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Last time I revisited the Isamu Noguchi Museum as it nears its fortieth anniversary by the Queens waterfront. The museum celebrates with a modest rehanging. Here let me excerpt a fuller review from one of my very first visits, for a better introduction to a place you should know.

To begin then, At the very end of his career, Isamu Noguchi worked on a large, roughly human scale. Like living animals, too, the sculpture sprawls oddly without losing stability. It rests on the ground without stands or supports—except where the base transforms the art object itself. Moving around a room’s central partition made me think of wandering in a zoo as a child. Yet late work has become completely abstract. Dark materials suggest the monochromes of late-modern painting, in Noguchi’s contemporaries from Mark Rothko through abstraction today. Arbitrary changes in texturing echo and subdue a painter’s more extravagant gestures.

The layout upstairs becomes only slightly more prosaic, like a maze of numbered boxes. It could represent a deliberate shift backward, to the architecture of an earlier Modernism. Noguchi’s career shifts with it. Its twin poles of art and urban reality do not. Elsewhere upstairs, the artist struggles in his role as public servant, with commissions that never got built. Yet a room devoted to the Japan project makes a fitting memorial quite by itself—only now, to an artist holding true to himself.

One gets a brief tour of the sculptor’s early career in Paris, under Constantin Brancusi. He learns effortlessly Brancusi’s imagery and materials. One meets again those bronze skulls and slim, towering birds. Noguchi also has his fling with Surrealism, in tight arrangements of small objects. He then grows more abstract, but also more at home in the conscious, the familiar, and the prosaic. He is finding his way to a personal style, away from Modernism’s dark interiority.

Elsewhere upstairs, the California-bred artist struggles in his role as public servant. He returns to Japan, where he also grew up, to commemorate victims of the atomic bomb. Later on, he worked alone and with Louis Kahn, the architect, on playgrounds along the Hudson River that would have made Sanford Robinson Gifford proud. Not one plan got built, in Japan or New York, but the artist never lost his utter self-confidence. For Manhattan, Noguchi submitted his projects again and again and again. A room devoted to the Japan project makes a fitting memorial quite by itself—only now, to an artist holding true to himself.

I thought of a play just on the edge of limits, too, as I walked again in the garden downstairs. I started by following the garden path, in its careful course past each work. Yet I could not resist breaking off to the small, loose stones for a closer look. I could not help running my hand through a slim sheet of water that trickles off the fountain. If art here tumbles on the edge of nature, so did I.

The factory versus the museum, the special exhibition versus the career history, the market versus the product—each tells a similar story. Noguchi speaks to a modern artist’s difficult identity as source for a richer art. As an American high modernist, with roots in three countries not long ago at war, he may well define the puzzle. As I walked again in the garden downstairs, I could not resist breaking off to the small, loose stones for a closer look. I could not help running my hand through a slim sheet of water that trickles off the fountain. If art here tumbles on the edge of nature, so did I.

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

Here it is, spring, so how about a glorious expedition? Starting fifty years ago, Isamu Noguchi pulled off a miracle. He turned a factory in Queens into a garden.

More precisely, it became the Noguchi Garden Museum and a tribute to one of Modernism’s greatest sculptors. Costco had not yet come to the neighborhood, where a piano factory a quarter mile north still held sway. A motel on Broadway looked none too inviting, and Socrates Sculpture Park on the waterfront was little more than an untended patch of green. And still, with the museum’s opening in 1985, three years before its creator’s death, it brought a place for awakening and for peace. It has served ever since as a venue for Noguchi and more.

Can it look half as miraculous today? Approaching its fortieth anniversary, it attempts something almost as daring. To celebrate the occasion, it rehangs the collection—nineteen galleries plus an actual sculpture garden. Amy Hau, its director since January 2024, asks to compete with Noguchi himself. He purchased the building across from his Astoria studio and took pains with every inch. As sales of his work rose and fell, he needed a place for what had become his private collection, and he wanted it to look just right.

He built just three rooms from scratch and adapted the rest to his art. Even now one can marvel at how factory interiors look so open, how sculpture blends into the garden, and how both turn the space inside-out. The museum (since an earlier renovation, simply the Noguchi Museum) reopened on a sweltering Thursday before Labor Day, in 2024, as a relief from summer and the claustrophobic gallery season about to begin. It was a chance, too, to shine without special exhibitions. Past shows have included Saburo Hasegawa and Christian Boltanski, along with Noguchi’s hopes for a Memorial to the Atomic dead. Now it could reclaim the entire building for him alone.

Not everything has changed. His legacy may be daunting, but Noguchi was always an eager collaborator—on a Yale museum with Louis Kahn, the unfinished memorial to Hiroshima, city parks, and even a swimming pool. For him, play was indistinguishable from craft and art. And the rehanging is respectful enough, to the point that you may not notice a change. It may be a tad stricter in grouping sculpture by materials and forms. But then Noguchi can hardly help looking familiar whatever his survivors have done.

One enters to work from the 1970s, at his most memorable. Pockmarked surfaces bring out the weight of stone and give way to polished marble. As color enters, the lines of his sculpture turn on themselves without ever quite closing the circle. The second floor returns as ever to early work with more hints of figuration, including portrait busts, and gathers public projects. Allow me, then, to draw on to my first review of the Noguchi Museum, more than twenty years ago, next time for a fuller and to invite you to read more. Meanwhile I combine the present post with a past report on exhibitions ten years ago of Noguchi’s connections to calligraphy, costumes, and dance for a longer review and my latest upload.

A Whitney retrospective that very year could not carry the same punch. Pieces looked like nothing more or less than, well, works of art. Where Jacques Derrida spoke of an artwork’s frame as a supplement that undermines art’s claim to finality, at the Whitney a sculpture’s base appeared as just one more effort to remove a beautiful object from this world. Smaller rooms for his lamps looked like a brand-name designer’s section of a department store. At his own museum, Noguchi erodes the very distinction between an art object and its surroundings. He sets his work free to enter the world.

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

I do not go to the Great Hall of the Met at year’s end to look for art. As a New Yorker in holiday season, I would be too busy dodging human traffic and counting the seconds in line. It moves fast, but that hardly describes a decent work of art.

Stillness, though, comes easily to Tong Yang-Tze with the ancient practice of calligraphy on a suitably grand scale. She covers the walls to either side of the entrance, through April 8. For once, even a hardened critic or shopper has to look up. Can even she keep a tradition alive in the crowd, no more than Lee Bul on the museum façade? Further within, the Met has a tradition in all its creation and perseverance, Tibetan mandalas, and I work this together with an earlier report on those as a longer and fuller review and my latest upload.

It is not easy to find a moment of peace in a museum atrium—or even a work of art. At the Morgan Library, since its 2007 expansion, you are probably too busy eating to care about either one. Since MoMA’s 2019 expansion, the block-long lobby is little than a waste of space, unless you buy into a tall projection as AI art. The Met’s first Great Hall commission, by Kent Monkman, went for murals of Native American history, as busy the coat check and a lot more pretentious. Jacolby Satterwhite preferred video, but visitors may have mistaken it for an ad, if they spotted it at all. Tong Yang-Tze does better by engaging, her title announces, in Dialogue.

The Chinese artist really is in dialogue—between art and poetry, images and words, East and West, herself and history, the work’s surface and New York’s most imposing space. A translation speaks of the “other,” but otherness for her is a necessary condition of humanity or art. As a child, she fled the mainland for Taiwan, at the cost of a divided family. She has designed her adopted homeland’s passport seal. Her text at the Met might challenge anyone to put it to use. One must divide it into columns before reading from top to bottom and right to left.

That allows ink to spread across the paper, like “all-over painting.” (Your favorite Abstract Expressionist here.) At left, trailing dabs have a presence of their own at top, all but detached from their place in letters and words. They play against curves that flaunt their creation in a single stroke—or the impression of one. The work at right is simpler still, although still close to drip painting. It suits the terse allusiveness of Chinese poetry and art.

A rehanging of the Met’s Chinese art pairs painting and calligraphy, while Japanese art from a private collection claims these and poetry as the “three perfections.” Sure enough, the Great Hall makes a show of perfection. As one text has it, “Stones from other mountains can refine our jade.” As an online translation of the other runs (with no mention of the “other”), “Go where it is right, stop when one must.” And so she does, leaving plenty of white space. The look of improvisation plays off against aphorisms some three thousand years old.

The Met will never permit a free lobby gallery like the ones at MoMA and the Whitney. It does, though, continue with its façade commissions. Lee Bul uses its sculptural niches for Long Tall Halo, through May 27. It adopts the metallic shine of a commission by Carol Bove in 2021 and the statuary of Wangechi Mutu the year before. It may not have the sanctity of a halo or the pop appeal of “Long Tail Sally,” the song, but Korean artist tries for both.

She is at heart a show-off masquerading as a crowd pleaser. She speaks of hoping to disgust the viewer, but you know better. She had her hall of mirrors, with a suspicious resemblance to infinity rooms for Yayoi Kusama, and the Fifth Avenue expanse of Museum Mile will do just fine for infinity. Bul uses the pedestal within a niche for a vertical component, like a poor excuse for a mythic hero. Her construction of small spirals then spills forward and out, twice ending in a point. Her subjects cannot get it up or keep it in.

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

The War to End All War did not end war, and the Holocaust did not put an end to anti-Semitism. Racism in the United States has its own ugly history as well. Can a contemporary black artist and a Jew from another era face it together?

The Jewish Museum opened its latest show the day after Donald J. Trump’s reelection with an archival image of a lynching. Both Trump and the lynching drew larger numbers than I ever imagined. Draw your own conclusions.

A video cuts between the grainy photograph and still another spectacle—a carnival in Paris, Texas, where the black man in the photo suffered a grisly death. It lingers over colored lights and rides, with the cutest of animals as their seats. It lingers even longer over the moment before death. Nor is it the only image of a lynching in “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out,” where Trenton Doyle Hancock “confronts” (as the museum has it) Philip Guston through March 30. Guston began drawing the mob nearly a hundred years ago, when its threat was all too real. Hancock to his delight is still catching up.

Born in 1913, Philip Guston has become a gallery and museum staple for his images of the Klan, including himself in his studio with blood-red hands and a white sheet over his own head. At first he earned anger and disdain for his turn from the comforts of postwar abstraction, later, as his fame grew and “mere” cartoons became fashionable, for his subject. Only recently Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts came close to canceling a retrospective, opening at last without a black curator. An African American, Trenton Doyle Hancock is still based in Texas and still grappling with the same sense of guilt and the same fears. He was not even born when Guston returned to that theme in 1969, but the Ku Klux Klan haunted him from an early age as well. One can still ask just who is confronting whom.

Guston’s early drawings have a nasty realism, Hancock’s a loaded ambiguity. In a photograph, he lies on his back in a corner completely covered by a sheet. He could be a dead body left for disposal or a Klansman catching up on sleep. Guston’s later figures are closer to caricature, with a nose borrowed from Richard Nixon. Often he sets just two figures side by side, as the artist and his model or the racist and his victim. He may never have left the studio for all one knows, but it is scary enough inside.

Hancock has much the same pairings, but with a recurring hero, named first Loid and then Torpedoboy. The character is at once captive and superhero. He is also both a participant and an observer. He may turn white from shock, far whiter than the murderer, or pitch black as if seen through the white man’s eyes. He also has more colorful pop-culture scenery, like the fair grounds. Paintings get much of their colors from plastic cups and lids. In ink on paper, dialogue or commentary runs wild without offering a pat resolution.

The controversy is not just about putting a good face on black experience in today’s culture-affirming art. It is about who has the right to speak for whom. Born in Canada to Ukrainian Jews, Phillip Goldstein grew up in LA from age 6. His parents had found safety and must have hoped for, well, normalcy, but he never could. You will recognize the turn against him from the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where a white artist, Dana Schutz, dared to paint the open casket of Emmett Till. They were taking responsibility for what they fear most.

Black artists, too, face their share of shoulds and should nots. Kara Walker has had no end of complaints for appropriating stereotyped black silhouettes. Should an artist paint only what she sees in the mirror, and should a male novelist incorporate only men? Should art stop speaking out against bigotry? I sure hope not, and I appreciate the sheer cacophony of voices at the Jewish Museum from just two artists. As Hancock has it in a recurring title, Step and Screw!

I have written way too much elsewhere about Guston, at the Met and in Chelsea, but then this is Hancock’s show by far. Yet the more time he spends on Guston, pouring through the estate in preparation for this show, the closer he feels. Did Guston paint a ladder to the sky, as his approach to memories? Hancock’s hero thrusts one leg through a ladder of his own. His are big canvases and maybe a bit silly, and I cannot tell the show’s four themes and sections apart, but daring and controversy go a long way. As a Jew in my own way myself, I can feel the mob growing closer and the spectacle all too real.

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

To pick up from last time on winter at SculptureCenter, the years that gave birth to sound art and text art also brought an uncanny silence. Strange perhaps, but hardly a contradiction.

Painting was losing authority, abstract or representational, and something had to take its place—not more stories about saints, sinners, or the artists themselves, but Minimalism. And if industrial materials could invade the gallery, why not something barely seen or heard? Where Minimalism boasted of art as object, subject to gravity, sound art was in the air. Now ASMA and Tony Chrenka bring their own silent music, but the stories and the objects are back as well.

ASMA may sound like a coughing fit, but it is much the familiar mix of ice-cold sculpture and sound. The collective (Matias Armendaris and Hanya Beliá from Mexico) calls the marvelous basement tunnels an “ideal space for music,” but the only sound this winter was of water, drip by drip. You had to listen carefully if you were to subject yourself to the water torture, through February 3. It also dared you to connect three distinct sections and motifs. One comes straight out of Minimalism, light sculpture—not in neon, but in older sources of light. The artists direct them through glass.

What looks like a bulb has a hand-made geometry, and what looks like a lens is just a glass disk. And the lack of focus continues into work that sticks more closely still to Minimalism’s industrial sheen. What light there is reflects off relief elements on polished spheres, like disco balls where dancing is prohibited. A third basement tunnel brings anything but dancers at that. Female dolls the size of small children lie on shelves or on the floor, seemingly unable to rise. One has at her feet a furry black creature like a wildly overfed rat.

One last space, for video, may or may not unify the three. It treats the basement as a source of images or abstraction. The dolls themselves aspire to the sexual charge of work by Laurie Simmons, but the point seems to be the music and the silence. Both continued upstairs, through December 22, in a side gallery that most recently held Bastien Gachet, but it is not out to give you the creeps. It takes Minimalism and music seriously. It makes up for a lack of poignancy with a bit of clarity, trickery, and paint.

Chrenka covers the walls at eye level with thin paired verticals, one brown and one white, each with a slight lateral twist. You may take them for twigs. I could swear that I had seen this strategy before, but its familiarity is deceptive. Julianne Swartz, for one, has herself both leaned wood against the wall and created sound art. Chrenka, in turn, has not salvaged branches but rather guitar necks, cutting away the frets. I smell a rat.

The cuts leave only bumps at left and right, which the artist reinforces by painting over them. The paint also helps them adhere to the walls, and it reinforces the silence. The slats broaden at top, like actual guitar necks waiting for someone to tune the strings. You cannot finger these fingerboards, but the white of the walls looks all the more compelling for that. So where is the promised music, and just where is that “ideal space”? Maybe the dolls are too world-weary to listen or to sing.

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

To live in an ever-changing city is to know loss. It is what makes you a New Yorker—the passing of friends and loved ones, the restaurant where you knew the menu by heart, the bar where all the customers knew you by name, the bookstore that taught you what and how to read. For Alvaro Urbano at SculptureCenter, it is as if a painting had come to life, only to insist by the very stillness of its actors that he will never see them again.

The show is his “Tableau Vivant” (literally a living painting), through March 24. Successive “In Practice” projects take the back room, and downstairs (as you will see next time) the pair known as ASMA listen for the sounds of Minimalism. Urbano pays tribute to a place where people once gathered and to its one-time creator, Scott Burton. Alvaro knows that he cannot bring back either one. You can still see benches from Burton in Manhattan, and people really do gather there and take their rest, but you better hurry. A renovation in Battery Park City has already slated them for removal.

Not that it matters, but a tableau vivant was a nineteenth-century fashion, and it, too, is not coming back any time soon. People put on an act, staging a favorite work of art. No worse, I suppose, than those who use 3D glasses and projections to put you in the middle of a painting, as if The Starry Night were a planetarium—and no better. Urbano’s tableau, however, is no mere reproduction. He salvaged whatever he could from the atrium at the former Equitable building in Manhattan, only a block from the Museum of Modern Art. That does not include people.

Back in the 1980s, Scott Burton brought Brutalism to Minimalism, as if nothing could be more hostile to human feeling, but with fine marble and flowers. He had an architect’s sensibility as well—a commitment to public spaces. Not all were cherished, and not all survive, but such is the city. This one fell victim to yet another tasteless renovation in 2020. Born in Madrid and based in Berlin, Urbano got there just in time and carted off roughly half. The result steals the show, as Atrium Furnishment.

Presence and absence alike haunt its semblance of a plaza where people once hurried past or stopped for lunch. It is a recreation in spirit, and spirits can be threatening. Urbano breaks up Burton’s marble circle, meant to evoke a clock face and the dreaded nine to five. It can now broaden to cover SculptureCenter’s main hall. (Converted by Maya Lin, the former trolley repair shop has its own spirit life.) It has the original’s beauty, but also its formidable mass, and it no longer welcomes seating.

Visitors are warned not to touch, for their own sake as much as the work’s. Leaves that have seemingly fallen are metal, with sharp edges. Their fall colors bring a reminder of death. Much the same colors shine out from light boxes propped here and there on the marble, streaked like a rock face and a geological record. The original’s flooring is gone, but a drop ceiling has collected no end of dust, and one lone object bangs against its glass as if trapped within.

Bastien Gachet has his own “object-based dramaturgy,” as he calls it, in the side room (since given over to Tony Chrenka) through this last October 21. Where you might hope for a bathroom, he sets a bone-dry sink. A keyboard lying on top has nothing to communicate, and a bucket on the floor holds what could be diluted blood. The rest of the installation lacks quite the same shock, but its bare wood furniture is creepy enough. I cannot swear what it has to say, least of all something about “pre-intentional,” real, and fake. It seems real enough to me.

Still, he and the more evocative work out front should have anyone asking what has been lost. Gachet also speaks of the imminent, emergent, and durational, and Urbano, too, confronts the passage of time. Burton’s trees have become his bare leaves, which can never die because they were never alive. They also create a bridge from the chill of an office building to the fragile warmth of Central Park. He took the form of his leaves from the Ramble, north of the park’s lake and south of the Delacorte Theater and Great Lawn, once a popular queer pick-up space. Burton died of AIDS in 1989.

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