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art reviews from around new york

It could be talking about New York. It tells of a city, a port city, open to the world. You can find pretty much anything here and anyone.

It is a prosperous city and an educated one, although not everyone speaks the same language. It is always under construction, with an eye to creating public spectacles and public spaces, and housing does not welcome everyone everywhere. It has, if anything, too many artists. Above all, it values diversity and tolerance where other states may not, with no shortage of synagogues to match. As happens, though, it is Amsterdam, the city of “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt,” at the Jewish Museum through August 10—and I work this together with an earlier report on finding freedom under Baroque Spain with Juan de Pareja and Diego Velázquez as a longer review and my latest upload. Now what happens if everyone here claims the Bible’s lessons as one’s own?

The Book of Esther has that rarity in the Hebrew Bible, a happy ending, but with conditions. It is a tale of threats, deliverance, and celebration, and Amsterdam had every right to celebrate. It had at last won its freedom from Spain, as a republic, in time for the great age of Dutch painting, and it saw Esther as about nothing less. History often singles out Rembrandt for his sympathy for Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, and he lived in a quarter that they, too, occupied—although that may have had more to do with an artist’s income and with official decrees limiting Jewish life while guaranteeing freedom of worship. Prints of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, have come to be known as The Jewish Bride. Here, though, the city takes credit.

A Jewish heritage, I might argue, is divided over Esther, too. After the fall of Israel, the Babylonian captivity, and a second conquest by still another empire, Persia, Jews were at last free to go home, but should they, and where is home? Should it lie in a capital for all the people, with the temple and its sacrifices? Or should it lie in the word of God and the law wherever they may be? Where the books of Ezra and Nehemiah demand a community apart, Esther is about living under foreigners, even marrying one. It might speak to the Dutch—or to New Yorkers today.

Do Jews celebrate on Purim to remember their deliverance from a royal decree of death? The Jewish Museum opens with a room for both aspects of remembrance, the story and the place. It has scrolls of the book of Esther, one of the Old Testament’s shortest, to be read aloud on the holiday, and stone fireplace guards with images. It has Delft tiles and silver to help in getting drunk, as the occasion dictates. It has prints of synagogues and a public square with a new town hall in progress. No one seems to be merely idling or, conversely, in a hurry passing through.

Only slowly do paintings take over the story, and they never stop. Near the end, a wooden chest bears small paintings of Esther, enough to call it a book in itself. Do Flemish artists also tackle Esther with crisper, shinier colors? So much for the exhibition’s political history, but then they do reflect a greater hierarchy of kings and attendants. A prominent Dutch painter, Jan Steen, illustrates the tale’s climactic revelation three times. He, too, has brighter lights, along with hokier gestures but a gift for composition.

Above all, here comes the circle of Rembrandt, especially a late student, Aert de Gelder. He can imitate his teacher’s bulky fabrics filling out the promise of female anatomy, but not the softer outlines and inward-directed eye. Where his Esther looks up, toward her god, or to the king, Rembrandt’s looks nowhere but within. So he does, too, in a self-portrait on loan from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (which lost a Rembrandt years ago to a still unsolved theft along with a Vermeer), at age a mere twenty-three. Its firm but parted lips speak of a young man’s confidence and a trembling inner light. The misty darkness of Rembrandt’s late portrait at the Frick Collection is still to come.

That leaves a major gap, Rembrandt’s Bible. You may well wonder where to find it, but the show has a whole room for a standing Esther simply thinking. It is a fraught moment. You may recall that Haman, an advisor to King Ahasuerus, takes offense when a Jew, Esther’s cousin Mordecai, refuses to bow to someone other than the one true god—and in return extracts a death sentence for the Jews. Offended that his wife did not show proper obedience either, Ahasuerus ditches her in favor of Esther, without knowing Esther’s faith. In the painting, she is preparing to tell him.

She will do so, obtaining a death sentence for Haman and a promise of deliverance, although it is a complicates story. (Can Ahasuerus go back on his own word?) And paintings mostly zero in the confrontation, with the bad guy in darkness and the king in the light. Rembrandt shows only Esther and an elderly attendant, and here the older woman is lost in shadow, while Esther is lost in her fears, in her determination, and in thought. Anticipation becomes drama. Rembrandt, around age thirty, has a lot of thinking to do himself.

Still, a large exhibition has a hole at its very center, and there is no getting around it. Not even Rembrandt, largely in his absence, can steal the show. The curator, Abigail Rapoport, does have a 1992 painting by Fred Wilson, who compares Queen Esther to Harriet Tubman. African Americans and other contemporaries can claim the story as a parable of deliverance, too. Yet New York has already had shows of the Rembrandt’s influence, and followers look if anything more awkward here. It is a fascinating story all the same, of a solitary Esther and a busy, unshaken city.

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

Amy Sherald became one of the most celebrated African American artists by painting one of the most celebrated African American women. It does credit to both women, her and Michelle Obama, as stylish and official. Which woman did more to create an image for others to admire?

If a portrait does the job well, it may never be easy to separate the artist from the sitter, the dancer from the dance. I wrote about the now popular painter twice before, on her delivery of the Obama state portrait and again with a fair survey of her work at her gallery. Much as I want to respond to so inviting a show as her midcareer retrospective at the Whitney, through August 10, my second past review really does say it all. Nor is this a black artist’s only display of innocence, sophistication, and sheer pleasure in one and the same portrait. So I also wrap this into past reports on John Dowell and Jordan Casteel, with their own monuments to African American portraiture and history, and invite you to read more. Sherald has refused to allow her own show’s planned second stop, at the National Portrait Gallery, calling the decision to “contextualize” her portrait of Obama in line with Donald J. Trump’s outrageous wishes, as censorship.

People do not often swoon over official state portraits, least of all followers of art. It would be like swooning over someone else’s yearbook photo—or a gold star from the world’s primmest teacher. Yet here they were, portraits of Barak and Michelle Obama making the news. Visits to the National Portrait Gallery soared, and (as you can see from the link) I swooned a bit, too. The portraits arrived just as an awful lot of people were longing for leaders with intelligence and a conscience, rather than just a certain orange president. People longed, too, for voices with authority to speak for them.

Oh, and then there were the artists, Kehinde Wiley for the former president and Sherald for his first lady. Wiley had appeared in galleries and museums before, often at that, for decorative, flattering, and frankly shallow portraits of African Americans off the street, all but exclusively young, aggressive, and male. He takes pride in his subjects, but with little hint that black lives matter and are at risk. Had he finally risen to the occasion, or had the occasion descended to him? Sherald, far less visible at the time, may offer a clue. Her latest portraits, much like Wiley’s in the past, stick to moments of leisure and to friends.

Her mega-gallery also has a group show that thrusts human sexuality at once in your face and behind a veil, with artists including Paul McCarthy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Mira Schor. Sherald does not. She makes desire so childlike that she adapted a famous photo of a kiss in Times Square at the end in World War II. Downstairs comes an older African American, Ed Clark—better known for his place in Abstract Expressionist New York and, quite possibly, the very first shaped canvas. Work since 2000 transforms even the purest of abstraction into glimpses of clouds and sky. For the gallery’s fall 2019 opener and again for a Whitney retrospective in 2025, lavish brushwork looks back to the most gentle and glorious of summer afternoons.

Sherald feels the warmth, too, even as the real air grows cold. Four bathers, the women on the men’s shoulders, enjoy the sand and a near cloudless sky. Who is to say which earns the painting its title, Precious Jewels by the Sea? A young black man sits high in a clear-blue sky, his butt on one girder and his back against another. Sherald took for inspiration a famous shot of workers at lunch, but this guy is neither dressed for work nor short of time. With just eight paintings at her gallery, for once a hot artist ignored the pressure to churn things out, so you could relax, too.

For Sherald, attention to friends does not preclude a leap of imagination. As a self-portrait has it, When I Let Go of What I Am, I Become What I Might Be. Some pretty tart colors share space with that sky blue. She has room for reality all the same, from a handsome young man to the overweight “girl next door.” Like Michelle Obama in her portrait, large central figures stand out against fields of color, almost like playing cards. They also share contrasting paint handling in figures, clothing, and backgrounds—to play degrees of realism against one another and to keep the surfaces alive.

Backgrounds are totally flat, but with wild swings in color from painting to painting. Flesh is well-shadowed, but not in the interest of anatomy or the fall of light. Faces are personalized, but not psychologically, and everything else pops to the surface, like a beach umbrella or a polka dot dress. Titles are poetic but erudite, like the recollection of Jane Austin’s Pride in Prejudice in A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune. The title for the construction worker, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, speaks to him, but also to you. If they still feel too much like pages from the style section of a Sunday paper, consider them official portraits of the girl next door.

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

People remember Consuelo Kanaga for her sense of community and commitment. I remember the lonely eye behind the camera and the beauty of what she saw. Can either story bring her back into the mainstream of modern art?

Wherever she went, she found a movement in which she could believe. She had already made a name for herself in San Francisco in Group f.64, but she left for New York in her twenties to hook up with Alfred Stieglitz, her friend and mentor, and to join the Photo League, a cooperative that cared as much about social as creative causes. The Brooklyn Museum opens her busy retrospective with a community at that, through August 3. A brief introduction sets her alongside an impressive roster of photographers, all of them women, who shared their progressive politics and took photographs of one another. You can see why Kanaga is known today mostly for portraiture, most notably of African Americans. Yet you may hardly notice she is there.

As the show’s title has it, she was out to “Catch the Spirit“—the spirit of her sitters, the spirit of her times, and the spirit of the left. Yet the first image that may catch your eye as you enter is of lower Manhattan without a person in sight. It looks south with the Brooklyn Bridge nearly lost in a mist but light rippling down the water and spots of light piercing the morning air. She had an esthetics of control, from the large and then medium-format camera with which she began to her techniques of dodging, or burning a print with touches of light, and, every so often, touches by hand. Alfred Stieglitz, of course, had his own gallery, which enabled him to spread the word about modern art. And f.64 took its name from the sharpest setting on the camera back then, to capture every detail.

That small opening room itself suggests a dual or divided commitment. It includes Berenice Abbott and Imogen Cunningham, with their painterly photographs of the “new woman,” as well as Tina Modotti, who made mostly portraits (and sat for many more), and Dorothea Lange, with her memorable images of poverty and the New Deal. Born in 1894 (of Swiss ancestry, her Spanish first name notwithstanding), Kanaga was still going strong enough to seek out the artist community in Taos in 1955. That same year she contributed to The Family of Man, the photo essay by Edward Steichen. She photographed a mother and her children, just as Lange’s best-known image showed a migrant mother in 1936. She Is the Tree of Life to Them, Kanaga called it, when idealism still spread.

That division was not simply ambivalence, but a necessity. She started as a newspaper photographer, for the San Francisco Chronicle, but opened a portrait studio to make ends meet. Ironically, it has overshadowed everything else, enough to leave her all but forgotten. Even so, her style gives substance and unity to the whole. On the one hand, she contributed to The Daily Worker. On the other, she created purely abstract photography the year of her death, in 1978.

Not surprisingly, her portraits often run to creative types and to blacks. She found both in Langston Hughes, here at the center of the show’s largest section. He poses in profile, meticulously dressed. But then her portraits have much the same bag of creative tricks when it comes to the common man or woman. She loves wide eyes, hands held to the sitter’s cheeks, and shadows darkening a sitter’s brow. She was asking to recognize a subject’s dignity.

For all that, her commitments were as eclectic as ever, because the tree of life demands no less. She quickly switched to a smaller, more portable camera, bringing her artistry to small prints as well. Still, she was never a documentary photographer or street photographer, because she had no interest in spontaneity. She took to the rooftops, for a New Yorker’s favorite sight, the multiplicity of exhaust vents, just as her view of lower Manhattan had no people and nowhere to stand. She still traveled, to North Africa and Venice, closing in on the basilica cathedral of San Marco. Naturally she prefers the intricacy of its architecture to the commonality of its public square.

She has paid a price for her poses. They can become predictable and perilously close to hokey. Still, even the sentiment is heartfelt, and it can never erase her eclecticism and commitment. Are the folds covering a woman rags or flowers? Are young women leaning toward each other in seeming amazement strangers or twins? For a moment, the only spirit that matters is theirs.

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

Candida Alvarez had a habit of speaking of herself in the third person. She Loved to Dream, a title went. She Went Round and Round. She was that Girl Ironing Her Hair.

But who was she? That girl going round is multiplying her arms like an anatomical study or a deity. Maybe a true artist would aspire to both. That girl born to Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn had to decide whether to iron her hair or to take pride in not being able to keep it straight. The dreamer may have wondered where to look to find her dreams. At El Museo del Barrio across from Mestre Didi, she may hardly know whether to look up close and personal or off into the distance to “Circle, Point, Hoop,” through August 3—and I bring this together with a recent report on Didi and Brazilian art as a longer review and

Alvarez must have taken Socrates seriously when he asked followers to “know thyself,” but she could not have found it easy. Born in 1955, she came of age just when critically acclaimed artists were refusing to try. Remember the “Pictures generation“? They were making pictures, not confessions. They and others were putting painting and art institutions to the test. And then there was this kid from Vinegar Hill near Dumbo, a child of the projects, not so near the action but unable to let go.

She could speak, too, in the first person. Identity was newly part of the picture, too, for women of color in the arts, and she had a breakthrough in 1989 with Soy Boricua, “I am a Puerto Rican American.” Inset to the upper left of a seeming abstraction is a child, black skinned and wide eyed. Look again and that image, after a family photo, becomes a larger portrait’s left eye, a dark color her left, more colorful passages her hips. She asked to know abstract painting and not just black abstraction inside and out. She made all the right moves and got her MFA at Yale in 1997.

That painting is one in a series of diptychs, one panel above the other. Colors change abruptly across the edge, and acrylic stains sink right in and shine right out. So do bright reds speckled with thicker paint, for She Wore Red to the Senior Prom. Elsewhere Alvarez gives up color completely in favor of black or shadowy grays dotted with white. She is out to connect the dots. As her brush curves freely across the surface, she is also speaking through symbols, and who knows what they represent?

In truth, she has no firm set of symbols, just an urge to let painting speak for itself. She experiments with Flashe, the rubber based paint, and a weave so thick that her canvas might be a net for the unwary. It is also her “air painting” and a way of letting light pass through. She is always improvisational, with smears on the surface and kitchen graters here and there on the floor. She calls an early series her hybrids, and never mind if you cannot say hybrids of what. As yet another title has it, Wish Me Luck.

She finds an anchor throughout in modern art. Body fragments evoke Surrealism, while Minimalism returns in black and white. Sparer paintings with the grain of wood as ground recall Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The show’s title work recalls the modern mantra of point, line, and plane. Still, she is the Puerto Rican telling stories and the New Yorker heading for the prom. She appeared before at the Whitney in “Puerto Rican art after Hurricane Maria,” and it is all Nueva York.

Not that Alvarez appears all that much. She herself may find it hard to follow Socrates, and her frequent shifts make it hard to pin her down. The curators, Rodrigo Moura and Zuna Maza with Alexia Arrizurieta, proceed more or less chronologically and by series, but the attempt defeats even them. Still, both her stories and her colors keep their shine. Mary in the Sky with Diamonds pays tribute to her mother-in-law, and the barbs in her circle of string, nails, gouache, and wood still have their bite. In a collision of cultures, she could know herself, family, and the Beatles.

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

To wrap up from last time on Jack Whitten at MoMA, what, though, is the subject of his experiment? If he keeps changing, is there a constant to his art—or something he has been missing all along?

Either way, there is a lot to see. Whitten has the entire sixth floor, reserved for MoMA’s largest exhibitions. White latticed partitions for drawings bring them closer to materials, too and to the paintings. A huge central room holds more than one series all by itself.

The curator, Michelle Kuo, makes the case for an artist with many interests. Whitten found success early, with a 1994 show at the Whitney, and his influence extends to the broken tiles and mirrors of Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim today. His many directions mean nothing less than a greater ambition. Any painter who thinks that abstract art encompasses activism and music is already thinking big. And anyone who thinks that it translates into all of western art and a science experiment is thinking even bigger. Those deep black paintings see stars.

Thinking big comports with Whitten’s one obvious constant, working big. It connects to his first loves in Abstract Expressionism and Mediterranean wall tiles. And work only grew. A triangle in honor of Malcolm X reaches to over feet in width, but the single largest is the tribute to 9/11, whose central image could be the Great Pyramid. Why? Puzzles like that abound, not always to the work’s advantage, but something big is going on.

A less obvious constant denies the whole question of his departures. With each new series, Whitten builds on and challenges past work. A late shift to ceramics recalls the painting for Invisible Man well before. Cuts recall a razor blade embedded in paint at its center. Ghostly images in black recall some of his earliest experiments, in abstract photography. They are passing through an unknown space, still finding their way.

They speak of the fate of invisible men, which points to one last constant. Those many histories from politics to music are his own as a New Yorker, a southerner, and a black. Whitten cultivates the tension between African American history and a history for all Americans. So does Whitten’s sculpture, inspired by folk and African art. It would be a new history, of grief and grievance, refuge and restitution, but such is the point. It would also be art.

Whitten has paid a price for so often changing his mind. I myself cannot always justify his departures or his returns. There are more luminous abstractions than his and more pointed tributes to the past. Not many, though, and they stand out at a time when diversity so often demands blind self-affirmation. Surely Whitten has better things to worry about than taking credit. After so many years, he can make his own totems.

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

How do you paint an invisible man? When Jack Whitten paints his homage to Ralph Ellison, it is his Black Monolith, and his imagined portrait is black and nearly five feet tall. It is black enough to create a mask that not even Whitten can penetrate, which is saying a lot.

Of course, he would not be up to the challenge without Invisible Man, among the most haunting works of American fiction. Ellison’s invisible man is very much alive every time someone looks between its covers. Nor is it merely a pathology in the mind of black man in a basement with too much to say. It is a reality, it asserts, that a black man can never escape as long as white America chooses to look the other way. Unless, that is, white America chooses to look and sees only its fears. Unless, too, a creative artist stakes out his own presence in sixty years of work, at MoMA through August 2—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review, in my latest upload.

That inviting and imposing face stares out from the entrance to Whitten’s retrospective, and he throws everything he can at it, including molasses, copper, salt, chocolate, and rust. The work contains broken eggshells, too, consistent with its broken tiles and mirrors, for a wide-open white background to a colorful work of art. If it is a rough assemblage, he is not hiding the damage. And if its materials are sticky, he was already well into his career in 1994, and he planned on being around a long time. He could return for inspiration to enough black and white Americans to keep you on your toes the whole way. He could also plan on being first and foremost an abstract painter.

For Whitten, persistence gave him the power to look back at both painting and America. He rang the changes on black abstraction, along with such artists as Sam Gilliam and Melvin Edwards. He lived through the fall of the Twin Towers and paid tribute to that, too. He took art into the digital era, with toner for his black. He was only, as the show’s title has it, “The Messenger,” but with a message he insists others hear. He kept starting over until others got the message, too, and so did he.

He made it easy. He worked in familiar genres, including spatters and stripes. He made his studio below Canal Street, where he could see Ground Zero and share the memories with anyone. At the same time, he made building a career anything but easy and invisibility almost inevitable. He abandoned figurative paintings and his homage to African Americans just when abstract art was giving way to critical thinking, conceptual art, and diversity. He kept changing just when a growing market for art demanded a signature that sells.

Invisible Man is tormented and angry, and Whitten is neither. There was always too much new to learn and to see. He was working class through and through, the son of a coal miner and seamstress in Alabama. Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, shares its very name with a process for making steel, but his parents were determined that he be the family’s first to attend college. He went as a premed, but dropped out to make art. Imagine him at just twenty in 1960, arriving in New York.

He found friends easily, from Willem de Kooning to Romare Bearden and from Abstract Expressionism to African American art. He had already thrown himself into the civil-rights movement. He could be an activist by day, a museum-goer on weekends, and a regular in Brooklyn jazz clubs by night. His brother was a jazz musician himself. His mentors taught him, as Edwards said, that painting was a form of improvisation but in forms inherited from the past. He and his wife summered in Greece and Crete where art and myth go back a very long way.

He dedicated much of his early work to his influences, which to him meant people. Other drivers were light and color, and they pushed him away from narrative painting. After a start with a loose haze, he used successive layers to blur the boundaries between horizontal stripes and to create a greater radiance. He favored orange and other departures from red, yellow, and blue to insist on the light. Materials were the greatest driver of all, and horizontal incisions run the entire width of a painting, leaving the stripes in low relief. He could make the cuts with a rake or a comb.

Whitten liked acrylic because he could layer it—and because he could make it dry slowly or fast. He could apply it to plastic sheets that could become the painted surface, even after he peeled them away, much like Beatriz Milhazes in Brazil. They become that much more visible when he abandons stripes for splashes of acrylic, for at once the free layered geometry of color-field painting and an underlying single color to the entire canvas. Much the same materials drew him to abandon color for black and white. He served as artist in residence at Xerox, where he experimented with toner. One can think of his entire career as an ongoing experiment, and I continue this review next time with why he kept changing.

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