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art reviews from around new york

To wrap up from last time on Jack Whitten at MoMA, what, though, is the subject of his experiment? If he keeps changing, is there a constant to his art—or something he has been missing all along?

Either way, there is a lot to see. Whitten has the entire sixth floor, reserved for MoMA’s largest exhibitions. White latticed partitions for drawings bring them closer to materials, too and to the paintings. A huge central room holds more than one series all by itself.

The curator, Michelle Kuo, makes the case for an artist with many interests. Whitten found success early, with a 1994 show at the Whitney, and his influence extends to the broken tiles and mirrors of Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim today. His many directions mean nothing less than a greater ambition. Any painter who thinks that abstract art encompasses activism and music is already thinking big. And anyone who thinks that it translates into all of western art and a science experiment is thinking even bigger. Those deep black paintings see stars.

Thinking big comports with Whitten’s one obvious constant, working big. It connects to his first loves in Abstract Expressionism and Mediterranean wall tiles. And work only grew. A triangle in honor of Malcolm X reaches to over feet in width, but the single largest is the tribute to 9/11, whose central image could be the Great Pyramid. Why? Puzzles like that abound, not always to the work’s advantage, but something big is going on.

A less obvious constant denies the whole question of his departures. With each new series, Whitten builds on and challenges past work. A late shift to ceramics recalls the painting for Invisible Man well before. Cuts recall a razor blade embedded in paint at its center. Ghostly images in black recall some of his earliest experiments, in abstract photography. They are passing through an unknown space, still finding their way.

They speak of the fate of invisible men, which points to one last constant. Those many histories from politics to music are his own as a New Yorker, a southerner, and a black. Whitten cultivates the tension between African American history and a history for all Americans. So does Whitten’s sculpture, inspired by folk and African art. It would be a new history, of grief and grievance, refuge and restitution, but such is the point. It would also be art.

Whitten has paid a price for so often changing his mind. I myself cannot always justify his departures or his returns. There are more luminous abstractions than his and more pointed tributes to the past. Not many, though, and they stand out at a time when diversity so often demands blind self-affirmation. Surely Whitten has better things to worry about than taking credit. After so many years, he can make his own totems.

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

How do you paint an invisible man? When Jack Whitten paints his homage to Ralph Ellison, it is his Black Monolith, and his imagined portrait is black and nearly five feet tall. It is black enough to create a mask that not even Whitten can penetrate, which is saying a lot.

Of course, he would not be up to the challenge without Invisible Man, among the most haunting works of American fiction. Ellison’s invisible man is very much alive every time someone looks between its covers. Nor is it merely a pathology in the mind of black man in a basement with too much to say. It is a reality, it asserts, that a black man can never escape as long as white America chooses to look the other way. Unless, that is, white America chooses to look and sees only its fears. Unless, too, a creative artist stakes out his own presence in sixty years of work, at MoMA through August 2—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review, in my latest upload.

That inviting and imposing face stares out from the entrance to Whitten’s retrospective, and he throws everything he can at it, including molasses, copper, salt, chocolate, and rust. The work contains broken eggshells, too, consistent with its broken tiles and mirrors, for a wide-open white background to a colorful work of art. If it is a rough assemblage, he is not hiding the damage. And if its materials are sticky, he was already well into his career in 1994, and he planned on being around a long time. He could return for inspiration to enough black and white Americans to keep you on your toes the whole way. He could also plan on being first and foremost an abstract painter.

For Whitten, persistence gave him the power to look back at both painting and America. He rang the changes on black abstraction, along with such artists as Sam Gilliam and Melvin Edwards. He lived through the fall of the Twin Towers and paid tribute to that, too. He took art into the digital era, with toner for his black. He was only, as the show’s title has it, “The Messenger,” but with a message he insists others hear. He kept starting over until others got the message, too, and so did he.

He made it easy. He worked in familiar genres, including spatters and stripes. He made his studio below Canal Street, where he could see Ground Zero and share the memories with anyone. At the same time, he made building a career anything but easy and invisibility almost inevitable. He abandoned figurative paintings and his homage to African Americans just when abstract art was giving way to critical thinking, conceptual art, and diversity. He kept changing just when a growing market for art demanded a signature that sells.

Invisible Man is tormented and angry, and Whitten is neither. There was always too much new to learn and to see. He was working class through and through, the son of a coal miner and seamstress in Alabama. Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, shares its very name with a process for making steel, but his parents were determined that he be the family’s first to attend college. He went as a premed, but dropped out to make art. Imagine him at just twenty in 1960, arriving in New York.

He found friends easily, from Willem de Kooning to Romare Bearden and from Abstract Expressionism to African American art. He had already thrown himself into the civil-rights movement. He could be an activist by day, a museum-goer on weekends, and a regular in Brooklyn jazz clubs by night. His brother was a jazz musician himself. His mentors taught him, as Edwards said, that painting was a form of improvisation but in forms inherited from the past. He and his wife summered in Greece and Crete where art and myth go back a very long way.

He dedicated much of his early work to his influences, which to him meant people. Other drivers were light and color, and they pushed him away from narrative painting. After a start with a loose haze, he used successive layers to blur the boundaries between horizontal stripes and to create a greater radiance. He favored orange and other departures from red, yellow, and blue to insist on the light. Materials were the greatest driver of all, and horizontal incisions run the entire width of a painting, leaving the stripes in low relief. He could make the cuts with a rake or a comb.

Whitten liked acrylic because he could layer it—and because he could make it dry slowly or fast. He could apply it to plastic sheets that could become the painted surface, even after he peeled them away, much like Beatriz Milhazes in Brazil. They become that much more visible when he abandons stripes for splashes of acrylic, for at once the free layered geometry of color-field painting and an underlying single color to the entire canvas. Much the same materials drew him to abandon color for black and white. He served as artist in residence at Xerox, where he experimented with toner. One can think of his entire career as an ongoing experiment, and I continue this review next time with why he kept changing.

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

Otobong Nkanga invites you to approach her work in stages, and each stage opens onto larger and larger vistas. She calls it Cadence and speaks of it as the cadences of life—but human life, she adds, is only a fraction of the cosmic picture. I want to say a negligible fraction, but it is the part that humans feel most keenly.

In fact, the big picture looks indelibly marked by humanity. Whether that is a good thing is hard to say, but it is impressive all the same. On commission for the outsized and unruly atrium at MoMA, she does her best to run out of space, through June 8. And I work this together with earlier reports on mixed media taking on painting, sound art, and installation as a longer review and my latest upload. Julius Eastman, Glenn Ligon, and Nour Mobarak also just happen to take on issues of race and personal identity as well.

There is no right way to tame the atrium, the worst element of MoMA’s 2004 expansion, because no one, however adept, really can. I still think of it as little more than a shopping mall whose chain stores have gone out of business. Recent installations, though, have refused to get lost in its waste of space. They can let classic works, like Rhapsody by Jennifer Bartlett or New Image painting by Susan Rothenberg, run its full length. They can play on the furniture and function of the museum itself, like Amanda Williams—or recreate city streets and fire escapes as a gathering space, like Adam Pendleton. Nkanga works on a still larger tapestry, literally and figuratively.

A single image sets the scene, draping down across an entire wall of the atrium, but not the center wall. Is that to keep it from dominating the rest? Rope sculpture hangs down from above, too, coming to rest on shiny black sculpture of craggy rocks. Bulges punctuate the rope, like bulges in wire sculpture for Ruth Asawa. Downright small work has the remaining walls—relief paintings, with caked surfaces like dried earth. They are largely monochrome, even when interrupted by unreadable text.

Or is it merely to give the tapestry the atrium’s largest wall. (Who knew that the walls differ in size?) It is a landscape, but not a familiar one from planet earth. At bottom, shimmering white curves outline what could be plants or waves. At top, orange fills the sky in bursts, like galaxies without stars or bombs bursting in air without the patriotism. About halfway up, a couple seen from behind contemplates the scene. They seem to take it all in without a care for the damage that people can exact.

Then, too, Nkanga might have chosen that wall because you cannot see it until have entered. Rounding the corner from outside, you first encounter the sculpture and a tempting glimpse of the small paintings. Once inside, you can stumble around fairly uncluttered space. It is officially the Marron Family atrium, and no doubt “family” refers to the donors, but parents do let their kids run about. You have already accumulated a reserve of impressions, varying in size, texture, and color. And then you can turn to discover the cosmos.

You can hear it as well, although not the explosions. A chorus chants something ethereal, while a single male voice repeats just one cadence. Nkanga hardly minds if you cannot understand a word of it. She is not spelling things out. Born in Nigeria, she works in Belgium, but nothing I could see alludes directly to her heritage, and the couple in the tapestry is probably white. And I do wish the work cohered and the text made sense, but everything seems to emanate from the landscape.

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

Piet Mondrian at the Guggenheim makes a fine introduction to a classic of modern art. Still, with only thirteen works, it can be little more than an introduction—especially when it comes to the stern, lively, off-kilter abstract paintings that made him someone to remember.

As I noted last time, you can look back to Mondrian’s 1996 retrospective and my review then, which looks further, too, at the significance of works in series within modern art. Allow me, then, an excerpt, with links to more.

Maybe I am imagining it, but it does not hurt an artist’s rep if the name begins with an M. Monet, Matisse, Miro . . . but Mondrian? Yes, indeed. The painter known above all for his austerity has taken everyone by surprise, including the critics. They have found the exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art a little less deep and a lot more fun than anyone could have expected. Mondrian turns out to be as joyful and decorative an heir of Monet as anyone could want.

I am not (altogether) joking. The reviews could well have been written in collaboration. They start with Piet Mondrian, unmarried at his death, with the thin features and wire spectacles of a European schoolmaster. Could this man, they marvel, have delivered the flash of a painting called Broadway Boogie-Woogie? The museum’s own bookstore managers panic at keeping up with the unanticipated demand snaking out the door.

I have to admit to the same relieved surprise. Mondrian’s work looks imposingly regular, its near-symmetry earned the hard way. A small square of primary color just balances a large square in another corner, which in turn could easily teeter over the edge of confusion without a saving black bar someplace else. Taking it all in is like holding one’s breath.

This show comes like one long, relaxing exhale. It begins with brooding landscapes and modern still life painted in Holland. In these and later paintings influenced by the Analytic Cubism of Picasso and Braque, outlines escape to take on an active life of their own. The delicacy of the lines resembles nothing in Picasso, however.

Also as in Cubism, the corners of the image appear to have dropped out. In this way, ordinary things and abstract forms can float, suspended for contemplation. The fragmentation slowly opens up Mondrian’s art to fields of calm, steady white.

In his best-known paintings, a firm rectangle returns, the areas of bring color expand, and the lines reach out to the painting’s unframed edge. Under their pull, the center no longer holds. Rather than enforcing symmetry, Mondrian kept on finding novel means to break it. He always starts with a form and lets his paint stretch it apart.

Later still, after the painter’s move to America, the color rectangles stay bright but grow smaller. They take on increasing activity, like blips on a crawl screen. Shortly before his death, they indeed come to recall the staccato accents of New York City thoroughfares. With the tribute of appropriation, Melissa Gordon even likens them to the front page of a newspaper

This show’s secret turns out after all to lie in that formula for a blockbuster. It asks that one reconsider why art sought the appearance of anonymity. It asks why symmetry breaking like his had such vitality. Paradoxically, modern art has depended for its color and variety on works in series.

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