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art reviews from around new york

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.

John Divola keeps returning to abandoned buildings in California for the sunsets, a photographer’s studio, and almost, just almost a sense of home. Any one of these is just a hole in the wall, with many real holes in its walls, but his photography fills them with a history and with light.

Like his show at the same gallery just three years ago, he draws on two series, one from many years past now, with much of the same geography. He is bolder than ever with his own additions and manipulations, at Yancey Richardson through February 22, to the point that sunrise or early evening light seems to shine right through those holes. He again makes one take stock of nature and culture. Still, rather than start again on a review, allow me to draw on my old one, revised in light of the new, so here goes. You still may look twice at those holes to know whether you are inside looking out or outside looking in.

Some things never change. When Divola exhibits two series together, from forty years apart, one could merge their one-word titles into a single revelation, Zuma Daybreak. In the first, photos overflow with light and color from sky and sea. The view from an abandoned building can hardly contain them, although windows and walls have an intensity of their own. And then a second series turns to black and white with much the same perplexity of inside and out, rebirth and decay. If you no longer know which is which, the photographer himself, the show’s title has it, is “Swimming Drunk.”

Daybreak here lasts a long time. Divola came upon the first property in 1977, in his late twenties, and he kept returning to it over the course of a year. It stood in Zuma Beach, in Malibu, better known for expanses of sand and surf than for abandonment, but they flow easily together. Photography can transform one into the other at that. Churning waters all but merge with the the ratty frame of a door or window. Interior light and paint compete with the white of clouds and sky. Together, they send the ultimate in mixed messages—but then Neil Young, who recorded Zuma two years earlier, had an aversion to unspoiled pleasure, too.

Divola persisted through the course of a day, from the crack of dawn to afternoon sunlight and a wilder sunset. As months passed, he made his own additions as well, including spray paint and artificial lighting, for patterns that seem to float or to burst off the walls. He had an assist from vandalism, wear and tear, and the fire department, which had used the building for training exercises. It is hard to know who took an axe to particular scenes—they, the photographer, or no one at all. Nature and human intervention each has its glorious excess, while the sobriety of black paint and interior shadows helps rein an unnatural nature in. So does the grid of architecture and windows.

A second series makes use of smaller sheets, the kind used for contact prints, in a gallery room often set aside for a different artist entirely. One could mistake it for Divola’s first approach to the theme or his inspiration in photography’s past. That would overlook how color entered the mainstream precisely in the 1970s, thanks to such photographers as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore who harped on saturated hues and unnatural light. That was also the time of Minimalism and the grid. Divola largely abandons those points of reference for “Daybreak” in black and white. He began in 2015, right after a show on very different themes, and he took until 2020 to complete the series. Still, one can wonder just how much in forty years has changed.

The setting in an abandoned building is back, but more confining, and his interventions intensify. Graffiti is that much harder to tell from a shower of sunlight or a density of shadow. Windows are fewer, and he may give over a print to an interior wall draped with what might pass for a work of art. Rather than a grid, it may display raw cuts like those of Lucas Samaras in paint. Samaras, though, never shreds the display space or calls it home. In the course of five years, Divola has made the room his studio, and a ghostly self-portrait appears faintly at least once.

It is still swimming in light and excess, though without the sea. Divola has moved inland to a cold war relic and abandoned air force base, for “The Ghost in the Machine.” Where the earlier series has the color of a psychedelic dream, this scene looks like a war zone, apart from bursts of sunlight, vegetation, and his own startling sprayed colors showing through real holes in the walls. In reality, it was once housing for men on the way to war. The one bit of verbal graffiti calls it Sleep Without Dreams. It is past daybreak all the same.

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.

Imagine the Museum of Modern Art without The Starry Night. Now imagine what it would have become without its founding director, Alfred H. Barr.

Not easy, is it? At one point, a turning point, as the museum approached its landmark opening in 1929, the two were at odds, and just try to guess who won. The outcome brought the museum that much closer to a canon for modern art, thanks in no small part to Lillie P. Bliss. Now MoMA gives her and her collection their due, to put its finger on what was at stake, through March 29.

Few exhibitions rewrite history, although more than a few try. With just forty works from the Lillie P. Bliss collection, the Modern rewrites its own history. Generations, me included, have learned how a young professor at Wellesley College gave modern art a defining history, one that lasted the rest of the century—and, to its credit, one that MoMA itself has worked hard for a while now to revise. Barr created a canon that started in Paris and found its fulfillment in New York, on the cutting edge of the present every step of the way. That is why he planned the new museum’s opening show on Fifth Avenue to stick to then contemporary American art. It took just three women to shoot it down.

As MoMA tells it, Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Quinn Sullivan were its true founders—with the indulgence at most of John D. Rockefeller himself. The three got the idea and contributed its core. Sick and tired of the crowds in front of The Starry Night, which is not even modern? Now you can see it much as it once stood in a private collection. Bliss also allowed her work to be sold to fund new acquisitions, a museum no-no today, but that helped pay for such stalwarts as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, as well. (That work still hangs in the main galleries.)

The founders saw a growing interest in the art that had shocked New York in the 1913 Armory Show, where Bliss first publicly exhibited her collection. She showed again at the Met, but she was not a precocious or instinctive collector. She met Arthur B. Davies, a painter of nudes and landscapes, and John Quinn, among the first collectors of modern art. Both had her looking back to the last century, with the Symbolism of Odilon Redon. She collected Georges Seurat as well—like the precision of Seurat drawings in Conté crayon in black. She found a new freedom, though, well into her fifties, with the death of her mother, who had needed no end of care.

And that freedom had her looking to the present—and to a future museum for modern art. I, for one, could easily leave The Starry Night to Vincent van Gogh on loan a year back to the Met. I could not imagine the Museum of Modern Art, though, without Paul Cézanne. No one else so embodies a vision of modern art as rigorous but constantly probing, even as the artist all but despairs of finding completion. And that vision was Barr’s. Still, Bliss collected work spanning Cézanne’s career, including Uncle Antoine, Pines and Rocks, Still Life with Apples, and the large Bather.

I still marvel at how his uncle plays the artist himself, how firm the bather seems, and yet how evanescent he is as well. I still marvel at how the weave of a forest both invites and defers the sun. I still marvel, too, at how the pattern on a cloth seems to tumble out onto a table with the already unstable apples. Bliss had caught onto something, and Barr must have been a welcome discovery as well. Still, she and her co-founders had to object when his planned opening show excluded Europe. Maybe her relative conservatism was at play, too, in starting with Post-Impressionism, but not altogether. Still, the women did not have to threaten a veto to change Barr’s mind, for he knew all along just how much lay at stake.

The show will never be “major,” and work will return to galleries for the museum’s collection when it is done. It includes letters, a telegram, newspapers, and the guest book from the museum’s opening for those who want to rewrite history for themselves. To the end, though, Bliss was still helping the museum keep up with its times. She bought Paul Gauguin woodcuts and a grandly flat portrait by Amedeo Modigliani. She bought Picasso’s Woman in White and the view out a window by Henri Matisse with an empty violin case and sunlight’s silent music. She died in 1931, never to see MoMA in its own building just blocks away from its first home, the one she knew.

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

It took Giorgio Morandi a long time to come into the light. He had to discover his subject, his palette, his brush, and his very detachment from what stood at only arm’s reach. The discovery stands out from a private collection on view in Chelsea, at David Zwirner through February 22—and one of two fresh looks at the foundations of modern art. I look at the second, Piet Mondrian in the Guggenheim, coming up.

Giorgio Morandi was anything but precocious. At least one might not think so from his holdings in the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, and it should know. Luigi Magnani was a friend and early supporter. In place of the sheer lightness of his better-known still life, early work runs to dark, heavy tones, often close to black. Black may have drawn him to prints and pencil drawings as well. It can give Morandi’s objects a history, too, of native instruments that can look both classic and quaint.

It may be his history as well, from an Italian painter in a modern scene increasingly centered on Paris, and he was fine with that, but he had to discover more. Born in 1890, he was adept from the very start, with the skills of an academic painter. That would explain the fondness for still life, darkness, weight, and those instruments out of the commedia dell’arte, much as for the Rococo and Jean Antoine Watteau. Yet it also had him thinking in the long term. If he was not precocious in the sense of child artist, he was in no hurry. He was in it for the long haul.

Early work also includes a landscape or two—and (surprise) a self-portrait. Already in his late twenties, he looks eternally young and slim, but still patient and secure. He is also testing the limits of time. Seated with a small, thin brush raised, he could be about to place the very next stroke, but he makes it hard to imagine his ever rising. An especially dark still life, encrusted with color, testifies to his admiration for Paul Cézanne, or so he thought, and its crust may reflect Impressionism. The curator, Alice Ensabella, sees just as much an older century and Jean-Siméon Chardin. He is still taking stock of his time.

Ensabella, a Morandi scholar, gives his early work the first of four large rooms, in a space usually reserved for the established and deceased. (Most recently it displayed a single large work by Richard Serra, curated by Hal Foster.) It can easily diminish smaller work, but here it allows a small retrospective. It comes seventeen years now after a full-scale Morandi retrospective at the Met. Rather than start over, let me ask you to read my longer review then. If he was slow becoming fully himself, he did live at home all his life.

What in due course changed him? Modern art, certainly, but also realizing his place in modern art. It was somewhat to one side, apart from Paris—but never all that interested in another Italian, Giorgio de Chirico, and Surrealism. As I wrote in the earlier review, he represents a third way to Modernism, neither Pablo Picasso nor Henri Matisse. Where Cubism had line and Fauvism had color, Morandi found weight and light. And he found them compatible.

That came with a serious departure. With a pencil or printer’s tool, he had used dense fields of parallel strokes to model his subject with precision and polish. He moved largely to paler washes, in the color of wood or plaster, often stopping short of the object’s edge. He could also stand household objects together, across the painting, each in front of or behind a wooden block. He was obliterating the distinction between the curve and the rectangle, foreground and background, home and studio, but also the thing itself and its space. The light belongs at once to the object, the painter, and the viewer’s eye.

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

Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien bear witness to a massacre, but they leave the testimony to others who survived. They bear witness, too, to an Asian people’s ways of life. The massacre took place nearly forty years ago in Escalante, an island in the Philippines, but for Camacho and Lien it could just as well be today.

It sounds modest enough, as “Offerings for Escalante,” at MoMA PS1 through February 17, and it becomes more poignant the more Camacho and Lien listen. On film, newly commissioned, survivors speak of falling to the ground to avoid the bullets, only to find themselves lying among the dead. They do not so much as speak of what brought them together —a mass protest in 1985 against the Marcos regime. Nor do they mention the peaceful revolution that succeeded in deposing him a year later. It is enough to bear witness. Are they stronger for having come together and survived—or that much more helpless in remembering? They themselves may not know.

For Camacho and Lien, it is nonetheless a teachable moment. They convert the two-level gallery just outside the rest of the exhibition into a study hall. A second film, of the protest itself, projects on a huge wall like a banner. Posters, display cases, and monitors round out the class. The survivors also do not mention the cause that brought about the protest, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, itself a matter of survival. The artists leave nothing unstated.

They see a reminder of not just present-day inequality, but also a colonial history of sugar plantations and exploitation. They add assemblages of whatever grows, some centered on skulls and other reminders of death. They are more moving, though, in their new-found modesty. Between the testimonies comes silence, over light brown fragments of rags or film itself, like a torn trailer. More poignant still is testimony from those who did not have to face death, small children. They sing together, as in a playground or classroom, but the words speak again of death.

Sohrab Hura is all the more moving for never losing his innocence. At past forty, he is the elder statesman this time out at MoMA PS1 (which also exhibits artists in residence from the Studio Museum in Harlem). Jasmine Gregory joins in with paintings after luxury watch ads, as “Who Wants to Die for Glamour.” Gregory wants to remind you of patrimony, preservation, and all that you are missing. Apparently, it is never too late to learn. Hura does better with less certainty.

He started as a photographer, capturing individuals against a background of forlorn beaches and unpaved roads. Neither the photographer or his subjects seem able to strike a pose. Street photography is often short of composed, as in “We Are Here” at the International Center of Photography, and uncomposed photographs often fall flat. Here they seem about right, a bit like Instagram for Stephen Shore. Less happily, Hura has switched to pastel and gouache for Ghosts in My Sleep and Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed. Suffice it to say that he has something to say about his aging mother and her dog. Now if only he could express it.

He has, though, explored India and its lives more fully in photographs and film. It takes him to the north, for winter and a touch of snow. It takes him to a festival, with a carnival in slow motion, at once colorful and somehow sad. People come for the rides, but even more to immerse themselves in rough coastal waters, a Hindu ritual of renewal. There is joy

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