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art reviews from around new york

Can art bear witness to a massacre? This winter I wrote about artists who do, and they have me thinking about political art and whether, even for a progressive artist, a message of any kind risks conservatism in art.

Can form and content be at odds like that, and does it matter? Surely these artists hit home because their form and message alike aim for the eye and strike home to the gut. Before I say more about them, then, let me talk through the dilemma and the promise. I did so many years ago with one of this Web site’s first essays, about an artist as in command of silence as Jan Vermeer—and yet even his women seem just about to speak? What would they say about art now? Now I wrap this in with the winter’s reports on Enzo Camacho, Ami Lien, Sohrab Hura, and Marco Brambilla as a longer review and my latest upload.

Just to ask about such matters could serve as a frame for any discussion of political art. Not only political artists will feel strongly about it. So many, in every genre and medium, will speak of finding something more in what they do than a message. I would be wrong to write this off as formalism or, conversely, an overriding need for self-expression. A generation of late modern artists and postmodern critics dismissed all that came before as likely both, even as much of the public dismissed abstraction, conceptual art, and the present. We were not going to be like that, because we were not going to give up on art.

Still, it is only fair to insist that not just political art, but most art, maybe all art, has a subtext not to be dismissed. How often art that had seemed remote to me became vivid once I read more about it. I had not appreciated the depth and shimmer of oil colors in Jan van Eyck and the Northern Renaissance until art historians like Erwin Panofsky taught me their iconography, the stories they set out to tell. It was important not just, as artists themselves might suggest, because it caused me to look longer—long enough to start to see. Without it, the liquid darkness in Francisco de Goya and Disasters of War might have seemed a pale excuse for monochrome abstraction. With it, that darkness became a reason to look and a reason to paint.

Consider an artist whose politics extends well beyond her art. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the film about Nan Goldin, a three-part narrative advances along parallel tracks throughout. The very first sequence speaks of the suicide of her sister, and the story continues to ground her work in her life with all its pain and triumph. The second track takes up her major work, the slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in all its closeness to her but also its silence. These are her friends and loved ones in the age of AIDS, and one can only guess who in a photo is dying or a survivor. One can only guess, too, which of the couples sharing a frame can overcome their physical and emotional distance.

The third track ups the ante on both those narratives, her life and her life’s work. It shows her as an activist backed by a movement. Their assault on the pharmaceutical industry advances, obliging museums to refuse tainted funding. And yet this last track will never fully engage a world outside of art institutions, and it all but gives up on art. Can political art, then, still make a difference? Did it ever?

As an undergraduate, a friend told me, he sought an answer in a hole in the ground. Joel Shapiro, the sculptor, asked his students for two works apiece, one sincere and one false, but forget that. For each, my friend dug much the same two holes in the program’s yard, three by three by three. He started with the false one, but by the time he had turned up all that soil the false had become true. He might have felt a personal obligation or a personal violation in filling them up again.

At art’s most rewarding, the artist’s ideology is part of the work, too, intended or not. Whether politics, religion, or belief in itself, it develops right along with the visual and material. I think of existence and subtext as a bit like music and lyrics, and there is no point in making songs into lesser symphonies. The subtext can be what gets the artist up in the morning, throwing paint at canvas, or to bed in the evening, contemplating every detail, and it can raise other subtexts as well, like as the artist’s disturbing passions. It is a writer’s job to tease all these out and to show that form and content are alike part of the work, the very same work, and just what that entails. What goes wrong with bad political art may be that they never really are.

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

In 1924, eleven years after J. P. Morgan’s death, the Morgan Library opened to the public. His son relied on it too little to keep it to himself and respected it far too much. Its outreach has grown ever since, from galleries where Morgan once had his home to the garden where visitors can imagine walking beside him.

It still has the feel of a private treasure that they, too, can call their own. A nook out by cafeteria has children’s books for those too young and too in love with words to prefer high tea. It may have lost its serenity and dedication since Renzo Piano added an atrium, but now another presence walks alongside you as well, Belle da Costa Green.

Jack Morgan rehired his father’s personal librarian and appointed the Morgan’s first African American director. Did you know that they were one and the same? If not, you are hardly alone. In her own time, Green passed for white. An exhibition calls her “uncompromising,” but was it a compromise or an act of defiance? For its centennial, the Morgan seeks “A Librarian’s Legacy,” through May 4.

The Morgan’s anniversary celebration began with a display of Morgan’s Bibles and, in delicious counterpoint, Medieval money. And surely anyone who worked so closely with a wealthy man who fashioned himself a scholar had to respect his tastes. And, sure enough, “A Librarian’s Legacy” gives due space to illuminated manuscripts like The Crusader Bible. It shows off not one but two Rembrandt prints, including one long known as The Hundred Guilder Print for its public presence and its cost. Still, she plainly exceeded Morgan’s scholarship and shared his tastes. This was not a compromise but a true collaboration.

How, though, did Belle Marion Greener, a black kid from Washington, D.C., become Belle da Costa Green? And how did she become the librarian of an outstanding collection while still in her twenties? The curators, Philip Palmer and Erica Ciallela, give her both the museum’s most prominent galleries—the first for her story and the second for her work. Born in 1879, she grew up in the north of the city, closer to Howard University, the historically black college, than to the Capitol. Still, her father, headmaster of a segregated school, was the first black graduate of Harvard, and her mother’s family valued class and education as well. They had a society wedding.

On their separation, her mother took her to New York and changed their name. It was a new life, with bustling streets and a picnic up the Hudson. She served as librarian at Princeton before leaving for Morgan in 1905, while its Charles F. McKim building was still underway. Still, it was the age of Jim Crow, public lynchings, and racism that embraced its name. A photo by Alfred Stieglitz shows Jean Toomer, a leader in the Harlem Renaissance who became a Quaker and left for rural Pennsylvania. Passing, it seems, is what you make of it.

Greene made the most of it, and the press found her irresistible for her achievement, good looks, and fashionable comportment. So did such photographers as Charles White, who shows her profile, her head duly raised. When she lets her guard down for a smoke, that was a pose, too. The show’s second half centers on her imposing desk, but she did not sit still. She took her expertise and selections from the Morgan to New York’s Public Library and the 1939 World’s Fair. She oversaw conservation of a work after Botticelli that hung and still hangs among lesser Renaissance paintings in Morgan’s study.

Just what, though, did she contribute? The show has plenty of evidence, including ledgers and a library card, but few answers. Past shows have slighted her in favor of Morgan and present-day curators, but still she has her range, from the Middle Ages to twentieth-century work that her patron might never have swallowed. She thanked Abraham Walkowitz personally for his 1913 Human Abstract. And, in her own less than obvious way, she had her race. Years before, her father had appeared with Frederick Douglass in a print of leading black Americans, and one of her last acquisitions was a letter from Douglass, before her death in 1950.

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

Allow me to continue this week with excerpts from this site’s long history. Last time recapped a “theory piece,” about debunking or sustaining the religious aura of a week of art. But if God has spoken to an artist face to face, it would have to be Rembrandt. Could that be why Rembrandt kept returning to a man who spoke with God?

With “Divine Encounter,” the Frick takes up the life of Abraham. Every so often I like to use this blog to look back at this site’s huge archive of essay sin review, particularly when I could dwell on a single painting. This excerpt dates to 2017, and I invite you to read more.

Kidding aside, Rembrandt always thought of belief in personal terms. He shows Abraham prostrate on the ground, unable to face God, humbled by the promise of a son and a covenant with the Jewish people. He shows him hearing again the promise, from three strangers who will reveal themselves as angels and then as the voice of God. He shows him facing God’s command to sacrifice that promised son, Isaac—and acting on that command even as an angel interrupts the sacrifice. He shows him casting out an older son, Ishmael and the boy’s mother, a mere serving woman, while unable to turn his back on them. In every case, Rembrandt shows the patriarch coming to grips with the strangeness of the divine, only to rediscover the terror and confusion of his own humanity.

The Frick borrows a single painting less than nine inches wide, perhaps an oil sketch for a lost or never completed major work. With that and just eight prints and drawings, it has staged a small show in every respect but its artist. The painting, from a private collection, shows Abraham Entertaining the Angels. The patriarch has welcomed three strangers—in anticipation of the commandment only much later, through Moses, that “you shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” Abraham raises a pitcher, its lid just slightly ajar, and a bowl to receive its content. Will he ever deliver sustenance to strangers in a strange land? It depends on what anyone can know about the needs of the human or divine.

A man addresses Abraham at the painting’s center, as a teacher or a friend. The mere mortal at right and the other two strangers at left form a half circle, hanging on every word, but also a pyramid with the young speaker at its apex, elevating him to the rank of a god. He has not yet revealed himself, but he is not just bathed in light. His glow also illuminates others in a darkened world. The angels still shield their wings from Abraham’s field of vision, and the one in the foreground has the earthy colors of this world. The tree behind them, with its thick bole and twisted branches, could stand for earthly vegetation or the tree of life.

The illumination does not extend to Abraham’s wife, Sarah. The Bible has her laughing at the thought of a son at her age—or even scorning it. Here she looks on in suspicion, lurking in an open door, just as she will in a print of the same scene ten years later, in 1856. There God has the beard and robe of an elder statesman, with Abraham almost his mirror image. The background has grown deeper and lusher, and Ishmael scampers over a fence. His playfulness reinforces the moment’s solemnity, and his crossing the fence to a wider and wilder world anticipates his banishment.

Abraham is caught between families, between obligations, and between worlds. So he is again with his arms outstretched to banish Ishmael and the boy’s mother, Hagar. Is he lying to himself about his responsibility toward others? One hand points to the wilderness, the other to the doorway and a dog—at once firm in his resolution and desperate to hold onto them all. Rembrandt never does represent him at his most outspoken, negotiating with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. When Abraham asks if God will kill even a handful of the righteous in order to punish the wicked, is he speaking on behalf of the saints, the sinners, or his own dual nature?

Maybe only Rembrandt could have found a way to ask. His etchings animate the shadows with crosshatching and freer touches of drypoint, while thick squiggles of ink leave much of the paper untouched and a story’s conclusion unstated. The curator, Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, suggests that he understood the burden of a divine encounter from Calvinism, but he has a way of speaking the unspeakable in art. The show does not borrow The Sacrifice of Isaac from 1635, when Rembrandt was not yet thirty, but the remaining drawings and prints stick to its theme. Even when Abraham fondly strokes a son’s chin, one has to remember where he will later raise his knife.

In Rembrandt’s early painting of the sacrifice (now in the Hermitage), a century after a shocker by Andrea del Sarto, the angel obliges Abraham to drop his knife—but it hangs suspended in midair, its point aiming straight at Isaac’s throat and its blade falling toward the boy’s crotch. Does it matter that God will provide or that God’s covenant requires circumcision? In a drawing from the 1650s, Abraham still bends over Isaac, laid out on a table as if for surgery, even as the angel bears down. In a print from 1655, Rembrandt clings to the knife even as the angel’s face comes close to kissing his dark, blank eyes. One can barely discern the ram that the angel has brought to the sacrifice, and the angel still covers the boy’s eyes. God has spoken, but will human nature have the horrifying last word?

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

For years now, critics have been out to dismantle fine-art institutions. The right takes a practical approach: cut their funding. The left, like me, would settle for deconstructing them.

Yet the religious aura of the arts is alive and well. I want to explore why, what that means, and what about art it misses. Every so often I like to use this blog to return to something I wrote as this Web site was taking shape, along with my ideas. Let me, then, excerpt from a longer article from 1994 and ask you to read more.

No reproduction, of course, can duplicate a painted surface, colors, scale, and site. These and other factors create that relationship to art works that viewers have held special. They initiate relations among producer, purchaser, and critic unimaginable before. In the haste of a new CD-ROM to create a virtual museum, one can easily forget how much was never meant for display on public walls. On slides or online, the art world, too, is one fiction among many. What it contains, though, and what it implies may turn out to be real.

If that fiction is seen as religious, think of all that it leaves out. Imagine grounding art in another metaphor, one as seemingly spiritual but harder to identify with a single creator. Critics have sometimes seen site-specific works as stand-ins for the artist. Think instead of a site larger and more diffuse than anyone alive. Think of those wonderful sixteenth-century paintings, by Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte, of the spacious interior of a Dutch city church. For Saenredam especially, I imagine it as the distant comfort promised in Vermeer’s quiet View of Delft.

Art is in the people who stop to meet. In the Dutch society of these paintings, the large, well-lit spaces were like a village square. It is in the light that fashions inanimate spaces, majestic stonework, and un-self-conscious pet dogs alongside the high and mighty.

Art is in the saints or gargoyles on the pillars, even when they appear to come alive. The carvings turn their back on religious dogma to let in a sense of play and natural diversity. It is in a child’s graffiti on the stone, thumbing its nose at the whole sermon going on elsewhere. It is in the grave markers, attesting to a human tragedy that no religious sensibility can ever fully explain away.

Art, too, is in the detachment and provocation of the painter. Thanks to willing viewers like myself, a painter or performer can pretend to see and absorb all this. Along with the artist, I have agreed to imagine that art is only about sharing it among men and women.

Well before Internet art made the Whitney Biennial, artists have been agent provocateurs, flawed collaborators, and double agents as often as spiritual guides. Either way, they know that there is no short cut, soulful or otherwise, to going about their work. This difficult age looks to an imagined past for shortcuts; think of the American elections. I look at art just because it is no less a pretense or an institution. In its precision of sentiment, it knows better.

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

So little seems to be going on—a woman alone in a private room, few props, no motion, no overt emotion, the letter itself a slim ribbon of light. Jan Vermeer makes no fuss about what she might be reading and why it deserves to be painted. He seems to lavish all the subtleties of a great colorist and observer on next to nothing.

I kept looking for meaning in Vermeer’s gesture. And I kept returning to the same characteristics—reflected light, intricate but confined spaces, and the slow movement of the eye across a flat surface. He captures only the nuances of reflected light, the edges of a stark room of indefinite dimensions, and a surface almost compulsively divided by a window pane and green curtain. Its implied grid calls to mind the explicit cast-iron grid of the window. In his Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, a blemish in the wall captures the light. In room after room of his 1996 Washington retrospective, they have filled a museum with clarity and light.

It is an old debate: is art best defined as symbol making or as something that resists interpretation? Does its allegory have a subtext? Has contemporary art triumphed over old narratives with “pure painting,” or is it telling new stories entirely? Do true artists never explain their work, or are they the only ones with the right to try? Both sides beg for the vast institution called art history, and neither side is ready to ask how uniform and coherent that institution really is.

I want to make the question more concrete in a context of real history. I want to follow my own adjustments as I faced the mutest artist of all. Maybe my favorite work from a visit to Dresden is one of the city’s two by Vermeer. It shows a woman reading a letter. What if I could stand at her shoulder and read along with her? I shall never know for sure, but that resistance to reading is a kind of meaning, too—one that could never have existed without Vermeer.

In the twenty-five years since this Web site began, it has become a reference in contemporary art and art history on a scale that I never imagined. When I started, I could only share my thoughts on exhibitions then and some of my most treasured artists. Vermeer was one of them, and in those pre-Google days you could search the Web for him and find me among the top three or four hits. It seemed all the stranger to me, since they were personal, even private thoughts, much like the woman’s reading a letter. If mine could become so public, could I somehow share in hers and share it with others, too? I had to explain to myself the painting’s narrative and its apparent reserve.

Back then, too, I was making up for lost time, with thoughts from before I began to write. That included more “theory” than I would dump on you today. My answer had to reconcile symbolism and “pure painting”—the tools of art history and everything that art had learned since Modernism. It meant facing how much Vermeer owed to tradition and how much he changed it. It meant asking how the consummate artist of light and space could also be painting love. 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.

Every so often, let me use this page to return to a much earlier article, with apologies that it is longer and more ambitious than I would allow myself today. With a little luck, I can still evoke the work at hand (aided by some present-day revisions with just that in mind). I am talking about a seventeenth-century girl on the threshold of seduction or marriage—but not only that. From hidden religious doctrine, I wrote, Vermeer moves to the secrets of the heart. From the experience of a sacred figure, he moves to the sacredness of experience. By refusing to let you or I read his symbols and his letter, he has found a greater realism and a more modern art.

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

Surrealism called its experiments with collaborative art Exquisite Corpse, but what was so exquisite, and where is the corpse? Half a century later, Ted Joans wanted to know, and the questions haunt “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body” at MoMA. I also work this together with a recent report on “What It Becomes,” about the changing image in an artist’s self-portrait, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Joans had every right to ask. The painter, poet, and filmmaker had been around himself, long enough to known André Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. As an African American, he could count himself among the excluded, even by a movement meant to live on the edges of the acceptable. As a jazz musician as well, he could only appreciate a form based on improvisation and collaboration. In the original corpses, each contributor could see only the latest addition (and only in part at that) before adding more. Joans conducted his version more blindly still, by mail.

Its thirty years of submissions, starting in 1971, add up to a long accordion book indeed, in a display case that makes you, too, take it one drawing at a time. Mailing labels and envelopes that got it here lie in disorder on the floor. Here, too, nothing is all that exquisite, and the corpse is as elusive as the artists were far away. So where is the body? It is the theme of “Vital Signs” recent work from MoMA’s collection, through February 22. If it remains elusive, such as art today.

If Ted Joans was awfully late for the extended party, so is the Modern. The curators, Lanka Tattersall with Margarita Lizcano, call the show “an expanded account of abstraction,” but abstraction had been losing authority even before it begins. Painting made its return all right, but where anything goes, including an ill-defined mix of abstraction and story-telling. One takes for granted now women artists riffing on the female body in art. The History of Her Life Written Across Her Face, by Margo Humphrey, could stand for them all. If her black face looks much like a mask and the images have spread to miniature suns and a crucifix on each shoulder, all the better.

That opening room, for “Mirrors,” and the closing room with Joans and “Multitudes” sum things up. Artists are there now, at the center of their fantasies and fears, but then so is everyone else. Nothing new here either, and one can predict easily enough what comes up. That includes the usual suspects, like Frida Kahlo (that face), Eva Hesse (a breast with a penis), and Louise Bourgeois (so many bodily spaces, not all of them yours or her own). Mary Kelley weaves a personal postpartum record, much like pregnancy and motherhood for Julia Phillips at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. The show ends with a younger voice, Barbara Hammer, intoning deep thoughts on the primacy of touch before the naughty bits get going.

Never mind a certain lack of novelty. This is, after all, a museum collection, receiving a welcome emphasis since MoMA’s 2019 expansion. “Vital Signs” may not look all that vital, but more than a hundred works by sixty-five artists will do—and the collection continues upstairs and down, with its room for Jackson Pollock and true abstract art labeled “Fields and Figures.” True, the themes feel forced and almost impossible to tell apart. When Adrian Piper has the exquisite taste to take Immanuel Kant and yoga with him on vacation, why does his painted mirror go dark? When Maren Hassinger sets out thirty-two black bundles of wire and rope, are they not multitudes, too?

The thematic layout also offers little help with chronology or artists. Just how, since the 1970s, did art get this way—or was it there all long? MoMA leans to the latter, but I am not so sure. Jackie Winsor blackens Minimalism along with her charred cube of wood pallets, but it seems a long way from the prints right behind it. Lorna Simpson shows only her back, her shoes, and the labels that a black woman hesitates to wear. Lynda Benglis turns up three times, but not posing with a prick.

Still, the show has plenty of shared strategies and impressive work. Colorful drapery by Rosemary Mayer has its dark echo in Mrinalini Mukherjee and a suit of black hemp. When Charles Gaines reduces a woman’s face to pixels and Maria Lassnig distorts her own on color TV, they are analyzing and reconstructing gender. So is Ana Mendieta, who changes her image simply by making up. Greer Lankton speaks of her art as an act of self-construction, though her “contortionist” makes more sense alongside Blondell Cummings, who turns a black woman’s household labor into “interpretive dance.” Nor is Rebecca Horn the only artist to see her life on video as a dream, a journey, or a trance.

The dualism of mirror and multitudes could even amount to a theme. While art as the mirror of nature has lost favor, it still casts its multiple reflections. Senga Nengudi has her supremely tactile nylons weighed down not by her legs, but by sand, and its rise and fall here extends many times over. Belkis Ayón offers herself as a gathering and A Challenge in black and white. And Kiki Smith inserts cut-out flowers into portraits as herself and as a worm. One could almost call it exquisite or a corpse.

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