New York Art Notes

Spring 2025
The Met’s big show this season was Sargent & Paris, basically a retrospective of his works from the decade beginning with his 1874 arrival in Paris. The 1874 date was serendipitous, as it matched the “Paris 1874” exhibition last year at the National Gallery, commemorating the first Impressionist exhibition. We could see Sargent’s work in the context of what else was being made in Paris at the time. Sargent’s rise to fame rested on his portraits, especially his full-length portraits of Parisian society figures. They are technically flawless, unlike, say, the anatomical distortions of Ingres, and convey a regal bearing that must have endeared him to his sitters. I see Van Dyck and Constable as his obvious precursors, and the line sort of ends there (see “Amy Sherald,” below).  But Sargent these days is admired almost more for his genre pictures, his watercolors of nature and, at his previous Met show, homoerotic studies. For some reason I can’t understand and struggle to explain, I am turned off by much of this oeuvre. I am wowed by his better portraits–as with any artist working on commission, not all his subjects interested him–and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is one of my favorite paintings when it’s at the Boston MFA (it was less impressive in the Met exhibition). The rest of the stuff I can do without, including the Birthday Party I regularly saw at Mia. Why? The purple color that he favored? The slightly fuzzy line he used (when compared, e.g., to contemporaries like Tissot or Beraud). His high prices, which puts him in the Overrated category I resent? Sargent has so much in common with Whistler, and the comparison to me totally favors the latter.
The other big show at the Met was the opening of the remodeled Rockefeller Wing, to which I’ve devoted a separate entry.  On Members’ Morning our last day I strolled throgh “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Costume Institute’s big show for the year. The display is spectacular, the opposite of the Rockefeller Wing. Walls are black, light is low, objects are spotlit dramatically, glass casing is non-obtrusive and avoided where practicable. There’s no sense of open wasted space. The objects presented were an impressive mix of historical works from diverse American collections and modern examples from contemporary designers.  Overall, however, I felt a little uneasy at the show’s concept, singling out Blacks. The historic pieces, largely paintings and graphic work, signified less a choice of Black style than the clothes a slave owner used to dress his people. As for current design, it seemed to play into the idea of Blacks as different from the rest of society, which goes to the question of whether the Black Power movement was/is good or bad for all of us. Where to draw the line between Equal Opportunity and Black Entitlement? I have no answer, but the question nagged at me as I walked through the show. Only the ruffled shirt of Prince and the white portrait by Barkley Hendricks made me admire the art.

Now for something good: My two favorite shows of the spring were Hilda af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers at MoMA and Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity at the Jewish Museum. Like everyone else, I was stunned and exhilarated by the af Klint retrospective at the Guggenheim a few years back, introducing her as the real progenitor of abstract art. Her floral studies were something very different, but just as accessibly stunning. I’m a sucker for beautiful pictures of flowers, and af Klint’s eye and hand did more than justice here. But true to her esoteric philosophy (citing Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy), she categorized each botanical with a mystical symbol and a characteristic phrase, adding a dimension that you sensed but couldn’t really experience to each sheet. A handful of other, more typically abstract works and period field guides rounded out the surprising exhibition.
I’ve known Ben Shahn’s portrait of Sacco and Vanzetti forever, as it appears in almost every standard text of American 20th-century art. From this one work his style is immediately recognizable: flat figures, quiet colors, jagged edges, illustration-adjacent. The question, is this fine art?, seems less pertinent now that we recognize the artistry of so many Black painters who share Shahn’s intentional primitivism, from Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley through Kerry James Marshall and Henry Taylor. The show at the Jewish Museum opened with the famous “Sacco and Vanzetti,” seemingly Shahn’s largest work, but covered his entire career. By the time I left, I felt I knew all I needed, or was likely, to know about the artist, which, to my mind, makes it a successful retrospective. Best was the first gallery, which showed other, smaller works telling the Sacco and Vanzetti story, some derived from newspaper photos, and an equally gripping series on the Tom Mooney case, another apparent miscarriage of justice. Shahn’s social conscience drove his art, though wartime posters and civil rights manifestos. Only in his final years, when his art turned to Jewish words and symbols (perhaps emphasized because this was the Jewish Museum?) did it seem more pedestrian.
Amy Sherald’s career seems a little short for a retrospective, but the Whitney put on a handsome display of her work, which seems to have changed very little over the years. Her choice to paint all her Black subjects with gray(ish) skin against a bright monochrome background  adds to the sameness of her catalogue. Some works are very affecting, often because of the subject’s clothes. When she tackles a scene, rather than a straight portrait, the results are mixed; I like to think she has room for improvement and more excitement here. There was nothing in the Whitney show I liked as much as Sherald’s two paintings of men on motorcycles in the Giants exhibition which I saw first in Brooklyn and on this trip in Minneapolis. The obvious comparison to Sherald is not so much Kehinde Wiley (who authored the official Barack Obama portrait as complement to Sherald’s Michelle) as Barkley Hendricks, who also paints life-size Black models with a monochrome background. The Hendricks example in the Met’s Superfine show struck me as so much richer than any Sherald portrait. But let’s look again in ten years.

Fall 2024
I was lured to MoMA by the opening of “Vital Signs,” subtitled “Artists and the Body,” although it could more descriptively be called “Women Artists in our Collection and What they Thought of Themselves.” For most pieces, it seemed clear, the artist was more concerned with expressing something they felt than in communicating anything to the viewer. For example, scraps of a diary the artist kept each day her baby was growing up, paired with a handprint. Or, photographic self-portraits wearing different expressions and wigs. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to buy, let alone hang in their home, anything in this show. Visual beauty was nowhere on display. The point was even clearer when I moved to the galleries of the permanent collection. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Kirchner, Magritte, et al., were of course expressing themselves but in a way that made you feel you were part of the communication, not an outsider to the artist’s private life.

Going through the fifth floor of MoMA was the closest approximation I’ve felt in New York to our experience at the Uffizi. Only at MoMA the route wasn’t one-directional, so people were crowding from both directions. And there were probably as few New Yorkers, or Americans, in the crowd as there were Florentines, or Italians, at the Uffizi. Once again, I felt how poorly designed the layout of MoMA is. One has no idea what stairs, or elevator, will take you where. Once on a floor you need to find the sign to know where an exhibit is. The escalators from the upper floors don’t flow one to the next. And labels have been eliminated in the galleries, probably to keep people from camping in front of works in favor of iPhone audio away from the object for those who need that service.

I visited two museum-quality one-person exhibitions on the Upper East Side. Mnuchin Gallery generally has first-class examples of major artists, and their homage to Frank Stella was no exception. Bringing together  works from his lengthy career allowed my mixed judgments: his early black and straight-line paintings are classics; his colorful geometric series are distinctive and refreshing; his late-career 3-D painted aluminum wall sculptures are daring but ultimately empty. Still, you have to admire an artist who can create such different bodies of work, all with power and majesty. At the very opposite end of the spectrum we found Giorgio Morandi, also in a career retrospective that traveled from Rome to a pop-up brownstone gallery on 63rd St. Where Stella’s works are big and bold, Morandi’s are small and discreet, and for 30 years he seems to have painted the same bottles, jars and pitchers. Presumably he had to change the flowers he painted over the same period. There were lovely works at the start and at the end of his career. Rather than try to analyze how his style evolved, it was enough to love one composition after another. Seeing so many together didn’t dull the pleasure; it was a treat.

The other memorably fun show was works on paper from the collection of the artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly) at the Drawing Center. There were hundreds, but all shared a spirit of fun, much like the work of KAWS himself.