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art reviews from around new york

Stéphane Mandelbaum died at just twenty-five, in 1986, of a hit job. Yet his life was only as messy as his art, at the Drawing Center through February 18.

If his retrospective were a crime novel, there would be all too many suspects. The curators, Laura Hoptman and Susanne Pfeffer, speak discretely of a criminal syndicate, but he himself barely skirted the law. He trafficked in the black market for art and got caught trying to steal a work by Alberto Giacometti. He hung out in all the wrong places, only starting with clubs and cafés in Brussels. The dark night scene in Montmartre for Pablo Picasso seems tame by comparison. His drawings themselves bear damaging testimony.

They start with fellow denizens of that scene, with unfailing sympathy. It extends to young white men and black women in racially charged surroundings. Titles identify them by first name, because his art was on a first-name basis with everyone. He calls them collectively Lolitas, with the humor turned at least partly on himself. His pencil swoops casually across the page, staking out faces and poses alike in its long traces. He works fast, and there is no going back.

Mandelbaum drew what haunted him. That, at least, is a given for a compulsive artist, but it raises more questions than it answers. He drew what he loved, in faces out of his favorite haunts and dearest imagination. He drew, too, what he hated and feared. But which was which? What were his nightmares, and what were his dreams? An artist who blended self-portraits with Nazi imagery may not himself have known.

Who can say what he left to his fevered imagination? Raised as a Jew, Mandelbaum heard of the Holocaust from a grandfather who survived it in Poland and whose brothers did not. A book, a gift from his father, helped him follow that family history, but in reverse, like a personal journey into the past. Its title says it all—Souvenirs Obscurs d’un Juif Polonais Né en France, or “Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France.” A series of drawings takes off from the book, by Pierre Goldman, but with embellishments. He cannot disentangle observation from confession and confessions from nightmares.

He draws Nazis like Ernst Rohm and Joseph Goebbels, the latter in the midst of a terrifying speech that Mandelbaum could never have heard. He draws the filmmakers he admired most, including those he could never have met. Naturally they, too, made their name with subject matter on the edge, like Pier Paolo Pasolino, Luis Buñuel, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He draws Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, dressed for a rendezvous in cold weather. He sketches Francis Bacon, whose insistence on finding character in the cut of a face anticipates his own. He leaves open, though, what counts as realism and what as distortion, as Bacon never could.

A solo show extends from the main gallery to the smaller one behind it, and the ample space only raises more questions. Just what kind of artist was he—an outsider before outsider art entered the mainstream, the graduate of a proper arts education, or a willful heir to Bacon? After the café drawings, he crowds more and more onto a sheet. That includes text fragments that are all but illegible, collage like the face of a Nazi on a porn star, a self-portrait as Geule Casée (or “Broken Face,” only more vulgar in French) and swarms of pen marks like armies on the march. He may never earn a greater reputation outside Belgium, but he provides testimony to a fatefully short life. The real killer may have been the twentieth century.

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Life would be tough going, even if people did not put so many obstacles in their own way. One could try to clear them out by, say, spending less time alone with devices, viewing nonsense like mine. Sandi Haber Fifield delights in them—the ones she observes and the ones she creates in photocollage.

A barrier for her can stand in the way of knowing others, like the shadowy figures in her work. Yet it is simply part of life. It is the visual equivalent of memory, at Yancey Richardson through February 17.

Nature presents obstacles enough, from stony landscapes to dense undergrowth, and Haber Fifield brings them into sharp focus. The accumulated fragments in her collage create their own depth of field as well, layer upon layer. Her point of view shifts easily between face down and face front. One can feel oneself approaching things to push them aside. One can feel oneself, too, stepping back to find one’s footing. Her considerable white space may or may not help.

That is not to mention the built environment. Not that she necessarily distinguishes it from nature, no more than James Welling or John Houck—and I work this together with last week’s report on Welling and an upcoming one on Houck as a longer review and my latest upload. Potted plants with bare branches stand just outside a garage because her cuts place them there, but they could just as easily have grown there or landed there as home decor. A work crew must have piled those irregular gray stones. A man stands face to face with an entire wall of vegetation. Like the plants and stones, he may never find his way inside.

Much else, too, has no sense of home, only of barriers. That includes the one-piece plastic fencing that people love to hate—on top of her own thin strips of wood. A police cone has acquired colorful stripes and presides over torn branches in full leaf, like a memorial or celebration. If that suggests a death or absence, so do the silhouettes of boys at the beach. Do not, though, lose hope, for they are taking a break from exertion, and flowers, too, appear in silhouette. They are, the show’s title has it, “The Thing in Front of You,” and that is not the same as the thing in itself.

Mark Alice Durant, in the show’s catalogue, compares her attention to that of a well-known painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the epitome of Northern Romanticism. A man stands on a rock, back to the viewer, looking out on distant mountains and foggy seas. Still, Haber Fifield (no relation to me) is not so much commanding as creating, and the layers keep coming, defying distance. Brutalist architecture comes at you corner on, one side in shadow. Her angled cuts echo the building’s edge and her edge-on point of view. Once again, obstacles are just another word for experience.

Covid-19 brought its share of barriers to entry, but it gave her time, she says, to think. For the rest of us, what was there to do but take up knitting? And what was there to do after the lockdown but pick up the camera and get going? It may sound like a cliché, but Rachel Perry, at the same gallery, did both. She has not fallen for female stereotypes, but she makes the most of them. They become a window onto her studio.

Knitting for her is not folk art but Minimalism. And Minimalism, in turn, takes shape from the business of art in the present. Perry broke down cardboard boxes, delighting in the odd shapes that others would take to the trash. She also photographs herself with her work, in a floor-length dress of many colors, in diagonal stripes. She also keeps finding ways to hide her face, with her back to the camera or a mirror between her and you. Barriers take many forms, and they belong to artists that you may never see.

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James Welling can make photography look like painting or, for that matter, pretty much anything else you like. He cherishes the marks of a photographic print all the same.

Photos for Welling come in all kinds, but they always make an impression. In close-up, orange lilies flare out in all directions, not least toward you. Streaks of yellow and purple might almost have come from a loaded brush, but alongside the precise outlines and vivid green of spores and leaves. They are in a great tradition of painted flowers, but they speak not of death within nature, but of life. Unlike painting within that tradition, from Flemish still life to Cecily Brown to this day, they do not serve as a warning, apart from a warning about painterly or photographic accuracy itself, at David Zwirner. If you leave thinking instead of silkscreen flowers from Andy Warhol, another artist with thoughts of death, you would not be far wrong.

Waves splash up against the picture plane, but they take their color from photocollage. They have the texture of bare canvas or of rocks along the shore. Like a classic seascape, more texturing brings out the blue of the ocean, both up close and up to the horizon. Its horizontals echo the familiar format of a landscape, and sure enough this is a painter’s territory, the Maine coast that drew Winslow Homer to set up his studio and to look again to the sea. The gallery compares it to the gray sea for John Marin as well. It is Welling’s usual UV-curable ink on aluminum nonetheless.

Wooden double doors have their own peeling paint, in a saturated blue that should surely have faded. They, too, insist on the picture plane and the human activity shaping nature. Welling’s landscapes are a built environment, from Cubi, sculpture by David Smith on the Yale campus, to windows set back within concrete cubes for the brutalism of a government center in California. I mistook the layered horizontals of piers and background architecture for an ocean liner. The scenes range across the United States, but they keep returning to the artist’s worktable, often as not outdoors. Stones and fabric in his studio have harsh lines and deep folds that all but insist on brushwork, but they dissolve into the dots of a screen print.

Welling’s mind games are never less than visual, and they give equal attention to the photographic process and to real things. He calls the show his “Thought Objects,” through February 10. They invite one to rethink the artist’s thoughts and the medium. He starts with photographs, but each print is a distinct object and a distinct step in the process as well. One can easily imagine plated loaded with ink pressed and dragged onto aluminum. One can see why he appears at MoMA in a show not of photography but of late modern prints, in collaboration with Jacob Samuel.

Welling has appeared in all sorts of contexts, as well as in frequent shows at the gallery. He has indulged in abstraction with black quadrilaterals and direct impressions on sensitive paper. He has been part of what Walter Benjamin called the Arcades Project, what the Met called “The Poetics of Place,” and what a gallery called “The Photographic Object.” He has appeared in ghostly color negatives and in washed-out blue in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He comes closest to his experimental side here with prints that leave much of the paper untouched. All you get is traces of photography that only thus find their way into prints.

It is easy to take him for granted, and (as you can see from the sheer number of links), I often have. It is easy enough, too, to dismiss his large prints as pretentious, and they are not. Old standards of beauty, it turns out, get along just fine with the harsh scrutiny of UV light. You can start to ask something that you might have overlooked: in that moment between camera work and the print, is the photo an aim, a process, or a thing in itself? It takes all three to create a thought object.

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To pick up from last week on women in abstract art, you may have lingered a long time with Georges Seurat, but never over a single dot. Yet he did. How else to create the luminous color of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte), without a mathematical formula in his head or digital assistant by his side?

He brought the same precision and stillness to works on paper, trusting again to his hand and eye. Zipora Fried asks for your trust, too, as she extends his Pointillism to verticals, set side by side in the horizontal bands of her abstract art. One can imagine her counting off the thousands, at Sikkema Jenkins through February 3.

Fried does not object to calling it painting, although she works not in oil, but in colored pencil on board. She is, after all, in a long tradition of translating precision into luminosity, from Jan van Eyck through Claude Monet, Georges Seurat and Sunday on the park with Georges, and beyond. Up close, you can hardly escape a mark’s physical presence. Standing back, you can still see colors mix within a single stroke, while relishing the glow. Bands may blend into a single field of changing color, like Monet’s late waterlilies without a dot in sight. You can see the work again when you get home, online, where one can easily mistake it for color-field painting, with poured paint on stained canvas.

Fried is not quite in their league, but then who is? Her compositions are as intuitive as her marks, and ceramics in black and white are more irregular still. When it comes down to it, the Israeli-born artist is still finding her way. I first caught her ten years ago on the Lower East Side, when she built color from triangular tiling, and again two years later with freestanding paintings descending to the floor, stained on both sides. Her first bands of color had the distinct fields of geometric abstraction, with verticals as thick as matchsticks. Now they gleam and flow.

Time is on her side within a work as well. Once again, Seurat’s dots have become verticals, each one taking time. Do not even think of counting. The bands encourage one to experience her work in time, from left to right, and many change color midway. One might contrast them with Seurat’s stillness, but they are still about color coming to be. They are large works at that in a large room, inviting one to step close and allowing one to step back.

They also suggest landscape, with their most memorable color a deep blue. Others introduce a forest green, like the “dark places” of Tariku Shiferaw. As one title has it, I Know My Way Through These Woods, and it is also a boast. “Whose woods these are, I think I know,” Robert Frost wrote, but forget the uncertainty of “I think.” I thought, too, of Dante “on the middle of life’s journey” and on the way to hell, “within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” What was lost may be found.

Fried shares the gallery with text painting by Kay Rosen, with its own certainty. For Glenn Ligon, an African American, text is curt and demanding, because so is America. For John Baldessari at Cal Arts, it is long on truisms and on the verge of making sense, because so is Postmodernism in LA. For Rosen, it denies the human hand while exploiting paint to send carefully mixed messages, and I leave a fuller account to a past review of her Chicago Minimalism. Still, anyone who partly blacks out a warning against censorship and writes HAT OMEN ANT has tricks up her sleeve. Women, it appears, want more than the letter W and the comforts of abstract art.

Landscape can take Fried only so far. The lowest color field might be a fiery red or yellow, as if unable to burn into the sky. Again, the point is the emergence of color in abstract art. How do ceramics fit the picture? Even now, I am not sure, but long black drips in their white glazing have a parallel in her handmade verticals, while here, too, shapes hint at representation rooted in abstraction—from urns and architecture to missile heads and weary bodies. In a show subtitled “Jubilation and Melancholia,” they may serve as a chastening reminder of the melancholy.

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To pick up from last time on “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” at Frick Madison, the paintings faced each other, as curated by Xavier F. Salomon, as if the wall across from Bellini’s had been waiting all along for a companion. Marcantonio Michiel saw them both at the house of Taddeo Contarini as well.

It is his account that gave Giorgione’s its attribution and its name—and there the mystery begins. Attributions to this artist have long been all over the map, and not all historians accept this one. My old textbook does not so much as mention it. If I accept it, it is in no small part because a mere imitator would have smoothed over its enigmas.

Michiel notes that it took Sebastiano of Venice, known today as Sebastiano del Piombo, to finish it, which only adds to the puzzle. One would never know that Sebastiano came to specialize not in landscape but in portraits, with monumental poses, fleshy faces, and fine clothing. Then, too, why did the painting need him? Giorgione spent a good two years on it, and he quit as much as a year before his untimely death in his thirties. He may have seen death coming and found a need for philosophy. But then he was among the more philosophical of painters all along.

One might not know it from his reputed life as something of a libertine, but he was never fully of this world. His Madonna has a throne so block-like and so high that no human could ascend it. That sleeping Venus in an unlikely landscape seems not just dreaming but a dream. Perhaps his best-known painting, The Tempest, has three figures in a landscape, a nursing mother and a soldier, as unexplained as the one now in New York. What, though, of the philosophers? They, too, could be dreamers or the dream.

Surely we can trust Michiel that they are indeed philosophers. He could have heard it from Contarini, who would have known from his own commission or the artist himself—unless, of course, he bought the painting from a third party. But then Michiel also gave Bellini’s painting a title that the Frick still uses, which is preposterous. Francis faces not a desert but Italian sunlight and fertile land. Still, the three men look philosophical enough or at least sufficiently detached. But whose philosophy?

For a while observers identified them with the three Magi on their way to the Holy Family, a misplaced piety that Giorgione never knew. These men are not bearing gifts like the Magi—apart, perhaps, from a geometry lesson. The young geometer could be Pythagoras, and his body does fit neatly within a right triangle. (Remember the Pythagorean theorem?) But then Pythagoras is usually shown older, and if the other two men are his teachers, they ignore him entirely, not to mention one another. Besides, while the one at right has the full beard, robe, and dour expression of a proper Greek, the one at the center wears a turban.

They could be the proverbial three ages of man, or they could be philosophers from three traditions—the natural sciences, the East, and the ancients. The cave, if it is one, could be Plato’s cave or the darkness that Renaissance science was beginning to dispel. For now, though, philosophy can explain only so much. It leaves open the enigma of nature and culture, as does painting in oil. You will just have to consult the landscape and the three philosophers for yourself. Unlike Francis, they will not be with New Yorkers for long.

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Not even bright sunlight can dispel the mystery of Saint Francis in the Desert at the Frick. How could it? The painting’s glorious sunlight is its greatest miracle.

It infuses the landscape, as painting before Giovanni Bellini never could. If Francis here is receiving the stigmata, or wounds of the crucified Christ, as the story goes, light may also be the bearer of that miracle. Not just scholars will be arguing over it for a long time to come. As it is, no one can agree on what Bellini depicts or even the time of day. The saint, in legend, wrote songs while renouncing worldly goods for a life in nature, and his open mouth may express ecstasy, wonder, or the moment before singing. No other work at the Frick Madison has had its own room.

For now, though, he has a still more mysterious companion in paint, on loan from the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna. A visitor to a villa in Venice in 1525 described it as Three Philosophers, but was he right, and which three? Whatever are they doing together, out of doors and far from home? What did Giorgione, its likely painter, owe to philosophy, and what was his contribution to the painting of sunlight, shadow, and landscape in oil? Did he in fact paint this one? Scholars have been looking for answers ever since, but you will just have to find your own in “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini,” through February 4.

Giovanni Bellini completed his Saint Francis before 1480, with clean lines and clear skies that mark him as a painter of the early Renaissance. Giorgione painted Three Philosophers thirty years later, in 1509. That, the richness of his colors, and the fullness of his forms place him in the High Renaissance in Venice. Titian, its greatest figure, entered his workshop and completed at least one of his surviving works, a Sleeping Venus. Bellini was part of the city’s leading family of painters, along with his father, Jacopo Bellini, his brother Gentile, and his cousin, Andrea Mantegna. Giorgione was a stranger to Venice when he arrived from a small town to make his career.

Still, they seem made for each other. They may belong on paper to different eras, but they share that special moment when oil paint was transforming art, by allowing that richness and fullness. Jacopo himself may have introduced it to Venice, decades after Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin made it the medium of the North Renaissance. One can see it in Saint Francis in a tree, where the colors run into one another and the oil still seems wet. One can see it that much more in the warmth of Three Philosophers. One can see it in everything from the loose brushwork of a philosopher’s short beard, to leaves emerging from darkness seemingly as one looks, to the translucency of a church or villa in the middle distance, to the blue of distant mountains.

The two paintings seem made for each other as well. Both depict figures in a landscape—not so much to contemplate nature as to take part in it. Nature, in turn, responds to them. That tree from Bellini leans toward Francis from across the canvas, as part of the miracle. In a minority view of the painting, after a folk tale, bright morning sunlight has appeared before dawn, calling a shepherd in the distance to his work. Two trees intertwine to frame perfectly the central of the three philosophers.

In both, the actors appear at the right. Tall rocks form natural stairs and a natural home. Francis emerges from one cave mouth, while the leftmost of the philosophers, seated, faces another. At least tradition calls it a cave, but if it is only a rock face textured by vegetation, its darkness is interesting enough for him and for me. He holds a mathematician’s or artist’s tools, a compass and a triangle, to take its measure. Francis faces only an ass, as stoic as any philosopher, and the light, but that, too, is enough.

In both paintings, the figures are decidedly apart from civilization and ever so close. Francis has an entire city, behind a fence and across a stream, with no need for other signs of life. Giorgione’s translucent church or villa seems to arise from its place in the landscape like a vision, with another an indefinite distance behind it. Both buildings give way to far-off hills, covered with greenery and dissolving into blue. Some historians see the color, which to me looks natural, as unexplained, perhaps a further miracle. Once again, nature and culture respond to each other.

And then there is the shared mystery of what is really going on. Francis has spread his arms, out of obedience or in joy. If he is indeed receiving the stigmata, though, where are the rays that in other depictions pierce his open palms? I devote a longer review (and one of this Web site’s first) to the painting’s mysteries, and you can read more for the whole story. I argue that sunlight itself is the source of the miracle—and, by extension, so is painting in oil. That and, for now, natural light from a Marcel Breuer window at the Frick Madison—and I turn next time to the three philosophers.

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