Art Highlights of 2021

Museum- and gallery-going were necessarily down in 2021, thanks to Covid, but we were fortunate to have our base in New York and family in San Francisco, giving us a chance to catch some of the season’s big shows and rub shoulders with smaller venues along the way.  In retrospect, the year doesn’t look so bad.

1. Vermeer at the Frick Madison. Having the Frick temporarily move four blocks from our apartment and space out its collection on the plain walls of the old Whitney building was a gift. It allowed a deeper connection to any number of works, notably for me Turner’s Harbor of Dieppe, Constable’s The White Horse and Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat. Best of all were the Frick’s three Vermeers on separate walls in their own room with a bench, where one could pause, reflect, admire, study and admire some more. In the fall, one of the three had gone to a show in Europe, being replaced by an example of contemporary Queer Art, which only made me realize how special my time with them in the spring had been.

2. Joan Mitchell. The best show we saw was the Joan Mitchell retrospective at SFMoMa, enhanced by curator Sarah Roberts’s private tour that we innocently latched onto. There was just enough information about the artist to fill out the picture, but it was the consistently appealing quality of the pictures that stood out. Her early works were entrancing; her late works were stunning. Coincidentally, the biggest work in the show, La Vie en Rose, had been my favorite painting in the “Epic Abstraction” exhibit I had seen at the Met in May (along with Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 30).

3. Jasper Johns. Even more than Johns’s oeuvre, what stood out here was the joint presentation by the Whitney in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Both shows in themselves were exhaustive and exhausting, but just different enough to keep your attention. Johns’s early paintings and objects are staggering in their power and continued relevance; and while I can’t say the same about his more recent half century, his search for new modes of expression is still impressive. Giving us a reason to visit Philadelphia, though, puts me in his debt.

4. British Rooms at the Met. At Candace Beinecke’s urging I made a special visit to the Met to see the newly installed British rooms and came away wondering if this is not the future of the encyclopedic museum. I had just been in Philadelphia, where traditional galleries of old European paintings, ceramics, furniture and sculpture were largely devoid of visitors and seemingly in need of dusting. In the spring I went through the Met’s rehang of its Old Master galleries and found them surprisingly boring. In contrast, my senses and spirits picked right up when I entered the Met’s British Rooms: mood lighting, original wall paneling and sensitive displays of a few highlighted objects made the experience so much more dramatic than a normal gallery. A panel on the wall set the historic period and gave a context to the art objects on display. As you walked through, rooms were of different sizes and objects displayed in different manners; there was no sameness from one gallery to the next. Instead of the “study collection” approach you get in the Met’s galleries of Greek vases or Baroque paintings, you were given a feel for a period and a culture. For the modern audience that prefers spectacle to scholarship, this may be the way to go

5. Holbein and Watteau. The Getty in the fall simultaneously featured a large traveling show of Hans Holbein the Younger and a small show, drawn from Los Angeles collections, of Antoine Watteau. The Holbein was a pleasant contrast to the earlier show of Medici portraits we had seen at the Met. Both 16th-century artists were favorites of the court and aristocracy, but while the Medici works, largely by Bronzino, were severe and mannered, Holbein captured his sitters’ personalities in a more human way. What struck me at both Getty shows, however, were the drawings by the two artists. Their well known “styles” were applied to the finished works. The drawings were not only more natural and spontaneous, they showed the surprisingly excellent draftsmanship of both men.

Honorable Mention:

6. For sheer fun, the drawing collection of Jack Shear at The Drawing Center in Soho, with Shear (the late Ellsworth Kelly’s partner) telling me of his Santa Barbara connection.

7. Visiting the new Lower East Side quarters of the International Center of Photography at the invitation of new director David Little and seeing the featured exhibit there, Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara, repeated in a smaller version weeks later at SFMoMA.

8. Unintended shopping trips to Questroyal Gallery where I looked for paintings suitable for Mia and wound up buying two “minor” works, by Bronxville’s George Smillie and Californian Julian Walbridge Rix, for my own gallery and a Daniel Garber for my bathroom.

9. Being wowed by works by artists new to me: Francesco Salviati’s Portrait of Bindo Altoviti in the Medici show; and a triptych by Mexican Remedio Varos in the Met’s International Surrealism show.

10. A fun trip to Christie’s where I found three paintings in “my” price range that I would have liked to bid on if we collected in those areas, by Sorolla, Daubigny, Firmin-Girard and van Ostade.