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art reviews from around new york

Nour Mobarak may not sound like a candidate for nostalgia. Born in Cairo, she identifies as a Lebanese American, works (mostly) in LA, and seems no closer to settling down, no more than a sadly conflicted world. Among her media are fungi.

Yet she sees them as an emblem of the geopolitical struggles that divide but also give hope. They nestle in soil, laying down mycelium, much like roots. She must like it, too, that the word for its fibers, hyphae, nearly rhymes with Daphne Phono, her installation at MoMA, in its studio through January 8.

Her work stops just short of nostalgia, too. Who can remember when a proper home put a phonograph record on the phono—the “talking phonograph” that Thomas Edison invented long ago? Contemporary DJs and a retro admiration for turntables and vinyl cannot make the old vocabulary any more vivid. Yet Mobarak has many time frames, in a disorderly room of “singing sculpture.” And what they are singing is Dafne, a candidate for the first opera, nearly ten years before Monteverdi’s Orfeo. They may not sing in anything close to harmony or unison, but those are to be found as well. “These are,” she insists, “the cadences of life.”

The opera itself can claim a resolution, at the expense of its heroine, Daphne. And it, too, has widely separated points of origin. Greek myth spoke of the sea nymph, or naiad, and her pursuit by Apollo, but it has survived thanks to Roman poets long after like Ovid. It may have grown more wistful in the process. Greek gods, particularly Zeus, had a sorry habit of lusting after lesser beings, stirring up jealousy among the gods and wars among humans. Ovid’s Phoebus (or Apollo) cries out to Daphne. He means no harm, for he brings a god’s love.

In the end, he transforms her into a laurel, a symbol of Apollo himself. Could the transformation explain the contrast between Mobarak’s snake-like sculptures? The largest winds through the air, while a shiny green one lies flat to the floor. Do fungi contribute to either one? The first has a thick, mottled surface like discolored concrete, but its snaking and mottling could echo her dreams of roots. She describes it as akin to a biological system, a technological network, or linguistics.

I would add song. Not that Daphne Phono sounds the least like early Baroque opera. Unlike Monteverdi’s breakthrough from modal to tonal music, with key changes and a twelve-tone scale, it sounds more like an incantation. I am still uncertain what to make of it or to name its language. Museum displays of sound art run counter to the arc of musical theater anyway. You can, after all, enter in the middle and exit at will. For once MOMA’s studio takes down its front wall as if to encourage you.

The remaining objects, roughly pots and pillars, share the rugged shapes and colors of concrete or stone. Wall text identifies them with the other characters in the story, including Venus and Eros. (Hey, someone had to set off a tragic love.) Never forget, though, that Apollo was the god of light, music, and beauty, which the myth in turn brings to love. As war in the Middle East widens, Mobarak must hope that they will reach there as well. She gives peace a voice, if not any more of a chance.

To wrap up from last time on late work by Robert Frank, he photographs his friends at ease together. Others turn their camera on him, like Joan Lyons and Danny Lyon.

His most obvious collaborations, though, were on films, starting in 1959 with Pull My Daisy He conceived it together with Alfred Leslie, with a script by Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road. (Kerouac also supplies the voice-over narration.) It works through their shared ambivalence about their own creative past, with (as I put it in another past review), an undercurrent of humor and disturbance that art cannot resolve. It also moves between images of family life and the arts.

Some have found it formless, which misses its narrative, but also misses the point. It celebrates the lives of artists, including their spiritual life, but art that makes things up on the spot on the spot. And if it still seems formless, just wait till you see Frank’s other films. (MoMA gives them monitors rather than rooms to themselves.) Just wait, too, till you see the rest of his photography. He pops over to Coney Island for a shoot, but this will be one long roller-coaster of a ride.

His most persistent collaborator was his second wife, June Leaf, and their greatest collaboration their move from New York. They observe much the same scenes at Cape Breton, Frank in photography and Leaf on paper. She gives acrylic and ink the translucency of watercolor—to capture the light, but also to preserve in paint the spontaneity of drawing. She renders a hand, too, perhaps Frank’s own mark. They turn their thoughts most, though, to the space of a home. In years ahead, light can still penetrate, but little else.

They differ in one thing: where Leaf’s scenes are otherwise empty, Frank is still asking his neighbors how they live. He seems happy to have discovered Mabou, a small town on the Cape where he can know pretty much everyone. They and their homes look ramshackle and improvised. One seems to be sinking halfway into the sea. A Mabou Winter is just a half-covered eye.

Walker Evans, long a friend and advisor, stops by to take a look around. For MoMA, it is just one more sign of collaboration. Even fans have mostly given up on Frank after The Americans, and the curators, Joshua Siegel and Lucy Gallon, hope to change that. Something, though, has changed for good. There is no getting around that images become closer and closer to throwaways, much like the “scrapbook.” Still, Frank knew the pain of throwing things away.

What remains is a portrait of loss. His two children died young, his daughter very young, and he himself retreats further and further within. He had always worked on the cheap, but now he trades his Leica for Polaroids—as he put it, “to strengthen the feeling.” Life Dances On . . ., the 1980 print that lends the show its title, seems more and more a bitter hope. Leaf’s absences of life become prophetic, and a typewriter rests untouched. An interior becomes bare walls and a dusty square of light.

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

To pick up from last time on late work by Robert Frank, that photograph of, just maybe, collaborators, should tell you something. They have been hanging out a long time now, and no one would dream of telling them how to pose.

Still, one appears behind the rest, on-screen or in a print, eager to join them but not altogether there. A couple hugs, but Frank stands apart at far right. He looks older as well, just short of sixty, with white hair and a scraggly beard. Hand-lettered labels below each person make them look like perps in police custody.

Frank was always restless. He had to hit the road for The Americans, and it testifies to a restless America. I caught up with him at the Met in 2010—and do check out my review then, which I would not dream of repeating. The series makes the perfect contrast to “America by Car” by Lee Friedlander, for no one had his feet on the ground as much as Frank. He stuck to the people he met and the symbols they embrace, in unsettled compositions. He was not going to wait around for photography’s “decisive moment.”

The book itself remained unsettled until practically the day of publication (in 1957 in Paris). Frank kept returning to his contact prints, circling and changing his choices. MoMA has it right when it includes contact prints among other discoveries, and it salvages film that he never released, too, as “scrapbook footage” in the basement theater. It boasts of its truth to Frank’s intentions by showing them in their entirety, but that has it wrong. He made his selections. He just kept changing his mind.

Born in 1924, he left Switzerland as a restless young man, and he could not sit still on his return to New York after The Americans. Sure, he could find a seat on the bus, but only to cross the city much as he had crossed the country—and to observe what he could from a window. From the Bus opens the show at MoMA, and it can be hard to know who on the street has made a decisive, theatrical turn and who has momentarily lost his way. Frank heads downtown soon after to what he could call home, east of the Village. He casts himself in a postwar scene that is giving America its integrity and its life. He still takes on commercial work, and MoMA includes a page from Mademoiselle, but with the freedom to say no.

He photographs artists, an incredibly young James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg, all of them friends. He could see Willem de Kooning at work from out his window, but he would rather photograph him up close. He spends an extended period with the Rolling Stones for what became his best-known group portrait. Naturally it is the period of Exile on Main Street. Still, he shies away from telling a story about psychology, creativity, and exile. He shoots painters without a brush in hand, Baldwin and Ginsberg without a typewriter.

Nor is he making a political statement. He has room even for a conservative icon, William F. Buckley. He must have known his own conflicting feelings about America. He had to keep moving, but he distrusted his adopted country’s restless spirit. To him it was the spirit of capitalism. It was time he refused to play the lone genius—a time for collaboration, and I continue next time with exactly that.

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

Are These Men Collaborators? It was 1983, and Joan Lyons posed the question in her title to a print. Robert Frank, among those posing for the camera, must have wondered as well. Among the greatest American photographers ever, was he fated to go it alone?

He must have wondered how much it was worth collaborating from the moment he arrived in New York in 1947, as a Jew from Switzerland. Not even a neutral nation could protect his family and community from the Nazis. He found work almost instantly, in fashion photography, first for Harper’s Bazaar—but was that itself a collaboration, with editors and professional models, or just a reminder of everything he mistrusted about America? He left almost as quickly for the road, for what became The Americans in 1958. It gave a face to Americans like no other work in photography, but were they, too, collaborators, or was Frank that much more in exile? Viewers ever since have wondered if this was their America, too.

Now MoMA picks up the story, with photography and film from the rest of his life, through January 11. It follows him through two marriages, both to artists, and to New York in the excitement of Beat poetry and abstract art—and with an emphasis on collaboration every step of the way. It takes him and his family to Nova Scotia, where he moved part time in 1970. He loved not just sky and sea, but even more his new neighbors. By his death in 2019, his circle had shrunk, as he spent more and more time not just in Cape Breton, but in his house alone. MoMA sees a turn after The Americans to work with others, but its poignancy may lie instead in how much he had to leave behind. Still, as the show’s title has it, “Life Dances On,” and I get started in earnest with an extra post tomorrow.

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

“My back is scarred by the lash—that I could show you. I would if I could make visible the wounds of this system upon my soul.”

Frederick Douglass made the wounds of slavery visible for a generation of white Americans, starting before the system itself came to an end in the Civil War. Making visible is also the business of art, and Isaac Julien recreates an address by Douglass in all its eloquence, on “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” And what is it, Julien asks implicitly, to African Americans today? The address provides the framework for an intimate look at the speaker’s life as a free man, on video at MoMA. In the exhibition’s title, it poses Lessons of the Hour, through September 28. It asks, too, whether a divided nation can ever escape slavery’s lessons.

This could be Julien’s year. Douglass escaped slavery in at age twenty-one, in 1838, and Lessons of the Hour takes its title from a speech in 1894, a year before his death. Again on video, in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Julien brings to life the Harlem Renaissance and its leading sculptor. He also curates an exhibition of that sculptor, and I bring together my reviews of that exhibition and Julien’s video as a longer review and my latest upload. As I wrote then, there is nothing savage about the art of Richmond Barthé—and, if there were, he would be the first to tame it. If you have any doubts, head right for Feral Benga, in a gallery retrospective of a thoroughly sophisticated artist.

“I have watched from the wharves,” Douglass said, “the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with its cargoes full of human flesh. . . . In the still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door.” His words evoke pictures, and so does Isaac Julian, but less painful ones. He opens to trees, to a gentleman’s study and a woman sewing, and to the man himself, slowly leading a horse. He follows Douglass on the train, looking inward and perhaps creating those words in his head. He ends with Douglass standing tall on a mountain’s peak, like the statue of a hero.

He works in film, transferred to video, for the epic clarity of its color. It runs from day into night and from introspection to fireworks on, of course, the Fourth of July. It includes shots of an hourglass marking the hour, if not its lessons. Still, time and history have a way of playing tricks. Day breaks again after the fireworks, on its way to the mountain. The sands of time sometimes flow and sometimes stand still.

Julien hopes to encompass both reality and hope, especially when they collide. A hand picks cotton, but it might almost be picking white flowers for their beauty, with echoes soon after in yellow glistening on a tree. The audience for oratory files into a Methodist church with the bare architecture of an arena today. It includes blacks and whites, men and women—some in the fashion of the day, others in the present. Other clips borrow police surveillance tape of protests against police murder, although I somehow missed them. The video runs just under half an hour, but one can enter as one pleases and, in time, see the loop begin again.

I first encountered the artist, born in England, in London in 2003, already moving in and out of history. Two videos placed him both within a Trinidad community forty years earlier, after a poem by Derek Walcott, and a contemporary city much like Baltimore, where Douglass lived as well. When I caught up with Julien again, with Playtime in 2013, I worried that he fixed all too easily on his heroes and villains. (Do read my review then, for a fuller picture.) Has he finally found the hero he deserves? Has his hero found the response he deserves, in fireworks and, in church, applause?

As Douglass, Ray Fearon makes his character nuanced, steady, personal, and profound (and I wish that the museum took more care to credit him). Then again, I may have sold Julien short all along. Ten Thousand Waves, in 2010, already has many messages and many channels to mess them up. His latest video, a highlight of the Biennial, comes closer still to an installation and a hall of mirrors. It also moves easily in time, back to the Harlem Renaissance. Now MoMA presents Lessons of the Hour, first shown in 2019, as a historical document itself.

Douglass was the most photographed American of his time. And the curators, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi with Erica DiBenedetto, set out photos, publications, and newspaper clippings, floor to ceiling and in cases. They also include the handwritten text of a speech on the role of images of black and white America. Is blackness once again “going dark,” feared by or invisible to white eyes? For Julien, Douglass speaks forcefully but never gets over his introspection, his memories, and his pain. “Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

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

“Crafting Modernity” tells a familiar story, about a world torn apart and renewed by Depression and world war. Only one thing: this time it unfolds with a tapestry, a table, and a chair—and on another continent entirely. Make yourself at home.

You know the story, about modern life and modern art. As recovery looked more and more urgent and more possible, it brought not a revival of the gilded age, but a home life that many more could call their own. Middle-class comforts included much that could not have existed before the twentieth century. Renowned artists and designers embraced the cause, with furnishings that many more could afford, without the stifling air of Edwardian wallpaper. In no time, capitalism made that cause a consumer revolution, as craft gave way to new technologies and new pressures to spend. If it thus took back its own promises, it sound surprisingly like change today—only centered not on Asia, Silicon Valley, or Madison Avenue, but Latin America at the Museum of Modern Art, through September 22.

If you have heard this story before, it may well be at MoMA as well. In 2015 it presented the same four decades of Latin American architecture, ending around 1980. You may recognize Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi, whose architecture appears along with others projected on the walls, as a backdrop for what might have stood inside. Here, though, they contribute furniture—Niemeyer a low table, suitable for stacking or a communal meal on the floor. Bo Bardi brings quite an array of chairs. Roberto Burle Marx, who with Niemeyer created buildings for the new capital city of Brasilia, has a painting, like a sketch toward the new interior design.

The museum is out to extend what one even means by design. Gego appears not for her wire sculpture, but for wiry white diagonals on a huge hanging. Olga de Amaral, also with art of the Andes now at the Met, and Cynthia Sargent display fabric as well—and I also work this together with an earlier report on that show at the Met as a longer review and my latest upload. Here, though, it appears not as art for itself but tapestry for the home. The filmed architecture, in turn, sticks to homes, not to massive public projects. It is remaking modern life one family at a time.

Still, it is remaking private life in public. Chairs appear by far the most often, not bedroom furniture, and films focus on exteriors and common spaces. The International Style favored slim columns and glass houses, which allow one to look out on nature, but also allow others to look in. The curators, Ana Elena Mallet and Amanda Forment, feature just six countries, to give their distinct traditions their due. At least one artist claims to draw on pre-Colombian art, but be careful. One might just as well speak of global art in a newly global economy.

A long wall diagrams each country’s social networks, like maps of the art world for Mark Lombardi. They testify instead to interactions and displacement. Naturally they include Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and others from the Bauhaus, but also Alexander Calder, Black Mountain College in New England, and ever so much more. In the show as a whole, artists can trace their origins to a dozen European nations and the United States. But you have heard that story before, too, about refugees from fascism who helped create postwar art. No wonder furniture had an eye to portability and reassembly in the face of exile—like Niemeyer’s Modulo, a “puzzle chair,” or lounge furniture from Roberto Matta that fits neatly together as a square.

Assembly and repetition also encourage the shift from craft to brand names. Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy (later Grupo Austral) gave their initials to the B.K.P. chair, a descendant of the Marcel Breuer chair with its tube frame and suspended leather. They conceived it not in Argentina, but in the Paris studio of Le Corbusier—and copies quickly entered Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house, and the Museum of Modern Art. International enough for you? MoMA provided another spur to invention with a 1940 design competition. Several of the chairs look out on the museum’s sculpture garden now.

Both threads, craft and commerce, offer surprises. Other brand names include a logo for Olivetti typewriters. Ceramics, as with Colette Boccari, may depart from a perfect circle, as if fresh from the oven, without losing their subtle color. High tech can have an industrial look, too, like flashlights by Emilio Ambasz that could pass in reproduction for pipes. Much the same red plastic enlivens a bar cart, an ice bucket, and a TV. Sit down, turn on, and pour yourself a drink.

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