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art reviews from around new york

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.

Piet Mondrian can seem above it all, and perhaps he was. His abstract paintings make no concession to the viewer—not the enticement of color or hints of people, places, and things. You must value them for what they are. They are not even “in your face,” like the sharp brushwork of Willem de Kooning or the nasty smiles of his women. In one of his earliest works, though, he really is looking down from above, as the earth and sea sharply curve away. Find your footing if you can.

Mondrian’s planet leads off a focus exhibition of just thirteen works at the Guggenheim, drawn from the museum’s collection, through April 20. It is not an oval, no more than his Ocean four years later, in 1914, for it fits nearly and properly into a rectangle. He makes clear, though, that the painting reflects the curve of the earth itself. He is painting a dune in Zeeland, in his native country, where the ocean is never all that far away. He has come to the westernmost province of the Netherlands, also its least populous, but then who would dare populate his art? Patches of undistinguished color set off its elements. And then the warm blue of sea or sky looms up to fill out the canvas, much as Mondrian itself finishes off Ocean in monochrome.

He would never allow his subjects to divide a canvas, but he is still disrupting things. The Guggenheim has just two of his more famous compositions, from 1922 and 1939, their thick black lines containing and failing to contain upsetting fields of red, yellow, and blue. In one, the black stops just short of an edge and could well have begun elsewhere. Mondrian also turns squares to create diamonds, where the sense of cutting things off at the edge is that much more apparent. He may omit color altogether, leaving nothing to slow the collision of line and field, black and white, and yet everything is, pointedly, complete. It is, as he called his idea of an art movement, simply De Stijl.

It may not make compromises, but is it austere? Not when the colors and lines keep coming, and not when a diamond in black and white can hang high on the wall like the iconic monochrome of Kazimir Malevich in Soviet Russia. Not, too, when he could adapt to exile in New York with his late Broadway Boogie Woogie, now in the Hague. How did he get from Theosophy, an early interest, to jazz? How could he not? One could almost call his entire body of work a matter of theme and variations.

Is it consistently abstract? Not that either, although a modest success allowed him to quit work on still life. Still, he found his first mentor in an uncle, a still-life painter, and, like Georgia O’Keeffe, he drew both abstraction and single flowers. Like hers, they come alive from a point of view up close, which allowed him, he felt, to focus as ever on line and structure. A blue wash made some of them easier to sell, but color once again can seem incidental. Love them for themselves or as a step toward abstraction.

A selective show like this one can challenge what you thought you knew while summing up a career. But then a 1996 Mondrian retrospective at MoMA did both already. It came a long time ago now, not long after I began this long-running Web site. It changed my mind about him and allowed me also to explore whatever “theory” concerning Modernism was in the air. Allow me, then, not to begin over again, but to invite you to read on from the link just now. Here I focus on the Guggenheim in focus.

Just how, then, did Mondrian get to abstraction? The story does not run in straight lines, unless you count Mondrian’s black vertical and horizontal lines of varying thickness. His Ocean seems to mark a transition from his earthscape in Zeeland. He constructs an ocean from a dense array of black crosses, like piers, but also like his later black. A still life centers on a flower pot on a crowded table—and then a painting nearly identical in size makes the pot its sole clearly recognizable shape. Yet he painted both the same year.

Was this a constant back and forth or a turning point? There is no denying the primacy of his later abstract art, although he also called it Neo-Plasticism, for it, too, was malleable and changing—not uniform, but in balance. Still, look again at his earth view to see what was already in place. Its curves refuse a familiar point of view, much as the Mercator perspective in an atlas must squash a globe onto the page. Mondrian’s abstract art is a similar challenge to the single-point perspective since the Renaissance. It is his inhuman perspective on Modernism and New York.

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

Has anything changed in forty-five years on Daufuskie Island? Will anything ever change? One can only wonder on coming to photographs of black Americans by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe at the Whitney, through April 27. She must be wondering herself.

Daufuskie was never an enchanted island, no more than the Deep South. For Moutoussamy-Ashe, though, it has become a heritage and a hidden treasure. Born in 1951, she published her series in 1981. Yet surely wedding parties still gather in their Sunday best in front of Union Baptist Church. Surely the bride still dresses in white, as does the bridesmaid walking discretely behind. Surely the men still fish in the warm air and turgid waters of the American South and still share their catch by boiling crabs. And surely Lavinia still smiles.

Or maybe not. Lavinia, known to anyone who cared as Blossum Robinson, was already getting on in years in 1979 when Moutoussamy-Ashe took her picture leaning so close to the camera that one could reach out and touch, and the community must have looked to her often for warmth and wisdom. The photographer began her visits to the island two years earlier and could hardly tear herself away. Still, everything comes to an end, and these are “The Last Gullah Islands.” They became a book, displayed along with thirteen photographs in the floor for the Whitney’s collection. It has a room to itself where Wanda Gág went on view last year, like an enclave from the fury and melancholy of America’s cities and early modern art.

African Americans came early to the Gullah Islands, and they, too, came for freedom and comfort. Former slaves acquired property off the coast of South Carolina after the Civil War, and they could fairly be proud of it. Moutoussamy-Ashe has a fondness for creature comforts herself and did much of her work for mass magazines. One can recognize the pyramid of wedding guests from any number of photos of weddings, graduation ceremonies, and extended families. It suits a place where family and community must easily blend together. She could not resist shooting another wedding, in Central Park, on her return to New York City—and, speaking of weddings, she married Arthur Ashe.

Much else, too, looks a tad conventional even in its modesty and misery. A ramshackle house and its windows barely hold onto a shutter or the wash on a line. “Aunt Tootsie” tends to her own wash while eying her children. A car with an impatient rider has blown out its windows, and a young woman leans up against a screen door that plunges her into near darkness. She becomes a study in introspection. Do I belong here, she might as well ask? Does anyone?

Still, not everything is magazine ready, and the questions keep coming. Moutoussamy-Ashe studied with Garry Winogrand, who knows the strangeness of people as much as anyone, and she became an AIDS activist when it counted most. Sometimes, too, convention does its job of keeping the past familiar. The Geechee islanders would have liked it that way. A boy carries the American flag at the head of a procession for graduation. Pride and patriotism belong to them, too.

Graduations, weddings, homes, and people—these are not portraits or events, but a way of life. It is not street photography where there are not all that many paved streets, and not documentary photography when nothing really changes. Is it trying too hard for human dignity? One could ask that about a lot of art right now, with its due celebration of diversity. Still, I can almost hear that smiling older woman, the folds in her clothes seeming to continue of their own accord in her wrinkles. Dignity is fine, but it’s me, Lavinia.

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

One more excerpt this week of this site’s rich history, after a look in depth last time at a work by at Rembrandt. If I may stop a tad short of the present in art’s history, I take you back to the site’s beginning. Carl Andre’s 1995 show was too good to be true. This was Minimalism as fine sculpture—or at least designer furniture. Its purity would outlast the passing tastes of a multimedia age, much less another weekend in Soho. The handsome, polished surfaces proclaimed no less, or did they?

On a closer look, one could start to see why performance art and Minimalism grew up together. Both put the artist as actor right in the space. Both celebrate chaos while tormenting the viewer with blankness and boredom. Both challenge the community to a game, and the artist refuses to be the first to quit. And yet the community may find at last a gesture of welcome. Every so often I like to use this blog to excerpt an extended essay in review of a single artist and invite you to read more. Here I take you back to almost the beginnings of this Web site, some eighteen years before my home page even had a blog.

Entering at Soho’s pioneering gallery, Paula Cooper, I faced only the bare walls. At my feet, two broad paths curved slowly toward the far corners. I mistook their smooth, off-white paving for marble, but the actual cedar planks were hardly less refined. They touched at one corner, angled apart precisely to remap the room.

Clearly I was mistaken, too, in thinking of paths. A sign by the door forbid me to touch, let alone leave a footprint. For three decades, Carl Andre has made plain materials laid flat to the ground into his signature, and this time no one was going to efface it. He might as well have set his literal mark on woven paper, to be preserved behind glass. The alleged participatory art of the 1990s and “relational esthetics” may seem far away.

Careful not to nudge the curves one inch aside, I walked hesitantly forward, and the floor narrowed uncomfortably beneath me. Only another visitor stood between me and a dead end. As I looked at him and back at the door, I knew I stuck out. A safer part of the floor lay maybe a yard away. I considered jumping, but I might not make it, so I retraced my steps to the gallery entrance. The phrase “walking the plank” started to sound all too pointed.

In the modernist insistence on materials, Postmodernism has seen a reductive arrogance. They note the signature of the creative genius, the artist’s insistent control over the viewer’s experience. Feminist critics know, too, that “he” is almost always the right pronoun. To add injury to mythic insult, Andre may have caused his wife’s death. Yet as I leaned gingerly over the hard wood he had so lovingly prepared, I thought how different, how unpretentious, Minimalism once seemed—like a model for the subversive everyday art of Joseph Zito and Neo-Minimalism today.

From the first drawings scrawled on cave walls like graffiti, art has shouted, pleaded, seduced, and cajoled: “look at me.” Often it served kings and churches. Increasingly it had to please new wealth—or the artist alone. Either way, it said, “I control what goes through your head.” All that changed with the 1960s. It was time for artists and patrons to stand aside so that others could take a look around.

Now there was world enough and time to enter the experience of what one sees, and what you saw was what you got. With Tony Smith in sculpture or with Minimalism, even seemingly prefabricated art turned from the denotation of oil painting to the connotation of the everyday. Recall that man who stood between me and a dead end. He was really quite at ease, his back arched comfortably against the wall. Something made me too want to hang around. As I at last turned to go, he reached out his arm to welcome his girlfriend.

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

Allow me to continue this week with excerpts from this site’s long history. Last time recapped a “theory piece,” about debunking or sustaining the religious aura of a week of art. But if God has spoken to an artist face to face, it would have to be Rembrandt. Could that be why Rembrandt kept returning to a man who spoke with God?

With “Divine Encounter,” the Frick takes up the life of Abraham. Every so often I like to use this blog to look back at this site’s huge archive of essay sin review, particularly when I could dwell on a single painting. This excerpt dates to 2017, and I invite you to read more.

Kidding aside, Rembrandt always thought of belief in personal terms. He shows Abraham prostrate on the ground, unable to face God, humbled by the promise of a son and a covenant with the Jewish people. He shows him hearing again the promise, from three strangers who will reveal themselves as angels and then as the voice of God. He shows him facing God’s command to sacrifice that promised son, Isaac—and acting on that command even as an angel interrupts the sacrifice. He shows him casting out an older son, Ishmael and the boy’s mother, a mere serving woman, while unable to turn his back on them. In every case, Rembrandt shows the patriarch coming to grips with the strangeness of the divine, only to rediscover the terror and confusion of his own humanity.

The Frick borrows a single painting less than nine inches wide, perhaps an oil sketch for a lost or never completed major work. With that and just eight prints and drawings, it has staged a small show in every respect but its artist. The painting, from a private collection, shows Abraham Entertaining the Angels. The patriarch has welcomed three strangers—in anticipation of the commandment only much later, through Moses, that “you shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” Abraham raises a pitcher, its lid just slightly ajar, and a bowl to receive its content. Will he ever deliver sustenance to strangers in a strange land? It depends on what anyone can know about the needs of the human or divine.

A man addresses Abraham at the painting’s center, as a teacher or a friend. The mere mortal at right and the other two strangers at left form a half circle, hanging on every word, but also a pyramid with the young speaker at its apex, elevating him to the rank of a god. He has not yet revealed himself, but he is not just bathed in light. His glow also illuminates others in a darkened world. The angels still shield their wings from Abraham’s field of vision, and the one in the foreground has the earthy colors of this world. The tree behind them, with its thick bole and twisted branches, could stand for earthly vegetation or the tree of life.

The illumination does not extend to Abraham’s wife, Sarah. The Bible has her laughing at the thought of a son at her age—or even scorning it. Here she looks on in suspicion, lurking in an open door, just as she will in a print of the same scene ten years later, in 1856. There God has the beard and robe of an elder statesman, with Abraham almost his mirror image. The background has grown deeper and lusher, and Ishmael scampers over a fence. His playfulness reinforces the moment’s solemnity, and his crossing the fence to a wider and wilder world anticipates his banishment.

Abraham is caught between families, between obligations, and between worlds. So he is again with his arms outstretched to banish Ishmael and the boy’s mother, Hagar. Is he lying to himself about his responsibility toward others? One hand points to the wilderness, the other to the doorway and a dog—at once firm in his resolution and desperate to hold onto them all. Rembrandt never does represent him at his most outspoken, negotiating with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. When Abraham asks if God will kill even a handful of the righteous in order to punish the wicked, is he speaking on behalf of the saints, the sinners, or his own dual nature?

Maybe only Rembrandt could have found a way to ask. His etchings animate the shadows with crosshatching and freer touches of drypoint, while thick squiggles of ink leave much of the paper untouched and a story’s conclusion unstated. The curator, Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, suggests that he understood the burden of a divine encounter from Calvinism, but he has a way of speaking the unspeakable in art. The show does not borrow The Sacrifice of Isaac from 1635, when Rembrandt was not yet thirty, but the remaining drawings and prints stick to its theme. Even when Abraham fondly strokes a son’s chin, one has to remember where he will later raise his knife.

In Rembrandt’s early painting of the sacrifice (now in the Hermitage), a century after a shocker by Andrea del Sarto, the angel obliges Abraham to drop his knife—but it hangs suspended in midair, its point aiming straight at Isaac’s throat and its blade falling toward the boy’s crotch. Does it matter that God will provide or that God’s covenant requires circumcision? In a drawing from the 1650s, Abraham still bends over Isaac, laid out on a table as if for surgery, even as the angel bears down. In a print from 1655, Rembrandt clings to the knife even as the angel’s face comes close to kissing his dark, blank eyes. One can barely discern the ram that the angel has brought to the sacrifice, and the angel still covers the boy’s eyes. God has spoken, but will human nature have the horrifying last word?

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

For years now, critics have been out to dismantle fine-art institutions. The right takes a practical approach: cut their funding. The left, like me, would settle for deconstructing them.

Yet the religious aura of the arts is alive and well. I want to explore why, what that means, and what about art it misses. Every so often I like to use this blog to return to something I wrote as this Web site was taking shape, along with my ideas. Let me, then, excerpt from a longer article from 1994 and ask you to read more.

No reproduction, of course, can duplicate a painted surface, colors, scale, and site. These and other factors create that relationship to art works that viewers have held special. They initiate relations among producer, purchaser, and critic unimaginable before. In the haste of a new CD-ROM to create a virtual museum, one can easily forget how much was never meant for display on public walls. On slides or online, the art world, too, is one fiction among many. What it contains, though, and what it implies may turn out to be real.

If that fiction is seen as religious, think of all that it leaves out. Imagine grounding art in another metaphor, one as seemingly spiritual but harder to identify with a single creator. Critics have sometimes seen site-specific works as stand-ins for the artist. Think instead of a site larger and more diffuse than anyone alive. Think of those wonderful sixteenth-century paintings, by Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte, of the spacious interior of a Dutch city church. For Saenredam especially, I imagine it as the distant comfort promised in Vermeer’s quiet View of Delft.

Art is in the people who stop to meet. In the Dutch society of these paintings, the large, well-lit spaces were like a village square. It is in the light that fashions inanimate spaces, majestic stonework, and un-self-conscious pet dogs alongside the high and mighty.

Art is in the saints or gargoyles on the pillars, even when they appear to come alive. The carvings turn their back on religious dogma to let in a sense of play and natural diversity. It is in a child’s graffiti on the stone, thumbing its nose at the whole sermon going on elsewhere. It is in the grave markers, attesting to a human tragedy that no religious sensibility can ever fully explain away.

Art, too, is in the detachment and provocation of the painter. Thanks to willing viewers like myself, a painter or performer can pretend to see and absorb all this. Along with the artist, I have agreed to imagine that art is only about sharing it among men and women.

Well before Internet art made the Whitney Biennial, artists have been agent provocateurs, flawed collaborators, and double agents as often as spiritual guides. Either way, they know that there is no short cut, soulful or otherwise, to going about their work. This difficult age looks to an imagined past for shortcuts; think of the American elections. I look at art just because it is no less a pretense or an institution. In its precision of sentiment, it knows better.

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