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art reviews from around new york

Everyone is a photographer now, but when did photography become for everyone? Was it when an “art photographer” like Walker Evans started collecting postcards—or when he made a penny photographer’s studio an image of America? Was it when the Kodak Instamatic made it easy or when cell phones and social media, like the Brownie more than half a century before them, made it affordable?

Or how about in 1863, when a mother of six received her first camera for Christmas? If the Met was right in 2013, Julia Margaret Cameron became “one of photography’s early masters,” but only by defying a common idea of what counted as halfway decent photography. “Not from the Life,” as she wrote in her notebooks, “but to the Life.” She was speaking of her wish to make photography more vivid than ever before—and her need to do it by mediating reality through fine art. She kept good company. She had the house next door to Alfred Lord Tennyson and photographed the likes of him and his elevated subjects.

As the Morgan Library makes clear more than a decade later, through September 14, she could hardly distinguish the two, no more than family and friends from the Bible or myth. Women for Cameron cast their eyes to the heavens or modestly toward earth. The eyes of men run wild. High Victorian madness or modestly was required, because only the “beauty of the world” suffice. Rather than start from scratch, let me share with you an updated version of my past review of Cameron as a longer review and my latest upload. I work it together with a review also from 2014 of Charles Marville, who became the official photographer of a great city coming to be, with a mission—not to celebrate the new, but to chronicle what was passing away.

With a woman’s face, enlarged on the wall by the exhibition entrance for Cameron, one might wonder if one has caught a glimpse of the photographer herself. It shows a young woman, that much more real and more ethereal thanks to her mute expression and the light that bathes her cheeks, picks out her eyelids, softens the wall behind her, and leaves the rest a shadowy blur. Actually, it is Cameron’s niece posed as “the lovely lady Christabel,” out of the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (“Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark.”) The photographer turned forty-eight the year of her Christmas present, and she was known as the plain sister in a family of beauties.

The temptation to see her there is telling all the same, long before Walker Evans, his postcards, and his penny photographer’s studio. It speaks to a still-new medium’s promise to capture the present moment and to freeze its immediacy forever, as past. It also speaks to Cameron’s wishes, in that unforgettable quote. The Met divides her work into three groups, with portraits of genius, women as subjects from literature and legend made “great through love,” and staged scenes. In practice, the groups are not so easy to tell apart, and the Morgan proceeds by date. Her subjects all belong to much the same world, the world of Victorian poetry and art.

She photographs the Tennyson family at home on the Isle of Wight, right down (the poet complained) to the bags under his eyes, and then illustrates an edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. She portrays John Herschel, the astronomer who coined the term photography, without literary “properties,” but with the same deep highlights and loose hair as for her Christabel, Sappho, or Circe. She presents her husband, a jurist, as King Lear, while framing a seemingly frank female portrait in dark hair and a circular frame, like the Medusa. She turns two young women into an early Renaissance Annunciation, with Perugino’s angel as a badly behaved child. When she photographs Alice Liddell at age twenty, she takes the woman that Lewis Carroll immortalized as a child and returns her to the course of time, but as a goddess. And the imagery, the upturned and downcast eyes, and the light all have their roots in a single movement in English painting, the Pre-Raphaelites.

So do David Wilkie Wynfield’s photographs of William Holman Hunt and George Frederick Watts, the painters, and William Frederick Lake Price’s posed image of Don Quixote in His Study, all also on view at the Met. With Price, a living man has become a character out of Miguel Cervantes who aspired to a myth—and, in turn, the character has become an artist. A dashing young couple as photographed by Oscar Gustav Rejlander would look quite at home half a century later, in the silent movies. What Cameron adds is her own way of bringing living subjects alive and into high relief, through overexposures. She is mediating between the present and literary time by a further adaptation of oil on canvas, in a softer focus and a deeper light.

Cameron’s accounts of technique’s discovery conflict, as a lucky accident or a deliberate effect. Maybe she herself was conflicted about her amateur status and her artistry, much like Alice Austen in America. She did not keep a portrait studio, in the sense of welcoming sitters, but she did have a studio in which to work, and she upgraded to a larger camera in just three years, in 1866. Her “out-of-focus . . . celebrities” won her sales, but also some nasty criticism. They marked her work as somehow both too artsy and just plain sloppy, but the trap was not hers alone. In bridging the conventions of painting and photography, Cameron found herself caught in long-raging battles over both.

The Met restricts itself to some three dozen prints, all from its collection, and the Morgan needs little more for a fuller picture, and anyway Cameron worked for barely a decade. Born in Calcutta, she returned to Ceylon in 1879, when her husband had property—and the window in time is revealing. British painting was trapped between realism and Romantic longings, until Claude Monet and John Singer Sargent brought “the Impressionist line” to England, where Sargent’s portraits ruled. And meanwhile photography, thanks to Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot, could only recently boast of a deep focus even in exposures under ten minutes, in contrast to streets in earlier French daguerreotypes that appear empty, because moving traffic has vanished into long exposures and the light. At a time when reports from the battlefield in Civil War photography were shockingly new, Cameron’s washed-out details must have seemed both a throwback and a deliberate affront. Long before Alfred Stieglitz in America insisted on the products of a black box as fine art, she must have reminded photographers of something they wished to forget—their debts to both.

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

If one thing comes to mind about the Middle Ages, it could well be stasis. What could disturb centuries of ritual, art, and ideas? What could disturb the darkness?

With The Book of Marvels, the Morgan Library traces not just the end of an era, but something more. In reality, the world itself was changing, and travelers were catching up with the changing picture. As the show’s subtitle has it, they were “Imagining the Medieval World,” and they invite you to imagine it as well, through May 25.

The Book of Marvels contained many discoveries, and so did the medieval journeys that preceded it. The Morgan does not stop with that one book, not even in the small gallery off the atrium. A modern marvel itself on its hundredth birthday, the museum holds the travels of Marco Polo to the East and Christopher Columbus—who published his own account of, he still believed, a shorter passage to India. It has the legend of John Mandeville, an almost surely fictitious Englishman, that may have first appeared in French. They witnessed men with six arms or two heads and bearded women. They found Asian spices, fabrics, teas, and the entirety of Islam.

O brave new world that has such people in ‘t. So goes a memorable line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from a girl whose discoveries, of flawed and altogether normal people, came by sea to her. As her father replies, chastening, ‘Tis new to thee. But then it is only a fiction, and so are the claims with which I began. Far from static, the Middle Ages had its philosophical changes, as Aristotle gave way to original sin, and its political ones, as Rome lost its dominance. It strayed from home for the Crusades to the Holy Land. Trade routes to the Middle East and Asia were opening up as well.

The show’s premise is suspect as well, although interesting. The travels of Alexander the Great and Pliny belong to the ancient world, not the medieval one, and The Book of Marvels, from the 1460s, or The Book of Nature, from 1475, to the Renaissance. Columbus obviously wrote after 1492—and not about India after all, but rather a true brave new world, the Americas. And will it be about the day-to-day world that men and women knew or about imagined marvels? If it has mostly anonymous artists without the true wonders of illuminated manuscripts and medieval bibles, it has the interest of actual lives, hunting and exploring. Someone had to push against the limits of the medieval world.

Just this past fall, the Met staked its tale of the early Renaissance on Duccio in Siena, at the center of new trade routes. Where would a curator stake a career, after all, without a contrarian’s history? The Morgan’s curator, Joshua O’Driscoll, has his fictions as well, but also insights. He grounds the show in both ways of discovering one’s own world, imagining and mapping. In different ways, they create and reflect the hierarchy of late Middle Ages and its giving way to something new. Already the appreciation of marvels suggests the advent of science, trade, and an openness to discovery.

The imaginings are themselves anything but the European church triumphant. The most vivid colors come with black African skin and Persian Islamic art. The many nudes are neither demurely shrouded nor Renaissance heroes. At the same time, a hierarchy appears in depicted wealth and architecture. Those nudes arrange themselves frontally in a several story building. They know where they belong.

Maps may seem more like historical curiosities than art, but they are just as revealing. A guide to the Crusades looks like a treasure map. Later ones show a closed world, but a world that contains multitudes. An encompassing sea forms the picture’s borders. It may consciously invert the ancient view bounded by the shores of the Mediterranean, as in the Odyssey. It may be a brave new world after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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