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To wrap up from last time on 100 Famous Views of Edo, I began with the changing city, because the museum does. The curator, Joan Cummins, makes a point of it, with wall text and a map, rather than changing colors, line, and light.

Despite herself, though, she sticks to tradition. An opening room introduces Hiroshige and pairs one print apiece by him and Shigemasa, but then the show moves on. (The older artist has a scratchier line, greater detail, less poetry and humor, and little color.) It saves Takashi Murakami for last.

Separate rooms for the two principal artists do not interrupt the flow of a series. It is up to you to compare and to contrast. Still, a small room between the two brings Tokyo into the present. In photographs by Alex Falcón Bieno, shops have become skyscrapers, and an elevated train follows the curve of a street. They look familiar from Hiroshige all the same. He is still the traditionalist and the visionary.

Had he visited the West, he would have had adjustments to make, ever the urban explorer. I can imagine him in Paris, heading up the Seine with Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir to be sure that he had seen it all—and that brings one to Takashi Murakami. He speaks of Renoir and Vincent van Gogh as influences. Does he really need to reach Hiroshige by way of Paris, and can he? A more obvious influence is Pop Art. Surprisingly, it may add to his respect for the past.

Perhaps it must, if you associate Pop Art with Andy Warhol and quotation. And Murakami takes quotation seriously. So much for the originality of the avant-garde. I kept waiting for modern Japan or Mickey Mouse to drop into his “famous views,” but they never do. You may struggle to figure out what, if anything, has changed between one series and the next. But then, if Warhol is right, what can change?

For one thing, painted views have become larger, and the series in full fills its single wall in three tight rows. At the same time, they have become flatter, as has to happen in blowing them up to poster size. They look all the brighter for that. They also call attention to the older artist’s attachment to the picture plane. Did Hiroshige allow a tree branch to loop over itself? With Murakami, the closed loop is that much harder to miss.

The flatter colors echo Pop Art, of course, along with the current fashion for anime and cartoons. The sheer pace of his work may make him sound glib, and so he is. There is nothing like Hiroshige for his stillness and humor. Will Murakami’s Edo ever be a famous view? Can quotation alone serve for the vitality of a changing city? Should Hiroshige vanish again for another twenty-four years, for preservation, it may have to do.

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

When Utagawa Hiroshige named his prints 100 Famous Views of Edo, he could have been describing the many faces of a modern city. A lifelong resident of Edo, in Japan, he could see it changing beneath his feet and always came back for more. A New Yorker would know the feeling even today. You can tally the precious gains and losses in the course of a lifetime, from favorite haunts to entire neighborhoods.

Hiroshige, though, seems to have felt only the pleasures, and he took equal joy in seeking them out, from 1856 to 1858. A map at the Brooklyn Museum marks the spot of each and every print, and they cover the city. Their scope and density are impressive indeed for a city still on the brink of modernity, and so is his ever-shifting point of view. He juxtaposes nature and culture, change and tradition—and not even their clash can disturb the stillness. Some of the handmade impressions have since vanished or faded, but the museum has a fine complete set, and it is on display for the first time in twenty-four years. One can walk alongside it, on all four walls of a large room, to share in their continued discoveries and the silence.

The museum asked a popular contemporary artist, Takashi Murakami, if he had on hand a response to the city—or would like to make one. Yes to both, and he has contributed not just one painting, but several, as tall or taller than he. Their size alone pulls Hiroshige into present. And then, as he always does, Murakami got carried away by his subject and his own facility. In a matter of months he created a complete series after the original—and I work their two views of Edo together with a recent report on still more of Asian art, in the art of India, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Hiroshige (and no one calls him anything else) was not the first to title a work Famous Views. Kitao Shigemasa, for one, had adopted it in 1770, and it had already come to stand for a genre as well as a boast. And Hiroshige’s series quickly earned its name. By the time he was done, it had grown to well over a hundred views in the face of demand, which also drove the multiple impressions. It found itself at the center of Japanese tradition, and no wonder. He rendered Edo day and night, in all weathers, and in every season, with an eye on both past and future.

Cities everywhere were changing fast, as urban economies brought expansion and commercialization. Hiroshige includes wood beams and towers as signs of construction. He moves easily between distant mountains and streets lined with stores and the craft that fed them, along with window-shoppers. The museum recreates a storefront in the center of the room. It was a low-rise city all the same. Towers tilt precariously and streets curve gently, with modern bustle and old-world charm.

Then, too, Edo had its own drivers of change. It had been growing for at least two centuries, but now feudal lords and shoguns had taken over. Samurai, their private armies, make a point of their discipline in close procession. Tourists showed up, too, for picnics, antiquity, and shopping. This was no longer a rural backwater, although it sits beside waters with views of a temple and its pagoda. Just ten years after this series of prints, the emperor moved in as well, and the city became Tokyo.

Hiroshige’s prints run in no particular order, through August 4, although he dates every one. Rather, he keeps the emphasis on discovery and variety. The simplest compositions proceed step by step into depth, marked by people, terraces, a herd of deer, more distant isles, mountains, and sky. Increasingly, though, he plays against expectations. The foreground cuts off architecture, leaving nowhere to stand. A ferry rider’s hands rest on a rail, but what he sees may or may not match what you see.

He is playing with scale and point of view. A cat sits on a sill, looking out along with you, but with the better view. A kite or bird seems way larger than life as it swoops down and into the picture plane. He plays, too, with strong color and gentle gradations. Wood blocks all but demand uniform colors, but not for him—from the intensity of sunset to boxes for each work’s title. If Japanese art makes you think of the monochrome of Chinese calligraphy and screens, think again.

A changing light adds still greater variety and drama. Tiny stars fill the night sky, and newly fallen show brightens the day. Sheets of rain in parallel streaks further define the picture plain and dare you to penetrate. And still the mood is peace. The exhibition opened just as cherry trees blossomed outside the museum. One banner shifts in the breeze, but others do not, and the cat lies still—and return for Murakami’s side of the story next time.

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

“Lift every voice and sing, / Till earth and heaven ring.” For two splendid decades after World War I, with Jim Crow still a vivid memory, there was a place for African Americans to believe in “a song of hope.”

What was the Harlem Renaissance, and where would a Renaissance be without painting? It must sound obvious, but even now people argue over the period’s legacy and its substance. With “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” through July 28, not every voice is singing. Politics is largely absent, and jazz itself is all but silent. Modernism seems curiously far away. Yet the Met makes an overdue case for its art—and it is the subject of a much longer and fuller review as my latest upload.

You may think of the Harlem Renaissance as above all a literary movement, with Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer in fiction, Countee Cullen in poetry, and Langston Hughes towering over both forms of expression. James Weldon Johnson, at the head of the NAACP, wrote of a “flowering of Negro literature.” You may think of it as a flourishing of theater, dance, and music, with such jazz greats as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, and Bessie Smith—and Johnson himself composed hymns, including what some have called the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Or you may think of it as a broader intellectual achievement. It stands as a rebirth for black culture itself. Hubert Harrison spoke of the “New Negro” as early as 1917, and Alain Locke took that for the title of an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays in 1925.

It was surely a rebirth for Harlem, neither the first nor the last. Harlem had served Dutch farmers and then city dwellers, as the first elevated trains headed uptown and a wave of European immigrants, many of them Jewish, sought affordable housing. Things changed once again in the twentieth century, as the Afro-Caribbean diaspora reached New York along with the Great Migration from the rural, racially oppressive South. Jazz came north from New Orleans with it, Louis Armstrong included, to found the swing era. The Apollo Theater had opened in 1914—improbably enough, for burlesque shows aimed at whites. It became the fabled venue for blacks only some twenty years later, thanks to a new Jewish owner.

The Met boasts right off of literary and cultural ferment. It opens with portraits of Locke and Hughes by Winold Reiss, Hurston by Aaron Douglas, and Johnson by Laura Wheeler Waring. Reiss, a German who found the rest of New York boring, brings his wiry black outlines broken only by the meticulous realism of his faces, suiting Locke’s hauteur and intellect. The pale patterned backdrop to Hughes hints at a ferment within painting itself, in early modern art. Douglas and Waring stick more closely to realism to flatter their subjects and their dignity. Then come portraits and street scenes, where ordinary men and women get to dress up, too.

The curator, Denise Murrell, is introducing not just a culture. She is assembling the artists who will render it. All three from that first room will turn up often, as will Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson. Motley brings the intensity of artificial light to equally unsettling narratives. Johnson has the brighter colors, flatter renderings, and impasto of folk art. Together, they set out the possibilities that other artists will explore, in a show of one hundred sixty works.

The show’s greatest pleasure is that it need not answer the charge. It can only keep looking for more. Sure, here Harlem itself lacks specifics, if not fashion sense. Yet a final room, easy enough to miss on the way out, does take to the street, for the eighteen feet of The Block, from 1971. Romare Bearden, then in his sixties, had been around the block, “Harlem on My Mind” was two years gone, and the Harlem Renaissance was history. The mural’s triumph may drive home the movement’s limits—or its importance for the future.

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

Cannot get up the energy to go to a museum? Frederick Kiesler would understand.

He wanted his work to respond to body movements, posture, and sheer fatigue. He saw his architecture and design as creating and breaching “fields of energy exchange,” even when you cannot. With his Mobile Home Library, you need not so much as reach for a book to read sitting down. The book would come to you—and I work this together with a recent report on another modern experiment in living, by Sonia Delaunay, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Its bare white shelves at the Jewish Museum do not look all that relaxing. Museum-goers cannot enter their half closed circle, for fear of damage, even as they wheel around the room or in place, through July 28. Still, Kiesler was an idealist, and he took seriously the idea of Modernism as a science—a search for truth in service to humanity. If he seems largely forgotten, that may show how much that dream has faded, but do not be too sure. As postmodern critics loved to ask, has Modernism failed? Perhaps, but this modernist outlasted many a movement.

At a given moment, Kiesler can seem merely quaint or way ahead of his time. Born in 1890 in the Ukraine, he seems just right for a world at war now. He headed off as fast as he could nonetheless—first to Germany, where he could see home design as both artifice and household necessity, and then to the Netherlands. He had success with stage sets, just as he later worked with performers at the Julliard. He did not join the Bauhaus, with its dream of art for the many, but he did accept an invitation from de Stijl, the movement with Piet Mondrian, before leaving for New York. He can seem the Forrest Gump of modern art, present at everyone else’s creation, but he was more than a walk-on and never unwitting.

Where an artist as commercial as Andy Warhol saw his early work in fashion as a step toward something more, Kiesler anticipates today’s growing interest in design as art. Nothing was above or beneath him. He undertook displays for Saks Fifth Avenue and a gallery for Peggy Guggenheim, Art of This Century in 1942. He worked with Film Guild Cinema starting in 1929. Does its name evoke both avant-garde film of the past and a revival house in the present? He taught for years at Columbia University, where he showed his students short films on everything from “radioactive rays” and “tiny water animals” seen under a microscope to “the world of paper.”

He aspired, then, to art as a science, but also art of the everyday, and he could not separate the two. It led him to found the Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia in 1938. Mobile Home Library recalls prefabricated, affordable housing, but it incorporates mobility and vision as well. Architecture for him had to be light on its fight and had to design with light, well before lighting as art for James Turrell and Dan Flavin. Naturally his culminating projects were Vision Machines. Naturally, too, they drew on the science behind “how we see” in order to stimulate hallucinations and dreams.

That science seems all but incomprehensible today, although a typescript spells it out in brutal detail. It turns, though, on the interaction between a machine and a human subject, much like AI art now. It gives new meaning to design correlation, as correlation between the mechanical and human, and it issued in a Correalism Manifesto. Rather than a mirror or window onto nature as a passive subject, Kiesler saw his work as “activating the active object.” He divided his design for Peggy Guggenheim into spaces for abstract, surrealist, daylight, and kinetic art. He thought of film itself as “photographs in motion.”

Interactive art has high aspirations even now, as with Rirkrit Tiravanija and relational esthetics. Yet it is almost impossible to replicate in a museum. What a show once called “theanyspacewhatever” may be nowhere at all. The curator, Mark Wasiuta, is left with display after display of the sketchiest of plans and sketches. He gets off to a strong start with the mobile bookshelves, live and in person, and a modest screen for films. Yet the library still bars visitors as it twists ever so slowly in the wind.

Just two more rooms follow, as if to rub in Kiesler’s broken dreams for contemporary living. His biomorphic Endless House never began—or at least never got past a 1958 model, seven years before his death. He called picture frames “deadening,” in contrast to the active object, but they do offer something to contemplate. Most good art is very much the active object, but it can also slow time and take time to come to life. His own art is well worth rediscovering, but it may not take all that long. Better grab a book.

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

Käthe Kollwitz started her career with death and ended with love. It could just as easily have gone the other way around.

Her first print series, from the 1890s, follows a worker’s revolt from its beginnings in Need and Death. This is A Weaver’s Revolt in Silesia, industrial country, where workers knew need and death well. A march that should be a triumph of solidarity and action looks more like a forced march, the workers hunched forward in weariness. And then comes simply End, with bodies on cots and the living barely set off from the darkness, pondering what has happened and what is to come. Her art comes down to the rise and fall of dignity and democracy, at MoMA through July 20. She knows, though, where she stands and how much she has loved—and I bring this together with a recent earlier report on the politics of German Expressionism and a forthcoming one on Paula Modersohn-Becker as a longer review and my latest upload.

Each series by Kollwitz has the same arc of death and love. Peasants’ War from 1902 to 1908 looks to the sixteenth century for models, and it finds one in a woman sharpening a scythe. It, too, ends in violent suppression. A third series, just after World War I, testifies to the costs of war. Titles speak of Mothers, The People, and Survivors, but not as heroes. Rows of women and children look formidable in their grief.

Kollwitz felt the arc of rise and fall personally. Born in 1867 in East Prussia (parts of today’s Russia and Poland), she moved to Berlin in her twenties with her husband, a physician who saw to the poor. She learned grief from his patients. Quickly acclaimed, she would have won a gold medal at the Berlin Art Exhibition had not the Kaiser himself stepped in. An award to a leftist and a woman would have gone too far. Still, war’s end made Germany a republic—and made her a professor at the Prussian Academy, its first woman ever.

Yet the arc had not finished with her, not by any means. She lost her younger son in the Great War, and the elder almost died from diphtheria. She lost her teaching position and freedom to exhibit to the Nazi rise to power. She died just weeks before their fall. It seems only right that MoMA hangs A Weaver’s Revolt from left to right, so that one encounters first its end. Still, she had found her purpose as an artist in insisting on the purposiveness of art.

Kollwitz took to paper because of that purpose. Prints to her meant multiples, to reach the people, like poster art to this day. It also allowed her to rework her art with a record of every stage. She combines woodcuts, etching, lithography, and drypoint, enhanced with sandpaper—and then overlays prints with whatever comes to hand. Her drawings could pass for series, too, as she begins again and again. If there is a progression from start to finished product, it eludes me.

She never lets go of a theme either, like revolts and state violence. That includes her most titanic drawings, of a mother with dead child. That woman holding a scythe has almost the exact same pose, but with a sharp object in place of a child. By the show’s end, she has taken up sculpture, and the pose has become first lovers after Auguste Rodin and, at last, a mother protecting her child from death as the ultimate act of love. It involves the same confusion of hands and limbs. It looks back to a Renaissance Pietà and the contortions of Mannerism—but then she was an academic, and other deaths recall a Dead Christ in older art.

The curators, Starr Figura with Maggie Hire, open with self-portraits as an extended prologue, but they, too, recur often. Kollwitz betrays neither fear nor certainty, her cross-hatching touched by washes and highlights, like the shine on her forehead. By the show’s end, she has documented aging with unflinching realism. She belongs to the first wave of German Expressionism, but without the gilded flattening of Gustav Klimt or the swollen, exaggerated hands of Oskar Kokoschka. She responds to World War I much like Max Beckmann, but not to satirize Berlin high society. She was never, for all her greatness, a revolutionary in her art, but she still has her arc and her archetypes of the people.

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

After my report last time on Della Wells, allow me a catch-up post for a review earlier this year of another African American, one that somehow I never published. A portrait by Marcus Leslie Singleton has the widest, whitest eyes that you may have ever seen. Dee Dee would be charming enough from that alone and her broad red smile, even were she not leaning so disarmingly toward a table set with flowers.

Their white and the deep blue of their stems and flowerpot erupt into a medley of white and blue in the sky, the leaves hanging down by her head, the seeming floral crown of her hair, her patterned dress, and the glints of color along her nose. But who is she? From the title, you might not know that Dee Dee is the black artist’s mother, which seems only right, for she deserves a life of her own. She opens a show in which every portrait is a study in relationships, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through January 27.

Dee Dee speaks loudly of the eternal awkwardness and pleasures of family and friends. She has held onto an image of herself in a photograph—and he takes pride in painting it as testimony to his affection. Still, its reserved title attests to the distance that remains. Photos always do, even selfies, and the closest figure in a group portrait picks up his own camera to shoot right back. A family portrait makes room for nearly twenty figures standing or seated around a table set for a celebration, but not with the varying degrees of closeness that, in a royal family by Diego Velázquez, tempt one to ask just who loves whom. And will the lonesome turkey really feed them all?

Some look downright sullen, and Singleton leaves it open whether that arises only from his chosen limits as an artist. He adopts nearly flat fields of color for dark skin, bright interiors, and sunlit streets, akin to folk art. That and a focus on portraiture have become something of a norm for African American artists like Demetrius Oliver, Titus Kaphar, Amy Sherald, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley. The show all but picks up where Henry Taylor last year at the Whitney left off. If Singleton differs, it is in caring more about relationships and less about putting family, friends, and strangers on pedestals. Dee Dee has the only solo act in the show.

The rest are group portraits, unless you count a still life with no one at all in sight—but even there a close-up of a parent and child hangs on the back wall. Singleton works when he can from photographs, and who does not have a photo of nearest and dearest somewhere on display at home? Most are of special occasions, the kind that bring people together, like a Sunday choir in an excerpt from a photo that brings the faces that much closer to him. Still, what counts as special is up to them. Other kids are just getting together, basketballs in hand. But then the one on a bike could be riding past.

They combine the pleasures and displeasures of the special and the everyday. Singleton shows his affection while preserving a sense of humor and other marks of detachment. Shea Butter Babies has just one true baby, perched on the handlebars of a bicycle like a hood ornament, with protective shielding on her front that reads Fun Time. Then again, the two grown women behind her might be babes of a sort as well. Interiors and houses open onto half-seen rooms with decorations of their own. And whatever are the cars and kids doing parked along the shoulder of a road?

Yet the everyday may lead to transcendence as well, like Dee Dee’s riot of flowers. Man’s Soul Turning into a Rock promises an epic transformation. Is turning into a rock altogether a bad fate? The soul is himself turning blue, in the company of angels and a man kneeling as if in prayer. Rays from his eye and another man pierce the soul as if bringing it to life. Then, too, the boys by the side of a road are Blue Angels.

The leap from the everyday extends to Singleton’s technique as well. It blends oil and oil stick with spray paint, glitter, and glue. Free browns running up and down a wall have little in common after all with outsider art, whatever that means. It speaks of inclusiveness at that. People of color, it turns out, run to all sorts of colors, from near black to near white. One can still doubt whether the world needs yet another glittery young black portraitist and an escape from politics, but he is already sharing the awkwardness and the love.

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