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art reviews from around new york

So many Eastern religions have embraced mandalas as connections to something beyond everyday pleasures and everyday cares. So many everywhere have marveled at their decorative richness.

Followers of Carl Jung have weighed in as well, because what Jungian can resist universal truths? So take a deep breath before entering the Lehman wing at the Met. “Mandalas” asks to appreciate them for what they are—not just catch phrases and aids to meditation, but literal guides to the spiritual universe. As the show’s subtitle has it, it is “Mapping the Buddhist art of Tibet,” through January 12.

You may need a map, a believer all the more so. This intricate universe reads outside-in, with concentric rows, columns, and circles of symbols like stamps or playing cards for the many steps in Vajrayana Buddhist practice. Over time, the rituals became more and more distinct, corresponding to distinct Tibetan sects. And the show also displays accessories to practice, most over a hundred years old. They are the practices of a warrior, with swords and shields. They are the practices of a celebrant, with masks, drums, and a trumpet so long that it could easily outstrip the trumpeter.

Oh, and what a universe it is. Buddhism has had its appeal to Westerners like Herman Hesse for its simplicity, especially in the spirit of the 1960s. It has seemed to tell a very human story, of the man who walked away from worldly temptations to become Siddhartha (or he who has achieved his goal) and the Buddha. Here you will encounter the five Buddhas, countless gods, their retinue, and their consorts. By that point, you may need an intercessor, and this form of Buddhism has plenty. They include goddesses, but also bodhisattvas, those who have achieved enlightenment but not yet become gods.

If they sound foreign to the jealous gods of the West, just wait until you meet them. They can be protectors, a source of hope as your karma determines who you will become in the next life. After a couple of centuries of Himalayan Buddhism, they begin to offer hope, too, to escape the endless cycle of reincarnation. Still, the most merciful gods are the ones with deadly weapons in the battle for enlightenment. But then the most austere in reputation are the sexiest. By all means, then, grab a map.

The Met has only a room for mandalas, off to the side. Rather, the show’s three main stages introduce the gods, the intercessors, and the rituals. The curator, Kurt Behrendt, sees them as getting you comfortable with the cast of characters before you reach the show’s true subject. In effect, they are maps to the maps. They all surround a central atrium with its own payoff—murals and carpets by a contemporary artist, Tenzing Rigdol. They present calm seas and rising or sinking suns in gloriously bright colors. They offer space to breathe and a place to rest.

Traditional paintings and sculpture are packed with detail. Ten heads rise up from one deity’s shoulders while samples of a thousand arms fan out. Patterns lend color—a predominant red, but alternating with blue, yellow, and green. A sun-struck yellow may serve as skin tone, but so may blue, sometimes faded to black. Pigment applied directly or mixed with glue, as distemper, adds intensity. The works may date back to the eleventh century, but they peak around 1350.

No question they take adjustments from ignorant Westerners like me. The cells of color flatten surfaces, but gods have a turn at the waist almost like Renaissance contrapposto, which announced a new humanism and a new approach to mass, motion, and depth. That turn at the waist can approach a dance as well, sometimes a wild one. Surviving practices include human dancers with loose robes and demonic, animal, or downright comic heads. All of these are about as far as can be from Chinese art or a show last year of not so early Buddhism. You may wish for more, like, say, mandalas traced in sand, but you could never have imagined a distinct north Asian universe.

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

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” Thomas Jefferson was speaking of Shays’s Rebellion, an uprising seeking debt relief and back wages from the Revolutionary War, but the Met is well ahead of his schedule in reconceiving history.

Not twelve years after reopening its American wing, the museum celebrates the wing’s centennial with a new look for American art.

In truth, it is less than a revolution. The painting galleries have nominal themes, but with due respect for movements, artists, and their times. Other changes have been in the works for years. One still enters through a bank facade, although the Met has long since added its own money maker, a popular café. One can hardly help entering onto rooms for Native American art, once sorely neglected, along with other rooms for “founding narratives” (aka period rooms). Allow me, then, to offer once more my personal guided tour from January 2012, starting here.

A gilded eagle had an unlikely flight. William Rush carved it in 1809 and 1810, for a Lutheran church in Philadelphia, where it supported a sounding board behind the pulpit with its iron tongue. By mid-century it had come to rest in Independence Hall, not far from Rush’s own statue of Washington. Now, still suspended by a chain and still atop its gilded sphere, it presides over the first room in the Met’s new American wing, which soars.

Of course, its meaning has changed—from an attribute of Saint John to the American eagle to the spirit of American art. Rush understood national symbols all along, though, and so does the Met. It centers the wing on a single floor for painting and sculpture, from the colonial era to the Ashcan school. And it centers that floor on its hoariest display of patriotism, Emanuel Leutze’s life-size Washington Crossing the Delaware. It does so with a knowing wink at its audience, too, like that of Robert Colescott to embody the painting in blackface. The press would not have insisted so often on Leutze as icon rather than art without the museum’s prompting.

Of course, too, the painting is storytelling, and the renovation is telling stories as well. Lots of them, in fact, and they overlap. By bringing painting together on one floor, the Met sets out American history as a series of unfolding themes. The same characters often reappear in new roles, as artists or as subjects. By moving the Ashcan painters here as well, it also says that the evolution of American themes did not end abruptly with Modernism. The museum gets to boast of its collection as at once authoritative and open-ended, and it makes for a terrific reintroduction to American art.

The American wing took its present shape less than thirty years ago, with the museum’s first distinct galleries for painting and sculpture. The Met could simply have shut the place down and started over, as it did for Islam. Instead, change has come gradually over ten years, with a reopening in stages since 2007. The new painting galleries merely complete the job. The basic architecture has not changed either, although the firm of Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo has found another three thousand or so square feet of display space. Yet this time small changes matter big time.

From changing images of Washington to changing images of the wilderness and the city, Met does not just present a history. It makes painting look good, by making paintings look at each other. It places sculpture in almost every room, from portrait busts to duck decoys. It shows the American eagle still in flight, not quite ready to land, with the textbook triumph of American painting another fifty years away. With luck, the wing’s stories will keep changing. Will Washington Crossing the Delaware be their centerpiece forever?

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

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.

For more than fifty years, Mexican artists toiled in the shadow of revolution. So, too, does the Met with “Mexican Prints at the Vanguard,” through January 5.

The Mexican Revolution took ten long years, starting in 1910, but artists before it could see it coming in all its violence. Well after, it served as a model and a call for change. To the left, and there were many on the left, it served as a cry to support for other revolutions, in Russia and Spain. Later still, it served as a bitter memory, as a government dedicated to remaking the country and the world gave way to yet another dictator. Could, though, the cries put Mexico at the vanguard of twentieth-century art? Perhaps, but only by remaining in the trenches.

“Mexican Prints” is thoroughly out of fashion, which is to say seriously modern. These days, a proper Mexican revolution would be a cultural revolution, with women in the vanguard, like Amalia Mesa-Bains recently at El Museo del Barrio, and Mexican tradition their passion. The Met ends in 1955 as if to avoid all that. References to Pre-Colombian art do appear in square-jawed heads, but not often, and figures costumed for a carnival come only at the end, with Carlos Mérida, as one of the few spots of color. But then Mérida also produced an abstract composition, give or take a bird. Frida Kahlo, in native costume as a woman’s act of defiance, does not appear at all.

The curator, Mark McDonald, starts in the 1700s, but not with native tradition. He looks instead to Europe, much like a past show of “Painted in Mexico.” Later, Tina Modotti will depict soldiers with a debt to Baroque paintings of a Madonna rising. In between, artists turned to the satire of Honoré Daumier. But this was always art as illustration, in service to a cause. Text can overwhelm images. Tracts and newsletters precede starker lithographs by David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Of course, Siqueiros was also a muralist, and the show runs in parallel with Mexican murals. Diego Rivera, turns up a print after one of his most famous. Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary, stands beside his horse. Rivera came to New York as well, for a show of his work at MoMA. José Clemente Orozco came as well, too, with a print of a vaudeville act in Harlem. Here or in Mexico, change was in the air.

Mexican prints first entered the museum’s collection at the instigation of a French artist, Jean Charlot, who moved to New York in 1928. He contributes a woodcut of Rich People in Hell. Others, too, adopted woodcuts for their jagged edges, with praise for Lenin and Stalin as the bombs fall. Siqueiros himself depicts a Trinity of Scoundrels. This is art and ideology in black and white. After the revolution, the new regime sponsored arts education. As that became a tool for state propaganda, Taller de Gráfica Popular (or Graphics Workshop for the People), took up the slack.

Still, something sets Mexican prints apart from Europe and America—and from their own easy answers: revolution comes at a cost, and death enters even in triumph. Zapata looks humble and heroic enough, but he stands astride a dead body. Rufino Tamayo pictures a native couple as heros, but they might be confronting hills on fire. Alfredo Zalce sees the Yucatan, a target of agrarian reform, as a paradise. Yet his figures struggle with the overgrowth.

Death enters even before the revolution. Celebrated in his time, José Guadalupe Posada continued the tradition of pages dense with text. Couples embrace, but “death is inexorable,” and wooers, bikers, and angels alike are skeletons. So is the “people’s editor.” Less well known, Emilio Amero stands apart in 1930 with a clock and telephone in Surrealism’s ghostly light. This is modernity, and art is in the vanguard, but it might end in darkness.

The oldest work in a show of “Chinese Painting and Calligraphy” is neither painting nor calligraphy. You might not know that, though, which only adds to its fascination at The Met.

It sure looks like calligraphy, but the characters have turned a ghostly white. Nor do they appear alongside a landscape as in so much Chinese art, although they seem to inhabit one—blending into a rocky, watery, or forested expanse. It takes on the texture of landscape as well, with eerie white slabs against a grainy black. As long ago as the fifth century B.C.E., an unknown artisan carved the cryptic characters into stone before rubbing them with ink and transferring them onto paper. Long before photography, it is the ultimate paper negative. It should have you wondering at the relationship between painting and calligraphy in the centuries of art to come, through January 5.

Chinese painting and calligraphy—it must sound like the entirety of Chinese art. And the Met often rehangs its Asian wing to showcase its collection, most recently in its space for Korean art. Sometimes the rooms for China convey a theme, like “Companions in Solitude,” whereas this time they approach a comprehensive history. Far be it from me to try for one myself. Consider then an amateur’s chance impressions and a single question: what are painting and calligraphy doing together in the first place?

You may take for granted that Chinese poetry and landscape were conceived together, in contemplating art and nature. That early work, though, has no true landscape at all, and each stage in its creation ruled out the fluency and precision of a fine brush in the artist’s hand. Other works have at most a token inscription, in descending letters. The Met throws in other media as well, with enamelware, porcelain, and silver for what the painted images represent. The installation ends with three scrolls of portrait busts from the 1700s. The interplay between Asia and the West has begun in earnest, and the fluidity of ink has given way to hard outlines and firm color.

Those portraits may compile a family history or a procession of scholars, but then most Chinese art looks to its ancestors. Could a backward glance be the secret of pairing art and text as well? The show opens with exactly what you might expect—sheets of painting and calligraphy mounted together. They stake out a point of origin, a millennium ago or more, only they date from up to three hundred years apart, and dates for either one are hard to pin down. The Met calls its hanging “roughly” chronological, and you can see why. It can still display a coherent history.

Is it about shared visions or influences, and can one even tell the two apart? Often the text, clear and dark, vies with the subtlety and lightness of painting, but which came first? Calligraphy here may be a colophon (which, I fear, the Met does not trouble to translate)—not the date and place of publication as in printing practices today, but a kind of commentary, in poetry and prose. By the 1600s, though, poetry comes can take priority as well. Does that make the whole an illustrated book? If so, calligraphy is itself an art, both text and illustration.

Remember an old truth in Western literature—that the greatest of all must die, but trees live on as a glimpse of eternity? Shitao, a poet, knows that “no old tree can gain its youth again” either, and it makes him wonder why he writes. Poignant as it is, it returns to the theme of authority and ancestry. They are explicit when armies gather and palaces hold sway. They are clearer still in the 1300s, with drawings of women at court. They have hair like helmets, in parallel stokes that a greater freedom has yet to disturb.

Power may yet require accommodations (and the Met never once mentions religion). The women look after their children or stake a claim for themselves—at least one dressed as a man. Nestled trees with a crown in their branches may stand for Mongol rule or a peace surpassing it. In the fifteenth century, with Fang Congyi and others, authority must take a back seat to a softer handling, a mistier landscape, and a “beneficent rain.” A scroll’s long format from Zhang Yucai makes that rain all the more encompassing. Ancestry is everything, but there is no looking back.

Calligraphy, too, takes on a life of its own—bold to the point of ink blots, although never again the spatters of that ancient rubbing on stone drums. You can almost imagine a history akin to that of European art, from the certainties of the Middle Ages to the artistic personalities of the Renaissance. The Baroque, in this history, would take one last step, at risk of losing art’s hand-won playfulness and atmosphere. Simplistic? Sure, and I cannot claim the expertise to say more. Still, it undermines the settled truths of a single, shared role and loving collaboration for calligraphy and painting.

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

Forget John Keats, at least for a moment. Spare yourself a recital of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Met looks back far earlier, to the origins of Western civilization in Cycladic art. As far as I know, all its creators were men, and their subjects were female, but this is not the male point of view that you may expect from Greek art. There are no warriors or their rewards, no earthly or unearthly grace. There is only the wish to journey together, to trade, and to survive.

Before a Grecian urn, hundreds or even thousands of years before, there was art, but not exactly Greek art. Before the great cities of Greek tragedies and Homeric myths, before there was much so much as a written language to describe them, culture flourished in a broad cluster of islands in the Aegean Sea, about midway between the mainland to the west and present-day Turkey. It had to be seagoing, for its livelihood, and it had to have a tough existence. Much of its art was created to bury with someone’s remains. Now the Met does its best to bring Cycladic art back to life, but it, too, has to move on fast. It has to cover twenty-five hundred years and four civilizations.

The Met announced new galleries for Cycladic art, opening January 25, but did not make a fuss over the matter. There are no signs directing visitors to them, although there is more than enough verbiage inside. In practice, they come down to a single room in the galleries for Greek art, although with space for more than a hundred fifty works. You may rush right past on your way between the museum’s great hall and its southern wing. Two works appear just outside, maybe just enough to arouse your curiosity. How can they look so unlike a hero, a helmet, or a Grecian urn?

Whatever it is, it has its own appeal quite apart from its history. The standing nudes by the entrance, with no need for a pedestal, look downright modern. They influenced Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, and Amedeo Modigliani, who felt a kinship with their very simplicity—their gentle curves, frontal poses, and approach to abstraction. One might mistake their pure white marble, abundant in the region, for limestone. Smaller figures within the galleries, almost like dolls, take the shape of violins, although violins did not yet exist either. Pablo Picasso and Cubism, with all their instruments and music, would have approved.

The Met has rehung it all to acknowledge Leonard N. Stern, the collector who contributed it—and to acknowledge a settlement reached with Greece, which will own the work but leave it on loan to New York. It is also a boast and a correction. Just when Mesopotamian women were giving voice to the early Bronze age, others were active, too, and I work this together with my earlier report on just that as a longer review and my latest upload. I did not know much about the civilizations or the art, although I can take comfort that, when it comes down to it, no one else does either. Written records did not exist, and technical analysis of old marble cannot deliver authenticity or anywhere exact dates. Paint would have covered its seeming brightness, and chemical analysis can identify the pigments, in more colors than a Grecian urn.

The time line is at least as fascinating as the work. It begins before 3000 B.C.E., about as old a look at human creation as there is. It is not yet the Iron Age, so the carving of marble (with glass, the surfaces refined with emery and pumice) is quite a feat. The carvings have almost childlike features, with a recurring motif of crossed arms, and jugs have distinguishing collars and handles, but their purpose is less clear. The figures are women, suggesting hopes for fertility for a people that knew endless deaths. Yet they are barely female—their hips and breasts as flat as, well, a violin.

The room turns to the Minoan civilization in Crete, after roughly 2000 B.C.E., and then to Myceneans on the mainland, after 1000 B.C.E.. More familiar Greek art, with kraters, or (sure enough) vases in red against black or vice versa, did not begin until around 700 B.C.E., and the Green alphabet emerged not long before. Minoan and Mycenean culture also runs to more useful and decorative art, like pins for clothing and seals, with real or imagined animals. The Greeks changed everything with their focus on youths and men, as warriors and most often in groups, in procession. Their patterns are less bold and their figures more sketchy than Cycladic art, and they cannot honor the dead one by one, but they could be more broadly imagined as ancestors. What to make of the new masculine values, even in light of Homer, is a fascinating question in itself.

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