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art reviews from around new york

A child was born in Gaza after her mother’s death, to an uncertain fate. Soon she, too, lay dead, I read in The New York Times, but what if she had lived, and what is it like to be a child in time of war?

To pick up from last time on New York summer sculpture, the question has become a staple of wartime journalism, with good reason. Articles like this one are crowd-pleasers—poignant, humane, hopeful, a bit of a cliché, and all too close at hand. So, too, is what I came to see, sculpture on the Met roof by Petrit Halilaj through October 27. He treats casualties of war not as numbers, but as budding lives and artists themselves.

Halilaj pictures not them but what they see, and he should know. Born in Kosovo in 1986, he was just five when a decade of Balkan wars began. He spent a year in Kukes II, a refugee camp in Albania, and an inscription along the base of one large work reads Return to Kukes. It is, though, the outlines of his remembered home, now destroyed. Sculpture since David Smith, Alexander Calder, and Gego has often boasted of “drawing in space.” And here a child’s drawing translates easily into slim, jagged lines of bronze and steel.

Halilaj, now based in Berlin, calls the show his Abetare, after an alphabet primer in Albania. On one trip home, he visited a museum of ethnology (a former museum of natural history) that had salvaged classroom desks from the Balkans, and he takes his imagery from what children had drawn or carved there, as children will. This is not just his home, but also theirs. Nor is it just his spider in a second sculpture, with the nasty smirk of a knowing child. Its shadows cling to the Met roof like graffiti, and so do smaller works, like one reading HERE. And here we are.

Other pieces include Batman (alas, not Spiderman), a proclamation that 2 + 2 = 5, a large flower, and a star, in what aspires to a child’s whole universe, but this is not just for children. Batman hangs upside-down like an actual bat, the math could be an act of rebellion or a refugee’s loss of years of school, the house looks near to collapse, and the giant spider owes a debt to Louise Bourgeois. (Her spider in Dia:Beacon was long my laptop’s lock screen.) Nor is the roof altogether suitable for children—not when it serves as a bar during summer. Art in past summers has been more site-specific, like table settings by Adrian Villar Rojas or a curved wall by Héctor Zamora, but Halilaj uses every inch he can. Two pigeons on the roof of the roof might have flown in from Central Park.

It pays to look up, all the more so because the Met has raised hedges atop the roof’s low walls. They add to the summer’s greenery and, just perhaps, public safety, but hide the view. And Halilaj is, at heart, always looking up. An angel poses on his spider, as if looking over its shoulder, and the pigeons could doves of peace. An eye could be a child’s or the ancient Egyptian symbol of prosperity and protection. The tilted house will survive as a work of art.

Still not quite ready to enter Central Park? A bright pink-purple missile defends the park entrance by the Plaza Hotel, as Parabolic Light. Fred Eversley through August 25 stands with the California “Light and Space” artists of the 1960s, like Larry Bell and Doug Wheeler, although he owes his translucent materials to more high-tech materials. Just hope he does not start a world war over who will inherit Minimalism. If he does, I am rooting for the spider. I am also set to leave Manhattan altogether in search of art, and I continue next time with Huma Bhabha in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

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

“Lift every voice and sing, / Till earth and heaven ring.” For two splendid decades after World War I, with Jim Crow still a vivid memory, there was a place for African Americans to believe in “a song of hope.”

What was the Harlem Renaissance, and where would a Renaissance be without painting? It must sound obvious, but even now people argue over the period’s legacy and its substance. With “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” through July 28, not every voice is singing. Politics is largely absent, and jazz itself is all but silent. Modernism seems curiously far away. Yet the Met makes an overdue case for its art—and it is the subject of a much longer and fuller review as my latest upload.

You may think of the Harlem Renaissance as above all a literary movement, with Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer in fiction, Countee Cullen in poetry, and Langston Hughes towering over both forms of expression. James Weldon Johnson, at the head of the NAACP, wrote of a “flowering of Negro literature.” You may think of it as a flourishing of theater, dance, and music, with such jazz greats as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, and Bessie Smith—and Johnson himself composed hymns, including what some have called the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Or you may think of it as a broader intellectual achievement. It stands as a rebirth for black culture itself. Hubert Harrison spoke of the “New Negro” as early as 1917, and Alain Locke took that for the title of an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays in 1925.

It was surely a rebirth for Harlem, neither the first nor the last. Harlem had served Dutch farmers and then city dwellers, as the first elevated trains headed uptown and a wave of European immigrants, many of them Jewish, sought affordable housing. Things changed once again in the twentieth century, as the Afro-Caribbean diaspora reached New York along with the Great Migration from the rural, racially oppressive South. Jazz came north from New Orleans with it, Louis Armstrong included, to found the swing era. The Apollo Theater had opened in 1914—improbably enough, for burlesque shows aimed at whites. It became the fabled venue for blacks only some twenty years later, thanks to a new Jewish owner.

The Met boasts right off of literary and cultural ferment. It opens with portraits of Locke and Hughes by Winold Reiss, Hurston by Aaron Douglas, and Johnson by Laura Wheeler Waring. Reiss, a German who found the rest of New York boring, brings his wiry black outlines broken only by the meticulous realism of his faces, suiting Locke’s hauteur and intellect. The pale patterned backdrop to Hughes hints at a ferment within painting itself, in early modern art. Douglas and Waring stick more closely to realism to flatter their subjects and their dignity. Then come portraits and street scenes, where ordinary men and women get to dress up, too.

The curator, Denise Murrell, is introducing not just a culture. She is assembling the artists who will render it. All three from that first room will turn up often, as will Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson. Motley brings the intensity of artificial light to equally unsettling narratives. Johnson has the brighter colors, flatter renderings, and impasto of folk art. Together, they set out the possibilities that other artists will explore, in a show of one hundred sixty works.

The show’s greatest pleasure is that it need not answer the charge. It can only keep looking for more. Sure, here Harlem itself lacks specifics, if not fashion sense. Yet a final room, easy enough to miss on the way out, does take to the street, for the eighteen feet of The Block, from 1971. Romare Bearden, then in his sixties, had been around the block, “Harlem on My Mind” was two years gone, and the Harlem Renaissance was history. The mural’s triumph may drive home the movement’s limits—or its importance for the future.

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

You have to be an egomaniac to keep your most precious possession hidden. And so was the speaker in “My Last Duchess,” the dramatic monologue by Robert Browning.

He alone unveils a portrait of the wife he killed, “for none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I.” He reveals more than he intends, but such are madness and poetry. In real life, patrons of Renaissance art had other motives than egomania: they were out to share the artist’s vision and their own.

They were putting on a show, and the curtain, if any, was just part of the act. The Met, though, sees only reticence and ownership. With “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance,” it calls up the devices that kept Renaissance portraits hidden, if not exactly under lock and key, from some of the period’s finest artists. It could be literally the obverse of textbook histories and modern museum displays, but were these faces truly under cover? And what, then, were they doing in paint? You may well wonder what the show is hiding, through July 7—and I work this together with an earlier report on Renaissance Bruges as a longer review and my latest upload.

From the very start of “Hidden Faces,” you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Religious art thrived on triptychs with wings that spoke of adoration of the central scene—wings that often folded shut. The donor portraits in the Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck occupy just two of twenty panels, both on the outside. Rapt in their piety and vision, they give way to that glorious vision as the wings open. You will not see that painting or its kind here. Instead, the Met opens with a single panel, a portrait of nobility and restraint by Rogier van der Weyden.

It does, though, have a heraldic device on its back, and it may well have hung from a chain, back facing front, until the man choose to swing it around. Here and in other works, heraldry, text, or the illusion of an official document attests to fidelity and ancestry. Do they sound more like obstacles than invitations to see more? One Latin inscription reads Noli Me Tangere, or “do not touch”—and the risen Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene could apply to the viewer and the painting as well. A panel could also slide over a portrait, an open and shut case. As for curtains, an illuminated manuscript depicts one, drawn aside from a Madonna and Child.

As constructions grew more sophisticated, so did the mask. With Hans Memling, heraldry gives way to still life. The leaves of the first have become a finely glazed vase holding flowers, sharing its warmth and illusion with the man’s shadow and beard stubble. Still others present an allegory, often as not more vivid than the portrait. With Lorenzo Lotto in Venice, petals shower down on Virtue, a woman, while Vice lurks, sinister but ineffectual, behind a tree. In a rare grisaille, or monochrome, Titian places Cupid beside the wheel of fortune, in command of fortune or its subject. It is chastening to think that painting like his on canvas, rather than panels, caught on as a natural cover.

Do not rejoice too soon at your own fortune. Most of these coverings are lost to time, and the curator, Alison Manges Nogueira, must settle for second-rate artists or clever recreations. On video, wood can still slide open and shut. Too much else is left to medallions or to the backwaters of Germany and the southern Netherlands. Jacometto Veneziano learned from Antonello da Messina, perhaps the first in Italy to experiment in oils. His portraits are lifeless all the same.

Just as scarce is an appreciation of art’s motives. Sure, the Met concedes, covering could protect a work from the elements, and smaller works in lockets had the advantage of portability. One could keep them close to one’s heart. Otherwise, the emphasis is on privacy, privilege, and hiding. It might do better to think of publicity and revelation. In that illuminated manuscript, nuns draw aside the curtain for a vision to refresh a weary traveler.

A curtain speaks not only of masking, but also of theater, and the whole point of a folding altarpiece is vision. It could be celebrating itself as a vision onto real and imagined worlds. This was after all the Renaissance with its greater realism and self-reflection. As with an altarpiece, that vision could take place in a public place, too, a cathedral. Lucas Cranach made his miniatures of Martin Luther and his wife, a former nun, not just to please them, but to spread the word to those still outraged at their marriage. But then, as another Latin inscription has it, “to each his own mask.”

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