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Surrealism called its experiments with collaborative art Exquisite Corpse, but what was so exquisite, and where is the corpse? Half a century later, Ted Joans wanted to know, and the questions haunt “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body” at MoMA. I also work this together with a recent report on “What It Becomes,” about the changing image in an artist’s self-portrait, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Joans had every right to ask. The painter, poet, and filmmaker had been around himself, long enough to known André Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. As an African American, he could count himself among the excluded, even by a movement meant to live on the edges of the acceptable. As a jazz musician as well, he could only appreciate a form based on improvisation and collaboration. In the original corpses, each contributor could see only the latest addition (and only in part at that) before adding more. Joans conducted his version more blindly still, by mail.

Its thirty years of submissions, starting in 1971, add up to a long accordion book indeed, in a display case that makes you, too, take it one drawing at a time. Mailing labels and envelopes that got it here lie in disorder on the floor. Here, too, nothing is all that exquisite, and the corpse is as elusive as the artists were far away. So where is the body? It is the theme of “Vital Signs” recent work from MoMA’s collection, through February 22. If it remains elusive, such as art today.

If Ted Joans was awfully late for the extended party, so is the Modern. The curators, Lanka Tattersall with Margarita Lizcano, call the show “an expanded account of abstraction,” but abstraction had been losing authority even before it begins. Painting made its return all right, but where anything goes, including an ill-defined mix of abstraction and story-telling. One takes for granted now women artists riffing on the female body in art. The History of Her Life Written Across Her Face, by Margo Humphrey, could stand for them all. If her black face looks much like a mask and the images have spread to miniature suns and a crucifix on each shoulder, all the better.

That opening room, for “Mirrors,” and the closing room with Joans and “Multitudes” sum things up. Artists are there now, at the center of their fantasies and fears, but then so is everyone else. Nothing new here either, and one can predict easily enough what comes up. That includes the usual suspects, like Frida Kahlo (that face), Eva Hesse (a breast with a penis), and Louise Bourgeois (so many bodily spaces, not all of them yours or her own). Mary Kelley weaves a personal postpartum record, much like pregnancy and motherhood for Julia Phillips at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. The show ends with a younger voice, Barbara Hammer, intoning deep thoughts on the primacy of touch before the naughty bits get going.

Never mind a certain lack of novelty. This is, after all, a museum collection, receiving a welcome emphasis since MoMA’s 2019 expansion. “Vital Signs” may not look all that vital, but more than a hundred works by sixty-five artists will do—and the collection continues upstairs and down, with its room for Jackson Pollock and true abstract art labeled “Fields and Figures.” True, the themes feel forced and almost impossible to tell apart. When Adrian Piper has the exquisite taste to take Immanuel Kant and yoga with him on vacation, why does his painted mirror go dark? When Maren Hassinger sets out thirty-two black bundles of wire and rope, are they not multitudes, too?

The thematic layout also offers little help with chronology or artists. Just how, since the 1970s, did art get this way—or was it there all long? MoMA leans to the latter, but I am not so sure. Jackie Winsor blackens Minimalism along with her charred cube of wood pallets, but it seems a long way from the prints right behind it. Lorna Simpson shows only her back, her shoes, and the labels that a black woman hesitates to wear. Lynda Benglis turns up three times, but not posing with a prick.

Still, the show has plenty of shared strategies and impressive work. Colorful drapery by Rosemary Mayer has its dark echo in Mrinalini Mukherjee and a suit of black hemp. When Charles Gaines reduces a woman’s face to pixels and Maria Lassnig distorts her own on color TV, they are analyzing and reconstructing gender. So is Ana Mendieta, who changes her image simply by making up. Greer Lankton speaks of her art as an act of self-construction, though her “contortionist” makes more sense alongside Blondell Cummings, who turns a black woman’s household labor into “interpretive dance.” Nor is Rebecca Horn the only artist to see her life on video as a dream, a journey, or a trance.

The dualism of mirror and multitudes could even amount to a theme. While art as the mirror of nature has lost favor, it still casts its multiple reflections. Senga Nengudi has her supremely tactile nylons weighed down not by her legs, but by sand, and its rise and fall here extends many times over. Belkis Ayón offers herself as a gathering and A Challenge in black and white. And Kiki Smith inserts cut-out flowers into portraits as herself and as a worm. One could almost call it exquisite or a corpse.

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

Imagine the Museum of Modern Art without The Starry Night. Now imagine what it would have become without its founding director, Alfred H. Barr.

Not easy, is it? At one point, a turning point, as the museum approached its landmark opening in 1929, the two were at odds, and just try to guess who won. The outcome brought the museum that much closer to a canon for modern art, thanks in no small part to Lillie P. Bliss. Now MoMA gives her and her collection their due, to put its finger on what was at stake, through March 29.

Few exhibitions rewrite history, although more than a few try. With just forty works from the Lillie P. Bliss collection, the Modern rewrites its own history. Generations, me included, have learned how a young professor at Wellesley College gave modern art a defining history, one that lasted the rest of the century—and, to its credit, one that MoMA itself has worked hard for a while now to revise. Barr created a canon that started in Paris and found its fulfillment in New York, on the cutting edge of the present every step of the way. That is why he planned the new museum’s opening show on Fifth Avenue to stick to then contemporary American art. It took just three women to shoot it down.

As MoMA tells it, Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Quinn Sullivan were its true founders—with the indulgence at most of John D. Rockefeller himself. The three got the idea and contributed its core. Sick and tired of the crowds in front of The Starry Night, which is not even modern? Now you can see it much as it once stood in a private collection. Bliss also allowed her work to be sold to fund new acquisitions, a museum no-no today, but that helped pay for such stalwarts as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, as well. (That work still hangs in the main galleries.)

The founders saw a growing interest in the art that had shocked New York in the 1913 Armory Show, where Bliss first publicly exhibited her collection. She showed again at the Met, but she was not a precocious or instinctive collector. She met Arthur B. Davies, a painter of nudes and landscapes, and John Quinn, among the first collectors of modern art. Both had her looking back to the last century, with the Symbolism of Odilon Redon. She collected Georges Seurat as well—like the precision of Seurat drawings in Conté crayon in black. She found a new freedom, though, well into her fifties, with the death of her mother, who had needed no end of care.

And that freedom had her looking to the present—and to a future museum for modern art. I, for one, could easily leave The Starry Night to Vincent van Gogh on loan a year back to the Met. I could not imagine the Museum of Modern Art, though, without Paul Cézanne. No one else so embodies a vision of modern art as rigorous but constantly probing, even as the artist all but despairs of finding completion. And that vision was Barr’s. Still, Bliss collected work spanning Cézanne’s career, including Uncle Antoine, Pines and Rocks, Still Life with Apples, and the large Bather.

I still marvel at how his uncle plays the artist himself, how firm the bather seems, and yet how evanescent he is as well. I still marvel at how the weave of a forest both invites and defers the sun. I still marvel, too, at how the pattern on a cloth seems to tumble out onto a table with the already unstable apples. Bliss had caught onto something, and Barr must have been a welcome discovery as well. Still, she and her co-founders had to object when his planned opening show excluded Europe. Maybe her relative conservatism was at play, too, in starting with Post-Impressionism, but not altogether. Still, the women did not have to threaten a veto to change Barr’s mind, for he knew all along just how much lay at stake.

The show will never be “major,” and work will return to galleries for the museum’s collection when it is done. It includes letters, a telegram, newspapers, and the guest book from the museum’s opening for those who want to rewrite history for themselves. To the end, though, Bliss was still helping the museum keep up with its times. She bought Paul Gauguin woodcuts and a grandly flat portrait by Amedeo Modigliani. She bought Picasso’s Woman in White and the view out a window by Henri Matisse with an empty violin case and sunlight’s silent music. She died in 1931, never to see MoMA in its own building just blocks away from its first, the one she knew.

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

From the start, Thomas Schütte was destined to be the next big thing, and he delivers big things as well. Now if only the little things mattered along the way. For conceptual art that keeps you thinking, turn instead to Rodney Graham. And I work this together with a recent report on Graham and another class clown, KAWS and the KAWS collection, as a longer review and my latest upload. Is Graham, too, just clowning around? I am not so sure, but first to Schütte.

One can hear the expectations in his titles—Large Wall, Large Wallpapers, Large Spirit, Father State, and Mother Earth. One can see it in his care to recycle his themes often enough to spread the word. One can hear it words, traced on the wall above the entrance to his exhibition at MoMA, through January 18. Alles in Ordnung, he writes in simulated jet trails, perhaps on his way to an international career. “All Is in Order,” which is only fair when all is in his hands. Once inside, things can only get bigger.

That large wall simulates a brick wall, interrupted by another wide passage between rooms, in simulated bricks akin to dozens of monochrome paintings. Just before it, the twelve and a half foot bronze of the father state faces visitors with an ample robe and impassive smile. Trust me, it says, but do not even think to get past me. Born in 1954, Schütte lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a larger state, with grand new construction and memorials to match. The artist has no patience for such politics, power grabs, and platitudes, but he matches them in every way. It is what makes his work conceptual but reassuringly material.

Schütte has not had nearly the presence in New York that he has found with European fairs and collectors. Even close followers of contemporary art may be surprised to find him in the museum’s largest exhibition space. His large work and frequent repetition make a visit quick and easy all the same. Works appear in no obvious order, least of all chronological, which is only fair. The greatest number date from close to when his expectations began. He painted and sculpted his own grave in 1981, with a death date of 1996, because he gave himself fifteen years to make it big, and that’s that.

He came up just when art was taking on its own new expectations, which could easily have excluded him, but Schütte caught on and made it his subject. For the curators, Paulina Pobocha with Caitlin Chaisson, art was seeing the decline of Minimalism and a surge of conceptual art, but plain old realism was just too appealing for him to pass up. Perhaps, but he could never let go of anything. He studied at the Academy in Düsseldorf with Gerhard Richter and a stellar cast, including Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth. Richter could have shown him how the lushest of paintings, abstract or representational, could pose intellectual puzzles. Struth showed how the art of museums could pose the same questions, Gursky how large projects could remake the human landscape.

He was fine all along with Minimalism, but it had to be at least halfway conceptual. He paints with a single color on swatches of fabric or plaster, and his wallpaper has delicate verticals that recall Daniel Buren, but with an overlay of stains and brush marks. He starts with more strictly conceptual art, but it has to be skillful as well. He gives himself a day apiece and no more for self-portraits, just as he gave himself fifteen years to succeed. He sketches Valium, like Andy Warhol with a heavier dose of anxiety and irony. Don’t worry, and for god’s sake be happy.

Still, he built his reputation on sculpture. Genzken had shown how portrait busts can look makeshift and sloppy, and Schütte fashions a man lost at sea from oozing polyester and clay. Almost immediately, though, busts acquire a fine polish in ceramics or bronze. Most are of women, with their heads down in a vain search for comfort and rest. Some are men, as Strangers or Jerks. Both are an assault on the pretensions of public sculpture.

Schütte is less well known for full-length figures like Father State and Mother Earth, but they, too, can look grand while refusing to play the hero. Some have a silvery finish on comic-strip body armor or bulging muscles, but in poses that all but shout torment. The busts can rest on pedestals or shipping crates. He has much the same love-hate relationship with architecture old and new, including models of museums and mansions that will never be built. A concrete cylinder could be a bomb shelter, but then it emits dog yelps like another kind of shelter entirely.

From realism and public works to conceptual puzzles and Modernism’s last gasp, Schütte is showing off. Long after his self-portraits, his real subject is himself. He obsesses over it, with no end of sketches and prints. Take what pleasure you like in oversized slices of watermelon as Melonely, and do not take too seriously the hints of melancholy and loneliness. Do take seriously or comically an artist at home and in his studio, with a clothes closet, a rack for socks, miniature easels, and pitifully small collectors. It is not easy being a great artist, but Schütte will do, he promises, whatever it takes.

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

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.