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To wrap up from last time on late work by Robert Frank, he photographs his friends at ease together. Others turn their camera on him, like Joan Lyons and Danny Lyon.

His most obvious collaborations, though, were on films, starting in 1959 with Pull My Daisy He conceived it together with Alfred Leslie, with a script by Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road. (Kerouac also supplies the voice-over narration.) It works through their shared ambivalence about their own creative past, with (as I put it in another past review), an undercurrent of humor and disturbance that art cannot resolve. It also moves between images of family life and the arts.

Some have found it formless, which misses its narrative, but also misses the point. It celebrates the lives of artists, including their spiritual life, but art that makes things up on the spot on the spot. And if it still seems formless, just wait till you see Frank’s other films. (MoMA gives them monitors rather than rooms to themselves.) Just wait, too, till you see the rest of his photography. He pops over to Coney Island for a shoot, but this will be one long roller-coaster of a ride.

His most persistent collaborator was his second wife, June Leaf, and their greatest collaboration their move from New York. They observe much the same scenes at Cape Breton, Frank in photography and Leaf on paper. She gives acrylic and ink the translucency of watercolor—to capture the light, but also to preserve in paint the spontaneity of drawing. She renders a hand, too, perhaps Frank’s own mark. They turn their thoughts most, though, to the space of a home. In years ahead, light can still penetrate, but little else.

They differ in one thing: where Leaf’s scenes are otherwise empty, Frank is still asking his neighbors how they live. He seems happy to have discovered Mabou, a small town on the Cape where he can know pretty much everyone. They and their homes look ramshackle and improvised. One seems to be sinking halfway into the sea. A Mabou Winter is just a half-covered eye.

Walker Evans, long a friend and advisor, stops by to take a look around. For MoMA, it is just one more sign of collaboration. Even fans have mostly given up on Frank after The Americans, and the curators, Joshua Siegel and Lucy Gallon, hope to change that. Something, though, has changed for good. There is no getting around that images become closer and closer to throwaways, much like the “scrapbook.” Still, Frank knew the pain of throwing things away.

What remains is a portrait of loss. His two children died young, his daughter very young, and he himself retreats further and further within. He had always worked on the cheap, but now he trades his Leica for Polaroids—as he put it, “to strengthen the feeling.” Life Dances On . . ., the 1980 print that lends the show its title, seems more and more a bitter hope. Leaf’s absences of life become prophetic, and a typewriter rests untouched. An interior becomes bare walls and a dusty square of light.

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To pick up from last time on late work by Robert Frank, that photograph of, just maybe, collaborators, should tell you something. They have been hanging out a long time now, and no one would dream of telling them how to pose.

Still, one appears behind the rest, on-screen or in a print, eager to join them but not altogether there. A couple hugs, but Frank stands apart at far right. He looks older as well, just short of sixty, with white hair and a scraggly beard. Hand-lettered labels below each person make them look like perps in police custody.

Frank was always restless. He had to hit the road for The Americans, and it testifies to a restless America. I caught up with him at the Met in 2010—and do check out my review then, which I would not dream of repeating. The series makes the perfect contrast to “America by Car” by Lee Friedlander, for no one had his feet on the ground as much as Frank. He stuck to the people he met and the symbols they embrace, in unsettled compositions. He was not going to wait around for photography’s “decisive moment.”

The book itself remained unsettled until practically the day of publication (in 1957 in Paris). Frank kept returning to his contact prints, circling and changing his choices. MoMA has it right when it includes contact prints among other discoveries, and it salvages film that he never released, too, as “scrapbook footage” in the basement theater. It boasts of its truth to Frank’s intentions by showing them in their entirety, but that has it wrong. He made his selections. He just kept changing his mind.

Born in 1924, he left Switzerland as a restless young man, and he could not sit still on his return to New York after The Americans. Sure, he could find a seat on the bus, but only to cross the city much as he had crossed the country—and to observe what he could from a window. From the Bus opens the show at MoMA, and it can be hard to know who on the street has made a decisive, theatrical turn and who has momentarily lost his way. Frank heads downtown soon after to what he could call home, east of the Village. He casts himself in a postwar scene that is giving America its integrity and its life. He still takes on commercial work, and MoMA includes a page from Mademoiselle, but with the freedom to say no.

He photographs artists, an incredibly young James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg, all of them friends. He could see Willem de Kooning at work from out his window, but he would rather photograph him up close. He spends an extended period with the Rolling Stones for what became his best-known group portrait. Naturally it is the period of Exile on Main Street. Still, he shies away from telling a story about psychology, creativity, and exile. He shoots painters without a brush in hand, Baldwin and Ginsberg without a typewriter.

Nor is he making a political statement. He has room even for a conservative icon, William F. Buckley. He must have known his own conflicting feelings about America. He had to keep moving, but he distrusted his adopted country’s restless spirit. To him it was the spirit of capitalism. It was time he refused to play the lone genius—a time for collaboration, and I continue next time with exactly that.

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Are These Men Collaborators? It was 1983, and Joan Lyons posed the question in her title to a print. Robert Frank, among those posing for the camera, must have wondered as well. Among the greatest American photographers ever, was he fated to go it alone?

He must have wondered how much it was worth collaborating from the moment he arrived in New York in 1947, as a Jew from Switzerland. Not even a neutral nation could protect his family and community from the Nazis. He found work almost instantly, in fashion photography, first for Harper’s Bazaar—but was that itself a collaboration, with editors and professional models, or just a reminder of everything he mistrusted about America? He left almost as quickly for the road, for what became The Americans in 1958. It gave a face to Americans like no other work in photography, but were they, too, collaborators, or was Frank that much more in exile? Viewers ever since have wondered if this was their America, too.

Now MoMA picks up the story, with photography and film from the rest of his life, through January 11. It follows him through two marriages, both to artists, and to New York in the excitement of Beat poetry and abstract art—and with an emphasis on collaboration every step of the way. It takes him and his family to Nova Scotia, where he moved part time in 1970. He loved not just sky and sea, but even more his new neighbors. By his death in 2019, his circle had shrunk, as he spent more and more time not just in Cape Breton, but in his house alone. MoMA sees a turn after The Americans to work with others, but its poignancy may lie instead in how much he had to leave behind. Still, as the show’s title has it, “Life Dances On,” and I get started in earnest with an extra post tomorrow.

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Wrapping up from last time on the fall New York art fairs—call it my way of wrapping up the old year and the state of the art. And Art on Paper should be just the thing for buyers who cannot afford the Armory Show. So what if the work also looks cheap?

Starting well before Rembrandt, artists have always put their thoughts on paper for some of their most lasting and original work. Yet the stress here is on reproductions or close to it, and no one seems to have encountered, much less read, an artist’s book. The fair has its share of commerce as well, like a display of luxury cars at back and stands touting “the art of wine.” Neither is made of paper.

Nor are paintings by Elise Ferguson, in patterned curves that rather familiar themselves. Painting turns up as well in performance, by Fabien Dettori. Ching Ka Lin and Ching Ke Lin make sculpture from bamboo strips—a home on wheels and an orange helix. All four are among the fair’s special projects, once again a highlight. (Keep your eye out, because all but one fit neatly into booths rather than the aisles.) The pier off the Lower East Side could be worth the trip for its high ceilings and uncrowded display alone. Now what about works on paper?

Why, then, attend the fairs at all? The Independent comes to New York twice a year these days—once to a Cipriani restaurant and with not a trace of the passing scene. Is that classy or what? Fortunately, it also pays off with only twenty-eight exhibitors but nonstop rediscoveries of modern art. Sure, two booths fall back on Pablo Picasso and Gerhard Richter, the first with prints and the second with deservedly lesser-known series, but such is the price they pay for the expected. The fair does best, though, when it stretches the very meaning of Modernism and art’s history.

A young Stuart Davis (with Alexandre) does, immersed in the city’s dance halls, delis, protests, and burlesque, with all their uncanny darkness and light. He anticipates everything from Edward Hopper on his long walks to political art today. Janet Sobel does, too, as the very first drip painter, and critics, starting with Clement Greenberg himself, have rediscovered her so often that you might think there is nothing left to know. Hey, John Dewey, the philosopher, wrote her. Here, though, James Barron pairs her persistent realism with Sol LeWitt at his densest and loosest, and it works. I shall just have to take on faith that Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo stretched the art scene as well, should anyone have seen it.

Naturally there are women, like Squeak Carnwath (with Jane Lombard) who makes cryptic but clearly feminist notations into large canvas or an entire wall. There are people of color like Simões de Assis (with Galatea) in Rio, who makes every family gathering a carnival. There are black women, too, like Lenore Tawney (with Alison Jacques), whose assemblage has its broken eggshells and other mysteries and whose cast unexpected color in their shadows. Ryan Lee pairs painting by Emma Amos with sculpture by Richmond Barthé, whom Isaac Julien has placed at the center of his video history of the Harlem Renaissance. His black nudes seem more artful and less quaint faced with her male mingling with an octopus. One need not know that Amos has traced her own history in art to Africa.

Will I regret skipping the Armory Show at the Javits Center? Of course, I would have enjoyed it and the outsize convention hall—more than any alternative. I brings out the best in countless exhibitors, old and new, by obliging them to think big, and it must itself have been thinking big itself on its thirtieth birthday. Still, hope that next year I really will do my job, by cutting back still further on the fairs. Now if only what has become a nonstop, year-round global event could cut back, too. Oh, and don’t trust anything over thirty.

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Entering the holiday season means leaving the busy fall season behind. That makes it a good time to look back, and what better way than with a belated report on the fall art fairs? Here goes.

For years I had promised myself to skip the New York art fairs. What can they add to an already busy gallery scene in New York?

What can they bring to the already enormous pressure of that first week after labor day, when openings run wild? If those same galleries find their sales dropping, and more and more experience dealers are calling it quits, the fairs bear their share of the blame here, too. So if I could cut back at last this past spring, could I pull it off again in September? Could a compulsive critic withstand the compulsion?

Maybe not, but I could look once again for the alternatives. That has its drawbacks, too. Who feels the costs more than the kind of galleries that exhibit at “alternative fairs”? If they are not on a budget, who is? Others may feel under pressure to splurge on booths at two fairs, the Armory Show and one more, closer to their buyers and their roots—and I work this together with a past report on the spring New York art fairs as a longer review and my latest upload. Still other exhibitors have no dealers or curators, only aspiring artists, and what ever too often is the pleasure for a critic in that?

I have no answer, but I still have my compulsions. And what could be more of an outsider than a fair with just one dealer, the gallery that hosts it, but calls itself an Armory Show affiliate anyway—Salon Zürcher for “11 Women of Spirit +” If “Spirit +” sounds more like a flavored vodka than a true shot in the arm, it allows Zürcher to reset its count of editions to Part One. It still leans to women in abstraction, a timely enough cause as well. It may be running thin, especially after a summer group show of a hundred women, but such is the pressure to exhibit art.

It does have charming enough local landscapes by Brigid Kennedy—and charming enough knitted portraits by Mary Tooley Parker. Marykate O’Neil groups her portraits of leisure, with a woman, perhaps the artist, sipping wine on a larger scale if passing judgment on them all. Abstraction, in turn, can be jazzy, as with Susan Cantrick, or brushier, as with Patricia Spergel, who adds an artist painting. Still, it does tend to run together. I remember more the work that lives between abstraction and figuration—flowers by Tracy Morgan and open skies by Sue Carlson with a yellow arc on top. I took it all in but was ready to move on.

Once Volta was a path-breaker, the fair with single-artist booths, the fair that makes you look and remember. Now even a room for Ukrainian artists packs them in, everything looks familiar, and wiser galleries exhibit elsewhere. A girl at night on a country road, in black-and-white photos by Sophie Zhai (with London’s Mandy Zhang) or portraits of blackness, in color photos by Joanne McFarland (with Accola Griefen)? Yeah, sure, although both stand out, and McFarland’s sitters could be role models, plastic dolls, or the baby girl next store. Maybe, though, the real problem lies with the perpetual art fairs, all of them? Can anything stand out any longer in all the madness?

You may not think so at Clio, borrowing the space of a Soho gallery, where artists choose themselves with predictable results. Look instead to what could be the true New York scene, its office buildings, and Spring/Break seems out to explore them all. The fair that sounds like a holiday at the beach has moved to Hudson Square north of Tribeca, and it fits right in. Small offices offers close-ups, but office culture shines best in common areas. The fair does have painting, from cheery abstraction to dark fantasies, and sculpture, like an eccentric chess set or large wood pieces in a forgotten game (and I do not name artists because Spring/Break often fails to identify them). Still, it seems only right that one office holds Post-It notes, and one artist leaves out his colored geometry as if taking over the bar—and I continue next time with Art on Paper and the Independent.

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Mary Sully took the long view. It did not settle anything, but it did bring a kind of peace.

The Met calls a selection of two dozen drawings “Native Modern,” through January 12, and she was equally at ease with Native American craft, Modernism, and her own rebellious spirit. She herself called them “/personality prints,” and they depict no end of other personalities as well from stage and screen. She produced many indeed from the 1920s through the 1940s, none of them dated. It is all she can do to encompass New York between the wars and her own mixed ancestry—and I bring this together with my recent report on Aboriginal Australian bark painting as a longer review with more of the long view as my latest upload.

Each drawing has three parts, stacked vertically, for another kind of long view. Coming to Sully amid indigenous art in the Met’s American wing, one might dismiss her work as more of the same. Her vertical format and obsessive patterning recall traditional blankets and dresses, and the museum throws in one of each for good measure. She herself cultivated the image of the unknown, self-taught artist in America’s oldest Indian village. She appears on film, working away while dressed to the Native American nines. One can almost overlook the film’s producer, Paramount Pictures.

She knew her Dakota homeland, but she also knew New York, where her sister studied anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia University. She celebrated Easter on Fifth Avenue and dedicated a drawing to Fiorello La Guardia, the New Deal mayor. She called another drawing Greed, lest there be any doubt that corporate interests brought on the Depression in the first place. In a drawing for Walter Winchell, the radio news anchor, Sully’s zigzag patterns could be bursts of radio waves, carrying the city’s message to the world. A drawing for Florenz Ziegfeld has at top a circle of pretty faces, right out of the Ziegfeld follies. Others allude to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the Broadway actors, but also a child actress, because sophistication is in the eye of the beholder.

Sully cultivated her family history, too, in all its amalgams and contradictions. Her father, Philip J. Deloria, was an Episcopal minister in a Native American church, and a drawing depicts a ceremony. It has a minister at its center in a proper prayer shawl, while curtains to either side might be officiants themselves and seem to take on wings. She took her name, though, from her mother, herself of mixed ancestry. The young artist could not have minded that it also marks her as the great-granddaughter of Thomas Sully, the painter born in England. She could not have minded, too, that his parents were actors and his portraits include composers along with Thomas Jefferson.

She was taking the long view, too, in a triptych for Three Stages of Indian History. The patterned lower third may adapt “Pre-Columbian Freedom,” while figures on the grass just above inhabit an idealized version of Standing Rock Reservation, her birthplace. That leaves the crowded silhouettes at top for “The Bewildering Present.” Unless, of course, their dark outlines derive from Pre-Columbian pottery—and the wild zigzags for upheavals in Native American and modern art. Oh, and did I say that Sully titles that sunlit expanse “Reservation Fetters”? Freedom may not come easily.

The curators, Patricia Marroquin Norby and Sylvia Yount, single out one drawing for its “unusual ambiguity,” but ambiguity for Sully comes with the territory. Elsewhere dark silhouettes could represent Depression-era labor, entertainers, or celebrants. The colorful patterns could derive from her ancestors or still-revolutionary abstract art. Often text appears at bottom, as a fourth panel, to identify the subject. One for Gertrude Stein quotes “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Repetition like that could be naïve or revolutionary, too—and, of course, sheer patterning.

Not many artists back then were fluent in terms like “Pre-Columbian,” and not many had a linguistic ethnographer for a sister. And how many could turn colored pencil and pastel crayons into drawing with the precision of ink and a softness akin to watercolor? Sully is no closer to fame, but then she had reservations about fame, even as she pursued it. One last triptych has a cart at top overflowing with flowers, a floral tapestry, and then the zigzags. It could mark the passage from the streets of New York to the reservation and finally to abstraction. Or it could run the other way, from abstraction to nature.

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