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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, 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, the Lillie P. Bliss collection and its role in the origins of MoMA, next time.

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

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To wrap up from last time on black artists and ancient Egypt, the most potent ancient imagery cannot reduce past or present to a stereotype of greatness. Good art cannot appropriate tragedy on behalf of uplift. Rather, it returns quite literally from the grave to haunt the present.

Those black kids at the Met may have loved its Egyptian tomb as much as I did as a child, and so surely did Lauren Halsey. Just a summer ago, she took her version of the tomb upstairs for summer sculpture on the Met roof. It may have seemed awfully straightforward, like a recitation in school, but it evoked, her title explains, the east side of South Central LA. It was the story of her life, retold once more in a colorful collage on two square pillars here.

A full third of the show builds a scholarly history of greatness. If that sounds like a well-researched scam, then come kings and queens who cannot return from the dead. They can, though, learn from children, on a class trip or in O’Grady’s family album. Lonnie Holley transforms deities flanking a pharaoh’s tomb into very real, heavily swaddled children. If they seem one part comforted and one part repressed, so, they seem to say, are black families even today. When Betye Saar paints Window of Ancient Sirens, a triptych after a funerary mask of King Tut, she seems more disturbed than impressed.

Not that the accent is on subtlety. There is always the good cheer of Pop Art for Robert Colescott or the glorified street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Kara Walker, though, subtitled her grandest public work A Subtlety, and she was not altogether ironic. For all its scale and glowing whiteness, it had black features far from an Egyptian sphinx. And she made it of sugar, like a product of the Domino Sugar plant displaced by gentrification right next door—or of slave labor in the Caribbean. The Met can include only a sketch, a quick one at that, but it will do.

Ancient monuments appear again in contemporary settings, but in miniature, as collectibles. How better for the oldest intercollegiate black fraternity to assert its identity than on boardroom shelves, in a painting by Derek Fordjour? How much better still to explore blackness than with actual shelves on a large field of black soap from Rashid Johnson? David Hammons creates his own pyramids of human hair, while Sam Gilliam creates his in Minimalist aluminum, wood, white, and blue. Maren Hassinger make her Love (Pyramid) both sculpture and performance, in pink balloons. While not much to do with Egypt, Terry Adkins still pays tribute to Carver’s oxidized blue.

Art for art’s sake or history’s makes only a fleeting appearance before the show’s final third, about music. It includes album covers, lots of them, and a space for Afrofuturism, which somehow includes Julie Mehretu, the abstract artist, along with Sun Ra in jazz. And who could deny the impact of African American musicians? Still, album covers can take things only so far, and references to Egypt seem no more than coincidental. Besides, the Met already installed a period room for Afrofuturism in 2021. To misquote Sun Ra, space here is no longer the place.

This is an enormous show for so tenuous a theme. It will be fine for those who seek only role models in the terror and turbulence of history. As a handy survey of contemporary black art, it cannot match a larger and smarter show centered on Alvin Ailey, the choreographer, at the Whitney. Not that it lacks for artists and anecdotes worth knowing, not by any means. Who could imagine that William T. Williams found inspiration for his gray diagonals in Nu Nile, a black hair-care product? There may be gray areas left in a field of black and white, but a museum owes art more than a royal mess.

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Cleopatra’s throne does not look comfortable. No wonder she has taken her business elsewhere, into Egypt or into art.

Maybe it comes with the territory for so iconic a ruler and so fabled a beauty. The price of becoming an idol is a loss of humanity, in People or in history, all the more so when she knew that she was about to die. And Barbara Chase-Riboud does indeed give her a golden throne—or simulate one in small squares of polished bronze on wood. It looks magnificent, but also uncomfortably rigid and peeling, and no one would dare sit on it at the Met. She will, though, make more than one return along with a host of familiar images in a show of Black artists and Ancient Egypt, as “Flight into Egypt” through February 17. But are they truly an African American heritage for today?

Many have looked to Egypt before them—and thought it vital to black America’s humanity and dignity . Relate to Your Heritage, proclaimed Barbara Jones-Hogu, in psychedelic colors. The artist spoke out for a movement, AfriCOBRA, formed in the radicalism of the 1960s. Malcolm X traveled to Egypt three times, and a video shares a stop in Cairo. A photo by Eve Arnold accompanies black kids to the Met itself, where a boy in a while shirt and narrow tie could almost be Malcolm himself as a child. It seems only right for a show on the theme of awakening.

From the start, the Met argues, blacks contributed to scholarship on the region, from the Egyptology of the early twentieth century. George Washington Carver collected a sample of Egyptian blue (its ninth oxidation). Aaron Douglas applies the translucent colors that place him among the greatest in the Harlem Renaissance to a vision of ancient monuments. It could just as well represent a modern city under construction. The show takes its title from a loose painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, perhaps an oil sketch, in 1923. He had painted the interior of a mosque a quarter century before.

Two contributors, Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus, set out a study room so that you can discover more. As usual with such rooms, it has an interest in telling you what to study. Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave and abolitionist, had no doubts what is at stake: whites had set out “to deny that the Egyptians were Negroes” in order “to deprive the Negro of the moral support of Ancient Greatness.” The curators, Akili Tommasino with McClain Groff, have to agree. Yet the art on display has many colors, and that could be an African American heritage, too.

Fred Wilson sets out busts of Nefertiti, after the famous one often seen in strict profile, in gradations from white to black. They occupy, the work’s title explains, a Gray Area, and this is its “brown version.” Lorraine O’Grady pairs still more images of the Egyptian queen with photographs of children she has known, as her Miscegenated Family Album. As for Cleopatra’s shade of brown, no one can say. She was the last in a dynasty that Alexander the Great had installed in the path of conquest, which is not to say what it became. Barbara Chase-Riboud does well by leaving her out of the picture.

Europe and America alike had a fascination with Egypt, like many a child at the Met today. J. P. Morgan traveled in person to confirm his scholarly credentials and to stock the Morgan Library. Maxime Du Camp, a close friend of Gustave Flaubert, took up photography to document cities and monuments. Meanwhile black artists like Emma Amos have made a pilgrimage to Africa in search of their cultural and family history, but not to Egypt. Others, like Toyin Ojih Odutola from Nigeria, are still between continents in their art. Exhibitions have returned more and more to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

Then, too, can a focus on African Americans shift those gray areas a little too far toward black and white? Could the Arab world and Islamic art have their own colors and history? Could that, too, be a part of black history in a way the Met cannot fully grasp. Tanner did, after all, paint a mosque. And yet the show at its best questions its own pat history. As a white male, I cannot speak for African Americans, but its artists are still asking what remains of ancient greatness—and I pick up next time with just that.

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