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Caspar David Friedrich would never be alone as long as he could journey to the forest and the sea. They were all the company he needed, their bare trunks gathering the darkness in winter, their foamy crests the turmoil in his soul. When he faces waters and distant hills, there is literally no looking back.

He could have found his double in many another painting as well—or in the companions his doubles took with them to catch the rising moon. In 2001, the Met had a focus exhibition on Friedrich’s Moonwatchers (in the plural), not its last show of German Romanticism, and I excerpted my reviews of both just this week for you. Rather than start over, then, let me turn briefly to an ample retrospective, again at the Met, through May 11.

Friedrich will never be at a loss for company, but it will never be enough. The men here are anonymous, not the celebrated poet and painter doubling and redoubling the very notion of Kindred Spirits for Asher Durand in America, in 1849. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog , dressed in black and hand on one hip, faces down what he sees, apart and alone, even as his gaze reaches out to infinity. The earth replies with the chilliest of white and uniformly cool colors. Where many a Romantic captures motion and the light, gestures and colors here are barely natural. And their dangerous infinite makes this the Romantic sublime.

Friedrich belongs to a long tradition in German art, going back to pale flesh and moist flowers in late Renaissance nudes and Baroque still life. Friedrich took nature as his subject, but not as a naturalist. Unlike John Constable or Beatrix Potter, he left few quick studies of clouds or botanical species. Like a proper student, he built a reputation in drawing before he even approached painting. The Met opens with local scenery and familiar faces in works on paper, including his a self-portrait. Only then could he test the limits of observation and human understanding.

As curators, Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein make a point of that slippery contrast between the visible and the infinite, the known and the unknowable. For Friedrich, it is also a struggle for the meaning of vision, between the seen and the imagined. And the imagination wins out. A cross set again and again on a rock in early work, much like the wanderer’s tall crag, looks out on a full moon. Sands at sunset become the stage for an allegory of the stages of life.

But what is imagined and what lies just next door? What of a the portal of a church or the western façade of a cathedral? What of an equally grand stone arch? Friedrich keeps you guessing. Facing each, one can feel the same ever-present chill. The show proceeds chronologically and by motif, but Friedrich found his subject and style early on, apart from mistier early skies and the more explicit Christianity, and never let go. So, too, did fellow Romantics like Johan Christian Dahl and Carl Gustav Carus, and their works, a handful also on view, are hard to distinguish from his. For all his virtues, sameness means predictability.

The familiar experience has made him a crowd pleaser. Who can resist warm associations and stark feelings? Who can resist knowing what to expect? Still, Friedrich darkens and colors both brighten and deepen in late work, as if the foreground were itself layered over the whole. His studio window becomes as prominent as what he found on the other side of the glass. The infinite begins with the picture plane and with you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you missed the lavish retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich at the Met, through May 11? Me, too, until just days ago. If you follow my peregrinations regularly, you know that I have been laid up with ankle surgery since before it opened. I can only hope that I still have time to see a selection of the drawings that made his reputation and the paintings that make him a popular favorite.

I have, however, reviewed him more than once at length in the past. Nearly twenty-five years ago, the Met focused in on just two paintings, including Moonwatchers. I placed them in context of the very meaning of Romanticism, as seen in Romanticism and Its Discontents, by Anita Brookner, the novelist and art historian. And he was a man of his time. A decade later, the museum had an extensive survey of German Romanticism in works on paper, as seen through an open window—or, in the spirit of reflection, the subject of an open window. Allow me then two posts excerpting past reviews, with an invitation to follow the links to more.

Two men gaze through a wood at the moon. They may have turned to the forest for a connection to the night or for the sounds, smell, and light of nature buried in the sweat and toil of day. They could have sought each other’s intimacy, in the quiet of the night—apart from conversation that hardly knew when to stop. They have no weapons, but they could have sought adventure, swaggering in their broad hats and capes, confident in their powers to bring down their prey.

It hardly matters. Earthly quarry come way too easily. These men are in fact students—of the physical universe and the soul, the painter himself and a friend. They have stopped in their tracks, because they seek something farther and less attainable.

Instead of a fox, an idea, or the earth, they have gained clearing, and the moon stops them dead. The painter, Caspar David Friedrich, exaggerates a rise in the wood and distance to the sky with a low vantage point. He heightens the ghostly light with a color and shadow almost out of forest scenes in Bambi, if not out of a German tradition going back to at least the Northern Renaissance and Matthias Grünewald. Like the men but more literally, Friedrich steps quite out of physical space. He puts their motives aside, turning their backs to the picture plane. Now only the painter’s feelings count.

The painting appears in a haunting, well-chosen concentration. To help celebrate a new acquisition, the Met assembles two paintings by the German Romantic, several drawings, and a handful of other work showing his influence. The Frick Collection has shown repeatedly how much more a small show can bring home than many an overblown retrospective, and the Met’s restraint makes a familiar but elusive image fresh and intelligible. It may still run to hard-edged emotional overkill, but it is impossible to forget. If any painting could represent longing for the unattainable, this must be it.

Perhaps it makes sense that Friedrich often looks quaint or cartoonish these days, for all his broad appeal. The Hudson River School artist he most influenced, George Inness, can similarly look visionary or simply escapist. Friedrich did understand aspiration and failure. He knew personally Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who retold the Faust legend. Like Michi Meko today, he felt at home in the dark woods and a stranger in the urban wilderness. Life after Romanticism has had to battle the same issues of public identity and personal perception—with considerably less confidence in humanity and nature.

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

Does a dog have a Buddha nature? A Zen master’s no was brief and clear, but then who knows what else a dog might smell on a street near you?

Then, too, nothing is unequivocal in a koan—or in a thousand years of Japanese art from the Mary and Cheney Cowles collection at the Met. Its real and promised gifts are substantial enough to fill ten rooms off the museum’s Asian wing and its Chinese art, space enough to give a folding screen, a book, or a single scroll an alcove to itself. Sculpture alone could make you feel that you have entered a darkened temple or a tea house, with nowhere to stand apart from its guardians. An arrangement without regard for chronology may make you wonder if anything has changed or can ever change, until, that is, you stumble onto the present.

The show opened just days after a rehanging of the galleries for Chinese art right next door, to feature painting and calligraphy—often as not meaning poetry, and I work this together with my earlier report on that art as a longer review and my latest upload. And the show’s title promises to separate the three, as “The Three Perfections,” through August 3. Yet nobody’s perfect, and the Japanese insist on it. Think of Buddhism as the way to peace? Here the very first sculpture, a god, bears a sword to protect enlightenment from the likes of you. Another deity has a “wisdom fist.” And yet wisdom itself cannot transcend human imperfections, for all its resounding no.

Seekers of enlightenment still debate Zhaozhou’s no. For the Met, no means no, but could the Zen master have meant only the common image of a dog as a lowly creature? For a believer, everything in this world has a Buddha nature, and a dog has only to realize it. No wonder the sternest of guardians have a wider nature. In statues, the gods frown, but their robes flow freely, and gold enhances every fold. Nothing here is immune to delight, where even a stone for the artist’s ink may bear gilding.

Zhaozhou himself says nothing in what I hesitate to call a portrait in the Cowles collection, nine hundred years after his death. In a screen to his left, a bird rests on a tree looking gloriously upward. To the right, more lowly birds seem almost comic figures—but then the sage looks eccentric, too, with his scraggly beard and a knife, perhaps a writer’s tool, fallen to the ground. Here no means yes, and yes means yes to the world you know. Chinese art flaunts its connection to the past, with reverence. Here everything enters the present.

A black stone fountain, set on white pebbles, conveys a felt peace and physical motion that even the ancients rarely knew. It is not a recreation of a long-ago tea garden, but sculpture by Isamu Noguchi from the Met’s modern wing. Calligraphy itself looks to the past for an artist’s present impulse. Japan adopted Chinese writing for a phonetic alphabet of less detailed, freer marks, and an artist had to learn both. Wall text displays a poem as thirteen Chinese characters and again phonetically, from the Japanese, as two full lines. But then, as a translation has it, “our joy is limitless.”

The Japanese writing system may appear separately, in graceful curves or as little as three letters and a spot of ink. Or the systems may blend into one another and into realism. Those curves adapt easily to stones, streams, and flowers. A single scroll may combine writing, patterning, and flowers. One god rests on a lotus, where attendants bring their presences and shadows as well. Who needs another wooden god with eleven heads?

When China enters the eighteenth century, its nods to the West speak of an empire’s decline. Japanese art is just getting going. A scroll of “immortal poets” gives them individuality and a sense of humor that Chinese art never felt. A growing emphasis on color allows trapezoids that add perspective, although not Europe’s linear perspective. It also allows a story, like the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, to unfold in an enormous folding screen. Like views of Edo from Hiroshige, at the Brooklyn Museum, it could take place in a far older landscape or in Tokyo today.

Noguchi himself invites contemplation of both past and present. Water Stone could be a found object or painstaking carving, with an eye at once to tradition, Modernism, and Minimalism. Water from this fountain does not spout up but rather ripples off the black tabletop onto white stone. A blond wood screen descends to maybe shoulder height. It sets the space of the ceremony apart from the viewer, who can nonetheless linger and belong. The work presents a complementary view from the other side, obliging a second encounter after a prolonged exposure to Japanese art.

I shall never get over my suspicion of a museum’s catering to collectors in exchange for gifts. I cannot easily explain this show’s arrangement—or a title that its wealth of materials hastens to ignore. It also includes a glass deer from Kohei Nawa in 2011, an oversized paperweight that I should just as soon had never appeared. Then, too, there is no challenging Chinese painting, calligraphy, and poetry. That is why Japan took it as a model. Still, neither is there challenging Japan’s thoughts of transcendence and its all-too-human refusal.

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.

What do you hate most about modern architecture? The odds are good that Paul Rudolph will have had a hand in it.

Could that be why his star has faded, to the point that you may never have heard of him? The Met places him at the very heart of his generation. It asks to see his work as soaring into space in all its material form, through March 16. True, if his most ambitious plans for New York had come to be, the Lower East Side would never have become a gallery scene. Gentrification has closed more than a few hot galleries anyway.

So what is it about modern architecture that drives you crazy? Is it Brutalism, with its concrete façades and, at times, brutal assault on the viewer? Rudolph called concrete “the material that can be anything.” Is it the urban planning of Robert Moses, leveling and dividing entire neighborhoods, with highways that still cut off half the Bronx from the other half and Flushing Meadow Park from the largely Dominican community. Rudolph was there, too, as designer of highways that would have barreled through Washington Square Park and the life of lower Manhattan. If Moses has become the evil mastermind in stories of New York, surely Rudolph deserves a terrible place at his side.

Is it the isolation of apartment towers for the wealthy few? Is it their long shadow cast on Central Park and capitals of Asia? Rudolph found commissions across Asia, for skyscrapers that left landscaping, public access, and pedestrian traffic to others, should they care. Yet he never lost his love of open space and modern materials. The fine shading of his pencil sketches alone aligns his interiors with sunlight. At his death in 1997 he still sought his “concretopia.”

To tell the story of modern architecture through the eyes of Paul Rudolph is like retelling Othello from the point of view of Iago, but with a difference. In place of that arch-villain’s “motiveless malignancy,” Rudolph laid out his motives clear as can be, and they can seem downright contemporary. In fact, he may have a closer parallel in Othello himself, with a spectacular rise and fall. He became chair of Yale’s School of Art and Architecture in 1958—and proposed a new building for it four years later. His plans for Robert Moses put him on magazine covers. That includes plans for yet another highway, along the Hudson River waterfront—all too close to where the city’s wealthiest galleries stand today.

Their failure made the magazines, too. The argument, by Jane Jacobs and others, against his assault on the street grid has been central to visions of the city ever since. Had his plans for the waterfront gone through, miles of parks, sculpture by David Hammons, the High Line, and Little Island would never have come to pass. Sometimes the good guys win one, and this time they did. Washington Square Park has had a revival. Just how bad, though, were the bad guys?

Unlike Moses, Rudolph was not content with subordinating neighborhoods to suburban access. He imagined integrating highways and vital architecture in a single structure, with towers overlapping roads. In his sketches, you might have trouble spotting the cars. Nor was he averse to decoration in architecture, although he preferred to find variety in the materials themselves. He saved a panel by Louis Sullivan in the shape of an older carving—perhaps because its plaster reminded him of the potential of concrete. Colored pencil enlivens his design for a chapel, to the point that rising diagonals of color overpower the worshippers and the altar.

The curator, Abraham Thomas, places him in the “second generation” of modern architecture, along with I. M. Pei and Eero Saarinen. Pei’s entry pyramid for the Louvre has a place in public memory, so why not Rudolph? Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport has become a hotel precisely because people will not let it go. The Met does not so much as mention such older architects as Marcel Breuer, whose former Whitney Museum made Brutalism itself a marvel. Nor does he mention Louis I. Kahn, whose Yale museums upstaged Rudolph’s academic towers and showed that concrete, too, can admit the light. Rudolph has no such fans, but he can help see what connects them all.

Consider how he went about constructing a tower. He worked like a child playing with blocks, stacking and staggering. It brings rhythms and variety—and encourages the eye to rise along with it. It amounts to repeated cantilevers, as with Frank Lloyd Wright, but without asking to defy gravity. It is modular, making it adaptable and affordable. Air and light can enter freely as well. Most of all, it calls attention to Rudolph’s favorite materials.

So what if they land like a ton of bricks? His designs keep rising, but do human beings have a place? His tubular wheeled chairs recall the Bauhaus, but are rigid and uncomfortable all the same. Still he was fully a part of his time. When he allows near cylinders to run the length of a structure, he approaches Kahn’s translucent Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. His own firm, near the Plaza Hotel and since demolished, anticipates today’s fondness for open offices. You can decide whether they would be open to you.