, the shoreline, and the meeting between trees and earth. He finds it, too, in the detachment of a high point of view.

Yet things quickly intensify, as each artist paints the other. The shadow beneath Derain’s chin divides his face between flesh and pale green, while the shadow beneath the other man’s eye could have scarred him for life. Matisse himself is consistently the wilder beast, with color for its own sake in a deeper space with a logic all its own. Their titles alone draw a contrast—between Derain’s care for the everyday labor of sailing and fishing, and Matisse’s for landscape, mountains, and the joy of life. He has an instinct for generalization from this very moment. It may come as a surprise, in the show’s third section, to discover that he painted Amélie outdoors on the spot, but he did.

The show wraps up with an extended postscript, for still life and portraits. A young sailor by Matisse could not conceivably get back to work without tempting those around him with his colors and curves. The section also takes the artists, if only briefly, into 1906. Derain brought what he had discovered to the sobriety of London at dusk. Both exhibited in the fall of 1905 in Paris. The Salon d’Automne set that year aside for Fauvism.

Yet that, too, leaves something out: the Salon counted Maurice de Vlaminck and others as Fauvists, too, in what had become not a summer’s impulse but a movement. It leaves out as well Matisse’s major works, such as Luxe, Calme et Volupté and the still greater color clashes of Woman in a Hat. Both exhibited at the Salon, but one would never know it here. The Joy of Life was soon to follow, as was the most startling of all, the portrait called (with good reason) Green Stripe. So was his ultimate breakthrough, starting in 1909 with Red Studio, and so was a very different meeting of the minds, rivalry with Picasso.

The curators, Dita Amory with Ann Dumas of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, leave all that out for a reason: they seek a point of origin in a pairing and a place. Matisse, they note, had been to Collioure before and would come again. Derain may have loved the night, but he never returned. Origins, though, have a way of receding into myth. This is beautiful art, but it stops short of the origins of Fauvism—or of modern art.

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

This has been a good year for sculpture as a high-wire act, but Ruth Asawa had a way of bringing it back to earth. Together with my earlier report on high-wire sculpture, it is also a longer review in my latest upload

Like Gego, she worked most often in wire—suggestive of the modernist impulse to reconceive sculpture as “drawing in space.” Yet she could not stop drawing everything that she saw in every medium that she touched, from what she called “potato prints” to a bentwood chair in felt tip and ink. Now the Whitney devotes an exhibition to nothing but drawing, as “Through Line” through January 15. The title could refer to her approach to sculpture, but influence ran both ways. It took sculpture into lightness and drawing into mass.

Like Gego, she worked outside the mainstream, the first in Venezuela and Asawa in San Francisco. One could almost blame Bay Area art for her obsessive touch. Both, too, were displaced by World War II, Gego as a German Jew and Asawa in the internment of Japanese Americans. She must have felt a return to art as a return to freedom, and she later attended a bastion of breaking bounds, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Still, she kept her eye on detail, like fish scales, the pores in a cork, or the veins and outlines of a leaf. She cared way too much to let go.

Wire can come as an airy rebuke to the unbroken welded steel of sculptors from David Smith and Alexander Calder to Mark di Suvero, Tom Doyle, and Joel Shapiro. An artist simply tied her wire to hold it together. Still, sculpture for Gego can also serve as a model for architecture in 3D and in mass. For Asawa, sculpture emulates the human form, with bulges like hips. It also has an inhuman vertical symmetry, bringing it closer to abstraction. So does folded paper between drawing and sculpture.

Born in 1926, Asawa grew up on a family farm in California, near dirt roads that already must have taught her to look down. Black Mountain College encouraged her interest in origami, but her teachers had higher aspirations. She studied math with Max Dehn and a vision of the future with Buckminster Fuller. She patterned receding circles after Merce Cunningham in dance. A 1989 video shows her still learning from movement as plain as breathing. Most of all, she said, Josef Albers taught her to see, but her abstract art shows the influence of his devotion to color and nested squares as well.

She also worked in the college laundry, and she used ink stamps meant for sorting as tools for drawing. It was the closest she ever came to conceptual art, but already repetitive in the extreme, one bed linen or shirt after another. Later, with kids in school, she picked up on the pleats in their clothing. The curators, Kim Conaty and the Menil Drawing Institute’s Edouard Kopp, speak of the found and transformed. They also arrange the show by themes, although I have trouble telling them apart. Still, it suits an art so determined that it barely changes from her return to California to her death in 2013.

She loved dance, but not as a collaborator among friends like Robert Rauschenberg. She was instead a lifetime learner, and she learned from everything. Her forms within forms include tree rings in the regions redwood forests, but she was just as fond of plane trees in the city, in Golden Gate Park. For Asawa, it gets hard to separate nature and culture, no more than fish scales and laundry stamps. Other sections of the exhibition speak of rhythms and growth patterns—patterns that she could have discovered or imposed. Maybe both at once.

Max Beckmann returned from World War I in his thirties, a mature artist and a broken man. His service as a medical orderly had ended prematurely, in metal and physical collapse, but his success had only just begun.

He found a ready market for his portraits in the freedom and sophistication of Weimar Germany. He found a subject, too, in the degradations he had witnessed and could not escape now. The Neue Galerie sees just eight years as a key to his more iconic later work. His mythic narratives arose, it argues, from the pleasures and poverty before his eyes.

New York got a good look at Beckmann in 2003, on what was just his most recent museum retrospective. One could call it political art, I wrote then, but his allegories never quite reveal their key. One could call it German Expressionism, but he himself would not, and his images rarely give up their sober colors, solid outlines, and mythic past. One could almost call it Modernism, but the tortured narratives, thick bodies, and grim faces scorn such experiments as well. A more recent exhibition took Beckmann into exile soon before his death. With your indulgence, I leave a fuller account to my reviews at the time, with more on his style, images, and career.

The Neue Galerie, in turn, offers not a survey, but a substantial correction, through January 15. It gives space to prints and drawings, at least half the show’s one hundred works. That is not a failing, because they were a big part of his output. Subjects could sit for them quickly and gain less costly access to his allegories, almost like the public for graphic novels today. And Beckmann responded to demand with large prints. He also, it turns out, was not just darkening his line with the medievalism of woodcuts. At least as often, he took to drypoint for quick, light hatching—finding echoes in the shocking skin tones of his paintings.

He could not let go of crushing memories. He sketches a morgue, a hospital, and open latrines. Nor could he stop looking. Cripples and beggars lay splayed or hunched on the street. Prints show the rising class that he deplored and with which he identified—those who sat for his portraits and attended the same supper clubs and carnivals. From past shows, you may know his early bathers after Paul Cézanne or later Vikings on a voyage of conquest. The wealthy, it turns out, could always rent a boat for the day.

It could not have been easy to enjoy each other’s company. You may remember Beckmann’s subjects as larger than life, himself included. Here, though, they pack the picture plane, with the lowest often upside down. It is only a step from an early Descent from the Cross to a carnival act. They hardly acknowledge one another as well—not even Adam and Eve at the temptation, where their tempter looks less like a serpent than a wolf. Jesus gestures to his followers as if putting them off.

Color comes as a corrective, too, to typical accounts of so dark an artist. It also came with success. One can see why he became the go-to guy for portraits. He does not have to flatter the new leisure class, not when he himself could aspire to a felt intelligence and self-possession. Maybe that is why they need few attributes, but Beckmann needs his tuxedo, cigarette, and horn. Art itself must have lifted him out of a breakdown.

He began teaching at the academy in Frankfurt, in 1925, and exhibited in Mannheim with the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Had he distanced himself from Expressionism or given it a lasting model, and what kind of “objectivity” could comport with his growing interest in theosophy? He still had to face the collapse of the republic. Yet the exhibition comes to an end well before the Nazis came to power, confiscated his art, and sent him packing. By then, it is hard to distinguish his Family Picture from his Dream. He had long since survived boredom, banality, and his own private hell.

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

Back in museums with the new year? I, for one, had forgotten so much. Just for starters, I had forgotten the glorious yellow in Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder at the Met.

Or had I? The Museum had closed its galleries for European painting for the Skylight Project, replacing the glass in each and every one. Half reopened in December 2020, and my experience of them began with just those fields of wheat. How much has the illumination improved, how much was I merely primed to look for light and color, and how much of the credit goes to Bruegel alone? Even now that the rest has reopened, I cannot say for sure, but the collection looks great all the same. It also looks at once classic, tendentious, illuminating, and confusing—and I pick up from where I left off in 2020, so by all means check out my longer report then as well as this one.

If you are expecting natural light flooding the galleries, you can only be disappointed to see thousands of bulbs behind the thousands of new panes of glass. But then, the Met is nothing if not controlling, and they seem just right for European painting. They bring out the depth and warmth of Bruegel’s yellow. They also bring out darker woods by Peter Paul Rubens in the same room and some startling curatorial choices. So why look up? Look around you—and not just for the mutual flattery of art and light.

As the leap ahead from Bruegel’s Mannerism to Rubens in the Baroque suggests, the rehanging in 2023 is more provocative than ever. The provocations have changed, to be sure, but not by much. The Met has had three years to rethink its choices, but it is telling the same story. Its account of the Renaissance now begins with “faces,” from both Italy and Northern Europe. One could almost forget how different the two were in style, purpose, and media. One might not so easily forget the double portrait by Filippo Lippi in Italy, with the solidity of his teacher, Masaccio, and a meeting of the sexes at a window ever so close to home.

More provocative still are the themes, again one to a room. As present times require, they describe art as instrumental. Not just one Madonna but two by Giovanni Bellini, early and late in his shift to painting in oil, fall under “Trade and Transformation in Venice—and so does the pain in a Lamentation by Vittore Carpaccio. “Faith and Love in Venice” has room for a more otherworldly love, in the eerie light of Savoldo. Even with Peter Paul Rubens, in “Flesh and the Spirit,” I leapt right to the spirit, for Saint Francis adoring a Holy Family so perfect that it excludes Joseph. I would have admired an independent Dutch nation in “The Patriotic Landscape,” but I was too busy with the variety of skies and worldly pursuits.

We are talking race, class, and power in a proper postmodern way. Does it matter that the prize portrait in “Portraits and Power” is not of wealth and power, but of Juan de Pareja, the slave whom Diego Velázquez set free to become a painter? Did Giambattista Tiepolo include blacks in his busy heavens? It is a game of Where’s Waldo to find out. It might be best to take all the rooms as a game, asking you to guess the theme. Please do not criticize yourself if you fail.

One last provocation is easier to ignore. Museums these days make a point of modern and contemporary art, like the Met itself with its new hanging for Korean art. Almost halfway through, I thought that these galleries had escaped that fate, but no. Pablo Picasso in his Blue Period turns up with El Greco, Salvador Dalí with Spain, and Max Beckmann with Francis Bacon on the way in. None look the better for it. A “focus gallery” for artists in their studio has room for Kerry James Marshall, Elaine de Kooning, and more.

Still, all is not lost, not with a collection like this. The Met has reined in the worst as well. It now as clearer divisions by time and place than in 2020. Just as much, the drawbacks can become advantages. Taking away separate wings for the Renaissance translates into a smooth arc from the origins of landscape and illumination to the real thing. The Baroque becomes not just a rebellion, but also an evolution. And the themes challenge you to retrace that evolution.

The return of European painting is not just a provocation. It is also a recovery and a relief. One may never feel close enough to Rembrandt in a room the size of a football field, but a full wall for Jan Vermeer is something else again. One can also appreciate the span of European art. It has room now for the Americas, in the eighteenth century, in a room that (surprise!) opens onto the Met’s American wing. A room later, both wings contain musical instruments, but each has a music of its own.

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