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art reviews from around new york

Richard Van Buren might seem the least likely artist to call a show “Hollywood High,” but look again. If the high wears wore off soon enough, that’s show business—and some serious art. It should have you thinking about the state of abstract art today as well.

Van Buren found his voice at the very peak of late modern art, and an exhibition spanning his career shows how much and how little has changed, at Garth Greenan through August 15. The same dilemma of old and new faces many a younger artist, too: oh, that again? Contemporary hybrids of media and genres can seem invigorating or simply exhausted. Either way, they are everywhere, with some of the most creative down in Tribeca—and I work this together with a gallery tour from earlier this year as a longer review and my latest upload, but first van Buren. As the song goes, “Hooray for Hollywood.”

Born in upstate New York, Richard Van Buren studied in San Francisco, about as far Hollywood’s “screwy ballyhooey” as California can get. I quote the old song, from the 1930s musical that also brought “That’s Entertainment,” but Van Buren is hardly a mass entertainer. He has since settled down in Maine, where an expectant film audience could hear the silence. He is a bit old to relive high school at that. His show repurposes work from 1969 and 1970, when he was already in his thirties, along with the new. Early and recent work could be downright jarring set side by side, but watch what happens as you follow the course between them.

Born in upstate New York, Richard Van Buren studied in San Francisco, about as far Hollywood’s “screwy ballyhooey” as California can get. I quote the old song, from the 1930s musical that also brought “That’s Entertainment,” but Van Buren is hardly a mass entertainer. He has since settled down in Maine, where an expectant film audience could hear the silence. He is a bit old to relive high school at that. His show repurposes work from 1969 and 1970, when he was already in his thirties, along with the new. Early and recent work could be downright jarring set side by side, but watch what happens as you follow the course between them.

I have skipped over a few years. For much of his creative life, he was a true New Yorker. The gallery calls him “inextricable from the creative firmament” of the city, where he taught at the School of Visual Arts (or SVA). It goes on to compare him to Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson—not someone from LA for whom Minimalism means a one-car garage. Yet he found his own path from the machine made to seashells and costume jewelry. They bring his work closer and closer to trash for its own sake while nurturing art as object, and he calls it sculpture.

Bare or stuffed to the gills, it still hangs on the wall, and it is still for me a kind of painting. Not that it needs much in the way of paint when it can have fiberglass and polychrome resin. It starts with subdued colors, only to add glitter to tart reds and blues. In the process it moves from relief to assemblage—and from Minimalism to “pattern and decoration.” Industrial materials become transparent casings to keep art in its place. It stresses hand assembly while seeming never quite at home.

It relies on geometry all the same to give shape to the spectacle. Early vertical slabs jerk aside at the end, like feet that have forgotten how to dance. A shift in color at the edge might pass for a cheap metal frame. Slightly later work adds a second slab or wiggles along the vertical. Van Buren is struggling against his own formula and liking it. It runs to half a dozen or more pieces before breaking free.

By then the stuffing is its own spectacle, in direct violation of the old demand from Frank Stella: what you see is no longer what you see. You have to work to decipher what Van Buren he painted, if anything, and what he assembled. How can such bright and shiny art cast only gray shadows? But wait, there are also light blue shadows—except that they are not shadows at all, but feathers. The busiest work, with what must be more than thirty shorter pieces, fits them all into a circle.

What, though, governs his choices beyond the glitter, and whatever happened to Hollywood? An artist who once shared a gallery with Morris is nowhere near as visible, only partly a matter of physical distance from New York. Are Minimalism and “pattern and decoration” too out of fashion—or too hard to fit into a single story? There is, though, a story asking to be heard about abstraction. Van Buren is still exploring geometry and color.

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

It could be talking about New York. It tells of a city, a port city, open to the world. You can find pretty much anything here and anyone.

It is a prosperous city and an educated one, although not everyone speaks the same language. It is always under construction, with an eye to creating public spectacles and public spaces, and housing does not welcome everyone everywhere. It has, if anything, too many artists. Above all, it values diversity and tolerance where other states may not, with no shortage of synagogues to match. As happens, though, it is Amsterdam, the city of “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt,” at the Jewish Museum through August 10—and I work this together with an earlier report on finding freedom under Baroque Spain with Juan de Pareja and Diego Velázquez as a longer review and my latest upload. Now what happens if everyone here claims the Bible’s lessons as one’s own?

The Book of Esther has that rarity in the Hebrew Bible, a happy ending, but with conditions. It is a tale of threats, deliverance, and celebration, and Amsterdam had every right to celebrate. It had at last won its freedom from Spain, as a republic, in time for the great age of Dutch painting, and it saw Esther as about nothing less. History often singles out Rembrandt for his sympathy for Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, and he lived in a quarter that they, too, occupied—although that may have had more to do with an artist’s income and with official decrees limiting Jewish life while guaranteeing freedom of worship. Prints of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, have come to be known as The Jewish Bride. Here, though, the city takes credit.

A Jewish heritage, I might argue, is divided over Esther, too. After the fall of Israel, the Babylonian captivity, and a second conquest by still another empire, Persia, Jews were at last free to go home, but should they, and where is home? Should it lie in a capital for all the people, with the temple and its sacrifices? Or should it lie in the word of God and the law wherever they may be? Where the books of Ezra and Nehemiah demand a community apart, Esther is about living under foreigners, even marrying one. It might speak to the Dutch—or to New Yorkers today.

Do Jews celebrate on Purim to remember their deliverance from a royal decree of death? The Jewish Museum opens with a room for both aspects of remembrance, the story and the place. It has scrolls of the book of Esther, one of the Old Testament’s shortest, to be read aloud on the holiday, and stone fireplace guards with images. It has Delft tiles and silver to help in getting drunk, as the occasion dictates. It has prints of synagogues and a public square with a new town hall in progress. No one seems to be merely idling or, conversely, in a hurry passing through.

Only slowly do paintings take over the story, and they never stop. Near the end, a wooden chest bears small paintings of Esther, enough to call it a book in itself. Do Flemish artists also tackle Esther with crisper, shinier colors? So much for the exhibition’s political history, but then they do reflect a greater hierarchy of kings and attendants. A prominent Dutch painter, Jan Steen, illustrates the tale’s climactic revelation three times. He, too, has brighter lights, along with hokier gestures but a gift for composition.

Above all, here comes the circle of Rembrandt, especially a late student, Aert de Gelder. He can imitate his teacher’s bulky fabrics filling out the promise of female anatomy, but not the softer outlines and inward-directed eye. Where his Esther looks up, toward her god, or to the king, Rembrandt’s looks nowhere but within. So he does, too, in a self-portrait on loan from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (which lost a Rembrandt years ago to a still unsolved theft along with a Vermeer), at age a mere twenty-three. Its firm but parted lips speak of a young man’s confidence and a trembling inner light. The misty darkness of Rembrandt’s late portrait at the Frick Collection is still to come.

That leaves a major gap, Rembrandt’s Bible. You may well wonder where to find it, but the show has a whole room for a standing Esther simply thinking. It is a fraught moment. You may recall that Haman, an advisor to King Ahasuerus, takes offense when a Jew, Esther’s cousin Mordecai, refuses to bow to someone other than the one true god—and in return extracts a death sentence for the Jews. Offended that his wife did not show proper obedience either, Ahasuerus ditches her in favor of Esther, without knowing Esther’s faith. In the painting, she is preparing to tell him.

She will do so, obtaining a death sentence for Haman and a promise of deliverance, although it is a complicates story. (Can Ahasuerus go back on his own word?) And paintings mostly zero in the confrontation, with the bad guy in darkness and the king in the light. Rembrandt shows only Esther and an elderly attendant, and here the older woman is lost in shadow, while Esther is lost in her fears, in her determination, and in thought. Anticipation becomes drama. Rembrandt, around age thirty, has a lot of thinking to do himself.

Still, a large exhibition has a hole at its very center, and there is no getting around it. Not even Rembrandt, largely in his absence, can steal the show. The curator, Abigail Rapoport, does have a 1992 painting by Fred Wilson, who compares Queen Esther to Harriet Tubman. African Americans and other contemporaries can claim the story as a parable of deliverance, too. Yet New York has already had shows of the Rembrandt’s influence, and followers look if anything more awkward here. It is a fascinating story all the same, of a solitary Esther and a busy, unshaken city.

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

Amy Sherald became one of the most celebrated African American artists by painting one of the most celebrated African American women. It does credit to both women, her and Michelle Obama, as stylish and official. Which woman did more to create an image for others to admire?

If a portrait does the job well, it may never be easy to separate the artist from the sitter, the dancer from the dance. I wrote about the now popular painter twice before, on her delivery of the Obama state portrait and again with a fair survey of her work at her gallery. Much as I want to respond to so inviting a show as her midcareer retrospective at the Whitney, through August 10, my second past review really does say it all. Nor is this a black artist’s only display of innocence, sophistication, and sheer pleasure in one and the same portrait. So I also wrap this into past reports on John Dowell and Jordan Casteel, with their own monuments to African American portraiture and history, and invite you to read more. Sherald has refused to allow her own show’s planned second stop, at the National Portrait Gallery, calling the decision to “contextualize” her portrait of Obama in line with Donald J. Trump’s outrageous wishes, as censorship.

People do not often swoon over official state portraits, least of all followers of art. It would be like swooning over someone else’s yearbook photo—or a gold star from the world’s primmest teacher. Yet here they were, portraits of Barak and Michelle Obama making the news. Visits to the National Portrait Gallery soared, and (as you can see from the link) I swooned a bit, too. The portraits arrived just as an awful lot of people were longing for leaders with intelligence and a conscience, rather than just a certain orange president. People longed, too, for voices with authority to speak for them.

Oh, and then there were the artists, Kehinde Wiley for the former president and Sherald for his first lady. Wiley had appeared in galleries and museums before, often at that, for decorative, flattering, and frankly shallow portraits of African Americans off the street, all but exclusively young, aggressive, and male. He takes pride in his subjects, but with little hint that black lives matter and are at risk. Had he finally risen to the occasion, or had the occasion descended to him? Sherald, far less visible at the time, may offer a clue. Her latest portraits, much like Wiley’s in the past, stick to moments of leisure and to friends.

Her mega-gallery also has a group show that thrusts human sexuality at once in your face and behind a veil, with artists including Paul McCarthy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Mira Schor. Sherald does not. She makes desire so childlike that she adapted a famous photo of a kiss in Times Square at the end in World War II. Downstairs comes an older African American, Ed Clark—better known for his place in Abstract Expressionist New York and, quite possibly, the very first shaped canvas. Work since 2000 transforms even the purest of abstraction into glimpses of clouds and sky. For the gallery’s fall 2019 opener and again for a Whitney retrospective in 2025, lavish brushwork looks back to the most gentle and glorious of summer afternoons.

Sherald feels the warmth, too, even as the real air grows cold. Four bathers, the women on the men’s shoulders, enjoy the sand and a near cloudless sky. Who is to say which earns the painting its title, Precious Jewels by the Sea? A young black man sits high in a clear-blue sky, his butt on one girder and his back against another. Sherald took for inspiration a famous shot of workers at lunch, but this guy is neither dressed for work nor short of time. With just eight paintings at her gallery, for once a hot artist ignored the pressure to churn things out, so you could relax, too.

For Sherald, attention to friends does not preclude a leap of imagination. As a self-portrait has it, When I Let Go of What I Am, I Become What I Might Be. Some pretty tart colors share space with that sky blue. She has room for reality all the same, from a handsome young man to the overweight “girl next door.” Like Michelle Obama in her portrait, large central figures stand out against fields of color, almost like playing cards. They also share contrasting paint handling in figures, clothing, and backgrounds—to play degrees of realism against one another and to keep the surfaces alive.

Backgrounds are totally flat, but with wild swings in color from painting to painting. Flesh is well-shadowed, but not in the interest of anatomy or the fall of light. Faces are personalized, but not psychologically, and everything else pops to the surface, like a beach umbrella or a polka dot dress. Titles are poetic but erudite, like the recollection of Jane Austin’s Pride in Prejudice in A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune. The title for the construction worker, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, speaks to him, but also to you. If they still feel too much like pages from the style section of a Sunday paper, consider them official portraits of the girl next door.

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