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art reviews from around new york

A dank chill has descended over painting everywhere since the pandemic, but nowhere so much as with Lorna Simpson at the Met. Just to enter black America through her latest art is to breathe the arctic air and to feel the arctic ice. It is to be up to one’s neck in crystal blue arctic waters.

The Met does not stick to Simpson’s Ice paintings, but the rest is no less bleak. Touches of yellow and those wide-open fields of blue cannot remove the weight of a meteorite descending from above or still more ice emerging from below. Their monotone grays do not compete with the touches of color, but rather add up to a single icy palette belonging equally to photographic prints, the artist, and life. A young man and a glamorous woman wrap themselves in it for warmth. They have little choice. They wrap themselves in the mists and masses as well, through November 2.

It is not quite their only recourse. That wet space beneath the heavens gets along just fine with a truly dry sense of humor. Simpson plays with the scale, drips, and black squares of abstract painting, to laugh at it like a proper Postmodernist, but also with it. Her Gradient and Special Characters series take the measure of violence in America, whatever the temperature. Black circles are at once bullet holes and the pattern on a polka-dot dress. The new African wing of the Met begins right outside, past a gift sheet, but it could be a continent away.

Simpson has put her sharp wit and deep feelings on display often enough before. Born in 1960, she had a Whitney retrospective in 2007, projects at the Brooklyn Museum in 2011, and regular shows at one of Chelsea’s poshest galleries. Is there really a need for more? The curator, Lauren Rosati, speaks of a more comprehensive show than any before it, but I am not so sure. Want to be the first to cover every stage of an artist’s career? Just wait until a little time has passed since her last show.

Not to confuse you with facts, but the Met has barely thirty works, most from a decade ending in 2021. It is no less timely for that. Where African American art used to mean African American history, scathing or supportive, recent shows have followed artists to Africa to recover a heritage. Simpson takes the logical next step. Why not leave the dark continent behind in favor of bright silkscreens and collage—and a hot continent in the midst of global warning for ice sheets? You can find a reality check in style magazines when you get home.

In fact, Simpson found her images and image makers in Ebony or Jet. That includes a woman with cat whiskers, a frisky smile, and a leopard-skin dress accompanied by a leopard with a wholly human smile. She turns stacks of those publications into sculpture as well, with a pretend ice cube beneath them. It may be a bit large for a drink and small for an iceberg, but The Titanic is safe. Just ignore the museum’s careerism in favor of its art. Simpson has what it takes to stay warm, the black community.

As I wrote after her retrospective, she refuses to play black artist while insisting on what the universal leaves out. Even now, as I wrote after her Brooklyn projects, she wears away at the boundary between the personal and the political (and you can follow the links to my past reviews for more). Her characters may talk, but they do not so easily communicate. They can let down their guard for a moment, but someone or something dangerous is about to interrupt, maybe the viewer. They can carry a tune, but it has to be easy to remember—or at least “Easy to Remember,” by Rogers and Hart. They can hum or whistle, but it is up to art to sing.

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

To pick up from a past review on nostalgia for a time that still looked with hope to the future, I could never quite love my Walkman. It could not replace my collection of LPs—a sizable shelf apiece for jazz, classical, and rock. It could not match the sound of an LP or even a CD soon to come. But my girlfriend bought it for me, I loved her, and she threw in a tape of the early Beatles, a true game changer in their time but already a distant memory. With its portability, the Walkman promised to be a game changer, too. Who was I to doubt it?

MoMA loves it, too. The 1979 cassette player has entered the collection and now “Pirouette: Turning Points in Design,” through October 18. So why had I forgotten that I ever had one, and how can I fail to name a single other cassette I owned? If this were a turning point, the worm has turned many times before and since. The iPod, too, is gone, and the name of the game is streaming. Before you know it, AI will be telling you what to hear.

The questions in “Pirouette” are built into any museum of modern art, not just the oldest and finest. A museum is about remembering, while modern art, consumer culture, and turning points share a desire to make it new. No critic, however visionary, can say just how or what is to come. MoMA show includes a 1983 Mac, with Susan Kare’s icons for its desktop as a bonus. Surely that if anything was a game changer or was it? It never came close to matching sales for PCs, it leaned heavily on genuine innovations at Xerox, and its white box looks quaint and awkward today.

Still, cool kids loved it, the kind that grew up to become artists and staffers at the Museum of Modern Art. In doing their job as curators, Paola Antonelli with Maya Ellerkmann necessarily exercise their taste in contemporary design. They have to be looking for trends and, with luck, making them. Yet the show has its share of products that are not in the least familiar and do not seem much like turning points. Flasks and carafes from Aldo Bakker, light-weight clothing from Gabriel Fontana, and a faux leather shopping bag from Telfar Clemens look tasteful enough, but they could only wish they had a longer moment in fashion’s sun. DJ gear from Virgil Abloh has to appear only because he was last year’s cool kid himself before his early death.

The show’s biases are not at all easy to pin down. It cannot get enough chairs—stackable plastic chairs, wheeled office chairs, a flax chair, a soft chair, and a knotted chair. More elegant and better known, Charles and Ray Eames have their low, simple profile for a gentle rocker. MoMA relishes digital typefaces as well, but with a quirky selection. One, it insists, is optimized for optical character recognition, as if your phone cannot recognize practically anything today. Retina, a sans serif font by Tobias Frere-Jones, and Oakland, a more patently pixilated one by Zuzana Licko for Emigre Inc., cannot have changed the game half as much as the base fonts in Microsoft Word. But then, just as compared to the Mac, Microsoft was never cool.

MoMA takes a special interest in signage, like the rainbow flag, the NASA logo, Milton Glaser’s I Love New York (with a heart for love), and Shigetaka Kurita’s emojis. A wheelchair icon from the Accessible Icon Project (Tim Ferguson Sauder, Brian Glenney, and Sara Hendren) has signaled reserved parking and access for all. One should be grateful for them all. It also demands the digital image of digital reality, however ugly and obscure. Designs by Fernanda Bertini Viégas and Martin Wattenberg track everything from Web search histories to wind patterns crossing the continental United States. Federica Fragapane’s plot of “space junk” in orbit, might look at home as the backdrop to a dance club.

Still, there are genuine icons of modern and postmodern life along the way. Some stand out for their modesty and might have been there forever, like Bic pens. There really was a Forrest Mars and not the red planet behind Mars candy like colorful M&Ms. One can forget that the @ sign had a creator, Ray Tomlinson in 1971. Other things caught on without exactly entering common use. Know those small six-sided black and chrome expresso makers that depend on water vapor from boiling on the stove? Alfonso Bialetti adapted restaurant pressurizers to the home, and I could not resist buying it, even if I have practically never used it.

So which is it, museum design, contemporary innovation, or the materials of everyday life? The show includes Swatch, but why not the smart phones and exercise phones of today? It has a 1996 flip phone just when, I should have thought, the future of cell phones was already on its way. A hair dryer, from MüXholos, might have been a turning point back in the 1930s, but it bears no resemblance to hair dryers in salons and bathrooms today. What kept me listening to that crummy Walkman anyway? MoMA needs a better dancer for its long-ago pirouette.

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

The most fragile and beautiful of art forms has become a monster. Make that “Monstrous Beauty,” in what the Met calls “a feminist revision of Chinoiserie,” but women themselves keep getting in the way, through August 17.

Lee Bul is among them, just as she prepares to leave her niche on the Met’s façade, and the whole heads for the Lehman wing, just months after Tibetan mandals. But does it rescue women’s art for women or write them off as less than spiritual? Are they Asian art or European? What century is this anyway? They may have unleashed a monster.

To be sure, even fine porcelain can get out of hand, and the Rococo made that a virtue. Along with flouncy clothes and depicted gardens, it became the very art of excess in the hands of Jean Antoine Watteau, Jean Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher—who took it from Rococo to revolution. How fitting that the Met’s exhibition comes just as the Frick Collection reopens to the public. To be sure, too, critics have looked to its sources in trade with the East, if not outright seizure. They have asked as well how the decorative arts served as a label for the display of wealth. It allowed its dismissal as less as less than fine art, better suited to China and women.

Monstrous, perhaps, but not half as monstrous as enormous porcelain filling the Lehman wing to overflow. Yeesookyung takes its two-story atrium for gilded fragments in dark colors. The surrounding halls include a handful of other contemporary Asian and Asian American artists, set amid a larger show of a more gilded age. There, too, context is everything, and paintings reinforce the role of decorative arts in defining a portrait sitter’s character for James McNeill Whistler or the transience of existence for Dutch still life. His interior could almost be a knock-off of “Whistler’s mother,” but with darker shadows. Either way, Chinoiserie Chinoiserie she values lies everywhere in the background.

Is it truly monstrous, though, and are the monsters women? The Met has a fondness for embedding contemporaries amid past art, to show history’s relevance, as with Tibetan mandalas last year in the very same space. It sells, but if anything it upstages the past. Looking for a proper history of Chinoiserie, Asian or European, and what set it apart? The work scoots casually across centuries of fans, mirrors, tapestries and tea sets, in no particular order, with carvings and castings almost entirely by men, as one might expect. A collage from 1929 by Mariana Brandt throws Anna Mae Wong, the Hollywood actress, but much has nothing at all to do with Asia.

Why, too, these contemporaries? They include ridiculously ornate porcelain towers by Heidi Lau and Lee Bul, with limbs like writhing snakes. Others, though, appear solely for their take on Asian women. Lau calls hers Anchored the Path of Unknowing, but the curator, Iris Moon, seems awfully knowing. Women’s art, she argues, can only be monstrous because so are stereotypes of women, when they are not simply effeminate. They are queens, mothers, starlets, shoppers, cyborgs, and little more.

One might dismiss women as shoppers, but cyborgs? (Mothers have their own issues.) The show itself points to other roles, as gossips over the tea table or as temptresses from the ocean’s deep. That goes back to the very birth of European literature in Homer, and here they are again on video for Jen Liu, in The Land at the Bottom of the Sea. Candice Lin has her salon, while Jennifer Ling Datchuk plays on narcissism with mirrors, one sprouting hair, and Patty Chang leans into herself on video as well. Arlene Shechet might have entered for her own ceramics, but then they would not be monsters.

They do, though, make a good case for monsters in contemporary art. Chang also spoons melons out of her left breast, and she may have suffered the most at that. Her bare white table could pass for a surgical bed awaiting its next patient or, given its holes, an instrument of torture awaiting straps. It may take a moment to recognize it as a work of art. There is a role for Chinoiserie in defining beauty, but the torture is real. Blame it on your mother.

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

I kept things short last time on John Singer Sargent at the Met, because he has been a subject, for both me and museums, so many times. But do follow the links to more, and here I offer an excerpt as an introduction.

When “Sargent Paints a Child,” the subject of a 2004 show at the Brooklyn Museum, adults hover everywhere. They are the parents—most often mothers, of course—putting on display for all to see their love, their duty, or their glamour. They are the unseen fathers, men whose wealth commissioned full-length portraits even for their sons and daughters, men whose status in society demanded it.

They are the adults these children were to become, shaped by a life of privilege and their few moments indeed away from its spotlight. They are the adults their parents expected them to become, carrying on roles and responsibilities known by heart. They are the adults the children wanted or feared to become, almost from birth. They are the actual young adults, reveling in the discovery of increasing freedom and sexual magnetism. And then there is another adult, Sargent himself, the self-styled man of the world who understood when a sitter’s name—and his own—turned on pushing those roles to their extreme. He is seeking out and questioning the shrinking space left for innocence by late Victorian culture.

That space resonates today. Think of the endless baby pictures passed around by digital camera and the Web. Then think of the constant assault of sexually charged material that kids see everywhere. Think, too, of the sheer proliferation of images, so that consumer choice becomes a choice of what role to play. Sargent could have been the first hipster, without ever setting foot in Brooklyn. He practically dares one to look behind the scenes—only to find that nothing is there.

As for Impressionism, he had neither the subject matter nor the technique. Where Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Claude Monet gave expression to a new middle-class leisure, often their own, he preferred summers in the Alps. And for the painter who adapted Impressionism for Americans abroad, he all but eliminated its heart—the construction of space and light through color. He does not set pigments side by side, for optical mixing. He washes colors into one another, alongside those dazzling whites, to get whatever hue, intensity, and darkness he liked. It transforms Impressionism into theater.

He grounds sitters in their social class, but he takes away any solid ground beneath one’s feet. A strong, frontal light flatters a boy, but also flattens him. Fluttering, red brushwork on the wall behind thrusts him unnaturally forward, and it accentuates his looming shadow. In a frontal portrait, a girl’s delicate white dress, the decorative wood paneling behind her, and her fixed stare right through the viewer make her float in front of the canvas. She seems doubly haunted, by the childhood she is leaving behind and by something more ghostlike in her future. But then too much finish was always a betrayal of Sargent’s art.

When adults turn up, the multiple centers of attention can become serious conflicts of interest. In a birthday scene, one sees first the dark, ill-defined shape of the father. Only then does one notice the mother, massive and dominant, cutting the cake. Finally one spots the child, off to the side, blowing out the candles, one year older now and lit from below by the flames. Remember as a kid holding a flashlight below your chin? Growing up is spooky.

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She has “the look of experience.” Henry James was writing about a savvy society columnist, but he could just have well have meant the man who painted her, John Singer Sargent in Paris. Each competes for the inside track onto society, high and low.

Now the Met tracks the years guaranteeing him a place in both, through August 3. It shows him still in his twenties but no less sophisticated and already a fixture in demand.

It was, James wrote, “a masterly rendering,” but you may remember a very different artistry. Emma Allouard-Jouan, a close friend of Sargent’s, is “slightly faded and eminently sensitive and distinguished.” Who knew that those terms all go together, and who associates them with so flashy a painter? Or does his surface flash always comport with something more? Only her face with its deeply shaded eyes emerges out of the darkness. She looks not so much worn as sober, with a working woman’s clothes, a journalist’s keen eye, and the elusive setting for a life.

Sargent arrived in Paris at just eighteen, in 1874, and you may think you know the story of an American in Paris well. Raw talent learns from his European betters, generous in their encouragement and unforgiving in their criticism. Sargent had particular luck in a mentor, the self-styled Carolus-Duran, who insisted on the study of Diego Velázquez. It taught Sargent minimal underpaint, near photorealism in charcoal, and commitment to portraits in the company of artists, writers, gentlemen, and kings. A less talented student would have floundered in the face of so many irreconcilable demands. Instead, it kept his mind open to the fitful pursuit of modern art.

Sargent could never quite embrace Impressionism or a newer art. He was born too soon and to all the right people, and he never did fit my tidy story. Raised in Florence to American parents, he came to Paris a seasoned traveler. Even so, he could hardly stay put. The curators, led by Stephanie L. Herdrich, take him to northern and southern France, Naples and Capri, Morocco, Boston, and beyond. His languid male models may leave one as uncertain about his longings in another way as well.

But then there are more than enough versions of John Singer Sargent to go around. If those versions include classical technique, racy female and child portraits, and fashion, all the better for him. It has given him New York shows of charcoals, caricatures, the artist’s creative circle, landscapes, and the influence of Spain—all within the time of this Web site. Excuse me if I largely leave you to past reviews for more. This artist who would try anything once and comport with anyone. And then he kept looking.

There is no explaining sheer talent, and good art should have you thinking about something else—just what he was doing. The son of a surgeon who chose to remain abroad, he had that rare combination of intellect, feeling, questioning, and detachment. A room at the Met for half a dozen contemporary artists helps, too, by focusing on differences. If you want a true Edwardian reformer, try James McNeill Whistler, but if you want the shock of the new, try Edouard Manet. If you want a science of vision guiding seemingly free brushwork, try Claude Monet. If you want a close copy after Velázquez, Sargent can supply one, but he will be sure that you see it as a quick copy.

He did not ask for outrage at his near strapless portrait of Madame X, but he got it, and it drove him to leave Paris for one last move, to London. It should make you think again, too, about the flash. Fashion for Sargent opens onto psychological depths otherwise unseen. A commanding red robe somehow pops out from an equally red curtain, because people here are only partly in command. A brother and sister share everything but their degree of confidence and uncertainty, while four sisters move through a room of vases as tall and as seemingly human as they. But then what is it to be sophisticated, apart from money, and what is it to be human?

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For once, it makes sense to have started on New York’s summer sculpture with the Met roof. True, it is not public sculpture in the city’s abundant parks, but the view brings it close enough. That is especially so with the roof about to close to bring it fully into the Met, as part of a redesign of its modern and contemporary wing.

It has also been each year’s first to open (and I take you to more after their late openings, but first a quick tour of solo acts). With her interest in music, you might say that Jennie C. Jones set the tone for everything to come. In particular, it had me asking about the place of Minimalism in sculpture a mere half century after artists and critics alike pretty much moved on. Sure enough, Edra Soto and Torkwase Dyson could pass for the real thing.

Both adopt industrial materials, with the warm browns of rusted steel. Both, too, work on a scale a bit larger than life, to invite viewers into the work. You can see through Edra Soto’s gates to others out for a stroll with Central Park behind them. If, like Jones, it is not quite art in the parks, it is this year’s commission for the park’s southeast entrance, across from the Plaza Hotel, and it welcomes the view, through August 24. Torkwase Dyson, in turn, creates a pavilion, with seating. The closer you get, though, the more it opens to the sky.

Both works do the unexpected for Minimalism, in accord with the eclectic “neo-Minimalism” common enough today. For such large, heavy sculpture, Soto’s could pass for painting. It divides neatly into four panels, each a geometric abstraction. Slim metal rods radiate outward, forming a surface at their center that reflects sunlight. And their radiance tells a story, about crossing borders. They recall for Soto the wrought-iron screens outside homes in her native Puerto Rico, and they rest on terrazzo within the picture plane, as if decorative tiling had taken flight.

Where Soto calls her work Graft, grafted onto her adopted city, this is Dyson’s Akua, meaning born on Wednesday, although I hesitate to ask why. Fresh off the 2024 Whitney Biennial, she has a lawn in Brooklyn Bridge Park, set back just far enough to make Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo, and the East River already distant memories. One can, though, see a shifting role for the work and its surroundings, through next March 8. What at first looks broad and solid, tapering in and out like the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor, reaches easily overhead. It also breaks up that much more clearly into metal beams with a circular opening above. A metal sheet on the ground could be the royal carpet inside.

Not that others can let go of Minimalism either, so long as they can run wild. Steve Tobin has his industrial roots, too, in more ways than one. His New York Roots, through February 28, began as piping before taking off in all directions exactly as the title would suggest. The half dozen works might have grown out of the ground here and there in the Garment District entirely on their own. Carl D’Alvia brings much the same party colors to the Upper West Side—and only a bit more restraint. His new work, on the Broadway median strip through November 1, plays on its compact shapes and single colors. It keeps threatening to settle down into geometric or alphabetic form, mostly near subway stops, only to refuse the offer.

But enough of abstract art, whatever the story line. How about the real New York, where pigeons are ready to prey on whatever you can offer? The spur of the High Line, near West 30th Street, has a history now of single works, through November with Iván Argote. Like a white drone by Sam Durant not long ago, Argote is thinking in terms of motion, although he titles his work Dinosaur, as if it were well past its prime. Like a bare tree by Pamela Rosenkranz just last year, he is thinking, too, in terms of natural life. His oversize pigeon, while beautifully detailed, looks a trifle obvious all the same.

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