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art reviews from around new york

It took Giorgio Morandi a long time to come into the light. He had to discover his subject, his palette, his brush, and his very detachment from what stood at only arm’s reach. The discovery stands out from a private collection on view in Chelsea, at David Zwirner through February 22—and one of two fresh looks at the foundations of modern art. I look at the second, Piet Mondrian in the Guggenheim, coming up.

Giorgio Morandi was anything but precocious. At least one might not think so from his holdings in the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, and it should know. Luigi Magnani was a friend and early supporter. In place of the sheer lightness of his better-known still life, early work runs to dark, heavy tones, often close to black. Black may have drawn him to prints and pencil drawings as well. It can give Morandi’s objects a history, too, of native instruments that can look both classic and quaint.

It may be his history as well, from an Italian painter in a modern scene increasingly centered on Paris, and he was fine with that, but he had to discover more. Born in 1890, he was adept from the very start, with the skills of an academic painter. That would explain the fondness for still life, darkness, weight, and those instruments out of the commedia dell’arte, much as for the Rococo and Jean Antoine Watteau. Yet it also had him thinking in the long term. If he was not precocious in the sense of child artist, he was in no hurry. He was in it for the long haul.

Early work also includes a landscape or two—and (surprise) a self-portrait. Already in his late twenties, he looks eternally young and slim, but still patient and secure. He is also testing the limits of time. Seated with a small, thin brush raised, he could be about to place the very next stroke, but he makes it hard to imagine his ever rising. An especially dark still life, encrusted with color, testifies to his admiration for Paul Cézanne, or so he thought, and its crust may reflect Impressionism. The curator, Alice Ensabella, sees just as much an older century and Jean-Siméon Chardin. He is still taking stock of his time.

Ensabella, a Morandi scholar, gives his early work the first of four large rooms, in a space usually reserved for the established and deceased. (Most recently it displayed a single large work by Richard Serra, curated by Hal Foster.) It can easily diminish smaller work, but here it allows a small retrospective. It comes seventeen years now after a full-scale Morandi retrospective at the Met. Rather than start over, let me ask you to read my longer review then. If he was slow becoming fully himself, he did live at home all his life.

What in due course changed him? Modern art, certainly, but also realizing his place in modern art. It was somewhat to one side, apart from Paris—but never all that interested in another Italian, Giorgio de Chirico, and Surrealism. As I wrote in the earlier review, he represents a third way to Modernism, neither Pablo Picasso nor Henri Matisse. Where Cubism had line and Fauvism had color, Morandi found weight and light. And he found them compatible.

That came with a serious departure. With a pencil or printer’s tool, he had used dense fields of parallel strokes to model his subject with precision and polish. He moved largely to paler washes, in the color of wood or plaster, often stopping short of the object’s edge. He could also stand household objects together, across the painting, each in front of or behind a wooden block. He was obliterating the distinction between the curve and the rectangle, foreground and background, home and studio, but also the thing itself and its space. The light belongs at once to the object, the painter, and the viewer’s eye.

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Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien bear witness to a massacre, but they leave the testimony to others who survived. They bear witness, too, to an Asian people’s ways of life. The massacre took place nearly forty years ago in Escalante, an island in the Philippines, but for Camacho and Lien it could just as well be today.

It sounds modest enough, as “Offerings for Escalante,” at MoMA PS1 through February 17, and it becomes more poignant the more Camacho and Lien listen. On film, newly commissioned, survivors speak of falling to the ground to avoid the bullets, only to find themselves lying among the dead. They do not so much as speak of what brought them together —a mass protest in 1985 against the Marcos regime. Nor do they mention the peaceful revolution that succeeded in deposing him a year later. It is enough to bear witness. Are they stronger for having come together and survived—or that much more helpless in remembering? They themselves may not know.

For Camacho and Lien, it is nonetheless a teachable moment. They convert the two-level gallery just outside the rest of the exhibition into a study hall. A second film, of the protest itself, projects on a huge wall like a banner. Posters, display cases, and monitors round out the class. The survivors also do not mention the cause that brought about the protest, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, itself a matter of survival. The artists leave nothing unstated.

They see a reminder of not just present-day inequality, but also a colonial history of sugar plantations and exploitation. They add assemblages of whatever grows, some centered on skulls and other reminders of death. They are more moving, though, in their new-found modesty. Between the testimonies comes silence, over light brown fragments of rags or film itself, like a torn trailer. More poignant still is testimony from those who did not have to face death, small children. They sing together, as in a playground or classroom, but the words speak again of death.

Sohrab Hura is all the more moving for never losing his innocence. At past forty, he is the elder statesman this time out at MoMA PS1 (which also exhibits artists in residence from the Studio Museum in Harlem). Jasmine Gregory joins in with paintings after luxury watch ads, as “Who Wants to Die for Glamour.” Gregory wants to remind you of patrimony, preservation, and all that you are missing. Apparently, it is never too late to learn. Hura does better with less certainty.

He started as a photographer, capturing individuals against a background of forlorn beaches and unpaved roads. Neither the photographer or his subjects seem able to strike a pose. Street photography is often short of composed, as in “We Are Here” at the International Center of Photography, and uncomposed photographs often fall flat. Here they seem about right, a bit like Instagram for Stephen Shore. Less happily, Hura has switched to pastel and gouache for Ghosts in My Sleep and Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed. Suffice it to say that he has something to say about his aging mother and her dog. Now if only he could express it.

He has, though, explored India and its lives more fully in photographs and film. It takes him to the north, for winter and a touch of snow. It takes him to a festival, with a carnival in slow motion, at once colorful and somehow sad. People come for the rides, but even more to immerse themselves in rough coastal waters, a Hindu ritual of renewal. There is joy

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To wrap up from last time on black artists and ancient Egypt, the most potent ancient imagery cannot reduce past or present to a stereotype of greatness. Good art cannot appropriate tragedy on behalf of uplift. Rather, it returns quite literally from the grave to haunt the present.

Those black kids at the Met may have loved its Egyptian tomb as much as I did as a child, and so surely did Lauren Halsey. Just a summer ago, she took her version of the tomb upstairs for summer sculpture on the Met roof. It may have seemed awfully straightforward, like a recitation in school, but it evoked, her title explains, the east side of South Central LA. It was the story of her life, retold once more in a colorful collage on two square pillars here.

A full third of the show builds a scholarly history of greatness. If that sounds like a well-researched scam, then come kings and queens who cannot return from the dead. They can, though, learn from children, on a class trip or in O’Grady’s family album. Lonnie Holley transforms deities flanking a pharaoh’s tomb into very real, heavily swaddled children. If they seem one part comforted and one part repressed, so, they seem to say, are black families even today. When Betye Saar paints Window of Ancient Sirens, a triptych after a funerary mask of King Tut, she seems more disturbed than impressed.

Not that the accent is on subtlety. There is always the good cheer of Pop Art for Robert Colescott or the glorified street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Kara Walker, though, subtitled her grandest public work A Subtlety, and she was not altogether ironic. For all its scale and glowing whiteness, it had black features far from an Egyptian sphinx. And she made it of sugar, like a product of the Domino Sugar plant displaced by gentrification right next door—or of slave labor in the Caribbean. The Met can include only a sketch, a quick one at that, but it will do.

Ancient monuments appear again in contemporary settings, but in miniature, as collectibles. How better for the oldest intercollegiate black fraternity to assert its identity than on boardroom shelves, in a painting by Derek Fordjour? How much better still to explore blackness than with actual shelves on a large field of black soap from Rashid Johnson? David Hammons creates his own pyramids of human hair, while Sam Gilliam creates his in Minimalist aluminum, wood, white, and blue. Maren Hassinger make her Love (Pyramid) both sculpture and performance, in pink balloons. While not much to do with Egypt, Terry Adkins still pays tribute to Carver’s oxidized blue.

Art for art’s sake or history’s makes only a fleeting appearance before the show’s final third, about music. It includes album covers, lots of them, and a space for Afrofuturism, which somehow includes Julie Mehretu, the abstract artist, along with Sun Ra in jazz. And who could deny the impact of African American musicians? Still, album covers can take things only so far, and references to Egypt seem no more than coincidental. Besides, the Met already installed a period room for Afrofuturism in 2021. To misquote Sun Ra, space here is no longer the place.

This is an enormous show for so tenuous a theme. It will be fine for those who seek only role models in the terror and turbulence of history. As a handy survey of contemporary black art, it cannot match a larger and smarter show centered on Alvin Ailey, the choreographer, at the Whitney. Not that it lacks for artists and anecdotes worth knowing, not by any means. Who could imagine that William T. Williams found inspiration for his gray diagonals in Nu Nile, a black hair-care product? There may be gray areas left in a field of black and white, but a museum owes art more than a royal mess.

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Cleopatra’s throne does not look comfortable. No wonder she has taken her business elsewhere, into Egypt or into art.

Maybe it comes with the territory for so iconic a ruler and so fabled a beauty. The price of becoming an idol is a loss of humanity, in People or in history, all the more so when she knew that she was about to die. And Barbara Chase-Riboud does indeed give her a golden throne—or simulate one in small squares of polished bronze on wood. It looks magnificent, but also uncomfortably rigid and peeling, and no one would dare sit on it at the Met. She will, though, make more than one return along with a host of familiar images in a show of Black artists and Ancient Egypt, as “Flight into Egypt” through February 17. But are they truly an African American heritage for today?

Many have looked to Egypt before them—and thought it vital to black America’s humanity and dignity . Relate to Your Heritage, proclaimed Barbara Jones-Hogu, in psychedelic colors. The artist spoke out for a movement, AfriCOBRA, formed in the radicalism of the 1960s. Malcolm X traveled to Egypt three times, and a video shares a stop in Cairo. A photo by Eve Arnold accompanies black kids to the Met itself, where a boy in a while shirt and narrow tie could almost be Malcolm himself as a child. It seems only right for a show on the theme of awakening.

From the start, the Met argues, blacks contributed to scholarship on the region, from the Egyptology of the early twentieth century. George Washington Carver collected a sample of Egyptian blue (its ninth oxidation). Aaron Douglas applies the translucent colors that place him among the greatest in the Harlem Renaissance to a vision of ancient monuments. It could just as well represent a modern city under construction. The show takes its title from a loose painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, perhaps an oil sketch, in 1923. He had painted the interior of a mosque a quarter century before.

Two contributors, Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus, set out a study room so that you can discover more. As usual with such rooms, it has an interest in telling you what to study. Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave and abolitionist, had no doubts what is at stake: whites had set out “to deny that the Egyptians were Negroes” in order “to deprive the Negro of the moral support of Ancient Greatness.” The curators, Akili Tommasino with McClain Groff, have to agree. Yet the art on display has many colors, and that could be an African American heritage, too.

Fred Wilson sets out busts of Nefertiti, after the famous one often seen in strict profile, in gradations from white to black. They occupy, the work’s title explains, a Gray Area, and this is its “brown version.” Lorraine O’Grady pairs still more images of the Egyptian queen with photographs of children she has known, as her Miscegenated Family Album. As for Cleopatra’s shade of brown, no one can say. She was the last in a dynasty that Alexander the Great had installed in the path of conquest, which is not to say what it became. Barbara Chase-Riboud does well by leaving her out of the picture.

Europe and America alike had a fascination with Egypt, like many a child at the Met today. J. P. Morgan traveled in person to confirm his scholarly credentials and to stock the Morgan Library. Maxime Du Camp, a close friend of Gustave Flaubert, took up photography to document cities and monuments. Meanwhile black artists like Emma Amos have made a pilgrimage to Africa in search of their cultural and family history, but not to Egypt. Others, like Toyin Ojih Odutola from Nigeria, are still between continents in their art. Exhibitions have returned more and more to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

Then, too, can a focus on African Americans shift those gray areas a little too far toward black and white? Could the Arab world and Islamic art have their own colors and history? Could that, too, be a part of black history in a way the Met cannot fully grasp. Tanner did, after all, paint a mosque. And yet the show at its best questions its own pat history. As a white male, I cannot speak for African Americans, but its artists are still asking what remains of ancient greatness—and I pick up next time with just that.

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After drip paintings came stained canvas, from postwar artists who could leave more to nature and nothing to chance. So what comes now? How about color carried to your eye by the wind and by paint?

Violeta Maya returns to the materials, imagery, and style of the late 1950s, with acrylic, raw pigment, and plenty of canvas to let them breathe. This is nothing but painting, in a tradition where abstraction is just that, just as for Susan English in Chelsea. It is also much of her best work, lbut she took me most by surprise with canvas hanging freely from four wooden arches and, every so often, billowing upward.

When it comes down to it, nothing really separates Abstract Expressionism from color-field painting except, perhaps, a heading in a textbook. Drips, stains, targets, or slashes, it was all gestural abstraction in postwar art, where only the gestures had changed and not so very much at that. It was, if anything, just a matter of temperament, as the delicacy and violence of flung paint gave way to the lushness of poured paint. One could almost call it a matter of male and female temperament, of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning joined by Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. One could, that is, had not galleries begun to rediscover such women artists as Michael West (Corrine in real life). As for the richness of poured paint, with color as a target, field, or veil, it all but belonged to Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Maya risks a return to not exactly unfinished business, but fashionably close, at Nicelle Beauchene through February 15. Painting is no longer dead, they say, and anything goes, but “anything goes” can take art only so far. It does, though, allow a certain breathing room. Barely in her thirties, she works in Madrid, just as galleries have begun to see AbEx as an international movement, with a steady flow of artists back and forth between New York and Europe. She counts Japanese art as an influence, just when museums have looked again at Asian art and seen calligraphy. She sometimes works on multiple panels to stretch color further, and Chinese or Japanese art can unfold across several sheets of paper as well.

She takes her own claims lightly. As the show’s title has it, with an almost British reserve, “Me Atrevo a Decir que Esta Pintura Está Viva” (I dare say this painting is alive). A painting’s title takes her acknowledged pleasures under advisement, in English: Enjoy the Ride While You Can. The stains unfold horizontally, eaping across canvas or in counterpoint. The four hinged arches are physically attached, much as the panels are attached visually.

Their canvas, too, can leap only so far. If a breeze enters the gallery, it is a gentle one, and the fabric builds up around a point of rest on the floor. They and the wood approach sculpture, with its own imagery. They resemble mirrors, with their rounded top, a bit taller than a gallery-goer. Maya may look at her work and see just a bit more than herself. It is her Miedo a lo Desconocido, or fear of the unknown.

Speaking of a leap, my little history skips over a good third of the twentieth century. After gesture came Minimalism, before Postmodernism, in dialogue with it, or insistently itself. It also came with its own idea of late modern art. It spoke of art as object and image, line and color, space and light, the thing itself and the thing to be seen. One could subsume them all into contrasting elements of painting, edge and field. Susan English takes just that as her art, at Kathryn Markel also through February 15.

English translates the nearly invisible traces of the 1960s and 1970s, as in Agnes Martin, into pale, matte colors. They vary within a field, like the sky, and a horizon line is implicit, as is gesture, although landscape itself is not. This is as pure as abstraction gets, but it has plenty of excuses for line—the line surrounding a painting or separating its parts. She stresses it with contrasting colors and panels, where the viewer must determine which truly bounds a color field. She also paints in white along many an edge, just short of a frame. The quiet colors and stable borders give every reason to slow down.

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For Mary Mattingly, nature’s most intense colors come out only at night. One could almost call them supernatural.

Mattingly photographs an exotic garden, set in an uncertain world. Its glow seems to come from the flowers themselves, in dense clusters of yellow, orange, purple, and blue. They run more to spheres than to the petals, like artificial lights. The surrounding greenery could almost stand in for wiring in a museum or holiday display.

They pop, but Mattingly’s “Night Garden” cannot altogether penetrate the darkness, at Robert Mann through February 22. Just try to imagine where you are. It could be underwater for the depth of black and the shimmer of light now and on the surface. Could those be fish swimming by or just more flowers soaking up the light show? They could belong to a nighttime landscape as well, with distant hills, more than once, and a full moon. It unfolds in layers, including layered flowers, like a landscape painter’s means of defining depth. The shimmers form veils or curtains waiting to be pulled aside.

Not that one could expect to see more, not when color like this cannot penetrate the darkness. The heightened contrast between elements helps create the interplay of natural and unnatural. Nature here seems perfectly well observed, in a painterly tradition going back the Romantic landscape and to flowers in close-up from Baroque still life through Beatrix Potter to Georgia O’Keeffe. Double exposures and darkroom additions, I assume, are allowed, including actual lamps, but nothing in violation of ordinary linear perspective. Hills have the breadth of the Hudson River School and an atmospheric blue. A trained eye could identify the flowers.

Mary Mattingly must have trained herself all over again. She began modestly enough, with twilight visits to Socrates Sculpture Park on the East River waterfront, where she has herself contributed her Water Clock. One may remember it more for trees, lawns, and art than for flowers, with the Noguchi Museum a block or two away. One may expect less of nature anyway in the coldest weeks of the year. Try to enjoy the irony of a school football a quarter mile up on Broadway with strictly artificial turf. But then the photos have no indication of place or time.

She began, then, not in the studio, but with chance discoveries in a neighborhood respite. It is hardly a botanic garden, but it will have to do. Still, she says, the park inspired her to take clippings from its flowers and to study them with care. Yet the crispness and color come equally from photography. Remember the bright, halfway creepy look of early color photography, as with William Eggleston, when they hardly passed for art? Mattingly retains that look but in the color that she has seen.

A skeptic could find a little too much artifice and beauty. These photos do not shy away from special effects. And who can object, as in her past work, to reminders of climate change? Still, she knows what to keep in reserve in the blackness. It obliges one to see art and photography, too, as a work of the imagination rather than a mechanical record—and a discovery as much as a creation. Maybe sunlight will return come summer, but for now it is up to you to say where and when you are.

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