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art reviews from around new york

Back in museums with the new year? I, for one, had forgotten so much. Just for starters, I had forgotten the glorious yellow in Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder at the Met.

Or had I? The Museum had closed its galleries for European painting for the Skylight Project, replacing the glass in each and every one. Half reopened in December 2020, and my experience of them began with just those fields of wheat. How much has the illumination improved, how much was I merely primed to look for light and color, and how much of the credit goes to Bruegel alone? Even now that the rest has reopened, I cannot say for sure, but the collection looks great all the same. It also looks at once classic, tendentious, illuminating, and confusing—and I pick up from where I left off in 2020, so by all means check out my longer report then as well as this one.

If you are expecting natural light flooding the galleries, you can only be disappointed to see thousands of bulbs behind the thousands of new panes of glass. But then, the Met is nothing if not controlling, and they seem just right for European painting. They bring out the depth and warmth of Bruegel’s yellow. They also bring out darker woods by Peter Paul Rubens in the same room and some startling curatorial choices. So why look up? Look around you—and not just for the mutual flattery of art and light.

As the leap ahead from Bruegel’s Mannerism to Rubens in the Baroque suggests, the rehanging in 2023 is more provocative than ever. The provocations have changed, to be sure, but not by much. The Met has had three years to rethink its choices, but it is telling the same story. Its account of the Renaissance now begins with “faces,” from both Italy and Northern Europe. One could almost forget how different the two were in style, purpose, and media. One might not so easily forget the double portrait by Filippo Lippi in Italy, with the solidity of his teacher, Masaccio, and a meeting of the sexes at a window ever so close to home.

More provocative still are the themes, again one to a room. As present times require, they describe art as instrumental. Not just one Madonna but two by Giovanni Bellini, early and late in his shift to painting in oil, fall under “Trade and Transformation in Venice—and so does the pain in a Lamentation by Vittore Carpaccio. “Faith and Love in Venice” has room for a more otherworldly love, in the eerie light of Savoldo. Even with Peter Paul Rubens, in “Flesh and the Spirit,” I leapt right to the spirit, for Saint Francis adoring a Holy Family so perfect that it excludes Joseph. I would have admired an independent Dutch nation in “The Patriotic Landscape,” but I was too busy with the variety of skies and worldly pursuits.

We are talking race, class, and power in a proper postmodern way. Does it matter that the prize portrait in “Portraits and Power” is not of wealth and power, but of Juan de Pareja, the slave whom Diego Velázquez set free to become a painter? Did Giambattista Tiepolo include blacks in his busy heavens? It is a game of Where’s Waldo to find out. It might be best to take all the rooms as a game, asking you to guess the theme. Please do not criticize yourself if you fail.

One last provocation is easier to ignore. Museums these days make a point of modern and contemporary art, like the Met itself with its new hanging for Korean art. Almost halfway through, I thought that these galleries had escaped that fate, but no. Pablo Picasso in his Blue Period turns up with El Greco, Salvador Dalí with Spain, and Max Beckmann with Francis Bacon on the way in. None look the better for it. A “focus gallery” for artists in their studio has room for Kerry James Marshall, Elaine de Kooning, and more.

Still, all is not lost, not with a collection like this. The Met has reined in the worst as well. It now as clearer divisions by time and place than in 2020. Just as much, the drawbacks can become advantages. Taking away separate wings for the Renaissance translates into a smooth arc from the origins of landscape and illumination to the real thing. The Baroque becomes not just a rebellion, but also an evolution. And the themes challenge you to retrace that evolution.

The return of European painting is not just a provocation. It is also a recovery and a relief. One may never feel close enough to Rembrandt in a room the size of a football field, but a full wall for Jan Vermeer is something else again. One can also appreciate the span of European art. It has room now for the Americas, in the eighteenth century, in a room that (surprise!) opens onto the Met’s American wing. A room later, both wings contain musical instruments, but each has a music of its own.

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

To continue my year-end review from last time, blockbusters always come with hype and hokum, and why not? Shows like these are costly to put on, while bringing in big money, and “van Gogh’s Cypresses” is no exception.

Does it really matter that some pictures include a certain tree? Maybe not, but the Met looked freshly at not just Starry Night, but the fatal last years of Vincent van Gogh. It also brought home his close connection to his brother, Theo, a dealer and his greatest supporter. Never mind that it came with an upbeat ending that no amount of great art can warrant.

And then in no time the lines were back for “Manet / Degas.” Can even a blockbuster sort out two creative minds and big egos? Maybe not, but it could still begin with Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas on their meeting in the Louvre and end with their envisioning Paris and politics through the lens of old masters and present-day ideas. It should have anyone continuing on to the Met’s galleries for European art, open again after the “Skylight Project.” It, too, comes with hokum, between loaded themes and forced interruptions for contemporary art. Still, this is the heart of a great museum.

Down in the Lehman wing, the Met jumps ahead to Fauvism and “Vertigo of Color.” It, too, has a dubious narrative, of just two artists and one summer—and it, too, is an all-male preserve. Still, if you never understood what brought Henri Matisse and André Derain together and how they differ, here you can. The show also returns to the role of painting out of doors in the creation of modern art. So, for that matter, did “Into the Woods,” French landscapes at the Morgan Library. Whose woods these are I only thought I knew.

Same goes for whose Modernism. Can Manet, who stood just outside Impressionism, and Degas, often seen as Post-Impressionist, point ahead to modern art and Pablo Picasso? As it happens, this was an anniversary year for Picasso, and museums all over the world competed to give him a really big show. So did at least one posh gallery, Gagosian, with documentation to match. The celebration included some lemons, like a comedian’s put-down of Picasso in Brooklyn, and revealing sidelights, like his early days in France at the Guggenheim. Yet they should already have one looking beyond the blockbusters.

My own favorite sidelights told of how Cubism never made it to a townhouse in Brooklyn—and how a stay in Fontainebleau led to two of Picasso’s most famous paintings. Like Matisse’s Red Studio last year, they suggest the importance of place—and a decent place to work. They also continue an exploration of when to declare art modern and what it took to get there. So did a show at the Morgan of Blaise Cendrars, a French poet, and his collaborations with modern artists. Oh, and how did America enter the picture, and when did Modernism become abstraction? MoMA looked for answers to both to Georgia O’Keeffe.

Is a return to so popular a painter just more of the same? Up to a point, although it stuck to her drawings. Besides flowers, it also held patterning for its own sake and views from an airplane window onto the earth, with its rivers, roads, and fissures. Like a true American, O’Keeffe took to the highway, only from above. I could not shake it out of my mind when I caught Chris Gallagher this fall at McKenzie on the Lower East Side. He does not need to look past the window itself for abstract art—and I continue next time with how to look beyond.

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