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art reviews from around new york

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.”

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There are moments in “Weaving Abstraction” at the Met that feel suspended between centuries. Does MoMA seek the origins of modernity in the aftermath of World War II for “Crafting Modernity” This exhibition reaches back to antiquity. Yet it ends in much the same years and much the same artistic circles.

Are they telling the same story after all? The Met’s mere handful of recent artists can hardly encapsulate weaving or abstraction. Their pairing with art of the Andes has its own suspense nonetheless, through June 16.

The exhibition’s full title speaks of “ancient and modern.” Centered on the Andes from as much as twenty-seven hundred years ago, it unfolds in space otherwise dedicated to modern and contemporary art. About halfway through, a panel could almost be a direct response to Minimalism. Its thousands of feathers affixed to cotton strings form a thick, soft surface that divides neatly into four rectangles, alternating between light yellow and blue. More yellow flecks the blue, as if about to take flight. Like the Post-Minimalism of Eva Hesse, it might be an extension of an animal or human body—or the human imagination.

The show features four women who came to prominence in just the last century, and they may feel suspended not just in time, but also in place. Anni Albers took up fabric at the Bauhaus but fled to America in 1933 and worked for sixty more years in exile. Sheila Hicks studied with her husband, Josef Albers, at Yale. Lenore Tawney studied with another refugee from the Bauhaus before joining the “fabric art” movement along with Olga de Amaral. What seems at first like a sprinkling of recent art, for contrast and relevance, gathers momentum over the course of a long room. By the show’s end, it has come to the very brink of the present.

It may seem like a mere excuse to approach either the present or the past—a routine excuse at that. More and more, museums are insisting on other times and other cultures, like Cycladic art at the Met. The museum has been slipping contemporary art into older contexts as well, like Korean art. More and more, too, artists have been turning to tapestries and fabric as their means of painting. It can serve as a further call for diversity, as well, to recognize “women’s work.” And now the Met heads to not just the rural South, but to the arid hills of South America.

But is there truly, as the Met puts it, an “Andean legacy”? The Bauhaus had its mission to promote craft as art, as a model for design. Albers did visit an ethnological museum back in Berlin. Yet her austere patterns have more to do with Modernism than ancient checkerboards. Hicks does not so much as take up weaving, although her dyes have parallels in ancient art. Her loose strands or the slits in Tawney’s slim black hangings, almost like gowns, may recall ancient “open looms.”

Peru is harder still to pin down, and the curators, Iria Candela and Joanne Pillsbury, make no attempt at chronology. They open with rich color from perhaps the 1500s, in a tunic of red and gray, before doubling back a millennium before to a coiled headband—and then further back to mystery figures from before the present era, their slim black tongues sticking out from sharp teeth beneath wild eyes. No wonder historians cannot assign many works to a single century, not when the culture left no written records. One cannot know when clothing served for necessity, for kings, for votive offerings, for gifts to secure peace, or for exchange. One cannot know either whether women produced a single one. One can know the lack of the very idea of abstraction.

Still, the Met is on a mission, too—to introduce the ancient and Incan cultures that the Spanish killed off. It is also insisting on women artists. de Amaral broadens fabric beyond what the Andes ever knew, with gold leaf, paper, and gesso on a “gridded wall.” Hicks is lushest and most varied of all, from densely curving colors to bare white descending in tassels as her Linen Lean-To. Its cryptic patterns may suggest an unknown language. But then the knots in ancient khipus may have communicated something, too.

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Where was my ad blocker when I could use it? Where was it, say, in 1844? That was when Henry Fox Talbot photographed fine glassware by any standards, but just what was he advertising? His print is not saying, and neither is the Met. It is nonetheless “The Real Thing,” opening a show of that name of product photography, through August 4. It sums up changes in how photography saw itself as well as things—and how advertising emerged as a product, too.

Talbot could hardly count as advertising, when the very idea was hard to conceive. Photography took too much care and attention for that, and publications able to handle it did not exist. Besides, the medium had other purposes—as staged dramas, portraits, or experiments. Fragments of bishop’s miters were surely not for sale, although the anonymous photograph might have been. Is the Met, then, cheating or seeking a broader context in history? The show’s subtitle speaks of “Unpackaging Product Photography,” but where is product photography without the package?

Art has long had a love-hate relationship with photography—and photos with packaging. Each year the AIPAD photography fair bends over backward to look like art, while the Jewish Museum has exhibited magazine photography and the International Center of Photography a provocative fashion photographer who died of AIDS. Then, too, art has always promoted images, going back to Renaissance princes, pharaohs, and kings. And the Met explains its earliest photos as promoting the medium. In truth, it is also looking for an excuse to display its collection and gifts from the Ford Motor Company. It proceeds modestly, though, with a small show.

Advertising in the modern sense emerged with the twentieth century, awkwardly at first but reluctant to give up claims to modern art. A sample from around 1913 features (seriously) the National Blank Book. Reproducibility became more than half the point, with golf balls, drill bits, and soaps. It was not, though, the only point, and Stella F. Simon leans on a violin’s elegance around 1930 to compose a picture. Many identified themselves with a movement, like Piet Zwart with De Stijl in the Netherlands and many more with Surrealism—were advertising not surreal enough in itself. André Kertész doubles a fork and redoubles it with its shadow.

Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach as Ringl + Pitt could embrace advertising while mocking it. Others had fewer doubts. August Sander photographs for once not a German worker, but what a worker might produce—light bulbs spiraling into darkness and depth. James Van Der Zee sets his eye this time out not on salons, town cars, and the Harlem Renaissance, but on a wig. Is it product photography, a preparatory study, or merely a discard? The wig rests off to the side against a black background, looking as small as can ever be.

Advertising, too, has its evolution, from the blank book. Of course, it acquires text. While the Met’s online image for the show features a shoe, in the actual ad it is subordinate to the stylish wearer, who can boast that “I Know Value.” Paul Outerbridge first poses a shirt collar against a tilted checkerboard, for the play of flatness and depth, black and white. Twenty years later, in 1940, his color photo turns to coffee drinkers (of A&P coffee), one in an apron and the rest in suits, as a meeting among men. He might be moving from product photography as an art to the thing in itself.

Advertising began before the turn of the century, but without photography. Just down the hall, “The Art of the Literary Poster” spans what one used to call the gay nineties, through June 11, for what readers then might have called the new woman and the modern man. Covers for Harper’s, by Edward Penfield, appeal to the reader’s sophistication, with images like a March hare that play on the month. Calendar and poster art by Will H. Bradley, Joseph Christian Leyendecker, and Ethel Reed show a life of leisure and activity, like cycling and tennis. All have much the same art nouveau styling, from the Leonard A. Lauder collection. One might still receive a calendar in the mail today a as fund raiser, for those lucky few with a big kitchen and not a cell phone in sight.

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India today is divided by religion, geography, and class—and united by little more than its divisions. Yet it has had a distinguished tradition—and a long, extended moment of royal grandeur in its art.

The Howard Hodgkin collection at the Met lingers over centuries of Indian court painting, with an eye toward nature but a special fondness for its artifice and its rituals. Even flowers seem at a certain remove, filtered by memory and designed to impress the dynasties that cultivated them. Could Hodgkin, the British artist, still have the delights of observation and artifice, not to mention elephants? In the show’s title, they all rest under vast “Indian Skies,” through June 9.

India is the world’s most populous country, crammed into the seventh largest by area, much of it in poverty for all its reputation in technology. And its prime minister is determined to exploit its hatreds and divisions in the interest of raw power, much like a certain right-wing leader in the United States. Hodgkin’s collection itself spans four royal courts and geographical divisions from north to south and plains to the Himalayas. Yet all four keep returning to a just a few themes and comparable styles. You might find Mughal faces more subtly shaded and Deccan flatness more tempered by color, Rajput and Pahari art more crowded and colorful still, but you might still struggle to tell them apart.

Successive invaders only added to its conflicts and traditions. As the show begins, around 1600, Persia has retreated from its hopes for conquest, and Hindu gods and godesses return often in the work, but one can still see the influence of Islamic art in a taste for patterns and anecdotal detail. By the show’s end, after 1900, the British empire has reduced the last maharajas to figureheads, and the Indian court along with court painting is coming to an end, too. In between, trade is bringing European painting to the mix as well, and it shows. For all its breadth, Hodgkin’s collection centers on the early 1700s, and its totality parallels what Europe called the Baroque. If it is also an art of flattery and conformity, the late Baroque had its academicism, too.

One may turn to non-Western art for its antiquity, like Cycladic art at the Met now, and the sheer length of its history, like recent shows there of Buddhist art and “Africa and Byzantium.” One may turn, too, to Asian art for its sense of timelessness, scholarship, and solitude, and indeed a rehanging to bring out poetry in Chinese art opened just days before “Indian Skies.” India here, in contrast, is a recognizably modern world. It is a hyperactive world as well. Themes run to wedding processions and hunting, where each figure has its own story. That and profile portraits, with a bearded chin jutting forward because this ruler is in command.

The show opens in the middle. Two dynasties have the room to the left, the remaining two to the right. Chronology is out of the question, but it would be hard to discern anyway. Hodgkin, who died in 2017, is unavailable as curator, but John Guy and Navina Najat Haidar devote the central room to him and, sure enough, the elephants. They accommodate royal riders while reducing them to nearly comic proportions. And the elephants, too, keep busy, on a rampage or joining in the hunt.

Museum-goers are used by now to shows of private collectors, flattering a potential donor while leaving the collector absent in all but name. Hodgkin, though, was a painter not so easy to forget, and the show’s nominal beginning includes two of his paintings, one titled Small Indian Sky. You may know his abstractions in oil for their wide, thick frames that both contain and accommodate the paint. What interested him in India is less clear. He must have liked the wild surfaces, articulating depth within flatness like Modernism itself. A limited palette and touches of bold may have reminded him of his own bright primaries, but I can see a closer parallel only in a single and very exceptional Indian painting that veers onto a field of tart yellow.

This is not a history of Indian art, and those new to that history may still have questions. I hesitate to display my ignorance by writing. Still, it has that marvelous collision between stasis and cultural divisions. Chinese and Western art appear in the flowers, but with a scratchy shorthand rather than elegant calligraphy of the first or the translucent brightness of the second in flowers from Flemish still life to Claude Monet and Georgia O’Keeffe. Intense reds in crowd scenes interrupt the muter colors of opaque watercolor. They bring nature itself to court.

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How do you cover a thousand years of art in two small rooms? You proceed as if nothing has ever changed, in a Native American tradition that extends to this day.

For “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” at the Met, a millennium is a single collective moment. It is curated by collective, too—the Pueblo Pottery Collective of artists, poets, and scholars. Nearly sixty members select a work apiece and, in wall text, relate it to what they love. The result is gorgeous and, of course, grounded, through June 4, but not much in the way of history.

For the collective, pottery sustains a people and a tradition. It has its uses, for cooking and storage, but also its spiritual and artistic value. The show divides into four sections for utility, ancestors, elements, and connections through time and space, but do not dream of keeping them apart. One curator introduces Anthony Durand, a much admired potter with a bold, distinctive style, by quoting his grandmother, who “taught me that our pottery is made for functional use.” Even a puki, or potter’s wheel clotted with red clay, could also carry water. For his own jar, Durand thoughtfully supplies a lid.

In turn, for all those hundreds of years, pottery displays much the same patterns of broken parallels, spotted here and there with animal life. It is making and remaking a people and their beliefs. Last, it has room for an individual’s contributions, like Durand’s broad horizontals in black and gold. If one had any doubt that a work could do three or four things at once, those “elements” are the earth and water of moist clay, the fire that makes it pottery, and the air of a potter’s inspiration. Can it still, though, speak of a single community and an unbroken tradition? A year after indigenous “Water Memories,” also in the Met’s American wing, and Civil War–era black potters in the Lehman wing, I have my doubts.

The show has its ground zero in the southern half of New Mexico, but crosses borders in every direction. As for chronology, forget about it. The curators pick their favorites, but the work falls where it may. History itself gets a pass, including the brutal history of Indian wars and white displacement. For that, you will just have to begin in the present, with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at the Whitney (and I work this together with my earlier report on Smith as a longer review and my latest upload). What so much as distinguishes the Pueblo? Even there, you are pretty much on your own.

The curators, with scholarly support from the Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Vilcek Foundation, supply a map. They also list nearly two dozen tribes, in both their own language and common usage. Plainly this is contested ground. Yet they stick to an upbeat narrative with a happy ending, like so much attention to diversity today. For more, one can always continue into the Diker collection, on long-term view, including pottery amid the decorative arts, often from much the very same place. You may hardly notice where either show begins or ends.

For all that, the Met does a service by introducing recent artists in context. Monica Silva, Rachel Namingha Nampeyo, Juanita Johnson, and Emilia (Emily) Lente Carpio use gentler curves like waves, for a time more concerned with a people’s place in nature. I might even guess at an evolution in time—but bear in mind that early work, after a thousand years of wear and tear, may not be as crude as it looks. Around the first European contact, glazed jars become smoother and more deeply glazed, with all the polish of colonial art. The most recent artists grow more personal. They may all but eliminate the bowl in favor of abstraction from nature, like black turtle figurines by Greg Garcia and a corrugated bowl in deep red by Helen Naranjo Shupla.

They may become more self-conscious, like Jeralyn Lujan Lucero with a seated woman beside her own tiny bowl. They may become downright whimsical as well, like a face jug by Lorencita Pino and a figurine by Felipa Trujillo, although a free-standing figure by an unknown artist dates as early as 1900. It makes sense that the curators keep citing their grandmothers, as artists and judges of art. It is not just that they set a model for working away, as women. They are also close enough to the present to belong to the curator’s experience, but far enough the past to harbor memories of their own. A loose sense of time is simultaneously a tradition.

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