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art reviews from around new york

Egon Schiele grew up in the shadow of sex and death, but it took him until he turned twenty to make them the stuff of his art. He hardly changed for the rest of his life. He had little choice, for he never reached age thirty. Besides, sex and death kept him busy enough along the way.

His father died of syphilis, and his parents suspected him and his sister of playing around. He formed relationships on his own terms and expected an open marriage. When that failed, he and his wife left Vienna for a town where their house became a haven for teenage girls. Arrested for seduction, he could have spent the rest of his life in prison, but the authorities settled for a charge of possession of pornography—more than a hundred drawings from his own hand. He walked free just in time for conscription in World War I. He died of the flu epidemic in 1918.

You may remember him for a painting of Death and the Maiden. Suffice it to say that they are in bed together, and the Schubert string quartet goes unheard. You may remember him that much more for obsessive self-portraits, often nude. Gaunt arms and hands extend to frightening proportions, their joints red with pain and the little flesh that remains touched by a gangrenous green. The Neue Galerie, though, sees his move from the big city as a return to a more idyllic childhood. It sees landscape painting and drawing as the one constant in his art, “Living Landscapes,” through January 13.

The exhibition includes photos of Schiele and poems expressing his dark, conflicted relationship with earth and sky. In reality, he was a handsome, charismatic young man, although always brooding. On coming to Vienna, he sought support from Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, and he got it. He exhibited with the first wave of Austrian Expressionism, the Vienna Succession, in 1909. Administrative duties in World War I kept him from painting, but also from combat, and he continued to exhibit widely, in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. If he had settled outside Austria’s legal and cultural capital as well, no one more relished the pose of the outsider in art or life.

A room for his early years does not look all that promising. Had Schiele died in 1910, like Paula Modersohn-Becker three years before, he might be remembered today as a Symbolist or not at all. When he paints landscape as a teen, it has little to do with nature. Dark compositions flecked by light look like nothing so much as Le Moulin de la Galette, from Pablo Picasso in 1900, when he, too, was anything but revolutionary. Schiele himself might have wondered if he would ever lighten up. Fortunately, he rediscovered sex and death.

For the 1909 Vienna art show, he contributed a painting of Danaë—smushed to the ground, but still a bloated white. Zeus came to her in a golden shower, but Schiele cuts out the gold and the rejuvenating rain. Soon enough, too, he introduces men. Lovers share a bed, seen from above or from nowhere at all, their long limbs at impossible angles. When he works on paper, the ground is as stained as the bodies. All he lacks is the gangrene, and that, too, is on its way.

Just months ago, the museum boasted of Klimt landscapes, but the show delivered far more than it promised. So does this one. A central room has landscapes to either side of the mantel, but with a visitor’s back to them coming in. Check out one, though, and its trees cast their branches everywhere—continuing as cracks in the soil, like a self-portrait with cracked skin. On paper, a thin, bare tree bears a spot of red, much like the artist’s knuckles. Could landscape have played a central role after all?

The last room follows him to the towns where he moved, and there, too, he has mixed feelings about the land. He lingers over a medieval town with its houses and spires, but with nowhere for him to stand, to observe, or to live. Distant hills have the angled blue facets of an iceberg. The town itself becomes a confusion of colors and geometries. And that confusion continues into paintings of a steel bridge and an equally massive mill. This may be landscape, but, yes, a living landscape, a place for the stubborn desires of modern life.

More than once, he returns to sunflowers. Had he developed a fondness for Vincent van Gogh and the gentle light of southern France? Yes again, and he admired van Gogh no end at an exhibition in Vienna. Still, he sticks to muter colors, and a rising or setting moon looms on the horizon like a distant eye. But then van Gogh, too, had his private terrors. And Schiele’s flowers, unlike those in a still life, are rooted in the earth as he could never be in art or in life.

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So many Eastern religions have embraced mandalas as connections to something beyond everyday pleasures and everyday cares. So many everywhere have marveled at their decorative richness.

Followers of Carl Jung have weighed in as well, because what Jungian can resist universal truths? So take a deep breath before entering the Lehman wing at the Met. “Mandalas” asks to appreciate them for what they are—not just catch phrases and aids to meditation, but literal guides to the spiritual universe. As the show’s subtitle has it, it is “Mapping the Buddhist art of Tibet,” through January 12.

You may need a map, a believer all the more so. This intricate universe reads outside-in, with concentric rows, columns, and circles of symbols like stamps or playing cards for the many steps in Vajrayana Buddhist practice. Over time, the rituals became more and more distinct, corresponding to distinct Tibetan sects. And the show also displays accessories to practice, most over a hundred years old. They are the practices of a warrior, with swords and shields. They are the practices of a celebrant, with masks, drums, and a trumpet so long that it could easily outstrip the trumpeter.

Oh, and what a universe it is. Buddhism has had its appeal to Westerners like Herman Hesse for its simplicity, especially in the spirit of the 1960s. It has seemed to tell a very human story, of the man who walked away from worldly temptations to become Siddhartha (or he who has achieved his goal) and the Buddha. Here you will encounter the five Buddhas, countless gods, their retinue, and their consorts. By that point, you may need an intercessor, and this form of Buddhism has plenty. They include goddesses, but also bodhisattvas, those who have achieved enlightenment but not yet become gods.

If they sound foreign to the jealous gods of the West, just wait until you meet them. They can be protectors, a source of hope as your karma determines who you will become in the next life. After a couple of centuries of Himalayan Buddhism, they begin to offer hope, too, to escape the endless cycle of reincarnation. Still, the most merciful gods are the ones with deadly weapons in the battle for enlightenment. But then the most austere in reputation are the sexiest. By all means, then, grab a map.

The Met has only a room for mandalas, off to the side. Rather, the show’s three main stages introduce the gods, the intercessors, and the rituals. The curator, Kurt Behrendt, sees them as getting you comfortable with the cast of characters before you reach the show’s true subject. In effect, they are maps to the maps. They all surround a central atrium with its own payoff—murals and carpets by a contemporary artist, Tenzing Rigdol. They present calm seas and rising or sinking suns in gloriously bright colors. They offer space to breathe and a place to rest.

Traditional paintings and sculpture are packed with detail. Ten heads rise up from one deity’s shoulders while samples of a thousand arms fan out. Patterns lend color—a predominant red, but alternating with blue, yellow, and green. A sun-struck yellow may serve as skin tone, but so may blue, sometimes faded to black. Pigment applied directly or mixed with glue, as distemper, adds intensity. The works may date back to the eleventh century, but they peak around 1350.

No question they take adjustments from ignorant Westerners like me. The cells of color flatten surfaces, but gods have a turn at the waist almost like Renaissance contrapposto, which announced a new humanism and a new approach to mass, motion, and depth. That turn at the waist can approach a dance as well, sometimes a wild one. Surviving practices include human dancers with loose robes and demonic, animal, or downright comic heads. All of these are about as far as can be from Chinese art or a show last year of not so early Buddhism. You may wish for more, like, say, mandalas traced in sand, but you could never have imagined a distinct north Asian universe.

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Exactly halfway through a show subtitled “Material and Motion” is a near empty room. A table set for a frugal meal nestles into a corner as if abandoned long ago.

Do not, though, not try to sit down. Mona Hatoum has left the sole chair empty, but its occupant’s unseen presence is not going anywhere, and her veins and flesh stare back from the center of the empty plate. The video recalls Hatoum’s actual colonoscopy, but that, too, has passed. So much for materials and motion, at the Guggenheim through January 11. And I work this together with past reports on sculpture by Dorothy Dehner and Alice Adams as a longer review and my latest upload.

The title proper, “By the Way,” sounds like a mere aside or a means to an end, and it returns often to assemblage, as object and act. Selections in 2021 from the museum’s holdings, as “Knotted, Torn, Scattered,” featured Senga Nengudi, her stockings and ropes sagging under their own weight. She is back now, and again the Guggenheim relies solely on its collection and largely on mixed-media constructions. (The museum rounded out its picture of collecting abstraction in 2022.) Materials and motion call for large work, and the present show has not two but three tower galleries. Hatoum’s table is small enough for a doll’s tea party, but the room itself looms larger and larger.

Still, it defies materials or motion. So does the poverty of Arte Povera in Italy. Gilberto Zorio leaves a scrap of PVC by the ceiling, while fiberglass from Piero Manzoni might have dissolved in a cloud. A motorcycle high on the wall from Mario Merz is going nowhere fast, too. Jannis Kounellis leaves a steel plate at an angle, casting its weight on sacks of coal. If you mistook them for coffee beans, you are reaching too hard for meaning.

The Guggenheim is as well. Each floor has its own theme—”On the Move,” “Gargantuan Appetites,” and “Material as Meaning.” Yet motion and meaning are hard to articulate, leaving only the gargantuan. Xaviera Simmons sets her snapshots beneath a strange black bundle, but her faces withhold their story. Kevin Beasley cakes sneakers, mics, and speakers in resin that both hints at a lost glamour and refuses it. When Mildred Thompson assembles wood into a flat picture, she might have slammed the door in your face.

As with these three, the show does not lack for talented African American artists—but not as you might expect. David Hammons, too, questions the material presence of the artist and his work. He has used such materials as shoe polish, a flag, and a hoodie—and all appear in a larger show of “Going Dark” on the museum ramp. Here, though, he leaves only the elusive traces of his “body prints.” Shinique Smith and Rashid Johnson are a closer match to the themes, with her bulging black fabric and his painting in black soap. It looks just right near the thicker surfaces of a white artist, Mark Bradford.

So does the mass of leather torn from the chairs of a Cold War secretary of state, by Danh Vo, or of a rug by Mike Kelley, draped over stainless steel pots. So, too, does the more modest mass of blue jeans from Joseph Beuys or a light sail from Robert Rauschenberg, in memory of India and his home on the Gulf Coast. The first thing one sees may be the most massive of all, coarse red mountains by Maro Michalakakos. They might have erupted that very moment, covering themselves in lava. As Dehner and Adams know so well, scale alone is mass. It just may not be going anywhere fast.

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Every self-portrait is a boast—a double boast. Yes, says the artist, I am a worthy subject, and yes I can pull it off with my art.

With “What It Becomes” at the Whitney, make that a triple boast, through January 12. Yes, its adds, I am worth hiding as well. There was more to me than you saw all along, and it is up to you, the viewer, to find it. As David Hammons has it, Close Your Eyes and See. .

Self-portraiture’s dual or triple nature goes back to its origins, in the Renaissance. An artist like Albrecht Dürer could boast not just of his skill, but of a new-found status relative to his patron as well. For Dürer in silverpoint at age thirteen, he had not yet even earned a patron. With “Hidden Faces,” covered portraits of the Renaissance at the Met last spring, every portrait was also a mask. Its sitter, after all, had an image to convey, too. By the end of 1960s, though, when the Whitney begins, the mask itself became a place to hide.

“What It Becomes” does not speak of masking. It calls art a way “to reveal the unseen” and to “make the familiar unrecognizable.” In other words, it is about self-creation. The curator, Scout Hutchinson, also speaks of art’s material presence, even in a space largely dedicated to works on paper from the museum’s collection, just outside the education department. It is about “inscription, erasure, and tactility.” It is a vanishing act all the same.

Presence is as presence does, starting with David Hammons. His body prints put himself into the act, but not to show his face. A famously reclusive artist, he reveals nothing, least of all his skill in drawing. They might as well be tire treads. He confronts, too, a black man’s invisibility to white eyes or, worse, violent removal. Body prints by Yves Klein in blue, not in the show, seem an empty boast by comparison.

The small show could be a catalog of strategies for vanishing. Some play the part of others, like Darrel Ellis in black wash, posing after a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Wendy Red Star leaves herself out entirely in favor of a leading Native American around 1880. The same red outlines in ink-jet prints frame her text and a hatchet in his hands, both as weapons. Toyin Ojih Odutola gives black skin to “famous whites.” Jim Hodges works with his own saliva, but the results look more like pond scum than a portrait.

Naotaka Hiro promises to Map His Body, with pretty enough colors but not much else. Others appear explicitly, but masked. Rick Bartow takes on the teeth and smile of a wild animal, in pastel and pencil. Maren Hassinger takes pains to apply her mask, like a woman applying makeup, but as blackface. I cannot say for sure whether her video celebrates, defies, or condescends to gender and race, but it resonates. Blythe Bohnen acquires her mask simply by time-exposure, so that the blur of her features serves as a beard.

Catherine Opie hides behind nothing more than her back and its blood-red incisions. And Ana Mendieta, never one to hide, brings one last strategy for vanishing. She sets an effigy on fire, leaving her very body image in flames. Self-portraits have become all but a ritual these days, as an affirmation of personal and cultural identity. These eleven artists look back to a time after Modernism when such things came with irony and pain. For all their flaws, they could still mean more than what it all became.

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To pick up from last time on the Brooklyn Museum at age two-hundred, the American wing can hardly wait to see you. It cannot even hold off long enough for a conventional sign announcing the exhibition and welcoming you in.

Instead, the space off the elevator greets you with signs picked right off the street, like one for a bus stop that might have just left off a full load of visitors like you. To its side, a living room set contains seating, shelves, and what the museum politely calls antiques. Not that collectors often treasure some cheap furniture, embarrassing carvings, and an old TV, and not that a museum often displays them. Make yourself at home as best you can. Inside, the mad rush never stops. Just try to sort out the period for many a period piece hung high and low amid others. Just try to identify them at all, some without so much as wall labels.

You can rest assured of one thing: this rehanging will emphasize BIPOC—black, indigenous, and other people of color. It claims that opening room for African American families of a certain age, and that should already have you wondering. Do its contrasts and disorder enhance or diminish the museum’s most esteemed collection? Does it honor blacks and women or trivialize them that much more? What is art, what is trash, and who gets to say?

The Brooklyn Museum has rehung its American wing before, though never as thoroughly. Not two years ago, as I reported then, it rolled out these very rooms to great fanfare. It put the emphasis on Native American art, with a first room for just that and the name of the Lenape nation in large type outside. It made a greater effort throughout to find parallels between tradition, but nothing like this. The latest comes just in time for the museum’s two hundredth birthday, so you will forgive it if the curator, Stephanie Sparling Williams, and her team boast, in the rollout’s subtitle, of “New Frameworks for American Art.” The entirety is “Toward Joy,” opened October 4.

Not that it has anything like an obvious framework or much cause for joy. The opening stress on indigenous art is gone, and samples of it are not so easy to find. Nor indeed is anything else. My eye first fell on small paintings by Winslow Homer and Martin Johnson Heade, with all their precise observation and near supernatural color. Look around, though, and the magic is gone, along with whatever else was going on between the Hudson River School and the threshold of modern art. Not far away lies Georgia O’Keeffe, amid an awkward mix of prim academics and garish color.

What, then, do they reveal about an artist? The room also includes a wonderful piece of Native American pottery, but what is that doing here? You may need the room’s introductory text to spot what they have in common: these are about troubled waters, from seascapes to the stories that a culture tells only to itself. Other themes include flowers, backs, and “Surface Tension.” These are not exactly recognized genres in art’s history.

This is not a way to celebrate inclusion. Rather than welcoming diversity, they take the life out of almost everyone. Georgia O’Keeffe seems closer to native symbolism than abstraction, which is interesting, but also stiff as a board in a company of stiffs. Albert Bierstadt, once on a partition to himself, shares a wall in the next room with lengthy text about, well, I am not sure what. Rather than breaking away from so much garish art into majesty, he looks just plain overblown. Artists this electric deserve better.

Rooms without wall labels do have touch screens for greater access, if you dare and if you care. Two alcoves feature the conservator’s hand, as “Radical Care,” which sounds promising, but I could not detect it. A shed acts as a study room, where paperbacks by Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and bell hooks tell you know what you are supposed to study, and it is not art. A long succession of nineteenth-century portraits, starting with John Singer Sargent, hangs at knee level as if on an assembly line. Chairs rest on high shelves as if someone forgot to take them out of storage. One more chair, facing a tea set, is by Frank Lloyd Wright—perhaps the least likely artist to take tea.

One sad result of the new hanging is to call attention to the collection’s gaps. Good as they are, Al Held and David Diao will have to stand for postwar abstraction. Still, if one group defies the rehanging’s limits and its strictures, it is women, especially black women One can discover portraits by Laura Wheeler Waring in 1940, akin to Fauvism, and Lily Martin Spencer, holding court with ripe cherries in 1856. Faith Ringgold has a rare place of honor at the start of a room with For the Woman’s House. It may take women to keep a major museum on a major anniversary on the map.

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Count on the Brooklyn Museum to throw quite a party, however embarrassing. Count on it, too, to celebrate the institution by celebrating the borough. On its two hundredth anniversary, it extends an open call to Brooklyn artists and invites them in. It fills the lobby rotunda with roughly two hundred works, through January 26, chosen from four thousand submissions, just in time for its birthday.

It is “The Brooklyn Artists Show,” with every pretension of the definitive—the Brooklyn artists and the show. Who could define Brooklyn or contemporary art once and for all? It is also an excuse not to worry too much about art. Hey, it’s only a party. If it falls a bit flat, such is the Brooklyn Museum. One may as well enjoy every bit of Brooklyn sunlight and not dwell on the details, no more than does the museum itself.

It may even lie about its age—like that eternally young elderly relative, but the other way around. What is the oldest, continuously operated art museum in the United States? That would be the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut. What about New York? The Met opened on Fifth Avenue in 1870. The Brooklyn Museum began instead as a public library, but then the New York Historical Society Museum and Library entered the picture earlier still, in 1804.

Upstairs, a rehanging of American art only adds to the confusion—and I turn to that next time, rounding out a longer review and my latest upload. The borough, though, has a way of reinventing itself, and the museum itself rolls out a new logo, as a “new visual identity”—a delightfully clean one at that. Back downstairs, things look weighty and tight. The café has moved forward from a long hallway to the underused lobby, near large paintings by Cecily Brown and Kehinde Wiley, with still larger sculpture by KAWS. If Wiley and KAWS are as glib as ever, they still ask for space. Outside the museum, a newly acquired sculpture in rusted steel by Mark di Suvero looks more formidable still.

The show of Brooklyn artists takes things down a peg. Each artist gets just one work apiece, organized loosely by subject if at all. Instead of wall labels, one has only the artist’s name stenciled on the wall, not even a date and title. As the saying goes, that’s all she wrote. The show could almost pick up where a private collection last season left off in the very same space, only with fewer iconic artists. But then this is about not iconicity but belonging. Two views of bridges between the boroughs hang side by side, neither one of them the Brooklyn Bridge.

Portraiture hangs more or less together, but then portraiture dominates the show. This is, after all, about diversity, what could boost that aim more than faces? One might expect no less than currency and diversity from an eclectic set of contemporary artists as curators—Jeffrey Gibson (a Native American), Vik Muniz (born in Brazil), Fred Tomaselli (a Californian), and Mickalene Thomas (an African American woman). In the American wing, her self-portrait lacks her usual glitter, and her face looks a bit dour as well. In the rotunda, things are looking up. Gibson makes sculpture, and the show has allusions to non-Western totems and household trash, but plain old painting still predominates.

All this makes it hard indeed to identify a work, to give it context, or to remember an artist. Anonymity has an upside, though, leaving space to enjoy a leisurely stroll. I am, I know, not really doing my job, but I felt on vacation, a nice one at that. A young woman, in a photo by Jasmine Clark, might be on vacation, too, seated in a perfect wildness in a pristine white dress. Isis Davis-Marks might be on vacation from Yale with her books still on her desk. I always liked those translations—and again, the story continues next time with more than two hundred years of American art.

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