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.