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To wrap up from last time, Ben Shahn has fallen out of favor regardless—and not just because art moved on to abstraction. Nor is it that he refused the past century.

That sketch of existentialists approaches the stark, jumbled planes and predominant reddish blue of Analytic Cubism. It just happens to take until the 1950s to appear. There is no getting around that posters are meant as propaganda. That great opening painting of Sacco and Vanzetti looks like a poster.

For one thing, he was out of step with the dominant media of his time. He disliked oil paint for its high gloss. He preferred tempera, from the Renaissance, with its soft matte colors, and he treated the thickness of gouache on an equal part with the transparency of watercolor. Just as much, he seems content with what he sees. You may be surprised at how much his painting of a handball court sticks to the photograph. In the two opening series, family members stand around facing stiffly front as in a selfie.

Of course, being told what to believe, even by someone rebelling against what others tell you to believe, can be cumulatively fatiguing. But Shahn runs the opposite danger. In his deep human sympathies and limited means, he risks not presenting a judgment. Everyone shares much the same grim look. Is that a way to convey the torment of J. Robert Oppenheimer after the bomb? Does it find humanity in the worst and guilt in everyone? Maybe, but I am not so sure.

In part, it reflects no more than Shahn’s moral sophistication and the moral complexity of his time. Like the rest of America, he had to adjust from the evils of war to the fight against evil and back again, and no one did it better. In part, though, he was just not that clear. He poses President Truman on a piano, carrying on with Thomas E. Dewey, his 1948 opponent, at the piano. Boys in power will be boys. But then Shahn thinks better of it and shifts to the Republicans alone.

What does he think of the Supreme Court? In the course of civil rights, he wanted to celebrate Brown v. Board of Education by picturing the justices. And so he does, seated side by side on the bench. They have the same blankness as the family of anarchists so long before, and they share much the same classical edifice as The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Detachment and ambiguity are extraordinary virtues, and Shahn had them. I could not help wondering, though, whether he had fallen into them through his limitations as an artist and his need to be serious, start to finish.

He leaves an impression all the same. His show becomes a testament to others and a newsreel of his century. It is hard to resist jumping back and forth to see it afresh. In a show whose last section is “Spiritualism and Identity,” what then has finally changed? Think of all his work as defining his identity and politics as his spiritualism. Think of his circles as expanding outward from Brooklyn to the world.

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

To pick up from last time, everything about Ben Shahn was serious, least of all The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. No sooner had he completed that series, with twenty-three paintings, but he began another, of an Irish American labor leader convicted of a fatal bombing.

The first painting has entered the Whitney Museum and reached a wide audience. One might never know that he lived nearly forty more years. During that time, he was never close enough to Modernism. He was still making what postwar abstract art dismissed as “illustration.” Now the Jewish Museum calls for a reconsideration, as “On Nonconformity,” through October 23.

Maybe his refusal of modernity derives from his exposure to the brutality of a century. Maybe, too, it derives from the fate of an Eastern European Jew. Born in 1898 in present-day Lithuania, Ben Shahn came to New York with his family as a small child and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn long before its brief home to contemporary art. He had already endured plenty, but it seemed if anything to have him always looking for a home and promptly claiming it. As an adult he roamed all over with a camera, from parades, to Greenwich Village, and all the way to Alabama. He converts a photo of a handball game into a small painting that will feel like home to many a New York kid.

He returns to Judaism late in life, to set forth Ecclesiastes, the miracles of the Haggadah, or simply his appreciation of Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish scholar. Shahn has a gift for pairing text and imagery, pressing on one another without getting in each other’s way. It gives his retrospective a warm, handmade conclusion. He might be the artist always celebrating with a holiday or hallelujah. And maybe now I can see him that way. It might be better, though, to see him as out to reclaim art as highly serious.

Shahn kept up with his times in terms of battles to fight, but also who was fighting. He creates a frontispiece for E. E. Cummings, the poet and contributes to Edward Steichen for The Family of Man. He creates posters with iconic steel workers. A bit over half way through, in a section for cold-war anxiety, he sketches men in watercolor as The Existentialists. It looks back to a time when art, politics, and philosophy inspired one another. Think more recently of Postmodernism and deconstruction.

Existentialism has taken its licks over the years, and so has Shahn, though he still has hardly vanished. Keeping up with his times could not have been easy, for he lived in interesting times. And there he was, following every step of the way—from anarchism to the New Deal, the labor movement, world war, the Cold War, and postwar anxiety (with existentialists), and civil rights. He travels to India for Gandhi for tribute and South Africa with block type for breaking reports. He likes posters not just because they might make a difference, but also to press close to the picture plane. When he returns to Jewish subjects, you may wonder what he had left to celebrate.

The curators, Laura Katzman with Stephen Brown, never need to choose between a chronological and a thematic arrangement. With news like this, they can have both. But if there is one constant, it is people—from the handball court on Houston Street to apartheid. The existentialists are standing figures, because they are exposing themselves and taking a stand. Shahn traces the Civil Rights movement through faces, most often of victims. If it is all too serious, it is your choice to look away—and I wrap up next time with Ben Shahn’s status today.

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

From the tall classical columns, you know this is serious business. You know it, too, from the men in black.

The three men stand somberly and rigidly, the shortest man in academic robes. The other two wear black suits with tall black hats. They hold lilies, proclaiming their innocence. Their faces reveal nothing, but something is dying to get out. A hint appears in the background, where a fourth portrait appears in the form of an actual portrait, framed between pillars. He may have something to say that the three men cannot confess.

From the columns and academic robe, this could be an institute of higher learning, with the suits its funders. It could seem freshly relevant today with Trump’s assault on top universities. Maybe political art will make a comeback. But no, this is a high court, and you know this is serious as well from the open coffins in the foreground, bearing Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists convicted of robbery and murder. Their death sentence raised more than serious doubts, from Justice Felix Frankfurter to Benito Mussolini, in one crazy, mixed-up, terrifying international affair. And it inspired a painting, a wider series, and an entire career for Ben Shahn—and (as we pick up next time) it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

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

Brendan Fernandes does not need much in the way of company, but he has no trouble finding it. At heart, he is just showing off. He poses while striding, facing a stubborn rock and while reaching out. It makes him at once a performer, a photographer, and a sculptor. It gives him multiple way of asserting a gay identity as well, at Susan Inglett through October 11. But are they really separate series, and who is counting anyway?

If so, photography more or less wins out. One series has him alone and seemingly confident, facing that rock. The rock gives him no quarters as well, gray, craggy, and close to life size. One additional photo substitutes a rounded cone in darker gray, in black spattered white. Much the same sculpture puts in an appearance apart from photography near the center of the gallery. For once, Fernandes will not settle for an image.

A second series might be its opposite. Its subject changes from hard rock to soft flesh, it allows him to hide, and it keeps him company. It, too, is photography. A pair of hands sticks out tentatively from behind a curtain or stage set, one black and one white. One can only guess whose, but then he never quite confirms who is striding. The hands reach out to one another and never let go.

They might be all about opposites—black and white, hard and soft, gay and straight. They might be all about accompaniments as well, in a show called “Duet.” They could be different ways of giving no quarter. Not that he is exactly conveying pleasure, much less identity. It might b challenging the very idea of identity. Even in the rock photos, he shows only his back.

The gallery itself often falls between painting and installation, behind a partition facing the street. What an interesting way to have come out. It leaves his art rooted in both identity politics and the past, a time of Minimalism and earthworks. Based in Chicago, Fernandes speaks of drawing inspiration from Scott Burton, and his show breaks for a conversation with Michael Harwood, who performed in Burton’s Group Behavior Tableaux at the Whitney Museum in 1972. Alvaro Urbano drew on Burton’s performance and Brutalism as recently as 2005.

With his broad stride and one hand behind his back, Fernandes gives no quarter, but he is concerned with gradations and accompaniment. This really is a duet. The principal rock is light as granite and the curtains are ocher and gray. You might see he is just finding himself as a gay male and an artist. He will be out any minute.

He could be writing about a work of art or art itself. “I don’t have any answers yet,” and how could he? “The questions are too big.”

But no, Aidan Ryan is writing about his uncle and aunt, Andrew Topolski and Cindy Suffoletto, and their life in art, in I Am Here You Are Not I Love You (University of Iowa Press). What happened to Topolski, who others relied on as a teacher, who counted a Soho gallery or two among his supporters, who had precious materials and “technical precision”? He emerged from Buffalo in the “Pictures generation,” only to become a footnote well before his death from cancer in 2008? What happened to Suffoletto, who set her own career aside for twenty years to manage him and his? How could she, and what allows anyone to persist in making art while others give it up without a trace? This is about two artists and his love, but also some “interesting moments” in late twentieth-century art—and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

Maybe you never heard of either artist. I had not, and Ryan plainly intends the book as an act of recovery—not unlike another new book, by Pat Lipsky, from the same university press. A patron and friend saw Andy’s work as akin to music, while a later critic, who savored the geometry, heard the music of the spheres. Others found a dense, cool dialogue of words and images, an intertextualism. Cindy in color plates recalls Arshile Gorky—his gentle brushwork and tantalizing bad dreams. Were their most vivid imaginings no more than promises all along?

Ryan could hardly help seeing Andy and Cindy up close (and forgive me for switching to first names along with him). He knew her all his life until her death in 2012 and stayed with them in their final home, in the Catskills. “We swam in the Delaware, ate Cindy’s meals, [and] played in huge piles of leaves.” He cannot help it, too, because of how all three thought of themselves and their art. The book is about, first and foremost, individuals and individual moments—from the arts centers and antique shops of Buffalo to returning from lower Manhattan to Brooklyn on September 11. By the time it lists Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Charlie Clough, Nancy Dwyer, and Michael Zwack as “permanent members” of the “Pictures generation” from Buffalo, they have already exchanged glances going by.

No wonder it opens in the present tense, for these are present moments and alive, even if the artists have died. It starts at the end, Andy struggling merely to snap a picture, while Cindy “does the lifting—tugging, stutter-stepping to clear a space.” It shifts to the past tense for the rest, but you may hardly notice the change. Even in the past tense, the fatal onset of Cindy’s lung disease comes as a terrifying moment in the present. Text is lyrical, too, and I am having trouble not simply quoting, leaving the narrative to them. Like fires on the horizon, life is something “we expect but never see coming.”

As a professor told Ryan, “we remember . . . not what people . . . did but what they made us feel.” He took it for a cliché but, he adds, he should have seen it as a warning. While modest in length, the book has more details than you may wish to know, but no shortage of feelings. It is the author’s story, too, as he matures into a writer, editor, and musician. It all ends pretty much where it began, with death and dying—and the note found in Cindy’s studio that became the book’s awkward title. That and the sting of a survey of the “Pictures generation” at the Met that left Andy out.

The book shines in fleeting moments, but it sees them as “opening onto a much wider world” of people and controversies. Did art in the 1990s sell out to commerce? Art for Andy was always a commodity, like the antique stores in Buffalo that fed it, and what commodity is more precious to an artist than time? Dealers and collectors are mostly admirable, even when they don’t know their own tastes, and Jean-Michel Basquiat is downright innocent. It is also a picture of what mattered personally to a generation known more for a brutal irony. Systems are fine, Andy would say, but “ideas are not art.”

It is a picture, too, of the art worlds that Andy and Cindy inhabited—although it must omit others in the movement, like Barbara Bloom, from the West Coast. How did Buffalo become home to the Albright-Knox (now Buffalo-AKG) museum, with Nelson Rockefeller (before his gift of African art to the Met) on the board and an awesome collection of modern and postwar art? How did institutions like the University of Buffalo and the Essex Arts Center nurture contemporary talent? (Hint: “you can do it with us or you can do it all on your end.”) Why did young artists then leave for New York City? Was it all to show at Metro Pictures, to enjoy Williamsburg rents, and to party at the Mudd Club? And how did Andy end up making furniture and woodworking in a village upstate?

The book is full of questions, as promised. Was his loss of stature and sales just the times—or was it the clash between critics like myself, who put art into words, and art, which surpasses the limits of my language? All well and good, but then no artist would have a chance. Is it all luck, or did his work fit uncomfortably between surface beauty, “Pictures” irony, and the “sensibility of a machinist”? Why did Cindy sacrifice everything for her art—and then, like Lee Krasner for Jackson Pollock, sacrifice her art for his? “She lets him help her move the armchair from its spot against the pale plaster wall,” and soon both are gone.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site. I do rely as much as I can on the book’s language, with minor edits to fit

What makes a photograph worth keeping? Is it something special—that special place, that special person, that special time?

True, the story goes, some collectors disdain photography as something anyone can do and too often does, before posting it online. Others, though, know just where to point and what to shoot on their way to the decisive moment. Sound awfully romantic? Edward Burtynsky goes that ideal one better. For fifty years now, he has been the first to think of not just what to shoot and what to print, but what to see. It could be somewhere that you could never reach or never wish to go. And he is in a hurry to get there, just in time for “The Great Acceleration,” at the International Center of Photography through September 28 (with a summer show at Howard Greenberg).

Born in 1955, Burtynsky has been seemingly everywhere. He is not, though, nostalgic for any of it and not in the least romantic. He is mapping, ICP says, “human alteration of natural landscapes around the world,” in an age that some call the anthropocene—meaning people front and center, effacing the natural world and remaking the planet. If you are not altogether sure whether that alteration is a great or a terrible thing, neither is he. Together with Sheida Soleimani, a refugee from half the planet away also at ICP, he wrestles with a bittersweet future. He is not looking away and not looking back.

Burtynsky is out to see what no one has seen in more than one way, starting by just being there. He has seen ship breaking in Bangladesh and auto wrecking in Arizona. He has reached textile factories in China, oil fields in Azerbaijan, sawmills in Nigeria, and silver mines in Mexico. Humanity, he explains, has come out of Africa, and now it has come “full circle.” He sees what no one has seen as well because too many have refused to see it. These are things of huge commercial value but disdained as the very name of garbage, like salt deposits, uranium tailings, nickel spills, and what they lay to waste.

Above all, Edward Burtynsky sees what others cannot because of where he stands. The Canadian adopted a high vantage point, sometimes from digital cameras and helicopters, even before he took to drones, where no one at all is exactly doing the seeing. His technological prowess has only increased over the years, with such devices as gyroscopes to stabilize flight. He is documenting technological advances, if you wish to call them that, as well. It makes the surface of the earth his canvas, with painterly images, and do not even ask who is painting. They can be wildly expressive, like the free curves of rice terraces in Asia, or startlingly geometric, with long bands and concentric or overlapping circles.

The curator, David Campany, suggests the influence of Abstract Expressionism on the camera’s “all over” picture. John Chamberlain, after all, made expressive use of auto wrecks, too. Chamberlain helped to initiate a further change in art, too, toward the commercial objects of James Rosenquist and Pop Art. Burtynsky’s subjects include a positive riot of brand names in Pennsylvania—including McDonald’s, Starbucks, Exxon, and Walmart. They could be competing to claim the intersection as their own or the entire earth. It has, Campany adds, an “unsettling beauty.”

I started with a sentimental ideal, but neither I nor Burtynsky necessarily shares it, not any more. He is not Henri Cartier-Bresson this late in the day in search of that “decisive moment.” Rather, he gains in relevance for what many before Andy Warhol once disdained, repetition and reproduction. He is not above decisive places and events, like Mount St. Helens after eruption, but he prefers subjects that retain their anonymity, as a window onto the everyday. He sees industrial transformation as a transformation in society and in human lives. It could be the price of a so-called free market or, in China, an instrument of the state.

Burtynsky calls one series Natural Order, with obvious irony, but he may not have to choose between ideals—or between ideals and no ideal at all. He is demanding that people observe and take responsibility for what is lost while responding personally to an endangered beauty. He likes the landscape best at noon, he says, for the “confusion of shadows.” He loves detail, like tiny holes in the land that appear only up close, or a field of black rubber tires. He prints big and in diptychs, to leave you asking just what is at all natural. He makes it hard to identify the subject or point of view.

Sweeping curves could belong to a highway or to erosion from frighteningly toxic waste. A salt river blends easily into suburbia and farming into tailings. People find work creating waste, but also in cleaning up. Sharp color is irregular and rare. (Who would waste good money on color in a prefab development?) Yet it and so much else could pass for touch-ups after the fact from a painter with a gifted hand.

If this is the anthropocene, with people as its ends and means, what counts as human? By far the most photos are devoid of people—and that confusion, too is a fact of modern life. Burtynsky treats some scenes as portraits of industrial and post-industrial workers, in leisure moments and numbing labor. But landscapes are for him a kind of portrait all by themselves. Burtynsky allows himself few signs of pain and plenty of bombast, but he is fine with that. There is a tempting beauty in a confusion of shadows.

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