haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

People remember Consuelo Kanaga for her sense of community and commitment. I remember the lonely eye behind the camera and the beauty of what she saw. Can either story bring her back into the mainstream of modern art?

Wherever she went, she found a movement in which she could believe. She had already made a name for herself in San Francisco in Group f.64, but she left for New York in her twenties to hook up with Alfred Stieglitz, her friend and mentor, and to join the Photo League, a cooperative that cared as much about social as creative causes. The Brooklyn Museum opens her busy retrospective with a community at that, through August 3. A brief introduction sets her alongside an impressive roster of photographers, all of them women, who shared their progressive politics and took photographs of one another. You can see why Kanaga is known today mostly for portraiture, most notably of African Americans. Yet you may hardly notice she is there.

As the show’s title has it, she was out to “Catch the Spirit“—the spirit of her sitters, the spirit of her times, and the spirit of the left. Yet the first image that may catch your eye as you enter is of lower Manhattan without a person in sight. It looks south with the Brooklyn Bridge nearly lost in a mist but light rippling down the water and spots of light piercing the morning air. She had an esthetics of control, from the large and then medium-format camera with which she began to her techniques of dodging, or burning a print with touches of light, and, every so often, touches by hand. Alfred Stieglitz, of course, had his own gallery, which enabled him to spread the word about modern art. And f.64 took its name from the sharpest setting on the camera back then, to capture every detail.

That small opening room itself suggests a dual or divided commitment. It includes Berenice Abbott and Imogen Cunningham, with their painterly photographs of the “new woman,” as well as Tina Modotti, who made mostly portraits (and sat for many more), and Dorothea Lange, with her memorable images of poverty and the New Deal. Born in 1894 (of Swiss ancestry, her Spanish first name notwithstanding), Kanaga was still going strong enough to seek out the artist community in Taos in 1955. That same year she contributed to The Family of Man, the photo essay by Edward Steichen. She photographed a mother and her children, just as Lange’s best-known image showed a migrant mother in 1936. She Is the Tree of Life to Them, Kanaga called it, when idealism still spread.

That division was not simply ambivalence, but a necessity. She started as a newspaper photographer, for the San Francisco Chronicle, but opened a portrait studio to make ends meet. Ironically, it has overshadowed everything else, enough to leave her all but forgotten. Even so, her style gives substance and unity to the whole. On the one hand, she contributed to The Daily Worker. On the other, she created purely abstract photography the year of her death, in 1978.

Not surprisingly, her portraits often run to creative types and to blacks. She found both in Langston Hughes, here at the center of the show’s largest section. He poses in profile, meticulously dressed. But then her portraits have much the same bag of creative tricks when it comes to the common man or woman. She loves wide eyes, hands held to the sitter’s cheeks, and shadows darkening a sitter’s brow. She was asking to recognize a subject’s dignity.

For all that, her commitments were as eclectic as ever, because the tree of life demands no less. She quickly switched to a smaller, more portable camera, bringing her artistry to small prints as well. Still, she was never a documentary photographer or street photographer, because she had no interest in spontaneity. She took to the rooftops, for a New Yorker’s favorite sight, the multiplicity of exhaust vents, just as her view of lower Manhattan had no people and nowhere to stand. She still traveled, to North Africa and Venice, closing in on the basilica cathedral of San Marco. Naturally she prefers the intricacy of its architecture to the commonality of its public square.

She has paid a price for her poses. They can become predictable and perilously close to hokey. Still, even the sentiment is heartfelt, and it can never erase her eclecticism and commitment. Are the folds covering a woman rags or flowers? Are young women leaning toward each other in seeming amazement strangers or twins? For a moment, the only spirit that matters is theirs.

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

Candida Alvarez had a habit of speaking of herself in the third person. She Loved to Dream, a title went. She Went Round and Round. She was that Girl Ironing Her Hair.

But who was she? That girl going round is multiplying her arms like an anatomical study or a deity. Maybe a true artist would aspire to both. That girl born to Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn had to decide whether to iron her hair or to take pride in not being able to keep it straight. The dreamer may have wondered where to look to find her dreams. At El Museo del Barrio across from Mestre Didi, she may hardly know whether to look up close and personal or off into the distance to “Circle, Point, Hoop,” through August 3—and I bring this together with a recent report on Didi and Brazilian art as a longer review and

Alvarez must have taken Socrates seriously when he asked followers to “know thyself,” but she could not have found it easy. Born in 1955, she came of age just when critically acclaimed artists were refusing to try. Remember the “Pictures generation“? They were making pictures, not confessions. They and others were putting painting and art institutions to the test. And then there was this kid from Vinegar Hill near Dumbo, a child of the projects, not so near the action but unable to let go.

She could speak, too, in the first person. Identity was newly part of the picture, too, for women of color in the arts, and she had a breakthrough in 1989 with Soy Boricua, “I am a Puerto Rican American.” Inset to the upper left of a seeming abstraction is a child, black skinned and wide eyed. Look again and that image, after a family photo, becomes a larger portrait’s left eye, a dark color her left, more colorful passages her hips. She asked to know abstract painting and not just black abstraction inside and out. She made all the right moves and got her MFA at Yale in 1997.

That painting is one in a series of diptychs, one panel above the other. Colors change abruptly across the edge, and acrylic stains sink right in and shine right out. So do bright reds speckled with thicker paint, for She Wore Red to the Senior Prom. Elsewhere Alvarez gives up color completely in favor of black or shadowy grays dotted with white. She is out to connect the dots. As her brush curves freely across the surface, she is also speaking through symbols, and who knows what they represent?

In truth, she has no firm set of symbols, just an urge to let painting speak for itself. She experiments with Flashe, the rubber based paint, and a weave so thick that her canvas might be a net for the unwary. It is also her “air painting” and a way of letting light pass through. She is always improvisational, with smears on the surface and kitchen graters here and there on the floor. She calls an early series her hybrids, and never mind if you cannot say hybrids of what. As yet another title has it, Wish Me Luck.

She finds an anchor throughout in modern art. Body fragments evoke Surrealism, while Minimalism returns in black and white. Sparer paintings with the grain of wood as ground recall Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The show’s title work recalls the modern mantra of point, line, and plane. Still, she is the Puerto Rican telling stories and the New Yorker heading for the prom. She appeared before at the Whitney in “Puerto Rican art after Hurricane Maria,” and it is all Nueva York.

Not that Alvarez appears all that much. She herself may find it hard to follow Socrates, and her frequent shifts make it hard to pin her down. The curators, Rodrigo Moura and Zuna Maza with Alexia Arrizurieta, proceed more or less chronologically and by series, but the attempt defeats even them. Still, both her stories and her colors keep their shine. Mary in the Sky with Diamonds pays tribute to her mother-in-law, and the barbs in her circle of string, nails, gouache, and wood still have their bite. In a collision of cultures, she could know herself, family, and the Beatles.

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

To wrap up from last time on Jack Whitten at MoMA, what, though, is the subject of his experiment? If he keeps changing, is there a constant to his art—or something he has been missing all along?

Either way, there is a lot to see. Whitten has the entire sixth floor, reserved for MoMA’s largest exhibitions. White latticed partitions for drawings bring them closer to materials, too and to the paintings. A huge central room holds more than one series all by itself.

The curator, Michelle Kuo, makes the case for an artist with many interests. Whitten found success early, with a 1994 show at the Whitney, and his influence extends to the broken tiles and mirrors of Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim today. His many directions mean nothing less than a greater ambition. Any painter who thinks that abstract art encompasses activism and music is already thinking big. And anyone who thinks that it translates into all of western art and a science experiment is thinking even bigger. Those deep black paintings see stars.

Thinking big comports with Whitten’s one obvious constant, working big. It connects to his first loves in Abstract Expressionism and Mediterranean wall tiles. And work only grew. A triangle in honor of Malcolm X reaches to over feet in width, but the single largest is the tribute to 9/11, whose central image could be the Great Pyramid. Why? Puzzles like that abound, not always to the work’s advantage, but something big is going on.

A less obvious constant denies the whole question of his departures. With each new series, Whitten builds on and challenges past work. A late shift to ceramics recalls the painting for Invisible Man well before. Cuts recall a razor blade embedded in paint at its center. Ghostly images in black recall some of his earliest experiments, in abstract photography. They are passing through an unknown space, still finding their way.

They speak of the fate of invisible men, which points to one last constant. Those many histories from politics to music are his own as a New Yorker, a southerner, and a black. Whitten cultivates the tension between African American history and a history for all Americans. So does Whitten’s sculpture, inspired by folk and African art. It would be a new history, of grief and grievance, refuge and restitution, but such is the point. It would also be art.

Whitten has paid a price for so often changing his mind. I myself cannot always justify his departures or his returns. There are more luminous abstractions than his and more pointed tributes to the past. Not many, though, and they stand out at a time when diversity so often demands blind self-affirmation. Surely Whitten has better things to worry about than taking credit. After so many years, he can make his own totems.

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

How do you paint an invisible man? When Jack Whitten paints his homage to Ralph Ellison, it is his Black Monolith, and his imagined portrait is black and nearly five feet tall. It is black enough to create a mask that not even Whitten can penetrate, which is saying a lot.

Of course, he would not be up to the challenge without Invisible Man, among the most haunting works of American fiction. Ellison’s invisible man is very much alive every time someone looks between its covers. Nor is it merely a pathology in the mind of black man in a basement with too much to say. It is a reality, it asserts, that a black man can never escape as long as white America chooses to look the other way. Unless, that is, white America chooses to look and sees only its fears. Unless, too, a creative artist stakes out his own presence in sixty years of work, at MoMA through August 2—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review, in my latest upload.

That inviting and imposing face stares out from the entrance to Whitten’s retrospective, and he throws everything he can at it, including molasses, copper, salt, chocolate, and rust. The work contains broken eggshells, too, consistent with its broken tiles and mirrors, for a wide-open white background to a colorful work of art. If it is a rough assemblage, he is not hiding the damage. And if its materials are sticky, he was already well into his career in 1994, and he planned on being around a long time. He could return for inspiration to enough black and white Americans to keep you on your toes the whole way. He could also plan on being first and foremost an abstract painter.

For Whitten, persistence gave him the power to look back at both painting and America. He rang the changes on black abstraction, along with such artists as Sam Gilliam and Melvin Edwards. He lived through the fall of the Twin Towers and paid tribute to that, too. He took art into the digital era, with toner for his black. He was only, as the show’s title has it, “The Messenger,” but with a message he insists others hear. He kept starting over until others got the message, too, and so did he.

He made it easy. He worked in familiar genres, including spatters and stripes. He made his studio below Canal Street, where he could see Ground Zero and share the memories with anyone. At the same time, he made building a career anything but easy and invisibility almost inevitable. He abandoned figurative paintings and his homage to African Americans just when abstract art was giving way to critical thinking, conceptual art, and diversity. He kept changing just when a growing market for art demanded a signature that sells.

Invisible Man is tormented and angry, and Whitten is neither. There was always too much new to learn and to see. He was working class through and through, the son of a coal miner and seamstress in Alabama. Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, shares its very name with a process for making steel, but his parents were determined that he be the family’s first to attend college. He went as a premed, but dropped out to make art. Imagine him at just twenty in 1960, arriving in New York.

He found friends easily, from Willem de Kooning to Romare Bearden and from Abstract Expressionism to African American art. He had already thrown himself into the civil-rights movement. He could be an activist by day, a museum-goer on weekends, and a regular in Brooklyn jazz clubs by night. His brother was a jazz musician himself. His mentors taught him, as Edwards said, that painting was a form of improvisation but in forms inherited from the past. He and his wife summered in Greece and Crete where art and myth go back a very long way.

He dedicated much of his early work to his influences, which to him meant people. Other drivers were light and color, and they pushed him away from narrative painting. After a start with a loose haze, he used successive layers to blur the boundaries between horizontal stripes and to create a greater radiance. He favored orange and other departures from red, yellow, and blue to insist on the light. Materials were the greatest driver of all, and horizontal incisions run the entire width of a painting, leaving the stripes in low relief. He could make the cuts with a rake or a comb.

Whitten liked acrylic because he could layer it—and because he could make it dry slowly or fast. He could apply it to plastic sheets that could become the painted surface, even after he peeled them away, much like Beatriz Milhazes in Brazil. They become that much more visible when he abandons stripes for splashes of acrylic, for at once the free layered geometry of color-field painting and an underlying single color to the entire canvas. Much the same materials drew him to abandon color for black and white. He served as artist in residence at Xerox, where he experimented with toner. One can think of his entire career as an ongoing experiment, and I continue this review next time with why he kept changing.

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

I kept things short last time on John Singer Sargent at the Met, because he has been a subject, for both me and museums, so many times. But do follow the links to more, and here I offer an excerpt as an introduction.

When “Sargent Paints a Child,” the subject of a 2004 show at the Brooklyn Museum, adults hover everywhere. They are the parents—most often mothers, of course—putting on display for all to see their love, their duty, or their glamour. They are the unseen fathers, men whose wealth commissioned full-length portraits even for their sons and daughters, men whose status in society demanded it.

They are the adults these children were to become, shaped by a life of privilege and their few moments indeed away from its spotlight. They are the adults their parents expected them to become, carrying on roles and responsibilities known by heart. They are the adults the children wanted or feared to become, almost from birth. They are the actual young adults, reveling in the discovery of increasing freedom and sexual magnetism. And then there is another adult, Sargent himself, the self-styled man of the world who understood when a sitter’s name—and his own—turned on pushing those roles to their extreme. He is seeking out and questioning the shrinking space left for innocence by late Victorian culture.

That space resonates today. Think of the endless baby pictures passed around by digital camera and the Web. Then think of the constant assault of sexually charged material that kids see everywhere. Think, too, of the sheer proliferation of images, so that consumer choice becomes a choice of what role to play. Sargent could have been the first hipster, without ever setting foot in Brooklyn. He practically dares one to look behind the scenes—only to find that nothing is there.

As for Impressionism, he had neither the subject matter nor the technique. Where Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Claude Monet gave expression to a new middle-class leisure, often their own, he preferred summers in the Alps. And for the painter who adapted Impressionism for Americans abroad, he all but eliminated its heart—the construction of space and light through color. He does not set pigments side by side, for optical mixing. He washes colors into one another, alongside those dazzling whites, to get whatever hue, intensity, and darkness he liked. It transforms Impressionism into theater.

He grounds sitters in their social class, but he takes away any solid ground beneath one’s feet. A strong, frontal light flatters a boy, but also flattens him. Fluttering, red brushwork on the wall behind thrusts him unnaturally forward, and it accentuates his looming shadow. In a frontal portrait, a girl’s delicate white dress, the decorative wood paneling behind her, and her fixed stare right through the viewer make her float in front of the canvas. She seems doubly haunted, by the childhood she is leaving behind and by something more ghostlike in her future. But then too much finish was always a betrayal of Sargent’s art.

When adults turn up, the multiple centers of attention can become serious conflicts of interest. In a birthday scene, one sees first the dark, ill-defined shape of the father. Only then does one notice the mother, massive and dominant, cutting the cake. Finally one spots the child, off to the side, blowing out the candles, one year older now and lit from below by the flames. Remember as a kid holding a flashlight below your chin? Growing up is spooky.

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

She has “the look of experience.” Henry James was writing about a savvy society columnist, but he could just have well have meant the man who painted her, John Singer Sargent in Paris. Each competes for the inside track onto society, high and low.

Now the Met tracks the years guaranteeing him a place in both, through August 3. It shows him still in his twenties but no less sophisticated and already a fixture in demand.

It was, James wrote, “a masterly rendering,” but you may remember a very different artistry. Emma Allouard-Jouan, a close friend of Sargent’s, is “slightly faded and eminently sensitive and distinguished.” Who knew that those terms all go together, and who associates them with so flashy a painter? Or does his surface flash always comport with something more? Only her face with its deeply shaded eyes emerges out of the darkness. She looks not so much worn as sober, with a working woman’s clothes, a journalist’s keen eye, and the elusive setting for a life.

Sargent arrived in Paris at just eighteen, in 1874, and you may think you know the story of an American in Paris well. Raw talent learns from his European betters, generous in their encouragement and unforgiving in their criticism. Sargent had particular luck in a mentor, the self-styled Carolus-Duran, who insisted on the study of Diego Velázquez. It taught Sargent minimal underpaint, near photorealism in charcoal, and commitment to portraits in the company of artists, writers, gentlemen, and kings. A less talented student would have floundered in the face of so many irreconcilable demands. Instead, it kept his mind open to the fitful pursuit of modern art.

Sargent could never quite embrace Impressionism or a newer art. He was born too soon and to all the right people, and he never did fit my tidy story. Raised in Florence to American parents, he came to Paris a seasoned traveler. Even so, he could hardly stay put. The curators, led by Stephanie L. Herdrich, take him to northern and southern France, Naples and Capri, Morocco, Boston, and beyond. His languid male models may leave one as uncertain about his longings in another way as well.

But then there are more than enough versions of John Singer Sargent to go around. If those versions include classical technique, racy female and child portraits, and fashion, all the better for him. It has given him New York shows of charcoals, caricatures, the artist’s creative circle, landscapes, and the influence of Spain—all within the time of this Web site. Excuse me if I largely leave you to past reviews for more. This artist who would try anything once and comport with anyone. And then he kept looking.

There is no explaining sheer talent, and good art should have you thinking about something else—just what he was doing. The son of a surgeon who chose to remain abroad, he had that rare combination of intellect, feeling, questioning, and detachment. A room at the Met for half a dozen contemporary artists helps, too, by focusing on differences. If you want a true Edwardian reformer, try James McNeill Whistler, but if you want the shock of the new, try Edouard Manet. If you want a science of vision guiding seemingly free brushwork, try Claude Monet. If you want a close copy after Velázquez, Sargent can supply one, but he will be sure that you see it as a quick copy.

He did not ask for outrage at his near strapless portrait of Madame X, but he got it, and it drove him to leave Paris for one last move, to London. It should make you think again, too, about the flash. Fashion for Sargent opens onto psychological depths otherwise unseen. A commanding red robe somehow pops out from an equally red curtain, because people here are only partly in command. A brother and sister share everything but their degree of confidence and uncertainty, while four sisters move through a room of vases as tall and as seemingly human as they. But then what is it to be sophisticated, apart from money, and what is it to be human?

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