haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

To wrap up from last time on boom, bust, and the future of art, what then counts as success? In 2009, at the very height of the boom, Edward Winkleman released How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, and he if anyone should know how.

A Williamsburg pioneer, he brought his gallery to Chelsea, expanding the action a block to the west along with three more of the most adventurous out there. He also started an art fair devoted entirely to high-tech, interactive art, including my very first experience with virtual reality. Still, for all its sane advice, it takes something for granted: you or anyone else really can start and run a commercial gallery—and you are dying to try. Oh, and did I mention that Ed’s gallery is long since gone?

Just to speak about what comes next after the pandemic has its own hidden assumptions as well. It takes for granted that art really is coming back, and it assigns blame for the losses to a virus. What, though, if the boom needs explaining in the first place? Yes, artists can make their own scene, and ideas matter, but that cannot be the whole story. Great movements in the past had their champions like Gertrude Stein, Lillie P. Bliss, and Petty Guggenheim, but not entire neighborhoods. And only the last of those three was a dealer.

Look back at HaberArts. I started with the art of museums, because I had years reading and seeing in my head. Besides, galleries did not take anywhere near as long to describe, as Minimalism and conceptual art lingered on. I summed them up with twice a year “gallery tours,” continuing for over a decade. I knew that something was changing, but what? Who knew that art today would treat discoveries then like old masters, with still life to match?

I took new arts districts as a pleasure, but the onset of big money as a threat. I wrote of what Jerry Saltz (now more of a cheerleader, I am afraid) called the “battle for Babylon.” I distrusted exhibitions as paybacks to donors and collectors. I hated that as fine an architect as Renzo Piano devoted expansion of the Morgan Library to a cafeteria. Already, Yoshio Taniguchi had used expansion at MoMA for a block-long lobby and an unworkable atrium. Did anyone still care about art?

In fact they did then, and they do—and it had a great deal to do with change. New audiences were transforming art into a popular art form. In turn, dealers and museum directors saw not just an opportunity, but a duty. Museums added education centers and no end of wall text. If people also require food to get them through the day, who am I to complain? Lines for the old-world cafeteria at Neue Galerie exceed those for the museum, and the Frick now has its first.

In short, there is no going back. Does that make this the bust to end all busts? Not necessarily, and I cannot predict the outcome of Donald J. Trump’s disturbing economics, but this history shifts debate from the roots of change to how the arts address it. The growth of inequality is real, but critics, artists, and institutions can see it as more than an end in itself. They can hope for crowds while resisting the allure of big money and mass entertainment. Meanwhile I just hope that the Jewish Museum brings back its black-and-white cookies.

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

If you stayed with me last week, you know what I am thinking these days, stuck indoors with an injury and too little else on my mind: should I cut back sharply, even as I regain full mobility? Have I simply run out of things to say?

Then, too, has art itself run out of things to say? And no, for once I am not talking about the “anything goes” spirit in painting, with old stories and familiar brushwork to match. Eclecticism has its rewards, after all, especially when it means discarding old divisions between the personal and the political, mythmaking and making art. Especially, too, when it translates into diversity, with more room for nonwhites and women. Rather, I mean lassitude on the business side, as galleries find it harder and harder to survive. I have given up counting just how many went under that seemed like permanent fixtures and how many dealers saw 2024 as a good time to retire.

Not that the two issues, what to say and how to pay for it, are unconnected. Quite the contrary. When art turns to new ideas and new energy, artists and collectors alike rush to share in the possibilities. It happened with Abstract Expressionism, and galleries are still turning up forgotten painters and neglected sculptors—or convinced that they should. It happened again with the millennium, when this Web site was still young. I set out with the belief that painting was not at all dead, thank you, and art history still matters. I was rewarded with a gallery boom, museum growth, and larger audiences for both.

Not that the boom is over yet either. The expanded Frick Collection reopens to high praise this very month, with the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Princeton University art museum on their way. And, however many have gone under, dealers trying. Who would have imagined the clean lines of a full building in Chinatown for Magenta Plains, the sprawl across Chelsea and Tribeca for David Zwirner, or seven stories for Pace gallery, with another branch just up the street—or the nonstop art fairs? And yet the losses are inescapable. More to the point, what if loss is the new normal?

Art has a way of renewing itself in the face of failure, because that pretty much defines the making of art. I my own writing a single painting each by Jan Vermeer, Jan van Eyck, and Giovanni Bellini because I could not get them out of mind. I started, too, with the first signs of a shift in galleries from Soho to Chelsea. I followed galleries to Williamsburg, Dumbo, and Bushwick—and watched them die. A gallery scene leads to gentrification, but art moves on. Can a shrinking Lower East Side and the new concentration of galleries in Tribeca fare otherwise?

Regardless, I can always learn something each step of the way—and not just from the dozens of niche art markets that remain. With Asian art alone, last year brought me face to face with calligraphy, mandalas, aboriginal art, heaven and hell, and the hell we are creating a climate of coal and ice. Buddhism aside, though, what if there is more to the story than cycles of renewal? What if thirty years of growth were the exception all along? What if attrition remains when the stars of the show pass? What is left at the end of the day?

Part is sheer economics. The cheap rents that brought past spurts (and allowed me to get by) are not coming back. Collectors have proved difficult to lure too far downtown or out of Manhattan. You know the old lines that the market can stay irrational longer than you can wait? As Dumbo proved, real estate interests can hold onto vacant property longer than you can afford it. Art develops in an agonizing parallel to inequality in a market economy as a whole, as the wealthy take up more space and more spaces, art worlds all to themselves.

To see what that means for the future, it helps to look back. Yes, I followed the cycle of boom and bust for thirty years, with the emphasis on the boom. And yes, I watched as a hurricane closed Chelsea and recessions took their toll. I watched, too, as Covid-19 shuttered museums, galleries, and art fairs entirely. But that still leaves the perils of business as usual, and I do mean business. Consider, then, an alternative history of contemporary art—and I pick up next time with just that.

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

To wrap up from last time on the future of HaberArts, themes are nice, and I still believe that art takes words. Yet I think differently now, in smaller bites that reach out to readers. If I had years of accumulated ideas to get through, fine, so long as they inform the art.

The art scene has changed, too, and I have changed along with it. Where “theory” once felt dominant, it has left mostly glib vocabulary and good intentions. It has also left me to discover yet again what I have to say. So how have my first instincts held up, and what has not?

Naturally I gravitated toward the Minimalism and formalism of my classmates—and of such icons as Carl Andre and Richard Serra who can extend art to the felt experience of the gallery. So, for that matter, have younger artists, and their concerns have made a recovery, with what I have called Neo-Minimalism. The Post-Minimalism of Eva Hesse and Senga Nengudi lives on in others today as well. More generally, I cannot set aside my love of abstract painting. In the years when, all the right people said, painting was dead, I found my way to Snug Harbor in Staten Island for reassurance that it was very much alive. And I still debate with myself what could make it powerful and new.

Abstraction is no longer all that abstract. It had bred a hybrid of realism, patterns, and myth, often centered on images of a woman’s body. And I can fairly claim to have been ahead of the curve, with early reports on several artists still hard to pin down, like Amy Sillman, Katherine Bernhardt, and Cecily Brown. At the same time, I have had to question the trend. When “anything goes,” what still matters? I keep questioning the commercial instincts of museums as well.

I had my shot at Postmodernism, but I could not give up my love of early Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, or late modern art (not to mention the Renaissance). I argued back then for a “postmodern paradox“: the call to dismiss Modernism made art dependent on it and kept it alive. And, sure enough, Modernism has spawned an impressive art fair, the Independent Modern. Meanwhile my own tastes have broadened, increasingly to public sculpture, architecture, and photography. Who knows what “public” and “private” mean anyway when you enter a museum.

Theory has itself moved on, becoming less a critique than a yearning for diversity. I have, I hope, taken special care to cover black artists like Bob Thompson, Isaac Julien, Kara Walker, black abstraction, and ever so much more—going back to when the Museum of Modern Art posed a choice of exhibitions in adjacent rooms for Jacob Lawrence and Wassily Kandinsky. I have aimed for a still greater advocacy of women artists, a theme of this Web site from the start. And in fact the single largest change in art over the years has been the rediscovery of past women artists and present-day Latin and Native Americans alongside white men. Yet I have my doubts about the tone of relentless celebration. Whatever happened to irony, urgency, and anger?

So where does that leave me? Stuck indoors with my leg raised and my expectations diminished. If I was ever breaking ground, and I have my doubts, I no longer am. Can I can look forward to writing again, but less often? It could make an exhibition less of a compulsion and more of a pleasure. For now, expect uncertainty and silence.

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

To pick up from last time on the future of HaberArts, had I introduced myself around, I might be better known today, like many a political blogger from those days, but I did not. I looked into submitting work to print magazines, too, but they demanded no more than four or five hundred words, and I wanted room to learn and to see.

They also demanded that writers pitch shows before they opened, so that the magazine could stay current. But then I would have to commit to art before I knew whether it was worth the attention—and whether I had anything to say. This was not what criticism should be. I still took the Internet as a game, but I had found my medium.

What, then, should criticism be? Naturally I had to discover that over time, too. My preface to criticism itself came years after I had begun, and it needed a fresh look years after that. Yet it still comes down to telling a story, through theory, description, interpretation, and judgment. But then every theory, description, or interpretation is a judgment, and every judgment is an interpretation. Think of them as four ways of answering, what is art?

I hate reviews that stop at “best of” lists and the bottom line—and that is just where memes and mass media are heading. Criticism can settle for picking winners, or it can invite you into strange and wonderful ideas and art. That includes my favorite artists along with newcomers who will soon be favorites, and I hesitate to tell you who that may be. Suffice it to say that that, too, keeps changing. When I started, it would have included Caravaggio, David Smith, and Jackson Pollock but would it have included their female counterparts in Artemisia Gentileschi, Dorothy Dehner, and Lee Krasner or Janet Sobel? It would surely have included Diego Velázquez, but would it stop to mention his black slave who became one of Madrid’s leading artists, Juan de Pareja?

I like to think so, but you can fairly ask me to prove it, and I think that over the years I have. When I started, though, I had been nursing some favorites for years, and the Web gave me the chance to linger over a painting by Giovanni Bellini in my favorite corner of New York, the Frick. (Hey, I, too, had my theories.) A book review allowed me to take my time with maybe the best of all, a double portrait redoubled in a mirror by Jan van Eyck, to whom I have returned again and again. Everyone has a theory about that one, and it got me into my longest review to date sorting them out. I doubt that I could write like that now.

It came at the end, as it turned out, of a wave of theory—the peculiar challenge of Postmodernism. I had my theory about that, too, and had to get it off my chest. Over time I got to respond to most of my favorite historians and critics, including Lucy Lippard, Rosalind E. Krauss, Hal Foster, Joseph Mascheck, Michael Fried, Peter Schjeldahl, Arthur C. Danto, and a distinguished student of his, Barbara Savedoff. I can only hope that they took disagreement as a mark of respect. Or maybe not, but then artists, too, can be gracious at criticism or angry at praise. When I marveled at a black artist and (quoting William Butler Yeats) his “terrible beauty,” his dealer (who may not know the poem) called me a racist.

That long review of van Eyck got me playing at deconstruction, for once, as just part of the game. I imagined entering a chain that ran from Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, through Meyer Schapiro, the finest critic and historian of all, and Jacques Derrida. Had Vincent van Gogh painted a menial worker’s boots or his own, and what counts as an artist’s own anyway? It comes down to yet another mystery, of who lies behind art’s images, and I made that a theme of this Web site as well. You can browse the entire site by theme here. Or browse by period in time and by artist—and I wrap up next time with where I am today.

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.

Infinite longing. One expects a decidedly romantic idea of Romanticism or nature after a stop for Caspar David Friedrich and lost souls. It also just happens to define Romanticism for Anita Brookner.

Brookner’s Romanticism and Its Discontents puts the emphasis squarely on the discontent. Her introduction to nineteenth-century French art and letters comes off all too pat and Romantic itself. Still, Romanticism truly deserves a survey as heartfelt and concise as this one. Last time I drew on past reviews of Friedrich at the Metto prepare you for its full retrospective, through May 11. Let me now place him in context of French and German Romantics, with an invitation to read more.

A movement so epoch-making may sound like an easy success. For Brookner, though, Romanticism means dealing with failure—and failing badly at the attempt. Her creators represent as many ways to cope with uncertainty. Some escape into idealism, art, and the Classicism of their teachers. Others look to determinate causes in science and humanity. Most found a hero in Napoleon. Each ends up with hardly more than a struggle, fatigue, and fancy ideals to which he himself puts the lie. Or so goes Brookner’s chilly romance.

Modern critics have opposed Classicism to Romanticism, using more contrasts than I care to remember—linear versus painterly, theater versus absorption, wilderness versus culture, primitive versus pastoral, authority versus community, aristocracy versus big industry, villa versus garden, and goodness knows what else. Perhaps only manifestos, historians, and art critics believe in periods anyway. Rebels against Jacques-Louis David, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot kept the revolutionary ideals of the first, the skepticism of the second, and the irony of the last. Nicolas Poussin and Poussin’s landscapes take Classicism into the Baroque with all its temptations intact, Delacroix paints like a Romantic while proclaiming his classicism, and J. D. Ingres echoes David’s line and idealized virtues while adding electric colors and an arm that manages to grow out of a sitter’s chest. One could debate forever whether Modernism ever outgrew Romantic individualism and a culture of capitalism.

Look again at Friedrich’s lunar vistas or the sea, with a dark clarity still visible in landscape art today. He and his countrymen celebrated not the unattainable, but a world newly at hand. One enters past maps of the lunar surface of incredible precision and beauty. Friedrich knew a little astronomy, too, when he included a ring around the moon. Earthshine, reflected light, makes visible just slightly more than half the moon. I imagine that scientists then would have told me just how much more.

Whatever the world, Friedrich invented it at its most luminous. He takes in a river or harbor scene around 1805—at age thirty-one, with a finely wrought view from the artist’s studio. Later a ship’s mast belongs to Woman at a Window, a painting of his wife from 1822. The mass reinforces the stasis and geometry of the window, shutters, and wall. Nothing else comes close to the deep red and green streaks of her dress seen from behind. Somehow she stands out from the same colors and handling, slightly toned down, in her surroundings.

Is that mix of public and private worlds what really drove Friedrich’s men to the woods? Nature lay close by, even to a city boy—too close by. Progress threatened to uproot nature, just as a massive tree trunk stands torn from the ground and erosion has left a protruding rock to survive the elements. It threatened to break forever the intimate link between humanity and nature. Fortunately, one still has artists and the imagination.

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