haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

“Ich bin Ich,” and of course she was, but Paula Modersohn-Becker had her doubts. The Neue Galerie takes the title of her retrospective, through September 9, from a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, and it rings true for today.

I, a woman, am myself and no one else, she wrote, a boast for many a woman artist now—but who am I? She had just left her husband, Otto, restless for answers. She could not go back to the younger artist she had left behind, but what was the way ahead? She had every right to ask, and she died at just thirty-one, on the brink of a new art form for a new century. Together with a recent report on Käthe Kollwitz and German Expressionism, it is also the subject of a longer and fuller review, in my latest upload.

How did German Expressionism arise in the first place? In her painfully brief career, Modersohn-Becker offers a snapshot of a crucial moment. She died of complications from childbirth (an embolism) in 1907, the very year of the museum’s most prized work, the woman in gold by Gustav Klimt. Almost its entire collection lay ahead. She had joined Worpswede, an artist colony not too far from her family home in Bremen, and studied in Berlin, with classical training in drawing from life. In repeated trips to Paris, she took in the latest exhibitions, but even more so the Louvre.

She admired Fauvism, but Henri Matisse and André Derain had returned from their summer by the sea barely a year before. Pablo Picasso was still a newcomer to Paris in Montmartre. Modersohn-Becker did not live to see World War I, which did so much to shape Max Beckmann, or the postwar decadence, turmoil and experiment that Hitler denounced as “degenerate art.” Everything for her was figure painting, even when it includes still life, and she was determined to make it modern. She left her own version of Klimt’s standing woman, with a similarly patterned backdrop, but she made it hers twice over, without the gold. It shows her and her alone, naked and pregnant.

She was painting affection, but with a frankness born of detachment and reserve. She paints herself repeatedly, in one case with a blank face. That self-portrait could be unfinished, but, hey, you never know. Often she holds up a flower, like a shield, because she deserves no less but can afford little more. She paints a mother and child, fleshy and caring, but neither friend, nor family, nor herself. She did reunite with Otto and give birth to a daughter, but the show’s only portrait of him, years earlier, brings him so close to the picture plane that his limbs become fragments.

Still, it an act of love, take it or leave it. At the very least, it is an act of respect from one artist to another. A room for work from just before 1890 accords peasants and workers that same respect. It also shows the discipline of classical drawing, in charcoal with bare accents of color, and what she had soon to give up. Her early subjects have distinct personalities, but modernizing for her soon meant something else again. From that point on, faces let on only discomfort at having to pose.

She begins taking things apart while building up flesh and paint to match. She also turns to children, they, too, cautiously holding flowers. She treasures those accents of color, which increasingly give a painting its focus. Still, she never fully gets over her muter early work. She may have liked Fauvism, but she prized Paul Gauguin more. She uses patches of brown much like his for shadows, to structure a figure and a painting.

In so short a career, it is hard to speak of artistic development, although Modersohn-Becker left behind more than seven hundred paintings and a thousand drawings. The show spans barely a decade, with no examples of her earliest work back in Bremen. (That work does allow the color clashes of Post-Impressionism.) She never did become the pioneering artist confident in her Ich and I. It does, though, leave her on the brink of something to come. Could that something be German Expressionism?

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

From the very start, LaToya Ruby Frazier stepped outside the New York art scene. As a young artist, she returned to her family home in the Rust Belt. She photographed herself as one of three generations of women, as she puts it, “unified by illness” but the illness extends poignantly to race, gender, and poverty in America—and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

For Frazier, the decline of the Rust Belt can only be a family affair. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, where Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill, she knows the people it employed, the jobs lost, and the desolation it brought to water, land, and air. Her mother had life-saving surgery at Braddock Hospital and still shows its scars. Her grandmother spent her failing days there, looking ever so smaller than her pathetic hospital bed. Frazier photographed both encounters with life and death for The Notion of Family, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, the series that occupied the first fourteen years of her adult life. And she still calls Braddock home.

Yet her notion of family has changed. More than ten years later, it extends to an entire city seen from above, where family and loss are only implicit but no less real. It extends, too, to other places where workers fight for their jobs and their very lives. She wants to give every loss a face and every face a voice, and photography itself has given way to photo essays, with personal accounts twice over, in images and text. She calls her midcareer retrospective “Monuments of Solidarity,” and it ends with words alone, at MoMA through September 7. Could, though, monuments overwhelm the artistry and solidarity the individual?

When White Columns presented “Monuments for the USA” some years ago, one had to expect an uneasy mix of patriotism and irony, and the group show delivered both. LaToya Ruby Frazier is interested in neither one. She accommodates many narratives and takes everything seriously. What begins as the story of black women “united in our illnesses” becomes first a town’s sickness and then a wider family. Auto workers in Ohio in 2019 include men and women, black and white, and their testimonies as well. Just past the exhibition’s exit, Frazier sings “Solidarity Forever,” the union anthem, to her own accompaniment on guitar.

This is not just about her. When Frazier began, family placed her among three generations, and their resilience stopped well short of boasting. In photos alongside her mother, they seem to share one set of eyes and lips. Yet shadows divide them, and her grandmother’s refuse, including a Pall Mall carton, litters the carpet. She was not yet thirty when she appeared among the emerging artists of “Greater New York” in 2010 and, as the family’s youngest, still coming to be. She returned in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and with “The Notion of Family” in Brooklyn, and I leave a fuller account of how much it moved me to the longer version of this review, with my report back then.

Still, things looked different from the moment she looked out and up. She could see the hospital, closed in 2010, in ruins and the view from a helicopter of a polluted river. She could see the town’s welcoming sign sponsored by a pest-control company and ads for Levis that took blue jeans and Braddock as the real America. If, as the ads read, “everybody’s work is equally important,” where are the black and women’s faces? A video in collaboration with Liz Magic Laser asks just that. It was time to head elsewhere.

In Flint Is Family, ending in 2020, families cling to their uncertain supplies of fresh water, and a mother and child leave for Mississippi. They might have needed the health-care workers in More Than Conquerors, which adds the last missing elements, photo essays. Workers pose for a picture and supply plenty of words, more than anyone is likely to read. Mounted on large steel frames, they become an installation. The health-care workers, in Baltimore, speak of inequality in opportunity for them and access to care for others. The auto workers in Ohio lament the last Chevy Cruze and what it means for them. They identify so much with their work that a worker crawls under the very last car to record its serial number.

The workers resist to the last, through their union, and Frazier shares their desperate optimism. She lays out the frames from Ohio in one long row, painted an industrial red, like an auto body run wild. “It is incumbent upon me to resist,” she says, “one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time.” It is getting harder, though, and the show ends with A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta, a migrant labor camp. The artist’s geography has left family and steel far behind. If you sense a collision in priorities between environmental degradation and job loss, Frazier is testifying to needs, not to a policy agenda.

The words of others are also her answer to the weight of the monumental. True, she is less and less vulnerable and closer and closer to a lecture, but “all I’m doing,” she says, “is showing up as a vessel.” On the Making of Steel in 2017 collaborated in its photography as well. Sandra Gould Ford, a steel worker who was losing her own job, takes up the camera. The curators, Roxana Marcoci wth Caitlin Ryan and Antoinette D. Roberts, give it an oval room under changing red light, to simulate the night sky that still overlooks it all. The overflow of words and the accompanying portraits, little more than selfies, are deadening nonetheless. Frazier has come a long way from the poignancy of the young photographer’s art, her stories, her family, and her illness.

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

Not all the artists in “Asian-American Abstraction” are Asian-American, but no matter. Who can tell the difference anyway?

Think I’m joking? The gallery, Hollis Taggart, asks just that. Wall text roughly midway through poses the question, and not even a checklist of works stops to answer. Take as long as you like with a challenging summer group show, through September 7. It is not the only summer group show to take American abstraction overseas and back, and I work this together with a recent report on “Americans in Paris” as a longer review and my latest upload.

Nearly fifty artists, past and present, fill both floors of the gallery for “Asian-American Abstraction” and who are they anyway? They show the influence of East Asian tradition, but also Abstract Expressionism—and there, too, you may have trouble untangling the threads. Don Ahn, for one, works with an eye to calligraphy, but with ink spatters as well. He may have you marveling at the sheer control of Chinese “Companions in Solitude” before him and, in a very different way, drip painting from Jackson Pollock. And then a second work adds a glowing yellow that not even Pollock could know. Ming Wang has her own descending black brush, but also an accordion book of pages twice “letter” size, to accommodate so much more.

Influence here runs every which way—all the more so in a room that includes Abstract Expressionists, too. It also bears text with that stubborn question. Franz Kline has his seeming calligraphy, but then so does Robert Rauschenberg in characters of his own invention. Black for Sheila Isham spirals down a red canvas as Song of the Palace, while Michael West is Drunk with Turpentine. Vivian Springford, like West (surprise!) a long-neglected woman artist, applies acrylic stains in near concentric circles. You may think of Georgia O’Keeffe or Morris Louis, but she had her first solo show in Tokyo, and she credits the influence of Walasse Ting, from Shanghai on his way to America.

If those artists looked to Chinese art, Chinese Americans had their versions of modern art as well. Ivy Wu brings almost Pop Art colors and well-defined geometry to her calligraphy, while Oonju Chan paints on open fields out of Joan Mitchell. Think, then, that you really cannot know the difference? Think again. Just to describe them is to see them as individuals. Those without a signature style can get lost along the way.

Abstract Expressionists relied heavily on their signature, like Kline’s monumental characters. Adolph Gottlieb has one of his characteristic explosions, of one symbol atop another. Sam Francis has his splotches of red, yellow, and black. They are easy enough to recognize even in relatively small works on paper. Chinese Americans, by comparison, can be more intricate or more fluid. You may pass that test after all.

Nor does it really come down to Asia and America. Postwar American artists had many influences and many that they influenced. Were they formal or gestural? Were they the heirs to Cubism, Surrealism, or something else again? Where they as American as the Hudson River School, which they admired as well? More and more, too, curators are looking beyond Abstract Expressionist New York to a global movement. Asians, say, had their share starting around 1954, in Gutai.

The question still matters, and it sets this show apart. It asks one to look beyond major works and heavy hitters. It asks, too, to well-known artists as infinitely changeable. Who would have thought of Rauschenberg as an abstract painter? He rejected all that, right? You might have to read his indecipherable letters to find out.

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

Yto Barrada photographed Gibraltar, near her African home town, as a touch point for North Africans in the treacherous passage to safety. She embraced it, too, for the sun and sea.

YThat was 1999, but even now she is traditional enough to work not digitally, but in the darkroom. At the International Center of Photography, you may wonder if she ever leaves its confines, even with a camera. She prefers photograms, of candy wrappers and child’s toys, as a cavalcade of overlapping colors and blocks of light. Sweet.

You may not think of Barrada as a photographer, but she began as one. She graduated from the one-year programs at ICP in 1996—then in a Fifth Avenue mansion that could have converted anyone to the medium. Now she returns home several times over. She was back in the darkroom ten years ago, on her return to New York, and she has a solo show at her old school of the results, while recent graduates of those programs share their work a floor above. It may not define her once and for all, but it helps broaden the museum’s self-definition. She may never become a full-time photographer, but she is, as the show has it, “Part-Time Abstractionist,” through September 2.

Actually Barrada has had several homes and successive media. Born in Paris to Moroccan parents in 1971, she spend much of her childhood in Tangier, studied at the Sorbonne, and co-founded a cinema art house in Tangier as well. She exhibited at the LMCC Art Center on Governors Island in 2020, with Bettina Grossman (or simply Bettina) as her guest. Her work there included sculpture, installation, and abstract art (and I leave you to my review then for more). Now she brings a long overdue touch of color to the barren, pebbled courtyard of MoMA PS1. The piled cubes of Le Grand Soir look like attempts at grand pyramids that never quite made it—or just long overdue seating.

ICP displays sculpture and video, too, in a small show curated by Elisabeth Sherman. A makeshift vase holds cardboard flowers, while the video takes her from the darkroom to an arid but tempting suburban landscape. Cars with what might be a hearse at its front pass homes whose only face rotates open and shut, like an oversize garage door. The procession reaches a traffic circle without heeding the temptation to turn, on its way to what must remain unseen and unknown. As the cars pass, red and white striped curbs swell into red along the pavement, and palm trees sink into the ground and rise once more. They, too, are part-time abstraction.

Are they playful in tone, formal exercises, or deeply allusive—much as the houses might pass for toys, Minimalist sculpture, or the American southwest? Do they belong at all at ICP? Whatever your answer, do not be too sure. The year’s celebration of “ICP at 50” recalled its founding mission, to promote photojournalism and a concern for humanity. Barrada earned her certificate in documentary photography as well. Yet ICP’s anniversary show also saw a broadening as far as abstraction, and so does she.

Barrada does not need a camera to approach the heights of abstraction. She relishes darkroom tools, like dodge and burn, and rescues paper from the trash. A sewing machine without thread punches its way through more paper, leaving first vertical and horizontal axes, then parallel lines between them. By the time she is done, she has a near textbook reproduction of a black painting by Frank Stella. In the one series with a camera, plumbing supplies from Tangier look like actors in a silent comedy. Take it seriously, but keep smiling.

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

This could be the most difficult review that I shall ever write—not because the art is all that hard to explain, but because it is so painful to try. To describe a performance by Carlos Martiel is to relive the terror, disgust, and shame that he hopes to produce. I can only imagine the pain for him, at El Museo del Barrio.

Not that he is present in performance at a survey of twenty years of work apart from photographs, occasional video on small screens, and titles that are painful enough in themselves through September 1. It is still his “Cuerpo,” or body. Is it good or bad if he causes you to turn away?

Martiel is, somehow, still going in a line of performance art that includes Chris Burden, who dragged himself across broken glass, and Pope.L, who crawled the twenty-two miles of Broadway in New York. Not for nothing did ExitArt, the former nonprofit, call a group show “Endurance.” Still, their work can come across as a stunt, and Martiel is all the more vulnerable at thirty-five in remaining stock still. In that he is an heir to Yoko Ono, with Cut Piece, but the scissors that cut away her clothing never touch her for all their threat. He may be closer yet to Marina Abramovic, impassive and unmoving on a gallery shelf. Her work, though, is one long ego trip, while he harps on, let us say, serious matters.

Born in Havana, Martiel may come closest of all to another Cuban artist, Juan Francisco Elso—and I work this together with my earlier report on him as a longer review and my latest upload. A retrospective of Elso at the museum last year gave pride of place to Por América, a man in wood pierced by arrowheads many times over, like Saint Sebastian. And still the sculpture, modeled after José Martí, the Cuban revolutionary, wields a machete. His near namesake, too, fights back, but with his body on the line. Martiel has no time for epic heroes, the first Christian martyr, or fine art. He is a gay Cuban American in the real world, now.

I have put off saying more as long as I could. This is his body and his show, although Por América could make a fine alternative title. In its very first work, not arrows but a flagpole pierces his skin, leaving the Stars and Stripes to drape from his chest. He has become a human flagpole, the very symbol of America, but an America that will never acknowledge him. Another flag hangs from above, with the red and blue turned to black and the white stained with blood. Let the blood be on your hands.

At the very least, it is all over his feet. They appear coarse and discolored in another performance. Blood is fresher still in another photo, where he holds a creature to his chest like a child or a pet. He might comforting it or taking comfort from it, but the seeming animal is only a loose collection of vital organs. It could make anyone who stares too long a vegetarian. What, though, does it say about gender, America, or him?

That can be a problem. Martiel can seem a one-note artist, and the note can ring all too clearly or hardly at all. He can also turn you away.That can be a strength, too, and critics must have brought the same complaints to Burden long ago. Martiel addresses Cuba’s repressive state honestly as well. He pins three of its medals directly to his chest—medals awarded to his father before him.

Still, it can fail. At his best, performance engages the viewer, daring one to turn away. He stands on a block in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, hands cuffed behind his back, like a slave at auction. He asks only for recognition, as a step toward freedom. In the show’s title work, he relies on others to save his life, with his neck in a noose as in a lynching waiting for him to fall. It is safe to say that enough people came through.

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

As a quiet summer nears its end, allow me a review that I somehow never got to post. If you remember Joyce Kozloff as a founder of what came to be known as “Pattern and Decoration,” you may wonder what she is doing with a show entirely of maps. They are contemporary maps at that, of regions torn apart by aggression and war.

They are recognizably hers all the same, with overlaid patterns that might themselves have been torn away, but from vintage wallpaper. They just happen to land at the site of unilaterally or mutually assured destruction. For once, the decorative arts land like a bomb. What might once have served as the comforts of art and home is now just one more part of the show’s “Collateral Damage,” at D. C. Moore through this past February 3.

It may still leave you wondering. Like Miriam Schapiro and Valerie Jaudon, Kozloff came to the movement with a dedication to painting and a smile, not the anger of a world at war. Surely the decorative arts have a different time frame from the latest news in mind, whether the frivolity of fashion or timeless craft. While critics could easily dismiss such art as, well, feminine, Kozloff embraced the label. She appeared in “WACK” at MoMA PS1, then still P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, as part of a “feminist revolution.” More than anyone might have guessed, she also anticipated patterning in art today, with its tributes to “women’s work” as serious business. Entering her eighties, she may be struggling to keep up with the headlines, but she is also making them.

Kozloff has been interested in maps since the 1990s, and her sources range from U.S. government surveys to ancient Rome. Her maps appear, too, exactly as her sources would have it—with the West Bank and Gaza as, pointedly in one case, “status undetermined.” They also reinforce her play between found imagery and the artist’s hand. A pattern landing on Israel takes the form of targets, but as single brushstrokes like spirals, and one can feel the bombs or the paint landing. Other patterns echo a region’s native culture. She is bringing her concerns up to date, big time, but with an eye to the past.

Maps have their own claim to the rigor of abstract painting and the flourish of patterns as well. Like both, they adhere to what critics used to praise as “flatness.” How else to render a 3D world on paper? With due respect to a certain columnist for The New York Times, the earth is definitely not flat. (A flat earth makes a lousy metaphor for globalization anyway.) A reproduction is itself collateral damage, and so is a work of art.

Most maps here have the simplest kind of projection, with outlines that do their best to reproduce political borders. They approach the view from above like a child’s drawing. As decoration, their tart colors put overt patterning to shame. The work based on the Roman empire, “Spheres of Influence” from 2001, addresses the problem directly. It adopts a mathematical projection that leaves its twelve panels in the shape of canoes, but flatter. Its care with geographical texturing is all the more striking for that—and closer to art.

Like it or not, Kozloff is still smiling in the face of disaster. Her art never spells out the damage, and that only helps it as political art. It runs from Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa to regions under Chinese control. Do not, though, come expecting ruined cities and refugees. Do come for the collision of subjective color and objective fact. Or should I say the subjectivity of fact in the arenas of art and conflict?

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