haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

To pick up from last time on the future of HaberArts, you will still have my personal museum and gallery guide, my hand-made search engine, and links to pretty much anything that piques your interest. While I converted my home page to a blog in 2002, the site’s core is still the archive of fuller reviews.

Some devote a couple of thousand words to fleshing out what an exhibition or book about art contains and what is at stake, with the corresponding blog post only a disposable excerpt. Others bring posts together as tours of the galleries, starting when anyone could tour uptown, Soho, Chelsea, later Williamsburg or Bushwick, and now the Lower East Side or Tribeca in an afternoon. I rely on them myself, to remind me of artists newly on display whom I had already forgotten. But let me tell you how this came to be.

A native New Yorker, I returned home after college, where I had studied physics, with no prospects. A friend had introduced me to fellow students in the visual-arts program at Princeton, where everyone, it seemed, wanted to be the next Frank Stella—or to explain less than patiently why older art was always a stupid idea. I could not make head or tail of what either one was doing. And I took that as a challenge. My friend and I converted a loft into cheap, spacious, and illegal housing. The entire city lay at my feet for the first time in my life.

I also had a high-school friend who spoke of a course that he had taken at Yale. He introduced me to the Northern Renaissance and to a historian, Erwin Panofsky, whose account of it showed me what patience and insight when it comes to art really mean. I had better make sense of art, and it was an excellent time to try. Museums all had cheap hours (MoMA the entirety of Monday), where I could take just a room or two on a visit, like doing my homework but a lot more fun. There was an upside after all to a minimum wage. Galleries, of course, were always free, and there was so much to read as well.

It was a great time for philosophy and critical theory, and artists were as annoyed, confused, intimidated, and intrigued as I. Some took a class in linguistics to learn about structuralism, only to find that linguistics had long since moved on. I had to move on, too, and fast. Deconstruction and “post-analytic” philosophy were only further background to literature and art. What moved them to the foreground was my first computer, my first email account, and another novelty, social media. They gave me an outlet for thoughts that I had been gathering for twenty years.

I started by posting those thoughts in an online “forum,” where virtual and real friends seemed to take me as the resident critic, even an authority. They urged me to start a Web site of my own. For a time, you could search the Web for Jan Vermeer, for one, and find me among the top two or three hits. That ended when Yahoo gave way to Google, which gives no credit for links within a domain from one page to another, but I was not hoping for attention. It all seemed just a game. For a time, my home page was a quiz designed to teach myself coding while turning people away.

The internal links remained, though, as part of my vision for art criticism. I wanted a body of work about art and ideas, and I watched it grow. If I mention something and you want to know who that is, I had a link to read more. I meant not a monument but a resource, just as it was for me. Theory could be as helpful as any other interpretation. And a review could be not a haughty or giddy list of what do with your weekend, but what artists do with their lives, and I continue next time with what criticism can be.

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

I started to write about art because I had something to say. I have stuck with it for thirty years to find out exactly what that might be.

It has made this the oldest Web site devoted to art and art criticism. By now the site contains millions of words about thousands of artists, from the full scope of art history to contemporary art.

Others have made claims for the death of Modernism and the birth of something new. This site has witnessed the supposed dead and the living#8212;and pondered whether after all they are much the same. It has tried to find a bridge between scholarly debates like that one and livelier reviews about what’s new in and around New York. But can I still have anything left to say? It is not an easy question, and I shall devote this entire week, continuing next time, to asking. It will take sorting out what I have always meant to say and what artists have taught me year by year.

The question is coming hard upon me right now, after ankle replacement surgery likely to keep me off my feet and out of galleries, museums, street art, and parks for up to a full year. I had been wondering, though, on my own. Already I have kept silent about the latest from artists who deserve to be seen and heard, because I had already covered them. Or I have posted links to an older review or two. I cannot promise to go silent for good, but I do expect to be silent for a while and to cut back after that. With luck, the results will be stronger for sticking to what I have newly discovered and what I have to say.

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

Caspar David Friedrich would never be alone as long as he could journey to the forest and the sea. They were all the company he needed, their bare trunks gathering the darkness in winter, their foamy crests the turmoil in his soul. When he faces waters and distant hills, there is literally no looking back.

He could have found his double in many another painting as well—or in the companions his doubles took with them to catch the rising moon. In 2001, the Met had a focus exhibition on Friedrich’s Moonwatchers (in the plural), not its last show of German Romanticism, and I excerpted my reviews of both just this week for you. Rather than start over, then, let me turn briefly to an ample retrospective, again at the Met, through May 11.

Friedrich will never be at a loss for company, but it will never be enough. The men here are anonymous, not the celebrated poet and painter doubling and redoubling the very notion of Kindred Spirits for Asher Durand in America, in 1849. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog , dressed in black and hand on one hip, faces down what he sees, apart and alone, even as his gaze reaches out to infinity. The earth replies with the chilliest of white and uniformly cool colors. Where many a Romantic captures motion and the light, gestures and colors here are barely natural. And their dangerous infinite makes this the Romantic sublime.

Friedrich belongs to a long tradition in German art, going back to pale flesh and moist flowers in late Renaissance nudes and Baroque still life. Friedrich took nature as his subject, but not as a naturalist. Unlike John Constable or Beatrix Potter, he left few quick studies of clouds or botanical species. Like a proper student, he built a reputation in drawing before he even approached painting. The Met opens with local scenery and familiar faces in works on paper, including his a self-portrait. Only then could he test the limits of observation and human understanding.

As curators, Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein make a point of that slippery contrast between the visible and the infinite, the known and the unknowable. For Friedrich, it is also a struggle for the meaning of vision, between the seen and the imagined. And the imagination wins out. A cross set again and again on a rock in early work, much like the wanderer’s tall crag, looks out on a full moon. Sands at sunset become the stage for an allegory of the stages of life.

But what is imagined and what lies just next door? What of a the portal of a church or the western façade of a cathedral? What of an equally grand stone arch? Friedrich keeps you guessing. Facing each, one can feel the same ever-present chill. The show proceeds chronologically and by motif, but Friedrich found his subject and style early on, apart from mistier early skies and the more explicit Christianity, and never let go. So, too, did fellow Romantics like Johan Christian Dahl and Carl Gustav Carus, and their works, a handful also on view, are hard to distinguish from his. For all his virtues, sameness means predictability.

The familiar experience has made him a crowd pleaser. Who can resist warm associations and stark feelings? Who can resist knowing what to expect? Still, Friedrich darkens and colors both brighten and deepen in late work, as if the foreground were itself layered over the whole. His studio window becomes as prominent as what he found on the other side of the glass. The infinite begins with the picture plane and with you.

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

Infinite longing. One expects a decidedly romantic idea of Romanticism or nature after a stop for Caspar David Friedrich and lost souls. It also just happens to define Romanticism for Anita Brookner.

Brookner’s Romanticism and Its Discontents puts the emphasis squarely on the discontent. Her introduction to nineteenth-century French art and letters comes off all too pat and Romantic itself. Still, Romanticism truly deserves a survey as heartfelt and concise as this one. Last time I drew on past reviews of Friedrich at the Metto prepare you for its full retrospective, through May 11. Let me now place him in context of French and German Romantics, with an invitation to read more.

A movement so epoch-making may sound like an easy success. For Brookner, though, Romanticism means dealing with failure—and failing badly at the attempt. Her creators represent as many ways to cope with uncertainty. Some escape into idealism, art, and the Classicism of their teachers. Others look to determinate causes in science and humanity. Most found a hero in Napoleon. Each ends up with hardly more than a struggle, fatigue, and fancy ideals to which he himself puts the lie. Or so goes Brookner’s chilly romance.

Modern critics have opposed Classicism to Romanticism, using more contrasts than I care to remember—linear versus painterly, theater versus absorption, wilderness versus culture, primitive versus pastoral, authority versus community, aristocracy versus big industry, villa versus garden, and goodness knows what else. Perhaps only manifestos, historians, and art critics believe in periods anyway. Rebels against Jacques-Louis David, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot kept the revolutionary ideals of the first, the skepticism of the second, and the irony of the last. Nicolas Poussin and Poussin’s landscapes take Classicism into the Baroque with all its temptations intact, Delacroix paints like a Romantic while proclaiming his classicism, and J. D. Ingres echoes David’s line and idealized virtues while adding electric colors and an arm that manages to grow out of a sitter’s chest. One could debate forever whether Modernism ever outgrew Romantic individualism and a culture of capitalism.

Look again at Friedrich’s lunar vistas or the sea, with a dark clarity still visible in landscape art today. He and his countrymen celebrated not the unattainable, but a world newly at hand. One enters past maps of the lunar surface of incredible precision and beauty. Friedrich knew a little astronomy, too, when he included a ring around the moon. Earthshine, reflected light, makes visible just slightly more than half the moon. I imagine that scientists then would have told me just how much more.

Whatever the world, Friedrich invented it at its most luminous. He takes in a river or harbor scene around 1805—at age thirty-one, with a finely wrought view from the artist’s studio. Later a ship’s mast belongs to Woman at a Window, a painting of his wife from 1822. The mass reinforces the stasis and geometry of the window, shutters, and wall. Nothing else comes close to the deep red and green streaks of her dress seen from behind. Somehow she stands out from the same colors and handling, slightly toned down, in her surroundings.

Is that mix of public and private worlds what really drove Friedrich’s men to the woods? Nature lay close by, even to a city boy—too close by. Progress threatened to uproot nature, just as a massive tree trunk stands torn from the ground and erosion has left a protruding rock to survive the elements. It threatened to break forever the intimate link between humanity and nature. Fortunately, one still has artists and the imagination.

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

Have you missed the lavish retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich at the Met, through May 11? Me, too, until just days ago. If you follow my peregrinations regularly, you know that I have been laid up with ankle surgery since before it opened. I can only hope that I still have time to see a selection of the drawings that made his reputation and the paintings that make him a popular favorite.

I have, however, reviewed him more than once at length in the past. Nearly twenty-five years ago, the Met focused in on just two paintings, including Moonwatchers. I placed them in context of the very meaning of Romanticism, as seen in Romanticism and Its Discontents, by Anita Brookner, the novelist and art historian. And he was a man of his time. A decade later, the museum had an extensive survey of German Romanticism in works on paper, as seen through an open window—or, in the spirit of reflection, the subject of an open window. Allow me then two posts excerpting past reviews, with an invitation to follow the links to more.

Two men gaze through a wood at the moon. They may have turned to the forest for a connection to the night or for the sounds, smell, and light of nature buried in the sweat and toil of day. They could have sought each other’s intimacy, in the quiet of the night—apart from conversation that hardly knew when to stop. They have no weapons, but they could have sought adventure, swaggering in their broad hats and capes, confident in their powers to bring down their prey.

It hardly matters. Earthly quarry come way too easily. These men are in fact students—of the physical universe and the soul, the painter himself and a friend. They have stopped in their tracks, because they seek something farther and less attainable.

Instead of a fox, an idea, or the earth, they have gained clearing, and the moon stops them dead. The painter, Caspar David Friedrich, exaggerates a rise in the wood and distance to the sky with a low vantage point. He heightens the ghostly light with a color and shadow almost out of forest scenes in Bambi, if not out of a German tradition going back to at least the Northern Renaissance and Matthias Grünewald. Like the men but more literally, Friedrich steps quite out of physical space. He puts their motives aside, turning their backs to the picture plane. Now only the painter’s feelings count.

The painting appears in a haunting, well-chosen concentration. To help celebrate a new acquisition, the Met assembles two paintings by the German Romantic, several drawings, and a handful of other work showing his influence. The Frick Collection has shown repeatedly how much more a small show can bring home than many an overblown retrospective, and the Met’s restraint makes a familiar but elusive image fresh and intelligible. It may still run to hard-edged emotional overkill, but it is impossible to forget. If any painting could represent longing for the unattainable, this must be it.

Perhaps it makes sense that Friedrich often looks quaint or cartoonish these days, for all his broad appeal. The Hudson River School artist he most influenced, George Inness, can similarly look visionary or simply escapist. Friedrich did understand aspiration and failure. He knew personally Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who retold the Faust legend. Like Michi Meko today, he felt at home in the dark woods and a stranger in the urban wilderness. Life after Romanticism has had to battle the same issues of public identity and personal perception—with considerably less confidence in humanity and nature.

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

If John Zorn leaves a single image, it is of himself, again and again, wielding a mean tenor sax. It suits a musician who dares to think for himself and on the fly.

He has fronted jazz bands and stretched the limits of rock. He has taken on the rigor and premeditation of a modern composer and arranger, too, from extended suites to bursts of counterpoint. You are as likely to hear him on a sound track as in the concert hall. Just try to pin him down. Just try, in fact, to call him a creative artist, but the Drawing Center shows him thinking in pictures, alongside Ericka Beckman through May 11.

John Zorn does come with a label, experimental music, for a composer past seventy and still in the midst of things. Naturally his scores are often as not for experimental filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard. And his work on paper looks very much like experiments, torn right from the lab, sometimes seen but not often heard. A recent series greets you on the way in with black spatters darkening into shallow pools and stretching into thin, irregular traces as if emerging before your eyes. They look as much like text results as like Jackson Pollock drips, and their technique suggests the laboratory as well. Whether in ink, charcoal, or pencil, it has a collective shimmer, as if lit from within.

If that suggests a certain insularity, he calls the show “Hermetic Cartography,” and do not pretend that you always get it. Hermetic means insular, much as many a hermit is found speaking to himself or to no one at all. At the same time, cartography is mapping, from another tendency in the avant-garde, toward arguing and explaining, and one sketch doctors a map of New England, like a key to the art world. Who can say why? It could be a stretch just to call Zorn a visual artist, and a Wikipedia article about him does not so much as mention it. The show itself relies just as much on ticket stubs and program notes as drawing, like something more insular still.

Still, the shimmer is often real. Not everything works altogether for its own sake, assuming art ever should. A black-curtained room is a dead end, as memorabilia often are. Still, the pools and swirls have the ghostly beauty of a photogram or a medical scan. Do not forget, too, that an actual “rayogram” still belongs first and foremost to Man Ray in Dada and fine art. Then, too, if Zorn’s are not actual direct impressions, experimental art still relies for its success on mind games. Zorn is always explaining.

He is also always in that space between improvisation and formal composition, popular culture and unconcern for a wider public. He is a born collector, unable to put much of anything to use or to throw it away. Often, too, things make explicit reference to popular art. The souvenirs have flatter outlines and color, like cartoons, and at least one refers to sound not by musical notation, but with a word like twang or splat. It also recalls just how much music in a composer’s hand is also an art—and how much notation, too, has its limits. Not everything here is all that beautiful, but then not everything has to be.

Exhibitions continue in the back room with Beckman and “Power of the Spin.” It would be a decent enough title for Zorn’s show, too, doing its best to put a new spin on things. One might well mistake her for more of him. She picks up on his Pop Art, in larger work that looks very much like comic books and collectibles. Downstairs she adds a projection based on a project by Zorn, like a step toward animation. Yet it is also a step toward live action.

It has just two characters, a man in overalls and a woman with green flesh. He is dressed the part for Jack and the beanstalk, while she is undressed for the part as Rapunzel. Choose your myth. More often, though, Beckman embeds her characters in a literal carnival, with art as its rides. An artist of the “Pictures generation” of the 1970s, she has a fondness for narrative and a promise of critique. If her characters are taking risks, the best of Zorn’s appear to explode.

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