ArtNotes Fall ’22

Wolfgang Tillmans
MoMA’s  “members field guide” compares  the emotional impact of a wall of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans to a “perfect pop song,” which makes me feel not so out of it, as many a “perfect pop song” also leaves me cold. The just-deceased Peter Schjeldahl calls Tillmans a “genius” in his New Yorker review, but maybe not as a photographer, which makes some sense to me, for when I compare his oeuvre to the photographers I admire, Tillmans’ work doesn’t measure up in any sense: not subject matter, not composition, not lighting. The show’s title is another clue: “To look without fear.” That’s what Tillmans does: he looks everywhere and shows us what he sees, without apparent regard for how his resulting photograph looks to us. And adding to the random effect: the photos are displayed in differing sizes, at different heights, some sharp, some blurry, mounted mainly on Scotch tape. I can think of but one image that arrested my glide: a male and female model seated at different heights in a tree, naked under their open jackets.

Bernd & Hilla Becher
At the absolute other end of the spectrum, the Metropolitan Museum is presenting an exhibition of several hundred photographs by the German couple, Bernd & Hilla Becher, I’ve long known of their revered status as teachers of the next generation of German photographers– Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, et al.–but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of their seemingly straightforward portraits of water towers and industrial chimneys. It turns out that these are meant to be shown, and seen, in series, and that is what the Met show does in spades, in five-plus galleries. Their focus is crystal sharp, the compositions precise and identical, and the photos are all taken on overcast days, so there are no shadows or noticeable lighting. (A video reveals that when there was a tree in the way, the Bechers cut it down, or “altered the visual environment,” as the label described it.) What this does is make you look closely and notice the small differences in buildings that are constructed in the same region for the same purpose. Making you look is one goal of a photographer, and the Bechers do this. Tillmans does not.

Edward Hopper’s New York
The Whitney Museum massaged its enormous trove of Hopper material by focusing on works relating to his many years in New York: no haunting-looking houses or New England scenes,  but most of what we think of when we think “Hopper.” I didn’t spend time on the vitrines of archival material; looking at all the oils, watercolors and drawings took a good 90 minutes. My main takeaway was an appreciation of Hopper’s evolution as an artist: three distinct periods emerged from the Whitney’s largely chronological installation. First came a “French” period when Hopper was in his late 20s/early 30s and had spent time in Paris. Not really New York scenes, the four paintings on display had a soft-edged post-Impressionist feel, grayly reminiscent of Albert Marquet’s contemporary style. There was no obvious bridge to the Hopper of the 1920s, when he painted his New York City masterworks, stunningly assembled in one gallery from their homes at the Addison, the Whitney and the Met. Aggressively frontal and horizontal, almost devoid of human presence, they caress the brick and stone of otherwise undistinguished buildings in a loving embrace that forever flavors how one sees the cityscape as the MetroNorth train rumbles past 125th St. Hopper’s paintings of the ’20s have a warmth that gradually fades, until his paintings of the 1950s and ’60s are positively chilly. The trope of the lonely woman–usually modeled on his wife, Josephine–facing an open window or empty room is affecting at first but loses its power as it repeats and becomes more stark.  More successful is the usher at the movie house, similarly lonely but balanced by the lone couple in the audience, the sliver of grey movie screen and the theater architecture that engages rather than repels. “New York Movie” dates from 1939, and the more famous “Nighthawks,” absent from this exhibition, is from 1942, suggesting another fecund period for Homer between the warm ’20s and the cold ’50s.

The Tudors
The Met’s big fall exhibition, for me, was more history lesson than art showcase. It goes without saying that England in the 15th and 16th century was not Florence for artists and, indeed, the best objects in the show are almost all by foreigners, most notably portraits and decorative designs by  Hans Holbein the Younger and tapestries from weavers on the Continent. Nicholas Hilliard is easily the best of the native artists: his works are decoratively two-dimensional while too many other paintings are simply flat and dull. On a second run-through I counted a little more than a dozen pieces worthy of permanent display (some normally on display at the Met), but I left with a better understanding of the historical reigns of the Tudors: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary then Elizabeth I. So that is something.

Cubism and the Trompe L’Oeil Tradition
Every art museum should have an example of Cubism for its collection–or even three, allowing for works by Picasso, Braque and Gris–but works in this style grow increasingly deadening the more you show. To put on an exhibition with more than 50 (75, even?) Cubist works is to invite boredom, and that’s what the Met has done in its latest show. To add a veneer of originality and interest, its curators have complemented Cubist works by the big three from museums around the country and Paris with purportedly trompe l’oeil works to illustrate a novel and still unproven, to my mind, thesis: that Picasso and Braque were drawing inspiration from a largely 17th-century European tradition when they made their breakthrough. The comparison seems to be that just as trompe l’oeilists were messing with visual perception, so were the Cubists; and whenever either depicted grapes they were harking back to the mythical Greek artist Zeuxis, whose painting of grapes was so vivid the birds tried to peck at them.
One problem with this pairing was that my eyes came alive whenever I got to one of the “trompe l’oeil” examples, casting the surrounding Cubist works in an even worse light. Another problem is there was no clear definition of “trompe l’oeil.” Some of the most stunning paintings on display would normally be classified simply as “still life,” not “trompe l’oeil”–for instance the beautiful works by Luis Melendez and Adrien van de Velde. There were also fine examples of 19th-century American trompe l’oeil by Harnett, Haberle, et al., despite the curators’ concession that the French painters would have been totally unaware of this tradition.
But ultimately what killed my interest was the intense focus on the “inside-baseball” references in each Cubist work. What did Picasso (probably) mean by including these three letters, this bit of wallpaper, this bottle or that instrument, or how it was a response, or challenge, to Braque. On and on and on. A specialist might be interested. Me?–not so much.

New York: 1962-1964
There was no consistent art in this exhibition: in a video of Robert Rauschenberg at the Venice Biennale he responds to a questioner that he doesn’t think of any “styles” of art in New York; that there are a lot of individuals doing their own things. Indeed, “a lot” is the ultimate impact of this show on two floors of the Jewish Museum. Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Kelly, Indiana, Martin, Marisol, Bontecou, Bourgeois, Rivers, Judd, Dine, Ringgold, Segal, Kusama, Oldenburg, Arbus, Edwards, Thompson–this is just a starter list of the bigger names. Chryssa was the most interesting new name. As a bonus, we watched Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in its riveting entirety, then moved to the next room featuring a table of MAD Magazine covers, which put all of this art in a context–i.e., I was aware of none of it when it was being produced.

Morris Hirshfield  
Approximately half of Hirshield’s extant 80 paintings were nicely displayed, with large explanatory panels in each gallery, at the American Folk Art Museum. I’ve long been a fan, partly because his style is so consistent and recognizable (i.e., I’m pleased with myself when I can name the artist from across the room) and partly because I like decorative symmetrical works (see, also in this field, Martin Ramirez). Hirshfield’s painting career came late in life and was short, which helps account for its consistency; but perhaps the bigger factor was his singular vision. The world he saw was 2D, like the Byzantine and Trecento artists. I mean, they saw the world as we do, but not when it came to representation. A grown-up’s version of a child’s drawing. Simple, but with an edge.

The Brooklyn Museum
I went to see the reinstalled Asian galleries and was duly pleased. Following museum trend, the display focused on prime examples, not massed quantities, and everything was given room to breathe. Knowing the large number of objects in its collection, I’m sure Brooklyn left a hundred ceramics in storage for every one in a vitrine. Also democratic was the uniform series of galleries on the mezzanine, with China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia, Cambodia, and Buddhism all given equal prominence, if not space.
I spent the rest of my visit on the 5th floor, to see Art of the Americas as well as a special exhibition of 19th century French painting. There were many old friends here, but new was the politically woke spin evident everywhere. It wasn’t just the inclusion of Native American objects and paintings by Black artists, it was the apologia embedded in caption after caption. The label for George Washington’s portrait, for example, notes that our first President “enslaved more than 300 people” while noting that the tension between this fact and the Declaration of Independence affirmation that “all men are created equal” is absent from the painting. The gallery of Pre-Columbian art I visited for echoes of our trip to Peru was presented in the context of climate change’s effect on the region.

Alex Katz 
Alex Katz ranks high on the list of artists I like because his style is consistent and recognizable–and figurative, I should add–but unlike Hirshfield he had an extremely long career, so the retrospective at the Guggenheim included early and late works that, respectively, prefigured and grew out of his trademark flat, cut-off, brightly colored faces, with or without umbrellas or raincoats, but always without expression. Those are the works I like, but there can be too much of a good thing, and I found floor after floor of typical Katzes slowly dimming my enthusiasm. Whatever points the exhibition was making could have equally been made with half the examples. I found myself yearning for a juxtaposition with the work of Chuck Close, another artist who used the human face as an object devoid of personality.

Christie’s
We spent as much time at the Christie’s showroom as at any museum, due to the exhibition of two stellar private collections: first, Gordon and Anne Getty, then Paul Allen. What struck us most about the Getty collection was simply how much she acquired. There wasn’t just one gorgeous Fantin-Latour floral still life, there were nine, plus comparable bouquets by Matisse, Cezanne, Gauguin and Redon (2). On and on. The entire first floor, both sides, was chock-a-block with beautiful objects; there was almost nothing you wouldn’t want for yourself–if you had a room for Chinoiserie, a room for Belle Epoque, etc. The collection was catalogued in four volumes and sold over ten auctions. The Paul Allen exhibition was of a different sort: there were only 60 lots, mainly paintings, but it was full of masterpieces, from Botticelli to Gauguin to Richter. Both shows impressed me with exactly what one could acquire if money was, literally, no object. The Getty collection revealed a consistent taste: it leaned heavily on the 19th century, and Anne’s taste–decorative, elegant, exotic–emerged, along with particular interests: in addition to all the floral paintings, there were more than 15 views of Venice, by Canaletto mostly, but also Bellotto, Guardi, Boudin, Whistler and Prendergast. The only consistent note in the Allen collection was Big Names. Reflecting that, the top lot for Getty was a Mary Cassatt at $7.5 million, whereas the top lot from Allen tickled $150 million.  Granted, there was a second Allen auction of 90 lots beyond the 60 we saw, but even there it was artists you’d find in the major museums. Allen, or his art adviser, was not exactly seeking out great paintings by less-than-famous artists; and there was nothing edgy or unexpected in the works he bought. The van Gogh was as blandly pretty as van Gogh could be; the Cezanne was his least appealing rendition of Mont Ste. Victoire, but still, it was Mont Ste. Victoire. Seurat’s “Models” was a copy of the larger original in the Barnes Collection, and the Gauguin was almost a cliche of his Tahitian masterworks. But maybe it was their familiarity that brought over $100 million for each.