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To wrap up from last time on Vermeer’s love letters, plainly Jan Vermeer does not like to repeat himself. Any artist’s studio is a confined space, with luck big enough for whatever is needed. And buyers often push for repetition, so that they know what to expect.

This painter, though, makes each painting its own variant on a woman, a letter, and her maid. Each is a study in uncertainty, hopes, and fears. Each could belong to a larger story as well, without so much as the need for a maid.

Three paintings can take you only so far, even from someone with so small and so stunning an output as Vermeer. Think of them, though, as just three scenes in lives awakening to adulthood and to love. Women keep reading a letter over and over, like the woman at the window in Dresden, long after the servant who delivered it has gone. The man who sent it appears at last, the cape of a gallant or soldier fully framing her as she turns away, uncertain whether to take pleasure or to flee. He embodies a wider world that she cannot fully enter, much like a map on the wall behind them both. He may have fought for the very city in Vermeer’s light-filled view of Delft.

The three paintings on display put her through her paces. She prepares for the worst, hand to her chin, as the maid delivers the goods. She accepts the letter while still at her music, sign of love. She begins her reply. She bathes in sunlight from a visible stained-glass window. She lets the light define the interior, a woman’s place, the window unseen.

She dresses as a lady, but she sits with a broom, a basket of dirty clothes, and a darker room to the side with a cabinet and linens. After all, she commands a wealthy household, but a woman’s field of command includes cleaning house, and the maid is her intimate. She commands lavish pictures on the wall as well, including fertile Dutch landscapes that Vermeer would have known from his day job, as a dealer. The largest painting within a painting, The Finding of Moses, tells of an infant left to die in Egypt and his rescue by women. Who knows how far sexually Vermeer’s woman has gone? Who knows, too, whether the fruit of love will lead the Jews or the Dutch to piety or to freedom?

Who knows anything for certain? As I wrote after his 1996 Washington retrospective, I may believe in Vermeer’s perfection, but I want to imagine his doubts—or are the doubts my own? The letter is often the brightest spot in a painting, but one cannot read a word of it. Nor can one quite read the women’s faces. As the curator, Robert Fucci of the University of Amsterdam, argues, they always look away. Look again, though, and they are questioning, smiling, angry, or close to tears.

Look again, too, at the woman already intent on writing, a draft crumpled on the floor. Maybe the soldier’s letter angered her, and she rushed to begin a more disillusioned reply. Or maybe she thought that she would never hear from him again, only to begin a more hopeful letter before it was too late. Look again, too, at the woman already intent on writing, a draft crumpled on the floor. Maybe the soldier’s letter angered her, and she rushed to begin a more disillusioned reply. Or maybe she thought that she would never hear from him again, only to begin a more hopeful letter before it was too late. Whatever the truth, Vermeer creates the space of a woman’s world. He trusts to an economy of vision that for many a modern viewer nears abstraction. He leaves everything uncertain except for the light.

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You know the presumed evils of smart phones and the toll on young adults. They make it impossible to concentrate on books and chores. They drive teens to suicide.

But you have heard all that before, endlessly, whether it is true or not. You could call it a meme. Go easy, though, on the warnings—of bullying and peer pressure, fraught communications and awful isolation. They might apply tenfold to a woman reading a letter. They might have you looking again at a woman, her maid, and a love letter from Jan Vermeer. With “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” at the Frick Collection through August 31, you may wonder how painting itself communicates.

To be sure, not every age is alike, and I lack credentials as social and technological commentator. Nor do I mean to distract from a favorite artist and a wonderful exhibition. I made a vow long ago to see every one of his roughly thirty-five paintings—and came seriously close after a 1996 Washington retrospective. Already by then I had written at some length about his Woman Reading a Letter in Dresden and how such modest means convey inner hopes, inner turmoil, a private space, and a larger world left unseen. The woman stands facing the window effectively looking out without once looking up.

Vermeer encompasses every variation in light—reflected off surfaces and in transit through the curtains. The woman’s face itself reflects off panes of glass, seeming to dissolve into color before one’s eyes. I asked how domestic objects become symbols and how narrative only enhances Vermeer’s reputation for “pure painting.” As I wrote then, something has entered along with the sunlight and letter, flung aside the small, red curtain above the window, and asked to enter even into her bed. Her downcast eyes direct a viewer’s own into the painting and into her very being, just like the reflected light that points into the room. I continued in a review of his retrospective to map his career, optical command, and visual questioning—and a third review pursues Vermeer’s women still further, through a Young Woman Seated at the Virginals.

Far be it from me to repeat all that. Rather than start over, I can only direct you to my words from so many years ago. (Yes, this Web site has been around a long time and accumulated a lot of history.) Nor need I argue that letters could stir up pretty strong feelings—feelings about a woman and her lover. The very first novel in most accounts (and surely the dullest), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, unfolded entirely in letters, and it was not just a plot device. Needless to say, a painting or a novel about communication is also reflecting on itself.

Stick, then, to just three paintings and a single exhibition. If nothing else, it picks up the tale of the Frick’s renovation and expansion from its April reopening. It opens a new gallery for nothing but temporary exhibitions, where the theater used to stand as a venue for lectures and music. The Frick need no longer set aside its holdings to make space for loans like, say, a past show of Dutch painting from the Mauritshuis—and a new, larger theater a floor below both looks and functions better as well. For now, three paintings hang side by side, with text on the wall facing the entrance. Each has its own partition, collectively spanning the gallery and masking the exit.

The museum, then, learns from Vermeer’s talent for confined spaces. It includes a work from its own collection (the oldest in the show), in which one can all but measure the slim space beneath the woman’s pen, its point resting on her table. She herself is measuring in her mind her distance from the letter that her maid holds out, tilted parallel to the pen—and her imagined distance from the outside world. Two more of Vermeer’s paintings remain in their usual places in the Frick. Filling out the exhibition show are loans from Dublin’s National Gallery and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is a short walk to more Vermeer in European painting at the Met.

If the Frick’s contribution to the exhibition seems the boldest in light and color, it has lost some of its shadow over the years. Those who know the artist will not be surprised that its black background was originally green. The background in the loan from Dublin is still green, while the loan from the Rijksmuseum places the woman almost in the background. One approach her across a dizzying pattern of floor tiles, with more barriers to either side. One approaches her, too, with the eye alone—and I continue next time with what you approach.

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Let me finally wrap up my review of 2025 New York summer sculpture now that it has all finally had its chance. To start with a bit of context, when Melvin Edwards brought summer sculpture that year to City Hall Park, it seemed only fair to New York. A city of unmatched achievement and diversity deserved a black man of exceptional achievement.

But that was the year of Covid-19 in the arts, when just soldiering on counted, and a pillar by Thaddeus Mosley towered over the scant crowds braving the art fairs. Now Mosley returns with the same dual commitment to Modernism and black America, and that dualism makes it shine, but its very nature has changed. When Edwards makes a point of welding and sculptural weight, he recalls both a slave’s manacles and David Smith. When Mosley turns to bronze in the same park as Edwards before him, he gives modern art a longer history and a softer edge, through November 16.

Just short of a hundred, Mosley has himself a history, and here he casts bronze after his own past sculpture in wood. Black abstraction has become a staple, and he should know. That whole time he has been living, working, and learning in Pennsylvania, between the Carnegie museums and steel country. His idea, though, of a city dweller is caught up in the woods. One could easily mistake his sculpture for wood at that, between its comforting brown and rounded surface. He takes care, he says, to retain the experience of differently kinds of trees as he gathers and cuts into them.

Sculpture for him also looks back all the way to Surrealism, with nested biomorphic shapes. Human forms peep out as dancers and pre-industrial actors rather than Smith’s icons of postwar American labor. David Q. Sheldon prefers Smith’s sharp edges overlaid and multiplied, typically with Smith’s steel shine. Up in Harlem, at one entrance to St. Nicholas Park through October 30, this version is bright yellow. If that were not welcoming enough, Michel Bassompiere sets down bears on the Park Avenue South median strip through next May 11. If that sounds more sentimental than Mosley and Sheldon combined, it is.

At least one sculpture park this summer had to do without summer sculpture. As plans tanked at the last minute and work promised online failed to appear, Socrates Sculpture Park fell back on its Socrates Annual, starting just days before summer itself bid its normal overhasty exit. Meanwhile Queens locals and others could settle for summer picnics, the view of Manhattan from Astoria, and scheduled performances by Pioneers Go East, a collective. It could be what they came for in the first place. Besides, they could always hold out for the emerging artists set for a colder New York, next through April 6. Better still, the park this year has boiled its selection down to just four contributors and the waterfront. That and New York City.

While I must defer a proper encounter to a later review, allow me to end in a more central location and on a more upscale note. Alma Allen starts her stroll along Park Avenue at 52nd Street, in the shadow of the great Seagram Building and within blocks of the Museum of Modern Art, through September 30. No wonder she creates sculpture pared down to late Modernism. A variant on a tube snakes back on itself to end at the top, with a resting place for an equally glittering bronze ball. Further up on the avenue’s median strip, self-closure has a change in spirit, but not in clarity and shine. There metal strips come from behind to land in what might be the sculpture’s lap.

Has Minimalism become rough fabric or raw flesh? Either way, it retains a dedication to symmetry, mass, and shine. Come to think of it, that earlier ball could be a seed, and Allen’s sculpture in the 2014 Whitney Biennial took the form of a giant nut. The works along the course of nearly a mile offer further variations on those themes, like the figure, headless but still gleaming, wrapping its arms around what could be a stack of waste baskets or an oil drum. An older man, fully formed and slightly daft, raises his cane in attack or defense. The poles of elegance and nature’s wildness could stand for the entirety of summer sculpture. Like Allen, it goes first and foremost for charm.

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MoMA PS1 is a busy place. It manages five separate solo shows this summer, through August 25, and “The Gatherers” through October 6, but then the artists themselves suggest a certain hesitancy—and I work this into an earlier report on Rirkrit Tiravanija, also at MoMA PS1, and Mary Helena Clark in the galleries as a longer review and my latest upload.

Their art seems all but forced on them, and it is hard to say whether they mean that as critique. One can forgive Alanis Obomsawin, for this is cinema, sixty years of it, and who can begin to take it all in? Only slowly can it take shape as indigenous Canadian art. In the process, ordinary people need do no more than speak to children and speak for themselves. The work itself has a rather slow pace that will grow on anyone. As a film’s title has it, The Children Have to Hear Another Story.

Thanks to Bani Abidi in Pakistan, children are still waiting. They line the parade route for an unnamed entourage of motorcycles and limos that may never arrive and would demand unqualified obedience if it does. The museum’s two-story lower gallery seems just right for an oversized display of applause, and the winding parade already asserts it importance, with security forces in pristine white. What it means as political statement or art I hesitate to say. Not much happens in Reserved—and no doubt it has already taken place in many countries many times before. Political power works, Abidi might say, because it is predictable, anonymous, and halfway entertaining.

Julien Ceccaldi may have already given in. This is “everyday digital subjugation and hyperconsumerism,” the museum insists, with the accent on the everyday. It is “distorted” as well, which here might count as praise. It centers on a good-sized mural of a painting within a painting, as Adult Theater. The oversized woman is suggestively lying down and already licking her lips. Three figures sharing a raised steel platform next to it might be a museum worker, a curator, and a global explorer.

Or maybe not, but everything here is an imagined archetype of an alternative museum or a stereotype out of mass culture. I lost patience before I could decide. Upstairs, Whitney Claflin is up to almost anything short of soft-core porn. She seems unable to decide, and it makes for a puzzling but more intriguing show. Abstractions make a point of their spareness and white ground along with their brushwork and drips. A naked mannequin does a hand-stand like a circus performer in on the act.

Claflin makes it worth looking regardless for connections that may not actually exist. Put it down to the summer doldrums and real talent. Sandra Poulson has more focus, and it allows her truly to take flight. Based in Luanda, London, and Amsterdam, she is not out to map contemporary art, but she has a way of taking in the past and giving it a place in the present. A crowded room bears furniture that appears assembled the wrong way, but good news: a cabinet, a desk, and a preposterous wooden toilet sit at odd angles, and the outline of a face in wood appears carved into a t-shirt, for This Bedroom Looks Like a Republic!

After all that, “The Gatherers” could be that rarity—a group show that will try anything once but sticks well enough together. Tableware from Tolia Astakhishvili and Dylan Peirce, a junction box from Klara Liden, and motherboards in their ratty cases from Selma Selman might each belong to a single artist. Together, the artists are gathering what becomes the detritus of its own assembly. Ser Serpas speaks of a corpse, and others might well have kept the wrapping and thrown the work away. Texture may count most of all. Worst comes to worst, Poulson has supplied the furniture to put it all away.

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To pick up from a past review on nostalgia for a time that still looked with hope to the future, I could never quite love my Walkman. It could not replace my collection of LPs—a sizable shelf apiece for jazz, classical, and rock. It could not match the sound of an LP or even a CD soon to come. But my girlfriend bought it for me, I loved her, and she threw in a tape of the early Beatles, a true game changer in their time but already a distant memory. With its portability, the Walkman promised to be a game changer, too. Who was I to doubt it?

MoMA loves it, too. The 1979 cassette player has entered the collection and now “Pirouette: Turning Points in Design,” through October 18. So why had I forgotten that I ever had one, and how can I fail to name a single other cassette I owned? If this were a turning point, the worm has turned many times before and since. The iPod, too, is gone, and the name of the game is streaming. Before you know it, AI will be telling you what to hear.

The questions in “Pirouette” are built into any museum of modern art, not just the oldest and finest. A museum is about remembering, while modern art, consumer culture, and turning points share a desire to make it new. No critic, however visionary, can say just how or what is to come. MoMA show includes a 1983 Mac, with Susan Kare’s icons for its desktop as a bonus. Surely that if anything was a game changer or was it? It never came close to matching sales for PCs, it leaned heavily on genuine innovations at Xerox, and its white box looks quaint and awkward today.

Still, cool kids loved it, the kind that grew up to become artists and staffers at the Museum of Modern Art. In doing their job as curators, Paola Antonelli with Maya Ellerkmann necessarily exercise their taste in contemporary design. They have to be looking for trends and, with luck, making them. Yet the show has its share of products that are not in the least familiar and do not seem much like turning points. Flasks and carafes from Aldo Bakker, light-weight clothing from Gabriel Fontana, and a faux leather shopping bag from Telfar Clemens look tasteful enough, but they could only wish they had a longer moment in fashion’s sun. DJ gear from Virgil Abloh has to appear only because he was last year’s cool kid himself before his early death.

The show’s biases are not at all easy to pin down. It cannot get enough chairs—stackable plastic chairs, wheeled office chairs, a flax chair, a soft chair, and a knotted chair. More elegant and better known, Charles and Ray Eames have their low, simple profile for a gentle rocker. MoMA relishes digital typefaces as well, but with a quirky selection. One, it insists, is optimized for optical character recognition, as if your phone cannot recognize practically anything today. Retina, a sans serif font by Tobias Frere-Jones, and Oakland, a more patently pixilated one by Zuzana Licko for Emigre Inc., cannot have changed the game half as much as the base fonts in Microsoft Word. But then, just as compared to the Mac, Microsoft was never cool.

MoMA takes a special interest in signage, like the rainbow flag, the NASA logo, Milton Glaser’s I Love New York (with a heart for love), and Shigetaka Kurita’s emojis. A wheelchair icon from the Accessible Icon Project (Tim Ferguson Sauder, Brian Glenney, and Sara Hendren) has signaled reserved parking and access for all. One should be grateful for them all. It also demands the digital image of digital reality, however ugly and obscure. Designs by Fernanda Bertini Viégas and Martin Wattenberg track everything from Web search histories to wind patterns crossing the continental United States. Federica Fragapane’s plot of “space junk” in orbit, might look at home as the backdrop to a dance club.

Still, there are genuine icons of modern and postmodern life along the way. Some stand out for their modesty and might have been there forever, like Bic pens. There really was a Forrest Mars and not the red planet behind Mars candy like colorful M&Ms. One can forget that the @ sign had a creator, Ray Tomlinson in 1971. Other things caught on without exactly entering common use. Know those small six-sided black and chrome expresso makers that depend on water vapor from boiling on the stove? Alfonso Bialetti adapted restaurant pressurizers to the home, and I could not resist buying it, even if I have practically never used it.

So which is it, museum design, contemporary innovation, or the materials of everyday life? The show includes Swatch, but why not the smart phones and exercise phones of today? It has a 1996 flip phone just when, I should have thought, the future of cell phones was already on its way. A hair dryer, from MüXholos, might have been a turning point back in the 1930s, but it bears no resemblance to hair dryers in salons and bathrooms today. What kept me listening to that crummy Walkman anyway? MoMA needs a better dancer for its long-ago pirouette.

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The most fragile and beautiful of art forms has become a monster. Make that “Monstrous Beauty,” in what the Met calls “a feminist revision of Chinoiserie,” but women themselves keep getting in the way, through August 17.

Lee Bul is among them, just as she prepares to leave her niche on the Met’s façade, and the whole heads for the Lehman wing, just months after Tibetan mandals. But does it rescue women’s art for women or write them off as less than spiritual? Are they Asian art or European? What century is this anyway? They may have unleashed a monster.

To be sure, even fine porcelain can get out of hand, and the Rococo made that a virtue. Along with flouncy clothes and depicted gardens, it became the very art of excess in the hands of Jean Antoine Watteau, Jean Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher—who took it from Rococo to revolution. How fitting that the Met’s exhibition comes just as the Frick Collection reopens to the public. To be sure, too, critics have looked to its sources in trade with the East, if not outright seizure. They have asked as well how the decorative arts served as a label for the display of wealth. It allowed its dismissal as less as less than fine art, better suited to China and women.

Monstrous, perhaps, but not half as monstrous as enormous porcelain filling the Lehman wing to overflow. Yeesookyung takes its two-story atrium for gilded fragments in dark colors. The surrounding halls include a handful of other contemporary Asian and Asian American artists, set amid a larger show of a more gilded age. There, too, context is everything, and paintings reinforce the role of decorative arts in defining a portrait sitter’s character for James McNeill Whistler or the transience of existence for Dutch still life. His interior could almost be a knock-off of “Whistler’s mother,” but with darker shadows. Either way, Chinoiserie Chinoiserie she values lies everywhere in the background.

Is it truly monstrous, though, and are the monsters women? The Met has a fondness for embedding contemporaries amid past art, to show history’s relevance, as with Tibetan mandalas last year in the very same space. It sells, but if anything it upstages the past. Looking for a proper history of Chinoiserie, Asian or European, and what set it apart? The work scoots casually across centuries of fans, mirrors, tapestries and tea sets, in no particular order, with carvings and castings almost entirely by men, as one might expect. A collage from 1929 by Mariana Brandt throws Anna Mae Wong, the Hollywood actress, but much has nothing at all to do with Asia.

Why, too, these contemporaries? They include ridiculously ornate porcelain towers by Heidi Lau and Lee Bul, with limbs like writhing snakes. Others, though, appear solely for their take on Asian women. Lau calls hers Anchored the Path of Unknowing, but the curator, Iris Moon, seems awfully knowing. Women’s art, she argues, can only be monstrous because so are stereotypes of women, when they are not simply effeminate. They are queens, mothers, starlets, shoppers, cyborgs, and little more.

One might dismiss women as shoppers, but cyborgs? (Mothers have their own issues.) The show itself points to other roles, as gossips over the tea table or as temptresses from the ocean’s deep. That goes back to the very birth of European literature in Homer, and here they are again on video for Jen Liu, in The Land at the Bottom of the Sea. Candice Lin has her salon, while Jennifer Ling Datchuk plays on narcissism with mirrors, one sprouting hair, and Patty Chang leans into herself on video as well. Arlene Shechet might have entered for her own ceramics, but then they would not be monsters.

They do, though, make a good case for monsters in contemporary art. Chang also spoons melons out of her left breast, and she may have suffered the most at that. Her bare white table could pass for a surgical bed awaiting its next patient or, given its holes, an instrument of torture awaiting straps. It may take a moment to recognize it as a work of art. There is a role for Chinoiserie in defining beauty, but the torture is real. Blame it on your mother.

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