haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Sonia Delaunay liked to say that she lived her art. At the very least, she dressed the part. She was not the only modernist with an urge to experiment and a grounding in design and everyday life. She did, though, know how to live.

One first encounters her at Bard College Graduate Center, or at least a mannequin in her place, through July 7, already dressed for art. Not in studio clothes, although the show’s final floor has all the informality of an artist’s studio, with an invitation to join in. Throw pillows set one at ease as the mess and dedication of an actual studio never could, each covered with the artist’s rhythms and colors. And back downstairs, on film, she is at work herself, surrounded by the same patterns, in progress or on herself. More formally, in a full-length photo, a dancer wears a dress of her design as Cleopatra. Delaunay’s dedication to form extended to collaboration and across the arts.

Born in 1885, she came upon her form with her husband, Robert Delaunay, and they never once departed from it ever after. You may know it from his paintings—their half circles spiraling down the canvas as if in motion. Assembled triangles or, if you like, disassembled diamonds lock the pattern in place, leaving no hint of a background color and nothing unpainted. They called it Simultané, which has entered English as Simultanism, and they felt it as not just a personal discovery, but one to be shared with humanity as the breakthrough between art and life. Colors run to pure primaries, but not to overwhelm the senses with their brightness. One remembers them equally for their richness and shallow depth.

Who made the discovery? One may as well ask who discovered abstract art. Was it them, Francis Picabia, or Hilma af Klint before them all? Maybe just say that they invented it simultaneously. In any event, Robert has gone down as the proper painter, Sonia as the one who applied his art to practical and impractical purposes, a simplification that has made her all too easy to overlook. Much the same charge long dogged Sophie Taeuber-Arp compared to her husband, Jan Arp—and Taeuber-Arp first had her collaborations, too, including puppet theater. Just two years ago, a MoMA retrospective corrected the record for her, and Bard is out to do the same for Sonia Delaunay.

Delaunay gets all four floors of an Upper West Side mansion, but it does not feel packed. It devotes the first floor to an introduction, including a huge time line, and the fourth to that studio. Besides, she thought less in terms of multiplying work than in dedication, with a single style and extended projects. One could just as well say, at the risk of cliché, that she lived for art. She worked with leading choreographers and theaters, including the Ballet Russe, and even designed playing cards. She had not sold out, but they did.

She had a revival at that, with new commissions in her seventies, as collaboration became newly respectable—even before today’s care to merge art and craft. Think of Robert Rauschenberg, also in dance. Of Jewish background, she found safety from the Nazis in the south of France, although her husband died in 1940. She moved in with, sure enough, Jan and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and commissions kept coming. They allowed her to work on a larger scale than ever before, in mosaics, tapestry, and interior design. Her furniture looks block-like and uncomfortable, but it allowed others, too, to live her art. It also helped answer a remaining charge, that she had never been ambitious enough.

She was never as edgy as Pablo Picasso at the height of Cubism, in his own close approach to abstraction, or as wildly playful as Taeuber-Arp. Cleopatra looks no more or less than expected in her pose and profile. The closest she came to the pursuit of the modern came early on, in illustrating a poem by Blaise Cendrars, on fuller display last year at the Morgan Library. It took her further, too, from Paris to the Trans-Siberian Railroad. She may have lived her art, but she was not out to transform ordinary life. She was first and foremost a woman of the theater.

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

What makes for a thoroughly dispiriting exhibition? Not just weak art or forced curatorial themes, but the smell of money. You could, after all, find that you were mistaken about the first two or, if not, waltz right through and forget it. The smell of money is harder to escape. It clings to your senses and to the entire state of the art.

You know the stench from museum displays of private collections, the owners angling for their name on the wall, the museum for a gift. You know it, too, from shows of fashion and celebrity, with no more relevance to art than the ticket sales they hope to achieve. Now the Brooklyn Museum manages both, with the Dean collection—from the family name of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, stars who know how to make music and how to dress for it. You know who they have in mind when they call the exhibition “Giants,” through July 7. And yet, for all that, the artists are names as well, with large works that themselves might hang beside giants. It could serve as a full-scale survey of contemporary black art, a lively one at that, if you do not mind the limits of stardom, sparkle, and trends, and I work this together with an earlier report on black portraiture by Marcus Leslie Singleton as a longer review and my latest upload.

Collectors, fashion, and celebrity need not rule out diversity—not to judge by past shows in Brooklyn of Virgil Abloh and Spike Lee. And these collectors know how to stick up for blackness and how to please. The curators, Kimberli Gant with Indira A. Abiskaroon, open with a glittery assemblage by Ebony G. Patterson that could pass for a store window at Christmas, were it not for the pink background and black children’s faces. Then the giants themselves kick in, with their BMX bikes and Yamaha piano, painted with Freedom and Love. Bikes return later, too, in paintings of wheelies by Amy Sherald. And then the collectors pose for Kehinde Wiley, as heavenly beings in an oval of flowers.

All fashionable, well, and good, but those black faces belong to real children and wheelies to the street. Forget the heavens this once. Wiley made his name taking his flattery to black men on the street. Here he also paints a woman lying down, on a still larger scale. If Beatz and Keys bring their precious possessions, they want you to relax, too, amid Bang & Olufsen speakers and soft black chairs. This is not, they are saying, just about them.

It is about people and politics, even if it does land in the museum’s Great Hall. The collectors pose again for Jamal Shabazz, in a photo hung with Eldridge Cleaver by Gordon Parks. They trace their ancestry to Africa, with a street scene from Ernie Barnes in 1957 and abstractions by Esther Mahlangu based on patterns that one could mistake for Native American. They have crossed the sea, like Barkley L. Hendricks to Jamaica for quaintly framed landscapes. Shabazz and Parks face off again in a long hall—the first for some of his most politically charged images, the second for the streets of Brooklyn. They could almost be debating what “Giants” is all about.

More often than not, it is about home, on or off the streets. Deana Lawson and Toyin Ojih Odutola have figures in suggestive interiors—although Lawson’s just happen to include a naked “Soweto queen.” Meleko Mokgos devotes a full room to families in Botswana. He says that he wants to know “how the subject is constituted,” but (postmodern rhetoric aside) he is in search of community. Fancier matters, like conceptual art and new media, take second place. Lorna Simpson places her photos above text for future and past, perfect and imperfect, but the operative word comes first, the present.

Still, “Giants” sees them all as stars. Mickalene Thomas, Kwame Brathwaite, and Nick Cave have their undying flattery and glitz, while Lynette Yiadom-Boakye brings her camera to the dance. Derrick Adams and Nina Chanel Abney span four canvases apiece. Politics itself takes a back seat, although portraits by Henry Taylor and Jordan Casteel plead for food and just plain respect. When Hank Willis Thomas makes a geometric abstraction from worn prison uniforms, he could almost be erasing it, along with one by Odili Donald Odita to its left. When his silvery arms cross in a worker’s protest, their sheen reflects on the entire show.

Still, “Giants” comes down to its collectors. Like them, it is self-assured and catchy. Like them, too, it returns again and again to the names and trends you know. If portraits of pomp and circumstance pass over a still greater adventure, perhaps the artists themselves could suggest alternatives. Meanwhile, Arthur Jafa all but knocks down the entire edifice. A truck tire laden with chains and suspended like a pendulum is heading for you.

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

You have to be an egomaniac to keep your most precious possession hidden. And so was the speaker in “My Last Duchess,” the dramatic monologue by Robert Browning.

He alone unveils a portrait of the wife he killed, “for none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I.” He reveals more than he intends, but such are madness and poetry. In real life, patrons of Renaissance art had other motives than egomania: they were out to share the artist’s vision and their own.

They were putting on a show, and the curtain, if any, was just part of the act. The Met, though, sees only reticence and ownership. With “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance,” it calls up the devices that kept Renaissance portraits hidden, if not exactly under lock and key, from some of the period’s finest artists. It could be literally the obverse of textbook histories and modern museum displays, but were these faces truly under cover? And what, then, were they doing in paint? You may well wonder what the show is hiding, through July 7—and I work this together with an earlier report on Renaissance Bruges as a longer review and my latest upload.

From the very start of “Hidden Faces,” you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Religious art thrived on triptychs with wings that spoke of adoration of the central scene—wings that often folded shut. The donor portraits in the Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck occupy just two of twenty panels, both on the outside. Rapt in their piety and vision, they give way to that glorious vision as the wings open. You will not see that painting or its kind here. Instead, the Met opens with a single panel, a portrait of nobility and restraint by Rogier van der Weyden.

It does, though, have a heraldic device on its back, and it may well have hung from a chain, back facing front, until the man choose to swing it around. Here and in other works, heraldry, text, or the illusion of an official document attests to fidelity and ancestry. Do they sound more like obstacles than invitations to see more? One Latin inscription reads Noli Me Tangere, or “do not touch”—and the risen Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene could apply to the viewer and the painting as well. A panel could also slide over a portrait, an open and shut case. As for curtains, an illuminated manuscript depicts one, drawn aside from a Madonna and Child.

As constructions grew more sophisticated, so did the mask. With Hans Memling, heraldry gives way to still life. The leaves of the first have become a finely glazed vase holding flowers, sharing its warmth and illusion with the man’s shadow and beard stubble. Still others present an allegory, often as not more vivid than the portrait. With Lorenzo Lotto in Venice, petals shower down on Virtue, a woman, while Vice lurks, sinister but ineffectual, behind a tree. In a rare grisaille, or monochrome, Titian places Cupid beside the wheel of fortune, in command of fortune or its subject. It is chastening to think that painting like his on canvas, rather than panels, caught on as a natural cover.

Do not rejoice too soon at your own fortune. Most of these coverings are lost to time, and the curator, Alison Manges Nogueira, must settle for second-rate artists or clever recreations. On video, wood can still slide open and shut. Too much else is left to medallions or to the backwaters of Germany and the southern Netherlands. Jacometto Veneziano learned from Antonello da Messina, perhaps the first in Italy to experiment in oils. His portraits are lifeless all the same.

Just as scarce is an appreciation of art’s motives. Sure, the Met concedes, covering could protect a work from the elements, and smaller works in lockets had the advantage of portability. One could keep them close to one’s heart. Otherwise, the emphasis is on privacy, privilege, and hiding. It might do better to think of publicity and revelation. In that illuminated manuscript, nuns draw aside the curtain for a vision to refresh a weary traveler.

A curtain speaks not only of masking, but also of theater, and the whole point of a folding altarpiece is vision. It could be celebrating itself as a vision onto real and imagined worlds. This was after all the Renaissance with its greater realism and self-reflection. As with an altarpiece, that vision could take place in a public place, too, a cathedral. Lucas Cranach made his miniatures of Martin Luther and his wife, a former nun, not just to please them, but to spread the word to those still outraged at their marriage. But then, as another Latin inscription has it, “to each his own mask.”

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

Joan Jonas launched her career in performance and video by pushing against the wind—a strong wind, on the coldest day of the year. If that sounds futile, she has described a later video as “moving with no pattern.” She still loves stories, but she finds them in things, from manta rays in the deep sea to fireworks in the sky.

She may begin with a story, like Juniper Tree after the brothers Grimm and Reading Dante. Her retrospective, through July 6, speaks of her drawings as “storyboards.” Futility itself can be a story with no need of an ending. Wind took Jonas and friends to the Long Island shore in 1971, where five huddled in a mass, for companionship and warmth, and two walked separately together. Her work recreates her life as both performance and travelogue, from desert sunlight to the darkness in her studio. When it comes to art and the powers that be, she is still pushing against the wind.

Jonas has been working in the space between installation, sculpture, video, and performance for as long as anyone. She could well have defined it. She has united music, dance, and her own athleticism, leaving her props, large and small, as cryptic reminders. Before and alongside classics of 1970s feminism, she extended what video could do with a woman’s own body. Her MoMA retrospective follows their use and reuse, while the Drawing Center looks to her drawings for clues. As a postscript, a 2007 exhibition packed much of it into a single room—and together they are the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

Wind already shows her attention to the feel of things, as the elements of nature and as experience. It also shows her dedication to others, with art as collaboration. It underlies her work with the Judson Dance Company and such musicians as Jason Moran, the jazz pianist and composer. It lets others structure a work or refuse to do so. When they head down to the vacant lots that would become Battery Park City, for Delay Delay, they mill about as if waiting to begin. With her first Mirror Piece, three years before she took up a Sony Portapak in 1972, she could collaborate with herself.

That urge to collaborate helped draw Jonas away from traditional media. This could no longer be just about the artist. When she does appear on camera, it may show rolling frames of only her legs, like a screen test gone terribly awry. The urge to cut, to multiply, and to recombine appears, too, in a mirror piece, where mirrors supply the patterned hem of a dress. The work does unfold in time, but not what others may take for real time. In Delay Delay, it takes sound longer to reach her than light, a doubled delay.

She acquires another alter ego soon after, as Organic Honey, dressed in whatever she could find in an erotic shop in Soho. Like Oscar Wilde, she can resist anything but temptation. When she heads for Las Vegas, she seems equally at home in a casino, in desert heat, and on Sunset Strip. The alternatives suggest, too, the role of drawing, within and alongside video. It could be drawing with a rake in the sand, with a casino’s lights, or with loop after loop of plain chalk. Large red drawings of rabbits, dogs, or nothing at all round out the story—or the lack of one.

Not that the drawings are finished work of art, whatever that means. Rather, the props stand within and alongside new media, and her retrospective cannot get enough of them. They begin with mirrors and the steel hoop that she brought to Jones Beach Dance. (Later her favorite companion, her dog, jumps through a smaller hoop.) It could support Vitruvian man, arms and legs spread wide for Leonardo da Vinci, but without a trace of Renaissance idealism. In Tap Dancing from 1997, a man just shuffles his feet back and forth on the floor.

Increasingly, she has returned to the sea, but not just to the shore. As she puts it in 2019, her work is Moving Off the Land. It reflects a real concern for human damage to the planet, but also her impulse to collaborate. A marine biologist has taken her underwater and, just as important, created the lenses for observing the deep sea. Those videos come with props, too. Small glass spheres, both black and white, might not look so out of place in Vegas.

Jonas reuses props from installation to installation. It is all part of what Organic Honey called her Visual Telepathy. The curators, Ana Janevski with Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, end with a work on several monitors to wrap things up. The manta rays from underwater have become kites overhead. The look both up and back to past work, given new life, suits an artist in her eighties with diminished output for twenty years now but still going. In the retrospective’s title, “Good Night Good Morning.”

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