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To wrap up from last time on a larger home for the Frick Collection, what has changed in all those new square feet (eighty-two thousand of them, should you be keeping track)? You may be tempted to say nothing—and a good thing, too. It would take a remarkable memory anyway to spot the new, beyond a room for drawings.

Could two of the three Vermeers have left that one large room, and could anything else has moved with them? That glass-enclosed corridor offers a clue. It now displays porcelain, as does a room just past the long one, with a surprising clarity of color and representation. They signal a renewed effort to integrate the decorative arts, but as art rather than the highly wrought luxury goods of the Eveillard and Moore gifts just months before.

That second room for porcelain used to hold a standing saint by Piero della Francesca—whose scowl, bearing, and red robe should stop you in your tracks. Beside it hung a painting by Jan van Eyck completed after his death, with the broader strokes of Petrus Christus. van Eyck’s sunlight is as intricate as his city, its urban architecture a tale of suffering and release. Both paintings have moved upstairs. While not imposing order on a seemingly untouchable collection, the second floor does now frame the whole with the Renaissance and pre- or Post-Impressionism. Art itself provides the map.

Reaching them delivers the most startling change of all. A lavish stairwell, unlike a second just past the ticket counter, was there all along, where a museum visit might once have ended. The mansion is that much more one’s own. Is Frick’s daughter coming down soon for breakfast? You can judge better when the restaurant opens in summer, but I suspect not. The rooms upstairs have found a purpose in art, but memories of home are thoroughly erased.

It is not the museum I once knew, only not in the way I expected and feared. After the luxuriant architecture of the old museum, the upstairs rooms seem modest and cold. They have a more conventional symmetry, to either side of twin corridors, in cramped quarters with no invitation to the eye between rooms. They have almost no decorative detail, and the corridors are barer still. They can make art look abandoned by mistake—and a visitor an intrusion. Rather than a museum or a mansion, one could be casing out a New York apartment.

Then, again, architecture can change only so much, and art has a visible and palpable presence all its own. It surprised practically everyone that the Frick Collection looked great in its temporary home at the Frick Madison (the Whitney’s former home and the former Met Breuer)—but a collection this good would look halfway decent on the subway. Bellini’s Saint Francis really could hold a room to itself, and it can hold its place in the mansion now. An expansion is no less needed, and the bareness also signals a proper restraint. Piero, Hans Holbein, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Goya can still send you home in fear for your life. Still, this may be only the start of hangings and rehangings yet to come.

Meanwhile, they bring home the greatest change of all. No longer my private museum, the new Frick is downright packed, even on a weekday. And the crowds may find a map right within that great hall and within the art. Jacob van Ruisdael takes care to paint alternate paths through a wooded Dutch landscape, to let you know exactly where you might go. Vermeer’s woman with a letter holds a pen with its point on the table and a space above that increases millimeter by millimeter, ending in her hand. Imagined or observed, art knows to take their measure.

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

To continue from last time on a larger home for the Frick Collection, I am used by now to museum expansions, and museums are all but obliged to have them. The New Museum, once a fancy designation for one-room installations curated by its founder, Marcia Tucker, is letting its stacked boxes tumble south along the Bowery (a work in progress), and the Met will soon revamp its incursion on Central Park for modern and contemporary art.

A 2015 home for the Whitney by Renzo Piano still looks like a hospital or a prison, but it works very well indeed. A 2019 expansion almost rescues the Museum of Modern Art from its disaster of an expansion in 2004. Piano reveled in excess again at the Morgan Library in 2016, moving the entrance from J. P. Morgan’s actual library to an atrium devoid of art. The Bronx Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Princeton University Museum are wrapping up their expansions right now—and, sad to say, I could go on.

But never mind. I have lost that battle long ago. Museum-goers no doubt deserve a place to eat and an education center—the thrust of a Lower East Side building for the International Center of Photography. Even the Morgan puts out children’s books and crayons in its atrium. And the expanded Frick Collection looks promising enough from the outside. Little above ground is brand new, and additions adopt the same Indiana limestone as Carrère and Hastings for the mansion in 1914 and John Russell Page for the museum in 1935. The garden looks lusher than ever, and it seems only right that the Frick reopened April 17, at the height of spring.

The architects have their priorities, and they are good ones. The same grand old entrance now leads to a larger ticketing area to handle larger crowds, with the restaurant safely upstairs. Better yet, unlike at the Morgan Library, I could then head back from there the old way, to the magnificent indoor fountain and beyond. To be sure, I had better things to see than a fountain, however grand. But I had found comfort there many a time after a walk from the subway. Selldorf Architects and Beyer Blinder Belle could have been thinking of me all along.

I stepped next into the same room as in the past, largely for James McNeill Whistler, and then to its right, where traveling exhibitions have often displaced Thomas Gainsborough. There is as yet no sign of them, although “Vermeer’s Love Letters” is already on its way. Nor is there is a contemporary artist or two to make history “relevant” to newcomers, although the Frick is not above that museum fashion either. Instead, to Whistler’s left, I could walk right into the Frick’s largest room and my most precious memories. There a woman sits for her maid bearing a letter—one of three paintings in the collection, all by Jan Vermeer, that place men and women in a larger world of maps, signs, budding empires, and love. Like her, so much of my feelings about art come out of the Frick, along with this Web site, and I shall try not to mention them all.

That room also has a seated self-portrait by Rembrandt, all but enthroned without possessions, apart from rags and an artist’s imaginings. It has his Polish Rider, which had me arguing for the value of critics, historians, and attributions in keeping the past alive. As I continued to other rooms, I could encounter again Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable, with his uncanny mix of Romanticism and precision—and Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini, with sunlight and the stigmata as a single gift of god. Portraits by Titian hang to either side, from an artist old and young. That Rococo playroom and garden, from François Boucher, still lies beyond, crazy as ever. Even I have offered a token defense.

They could serve as a pocket history of Western art, as textbooks once saw it and as new generations renew it. To help, the Frick has preserved its old-fashioned labels rather than tedious wall text—directing visitors to their phones and Bloomberg Connects for more. To help, too, renovation has included a “skylight project,” like the Met’s but with less hoo-hah, for a healthy cleaning to let in the light. Exterior light itself now enters a glass-enclosed corridor surrounding the garden. For the first time I found myself aware of which rooms face Fifth Avenue and the park. I might have found a map, and I wrap things up next time on where it took me.

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

It’s the perfect long weekend to celebrate this. I have never had a map to the Frick Collection. I never needed one. From the moment I returned to New York after college, it was a place to call home, and now it is back.

It was a place to find myself and to discover art, just as Central Park across the street had served me in growing up as a place to find myself and New York. Not that I shall ever have an actual home like the Frick, a stone mansion with ever so many rooms. Nor should I want one, when the city has so many marvelously adult places to work and to play. But Henry Clay Frick did, and his children could come downstairs in the morning to what has since become a museum for the likes of Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer. Wall paintings transform a room into a Rococo garden in defiance of gravity and Central Park, with a commanding cast in portraits to chastise me for my frivolity. The collection runs from the early Renaissance to the early twentieth century, with so much more along the way.

Now, though, I had to wonder. At last, the Frick invites visitors upstairs, if not for breakfast, then for a proper café and still more room for art. It has emerged from expansion, remodeling, and recovery with almost a third more exhibition space, a larger auditorium below ground, and other features of a modern museum. I wondered if I might need a map after all, and I should not begrudge you if you do. It is a respectful expansion all the same—respectful enough that one would need to look long and hard to know what has moved and why. It has earned uniform critical praise, but still I felt out of place in the old family rooms upstairs—and I tell you why in two posts, starting next time.

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

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet set high standards—for herself, for art, and for America. Her show’s very title sounds unrelenting, and her chosen medium looks unyielding as well.

“I Will Not Bend an Inch,” the Brooklyn Museum proclaims, and she offers nothing as malleable as clay. The museum sets out a shelf of her tools, through July 13, and one can feel them cutting into hard and soft wood alike. Her subjects, like a Congolese and a Cossack, look unforgiving as well. Do not be surprised if they turn out to resemble the artist.

Her very name puts those who encounter her on the spot. It is too late to change what an Old Testament prophet has seen. Her work looks like nothing so much as the chronicle in wood by Elizabeth Catlett at the Brooklyn Museum just months before. All it lacks is the knockout punch from Catlett’s larger than life wood fist. While Catlett lived to see the civil rights movement and had relatives who knew slavery, Prophet’s time on earth, from her birth in 1890, pretty much coincides with a history of modern art. Now if only it felt as free.

Her sculpture stands in one long line at the center of the room, and the museum gives her a time line as well, all but devoid of incident. Mostly she went to the Rhode Island School of Design (or RISD) and made art. She is, though, is not so easy to pin down. Just by gathering her sculpture into a collective history, the display literally takes them off their pedestals. Watercolors render nature sparely, in casual loops, with soft colors for architecture—and one set of towers sways in the wind. Like it or not, it bends more than an inch.

If she ever drew a line in the sand, she stepped right over it. Her busts are not just women, not even close. Like the Cossack, they are also not just black. Their anonymous faces have a particular debt to classical art. In her hands, it becomes be hard to tell the cloaks of ancient Roman statuary from a woman’s dress. Faces are themselves of uncertain ancestry and race, and titles speak of poverty and youth.

Are they gods, emperors, or African American labor? For Prophet, the categories run together, and African Americans have earned their place in history. Domestic labor and everyday human connections bring her closer to the gods. She was herself of mixed ancestry, with a black mother and Native American father, and the show identifies her as (ready?) Afro Indigenous. The closer her busts come to self-portraits, the lighter their hair. The more, too, they resemble masks.

She took an interest in diversity in her life as well. She taught at Spelman, the historically black college in Atlanta, and went to Paris to see art. Critics associate her with the “New Negro” movement, a coinage by Alain Locke, theorist of the Harlem Renaissance. That tight row of sculpture brings out the breadth an contradictions of race in America. All face out, in one direction or other, with much the curled lips and firm stares. They have the room outside Judy Chicago and her Dinner Party, an icon of feminism with its own love of goddesses.

Prophet changed the spelling of her name from Profitt to take responsibility for what she saw, with cause for outrage along with pride and hope. Has she entered history, or can she return to a sideline that Modernism had outgrown? For William Butler Yeats, art always takes the long view. “Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, / And all the drop scenes drop at once / Upon a hundred thousand stages, / It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.” It may yet, though, bend an inch.

If you have not dropped in at the Whitney in a while, now could be the time. You may never again receive such a warm welcome, but beware: you may come away wondering if its welcome is meant for you.

The lobby gallery is always free, already a welcome and welcoming gesture. Give the museum due credit. Its shows almost always focus on emerging artists, too, another gesture of outreach from the imperious art world. Now, though, it gestures in American Sign Language, an unprecedented sign of inclusion—and on a scale all but impossible to overlook. Two enormous red arms are wiggling their way to you. Christine Sun-Kim is something of a gatekeeper herself, as can happen in support of DEI, but you need not speak any one language to get the message, through July 6.

Together, the two arms reach across the gallery and to each other, one inflating as the other collapses. One hand points toward its destination, a niche cut into stone, with a gesture familiar enough to anyone: pay attention, and not just to me. The other wiggles, its palm open and facing down. That gesture depends on ASL for its meaning, a plea for recognition. It could ask to initiate a true dialogue or for you to hold back, to give the deaf space and time.

Which one? Sun-Kim gets three floors of the Whitney, not all free, for “All Day All Night” and what comes to seem a gesture of certainty. She is joined on video by her partner, but as part of the same silent lecture. In works on paper and on the wall, she creates pretty much her own language and never stops talking. Why, one drawing asks, do her parents use ASL, too? Because they are way cooler than your parents, because they love her, and because they understand other visual sign systems as well—such as pie charts, Venn diagrams, and musical notation.

Well, maybe not the part about other systems, but she sure makes use of them, on her own terms. She borrows musical notes for their shape alone, stacked like chairs. Her circles overlap as in set theory, but their placement is meaningless. Her pie charts have any number of data points, but their width is meaningless, too. I borrowed two of her answers to the question about her parents and threw in a third just for fun. I cannot swear that it makes a difference.

To be sure, her many languages extend the welcome, and only a terrible pedant would expect a music or math lesson. Her adaptations show a welcome ingenuity and sense of humor, maybe even artistry. They address what could otherwise be a contradiction, a plea for ASL that in no way requires a knowledge of it from museum visitors. Besides, how nice that she is on speaking terms, so to speak, with her parents. I shall not tell you about mine. Still, the welcome and the humor vanish from the moment one starts reading.

The show’s entire premise has its limits. Sun-Kim is responding to Alexander Graham Bell (better known for the telephone), who campaigned against ASL as isolating and disabling. The deaf should learn lip reading and a full participation in the spoken word. Bell, though, died more than a hundred years ago, and the battle against him was long since won. Besides, he meant well, and the debate should down to the data, like a proper pie chart. It should come down, too, like halfway decent stand-up or performance art, to less of a tin ear.

Sun-Kim has a point, and (sigh) you better get it. Besides science, the case comes down to engaging the deaf on their own terms, as a community of the enabled and the living. And she rewards engagement with her witty notation and those enormous red hands. Charcoals outside the education department could be incipient constellations in an all-encompassing black sky. Get to the top floor, though, and she dominates the conversation with or without her parents. I want to be DEI and not a disabler (and I wrote about the point of political art or, for that matter, sound art just this spring), but art is not just about her, me, or you.

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

Michael Armitage paints refugees on a dangerous crossing. Fortunately, they still have each other—unless that is the worst of the dangers.

For his latest work, he takes as his theme the passage from Africa, a theme that he must take personally. Born in Nairobi, he lives and works in London. Those who know his work will recognize the wild confusion of his narratives and the straight-on encounters in his portraits. More than before, though, that translates into political commitment and heart-felt sympathy, at David Zwirner through June 17. And I work this together with past reports on Elizabeth Catlett in black America and Jacob Lawrence, known for a very different Migration Series, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Armitage himself had a perfectly safe crossing—or as safe a crossing as an African can expect. He came to London to study at its finest art colleges, and he has made a successful crossing to America as well, appearing in a show of black artists at MoMA. He terms himself with a Kenyan Brit, and you can hear the confidence in his cultural heritage. Few are as certain that they can claim both Africa and the West. He paints on Ugandan bark and called his last show, in Germany, “Pathos and Twilight of the Idle,” challenging the uninitiated to spot the pun on Friedrich Nietzsche and Twilight of the Idols. If you feel a certain condescension, so be it.

The show is his “Crucible,” another boast. The Crucible is a play by Arthur Miller about the Salem witch trials, and Africans are dying because of prejudice now as well. Armitage asks to see a crucible as more than a watery journey. Its meanings broaden to the very concept of a dangerous passage and to metaphor. It returns the word to its more common meaning as a test or trial. People, he can hope, emerge stronger and more able to speak for themselves.

He calls a sculpture a near synonym, Trial, another boast of a European heritage. The Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka with a deadly ending, and here, too, individuals are caught in narratives that they may not survive and will never understand. I had not seen the artist’s sculpture before, but he places it first, with priority to its blackness. The cramped space of sculpture in low relief has its counterpart in the familiar space of his paintings as well. They include standing portraits and imaginings, in open waters, neighborhoods of London, and indefinite space. You may have to shift perspective after discovering which is which.

Three boys have found their way to shore at night, beneath turbulent clouds, stars, and artificial light. Should they take comfort in each other? Two of them hold the third, who can no longer to stand on his own—unless they are keeping him from finding escape. Friendships for Armitage are treacherous crossings, too. Sometimes small groups sit side by side, as eerie clusters of green, although flesh tones are normal enough. Shadows on naked flesh take an ominous shape, like skin that has away.

Distortions like these recall the agony in artists like Francis Bacon, R. B. Kitaj, and Lucien Freud. Armitage may have a British heritage after all. And that heritage extends to an all but exclusive focus on narrative and faces. I find that focus conservative and confining, like a test. Still, he has something that they do not, primary colors in daylight and blackness out of Africa. Just remember to rely on one another.

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