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art reviews from around new york

Exactly one hundred years ago, a show opened in Mannheim with one eye on the future and a middle finger squarely in the public’s face. It was 1925, and Germany’s loss in World War I was not just a bitter memory. Soldiers came home to a shortage of affordable housing, the ruins of a wartime economy, and a new art.

It was time to make demands—on art and on society. It was time for a Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Now if only its dreams could survive the Great Depression and the Nazis—and if only the artists could agree on their objective. For now, they will just have to find what common ground they can at the Neue Galerie through May 26.

Modern art in Germany had always had a confrontational spirit and a shortage of optimism, and the very idea of a New Objectivity may sound like a cruel joke. But then the movement made no excuses for starting over. This was no time for German Expressionism, with its implication of escaping reality. A smaller show, from the Kellen collection, has all that you might expect in wild colors and subjective impressions, through May 5, from Gustav Klimt and decorative portraits to /Wassily Kandinsky and Blue Rider. If a new movement, in contrast, came with contradictions, it also came with the promise of things as they are. Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub of Mannheim’s school of art had given it a name two years before, and even he thought it encompassed two directions that he could hardly reconcile.

Sachlichkeit in German can refer to the facticity of things or the facts, and Hartlaub distinguished “verists,” who faced a gritty industrial present, from “classicists,” who gave the future a more perfect union. If that were not enough, the Neue Galerie finds room for proletarian realism and Cologne progressives as well. It sees a meeting of art and technology, too, including the work of the Bauhaus, founded in 1919. The curator, Olaf Peters, includes Oskar Schlemmer’s painting of the Bauhaus that long graced the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art. It has Marcel Breuer chairs as well. If they are off limits to visitors, the future takes time to arrive.

It may arrive with a felt ambivalence as well. Marianne Brandt at the Bauhaus designed a clock, a telephone, a desk tray, an ashtray, and more. Nothing was beneath her. Models posed for ads for fancy jewelry, and nothing was above them. Still, a proper critique had to extend to consumerism. When an unemployed worker bares her shoulders to Otto Dix, the promise of sexual favors extends to neither one.

Reality here is treacherous, proletarian or not, but seeing it is half the battle. When photos by August Sander capture ordinary workers, they become individuals. Who needs Max Beckmann and his assault on Berlin nightlife when they can emerge into daylight? Other works focus on children, caring for dolls and one another. Others have the dignity of doctors, sowers, or educated readers. Still, it is a dangerous moment in a harsh world.

Exploiters may share the dangers with the working class. When capitalists meet for Georg Scholz or Franz M. Jansen, they cannot drop their pipes, their scowls, or their masks. When high society gathers around a felt table to make plans, most outright headless and mindless, the businessman looks like Donald J. Trump with a mustache, and a general sets down his bloody sword. A blind man’s dog looks bloodthirsty himself. Factories devoid of life for Carl Grossberg, though, look gorgeous. The future may be nearing after all.

Art here all but denies the contradictions, and such as the price of a movement. It also leaves names that few will care to remember. Yet they make real demands, including the demand to face the alternatives. A row of portrait busts runs from youth and determination to near abstract sculpture to a robotic mask. A doctor shares a room of portraits with a madman, because who is not a madman or a patient? The convex mirror above the doctor’s head wants to know.

When John Chamberlain made sculpture from used car parts, he inherited all the dynamism of a speeding car and all the gravity and perfection of a showroom. He could count, too, on a different kind of dynamism and stasis, that of postwar American art.

If he was throwing the scraps of sculpture every which way, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others were hurling and slathering paint. If he was welding them into something larger, so were Dorothy Dehner and David Smith, starting at an auto plant. If he was also adopting an icon of what had become in no time the classic American lifestyle, so were James Rosenquist and Pop Art. America, boosters felt, was in motion like no other country, but it was not going anywhere if that meant going away.

Kennedy Yanko makes art just as familiar, but not a bit larger than life. It has all the quick moves in converting a gallery into a showroom and a showroom into a highway. One work has rods sticking out in every direction, badly in need of repair. Others have gentle folds from surfaces of welded steel. Black is the dominant color, in what I took for industrial-strength spray paint. Rent a limo in Tribeca now, while you can, at James Cohan through May 10.

Yanko, though, is a designer, not a destroyer. His show fits easily on gallery walls and on pedestals, like scale models for something larger. He cultivates the look of fine design as well. These materials hold out hope that one could double them over by hand, without need of a hammer or blowtorch. Folded white has the texture of fabric rather than metal. Silvery surfaces make a point of shining.

The gallery lists only generic metal and, new to me, paint skin. Paint, it explains, accumulates on whatever it covers to the point that he can dispense with backing. Jack Whitten, the black artist, does much the same with acrylic on plastic before transferring it to painting. If Whitten is decidedly abstract, so is the generation that Yanko recalls. You call this painting? Well, yess.

Not that Chamberlain is devoid of trickery or artistry. If you have not seen his work in a while, you can easily have forgotten just how monumental and how pliable sculpture can be. You can forget how good he is as a pure painter. Series have stuck to mere arches and to black or twisted and cut into space itself. It is not out to barrel down the highway and ram into you from behind. Oh, and Whitten made sculpture, too.

Yanko is up to much the same thing, at a time when so much in the galleries seems like old news. He just happens to do it well, with an eye on art’s image of America. If it is a little too nice and a little too old, so be it. At the same gallery two doors down, Claudia Alarcón paints with actual tapestries, in conjunction with a South American collective, from the town of Silät, of her own devising. Yanko, though, pushes it harder even without the plea for cultural diversity. He also calls his show, “Epithets,” and there are a lot of names and terms here to throw around.

To wrap up from last time on the future of HaberArts, themes are nice, and I still believe that art takes words. Yet I think differently now, in smaller bites that reach out to readers. If I had years of accumulated ideas to get through, fine, so long as they inform the art.

The art scene has changed, too, and I have changed along with it. Where “theory” once felt dominant, it has left mostly glib vocabulary and good intentions. It has also left me to discover yet again what I have to say. So how have my first instincts held up, and what has not?

Naturally I gravitated toward the Minimalism and formalism of my classmates—and of such icons as Carl Andre and Richard Serra who can extend art to the felt experience of the gallery. So, for that matter, have younger artists, and their concerns have made a recovery, with what I have called Neo-Minimalism. The Post-Minimalism of Eva Hesse and Senga Nengudi lives on in others today as well. More generally, I cannot set aside my love of abstract painting. In the years when, all the right people said, painting was dead, I found my way to Snug Harbor in Staten Island for reassurance that it was very much alive. And I still debate with myself what could make it powerful and new.

Abstraction is no longer all that abstract. It had bred a hybrid of realism, patterns, and myth, often centered on images of a woman’s body. And I can fairly claim to have been ahead of the curve, with early reports on several artists still hard to pin down, like Amy Sillman, Katherine Bernhardt, and Cecily Brown. At the same time, I have had to question the trend. When “anything goes,” what still matters? I keep questioning the commercial instincts of museums as well.

I had my shot at Postmodernism, but I could not give up my love of early Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, or late modern art (not to mention the Renaissance). I argued back then for a “postmodern paradox“: the call to dismiss Modernism made art dependent on it and kept it alive. And, sure enough, Modernism has spawned an impressive art fair, the Independent Modern. Meanwhile my own tastes have broadened, increasingly to public sculpture, architecture, and photography. Who knows what “public” and “private” mean anyway when you enter a museum.

Theory has itself moved on, becoming less a critique than a yearning for diversity. I have, I hope, taken special care to cover black artists like Bob Thompson, Isaac Julien, Kara Walker, black abstraction, and ever so much more—going back to when the Museum of Modern Art posed a choice of exhibitions in adjacent rooms for Jacob Lawrence and Wassily Kandinsky. I have aimed for a still greater advocacy of women artists, a theme of this Web site from the start. And in fact the single largest change in art over the years has been the rediscovery of past women artists and present-day Latin and Native Americans alongside white men. Yet I have my doubts about the tone of relentless celebration. Whatever happened to irony, urgency, and anger?

So where does that leave me? Stuck indoors with my leg raised and my expectations diminished. If I was ever breaking ground, and I have my doubts, I no longer am. Can I can look forward to writing again, but less often? It could make an exhibition less of a compulsion and more of a pleasure. For now, expect uncertainty and silence.

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

To pick up from last time on the future of HaberArts, had I introduced myself around, I might be better known today, like many a political blogger from those days, but I did not. I looked into submitting work to print magazines, too, but they demanded no more than four or five hundred words, and I wanted room to learn and to see.

They also demanded that writers pitch shows before they opened, so that the magazine could stay current. But then I would have to commit to art before I knew whether it was worth the attention—and whether I had anything to say. This was not what criticism should be. I still took the Internet as a game, but I had found my medium.

What, then, should criticism be? Naturally I had to discover that over time, too. My preface to criticism itself came years after I had begun, and it needed a fresh look years after that. Yet it still comes down to telling a story, through theory, description, interpretation, and judgment. But then every theory, description, or interpretation is a judgment, and every judgment is an interpretation. Think of them as four ways of answering, what is art?

I hate reviews that stop at “best of” lists and the bottom line—and that is just where memes and mass media are heading. Criticism can settle for picking winners, or it can invite you into strange and wonderful ideas and art. That includes my favorite artists along with newcomers who will soon be favorites, and I hesitate to tell you who that may be. Suffice it to say that that, too, keeps changing. When I started, it would have included Caravaggio, David Smith, and Jackson Pollock but would it have included their female counterparts in Artemisia Gentileschi, Dorothy Dehner, and Lee Krasner or Janet Sobel? It would surely have included Diego Velázquez, but would it stop to mention his black slave who became one of Madrid’s leading artists, Juan de Pareja?

I like to think so, but you can fairly ask me to prove it, and I think that over the years I have. When I started, though, I had been nursing some favorites for years, and the Web gave me the chance to linger over a painting by Giovanni Bellini in my favorite corner of New York, the Frick. (Hey, I, too, had my theories.) A book review allowed me to take my time with maybe the best of all, a double portrait redoubled in a mirror by Jan van Eyck, to whom I have returned again and again. Everyone has a theory about that one, and it got me into my longest review to date sorting them out. I doubt that I could write like that now.

It came at the end, as it turned out, of a wave of theory—the peculiar challenge of Postmodernism. I had my theory about that, too, and had to get it off my chest. Over time I got to respond to most of my favorite historians and critics, including Lucy Lippard, Rosalind E. Krauss, Hal Foster, Joseph Mascheck, Michael Fried, Peter Schjeldahl, Arthur C. Danto, and a distinguished student of his, Barbara Savedoff. I can only hope that they took disagreement as a mark of respect. Or maybe not, but then artists, too, can be gracious at criticism or angry at praise. When I marveled at a black artist and (quoting William Butler Yeats) his “terrible beauty,” his dealer (who may not know the poem) called me a racist.

That long review of van Eyck got me playing at deconstruction, for once, as just part of the game. I imagined entering a chain that ran from Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, through Meyer Schapiro, the finest critic and historian of all, and Jacques Derrida. Had Vincent van Gogh painted a menial worker’s boots or his own, and what counts as an artist’s own anyway? It comes down to yet another mystery, of who lies behind art’s images, and I made that a theme of this Web site as well. You can browse the entire site by theme here. Or browse by period in time and by artist—and I wrap up next time with where I am today.

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

To pick up from last time on the future of HaberArts, you will still have my personal museum and gallery guide, my hand-made search engine, and links to pretty much anything that piques your interest. While I converted my home page to a blog in 2002, the site’s core is still the archive of fuller reviews.

Some devote a couple of thousand words to fleshing out what an exhibition or book about art contains and what is at stake, with the corresponding blog post only a disposable excerpt. Others bring posts together as tours of the galleries, starting when anyone could tour uptown, Soho, Chelsea, later Williamsburg or Bushwick, and now the Lower East Side or Tribeca in an afternoon. I rely on them myself, to remind me of artists newly on display whom I had already forgotten. But let me tell you how this came to be.

A native New Yorker, I returned home after college, where I had studied physics, with no prospects. A friend had introduced me to fellow students in the visual-arts program at Princeton, where everyone, it seemed, wanted to be the next Frank Stella—or to explain less than patiently why older art was always a stupid idea. I could not make head or tail of what either one was doing. And I took that as a challenge. My friend and I converted a loft into cheap, spacious, and illegal housing. The entire city lay at my feet for the first time in my life.

I also had a high-school friend who spoke of a course that he had taken at Yale. He introduced me to the Northern Renaissance and to a historian, Erwin Panofsky, whose account of it showed me what patience and insight when it comes to art really mean. I had better make sense of art, and it was an excellent time to try. Museums all had cheap hours (MoMA the entirety of Monday), where I could take just a room or two on a visit, like doing my homework but a lot more fun. There was an upside after all to a minimum wage. Galleries, of course, were always free, and there was so much to read as well.

It was a great time for philosophy and critical theory, and artists were as annoyed, confused, intimidated, and intrigued as I. Some took a class in linguistics to learn about structuralism, only to find that linguistics had long since moved on. I had to move on, too, and fast. Deconstruction and “post-analytic” philosophy were only further background to literature and art. What moved them to the foreground was my first computer, my first email account, and another novelty, social media. They gave me an outlet for thoughts that I had been gathering for twenty years.

I started by posting those thoughts in an online “forum,” where virtual and real friends seemed to take me as the resident critic, even an authority. They urged me to start a Web site of my own. For a time, you could search the Web for Jan Vermeer, for one, and find me among the top two or three hits. That ended when Yahoo gave way to Google, which gives no credit for links within a domain from one page to another, but I was not hoping for attention. It all seemed just a game. For a time, my home page was a quiz designed to teach myself coding while turning people away.

The internal links remained, though, as part of my vision for art criticism. I wanted a body of work about art and ideas, and I watched it grow. If I mention something and you want to know who that is, I had a link to read more. I meant not a monument but a resource, just as it was for me. Theory could be as helpful as any other interpretation. And a review could be not a haughty or giddy list of what do with your weekend, but what artists do with their lives, and I continue next time with what criticism can be.

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

I started to write about art because I had something to say. I have stuck with it for thirty years to find out exactly what that might be.

It has made this the oldest Web site devoted to art and art criticism. By now the site contains millions of words about thousands of artists, from the full scope of art history to contemporary art.

Others have made claims for the death of Modernism and the birth of something new. This site has witnessed the supposed dead and the living#8212;and pondered whether after all they are much the same. It has tried to find a bridge between scholarly debates like that one and livelier reviews about what’s new in and around New York. But can I still have anything left to say? It is not an easy question, and I shall devote this entire week, continuing next time, to asking. It will take sorting out what I have always meant to say and what artists have taught me year by year.

The question is coming hard upon me right now, after ankle replacement surgery likely to keep me off my feet and out of galleries, museums, street art, and parks for up to a full year. I had been wondering, though, on my own. Already I have kept silent about the latest from artists who deserve to be seen and heard, because I had already covered them. Or I have posted links to an older review or two. I cannot promise to go silent for good, but I do expect to be silent for a while and to cut back after that. With luck, the results will be stronger for sticking to what I have newly discovered and what I have to say.

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