New York Art Notes

Fall 2025
I’ve covered the Met’s big show for the fall, Divine Egypt, in a separate post and will briefly run down here the other art highlights of October in New York and Washington–the latter because although the National Gallery was closed by the government shutdown we went ahead with our planned four-day visit. A big reason for that was the arrangements we had made for a first-time visit to Glenstone, a private site space a half-hour into the Virginia countryside. It was spectacular, five hours of beauty and stimulation. The beauty came mostly from the architecture and the landscape, with a rolling nature walk, pond and outdoor sculptures around an agglomeration of pavilions and a more traditional gallery space. The leaves were down but the drying fall grasses lent a serenity appropriate to the season. The pavilions were each devoted to a single artist, demonstrating the depth of the Rales’s collection. I can’t say I was wild about any of them, although Simone Leigh’s sculptures looked unusually wonderful in their spaces, including a kneeling woman in the water lily garden in the building’s middle. Jenny Holzer was given the most room, but I had seen this in a New York gallery before and anything political, which this all was, evokes unhappy thoughts at the moment. Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, Roni Horn, a big Brice Marden, Cy Twombly sculptures, Robert Gober–all came across as pretty muted. I couldn’t say that about the Alex Da Corte installation, a technicolor crowd pleaser amid a lot of black-and-white. Michael Heizer, on the other hand, stood out, with big beams driving (falling?) into the red ground in his pavilion, and a huge scar in the ground outside. The separate gallery had all the big names from the similar period, an interesting and high-quality selection.

If Glenstone was blue-chip modern and contemporary art, the Rubell Collection in southwest D.C. was truly cutting edge. More often than not, the works, generally three to an artist, asked to be photographed. I had heard of none of the artists (except for a center work by Isa Genzken, whom I’d only recently met at MoMA), and they came mostly from Brooklyn but also Sao Paulo, Berlin, Los Angeles and other art hot spots. Kudos to the Rubells for discovering and supporting these artists. It made me wonder about the National Gallery’s current initiative to collect in this field.

We had been to the Phillips Collection last spring, but we returned for the opportunity to tour with Mary Morton and a new curator there. It also rotates work often enough to make the visit fresh. Thomas Eakins’s Amelia Van Buren was back on display, and Mary broke down Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” in thrilling fashion. Our other stop was at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, principally to see a traveling show from Europe on 17th-century painters from Antwerp to Amsterdam. It was largely disappointing–the women were obscure for a reason; nothing reached the level of Judith Leyster’s self-portrait, which had only come a mile or two from the National Gallery. The permanent collection, however, was fun to see, and there was a fascinating show of collaged photographs by Tawny Chatmon.

The big surprise for me in New York was at the Frick: Terra Sancta, a collection of liturgical objects–chalice, chasuble, etc.–from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. They were beautifully displayed and explained and you got a sense of their rarity: produced by the leading craftsmen of Europe and sent as donations to the Holy Land, they have remained there undisturbed, and probably largely unseen, for three or more centuries while similar works in Europe were lost, stolen, melted down. The Neue Galerie exhibited Erich Heckel, one of the lesser German Expressionists. He had his moments, but not at the level of more famous contemporaries. For fame, few can match Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose drawings were shown at the Morgan, along with a couple of paintings. The only interest I had in this show was analyzing why I consider him such a terrible artist. His people are ugly, his draftsmanship is lazy, his compositions are boring. His fat, pink women with kewpie-doll faces are an embarrassment to Degas, et al. If not for my time with Mary Morton at the Phillips I would be ready to write Renoir out of the Impressionist canon. Sixties Surreal at the Whitney was another disappointment. The pieces on view were too disparate to make any meaningful statement, and few of the artists had anything in common. Much of the work, as expected, was political, to the extent that it was meaningless without its label and wasn’t much to look at on its own. Once again there was literally nothing I wanted to photograph and take home.

The one must-see show of the season was Ruth Asawa at MoMA. I had seen so much of her work at the Whitney show a few years ago that there was no revelation. In fact, the Whitney show was stronger on her two-dimensional output. Regardless, everything she drew or painted was gorgeous, and her prints were clever and handsome. What MoMA had in spades were her hanging wire sculptures. It astonished me that so many dated from the very early 1950s–why has it taken so long for the art world to catch on? It was hard to find a piece that wasn’t stunningly beautiful; the originality and craftsmanship were both breathtaking.

Jason Busch took us through the show of quilts at the American Folk Art Museum, and as someone with no interest in quilts, I loved them. The show was organized around the materials and techniques that went into the quilting; I just admired their beauty. For an encore to our trip we went to Princeton, where the Art Museum had opened three days before in an extraordinary building by David Adjaye Associates. I say “extraordinary” both because of the way it commands, even hogs, space on the college campus and its open architecture. A fortress on the outside, inside it flows around one floor, without a door in sight. Our host referred to the collection as “provincial,” but I found nothing to apologize for. Perhaps it would rank behind Harvard and then Yale for a university, but when you factor in Princeton’s smaller size the quality and diversity of the collection is top-flight. Much like the Brooklyn Museum has done, PUAM has chosen to highlight representative works in each category, rather than putting on display a large quantity of anything. A student could see a good example of whatever they are studying and then go to the Met in New York for more.

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.