this week in art

POETIC TRIGONOMETRY

Who: Clara Joy, K. Porcelain, Ed Pankov
What: Music and poetry in conjunction with the exhibit “Bey, Nkem & Elechi: A Triangulation”
Where: ChaShaMa Gallery, 340 East Sixty-Fourth St. between First & Second Aves.
When: Wednesday, January 10, suggested donation $10-$20, 6:00
Why: In conjunction with the Gallery Particulier show “Bey, Nkem & Elechi: A Triangulation” at ChaShaMa on the Upper East Side, which closes on January 13, a special celebratory event is being held on January 10 at 6:00, “Poetic Trigonometry,” featuring musician and artist Clara Joy, musician K. Porcelain, and poet, mystic, musician, and ordained minister Ed Pankov. The exhibition, curated by Grace Nkem and Arabella von Arx, puts works by Nkem, Amir Bey, and Obinna Elechi in conversation, exploring cultural identity and colonialism via the African diaspora through paintings, drawings, and sculpture, including Figure in a Corridor by Nkem, Purple Mask by Bey, and The Everything by Elechi.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: PORTRAITS AT THE FRICK

Barkley L. Hendricks, Lagos Ladies (Gbemi, Bisi, Niki, Christy), oil, acrylic, and Magna on canvas, 1978 (private collection / © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: PORTRAITS AT THE FRICK
Frick Madison
945 Madison Avenue at Seventy-Fifth St.
Thursday – Sunday through January 7, $12-$22, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.frick.org

My favorite specific spot in New York City museums right now is near the center of the larger of the rooms at Frick Madison containing the stunning exhibition “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick.” Facing south, about ten or twelve steps from an inner doorway, you can see a pair of James McNeill Whistler full-size portraits in the small space, Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux, from 1881–82, and Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, from 1871–74.

But on either side of the entrance to the Whistler room are two works by Hendricks, who was born in 1945 in Philadelphia and died in Connecticut in 2017 at the age of seventy-two. (Whistler was born in 1834 in Massachusetts and died in London in 1903 at the age of sixty-nine.) To the right is Ma Petite Kumquat, a 1983 portrait of Hendricks’s wife, Susan, while on the left is Miss T, a 1969 portrait of Hendricks’s girlfriend at the time, Robin Taylor. (Lady Meux was a working-class woman who married a brewery fortune heir and was never accepted by his family; Mrs. Leyland was a close friend of Whistler’s who was married to a Liverpool shipping magnate.)

The differences among these four large-scale vertical portraits are striking; grouping them together this way at the prestigious Frick, home to myriad masterpieces from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, is an ingenious decision by curator Aimee Ng and consulting curator Antwaun Sargent.

“The Frick Collection was one of [Hendricks’s] favorite museums, to which he returned again and again to visit paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Bronzino, and many others. All three floors of Frick Madison are the context for this special exhibition; though Hendricks’s paintings are installed only here, on the fourth floor,” Ng said in a statement.

Sargent added, “When Aimee and I first began speaking about the Frick and its place in today’s world, I suggested an exhibition on Barkley L. Hendricks — obviously because of his interest in historic art as he developed his own style of portraiture of Black subjects, but also because the quality, dignity, and visual impact of his paintings are what I would think Henry Clay Frick might be drawn to if he were collecting now, thinking of future visitors to the museum in another hundred years. . . . Presenting Hendricks’s art at a storied institution like the Frick pays due tribute to the historic significance of Barkley L. Hendricks, and it also honors the evolving role of the Frick in modern American culture.”

Mrs. Leyland and Lady Meux each wear long, light-colored elegant gowns that spread onto the floor: The former stands with her back to us, hands clasped, the flower designs on her dress matching the flowers in front of her as she looks wistfully off to the side; the latter, in a hat with a flower on it, is looking right at the viewer as her body faces away, one hand grasping her dress, making sure we understand her station.

About one hundred years later, Taylor, in all-black except for a metallic chain around her waist, is looking wistfully off to the side, her body facing us, hands behind her back, her afro a modern contrast to Mrs. Leyland’s up-do. Meanwhile, Susan is also facing us, but her eyes are closed; she is wearing a black outfit with a red flower on it, a bow tie, a green curtain pull across her shoulder (evoking the background of Hans Holbein’s Frick masterwork, his portrait of Sir Thomas More), woolly leg warmers, and red and green bows on her open-toed shoes, her nails painted, a leopard skin pillbox muff in her left hand.

The two pairs of paintings encapsulate hundreds of years of art history dominated by race, gender, and class, as Hendricks uses his early influences to capture a more honest present. “I wasn’t a part of any ‘school,’” he said in 2017. “The association I had with artists in Philadelphia didn’t inspire me in any direction other than my own. I spent my time looking to the Old Masters.” He also insisted, “It had to be done Barkley Hendricks style — no copies.”

Barkley L. Hendricks, Woody, oil and acrylic on canvas, 1973 (Baz Family Collection / © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

The exhibition features five canvases in which the Black subjects — October’s Gone . . . Goodnight, Steve, Lagos Ladies (Gbemi, Bisi, Niki, Christy), Slick, Omarr — are wearing white against a white background so their skin and hair color seem to be floating in space; in Woody, Jamaican American dancer Woodruff (Woody) Wilson has his two arms and one leg stretched out, in yellow leotards against a yellow background. In Lawdy Mama, Hendricks sets his relative Kathy William against a gold-leaf background with a rounded top, echoing Italian Renaissance gold-leaf works, of which many are currently on view at the Frick.

In conjunction with the exhibit, Nasher Museum of Art director Trevor Schoonmaker has compiled a special 1960s/1970s playlist, with a specific song for each painting as well as intro and outro tunes; for example, Rotary Connection’s “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun” for Lawdy Mama, Don Cherry’s “Birdboy” for Woody, Gil Scott-Heron’s “I Think I’ll Call It Morning” for Miss T, Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” for October’s Gone . . . Goodnight, and Bob Marley’s “Natural Mystic” for Omarr.

The Frick has been moving into the twenty-first century for several years now, beginning with “Elective Affinities: Edmund de Waal at the Frick Collection” in 2019, in which the author and ceramicist created site-specific vitrines of objects made of porcelain, steel, gold, alabaster, and aluminum and placed them throughout the museum, and continued during the pandemic at Frick Madison with “Olafur Eliasson and Claude Monet,” “Propagazioni: Giuseppe Penone at Sèvres,” “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” and the current “Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera.” Here’s hoping the trend continues once the Frick moves back to its renovated home on Fifth Ave. later this year.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN
MoMA, the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, sixth floor
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 13, $15-$28
www.moma.org

“I Dont Want No Retro Spective,” Omaha-born artist Ed Ruscha wrote in a pastel-on-paper work in 1979. Oof — well, he’s got one heckuva retrospective continuing at MoMA through January 13.

There are many joys to be experienced in MoMA’s revelatory “Ed Ruscha / Now Then,” the most comprehensive survey of his seven-decade career, featuring more than two hundred works, including painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, artist’s books, and installation. As eye-opening as the show is, what lifts it to another level for me is the audioguide, in which Ruscha, a longtime LA resident who turned eighty-six earlier this month, offers his personal perspective on thirteen of the pieces.

Talking about the 1962–63 OOF, a large canvas with the title word painted in a sans-serif yellow on a blue background, Ruscha explains, “My first paintings were of words that were monosyllabic, guttural utterings, like ‘oof’ and ‘smash.’ Words that had some kind of vocal power to them and also had a social discord. These words came out of sound investigation. It’s almost like you walk into a butcher store and ask for a pound of bacon and they take a pound of bacon and slam it down on the counter. It’s the slam that I was after.” His good friend, architect Frank Gehry, adds, “He’s very interested in the mundane and the stupid. A painting that says ‘OOF?’ It says everything about the place and time he was living in.”

“Ed Ruscha / Now Then” is filled with such slams, and not only in his word-based paintings, such as Boss, Won’t, and Honk, and such branding and product re-creations as Actual Size, a depiction of a can of Spam, and Annie, the logo for the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. Ruscha, who spent a lot of time on Route 66 and other highways, particularly in Oklahoma, Texas, and California, captures the heart and soul of America in such striking works as The Back of Hollywood (the other side of the Hollywood sign), Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (the 20th Century Fox logo), and Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, a spectacularly angled gas station in bold red, white, black, blue, and yellow).

Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, oil on canvas, 1964 (private Collection / © 2023 Edward Ruscha / photo by Evie Marie Bishop, courtesy of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth)

Discussing the nearly six-feet-high 1963 oil-and-wax Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, in which the word “Noise” is tucked into the upper right corner, Ruscha says, “The word ‘Noise’ and all words to me, they have really no size at all. You can see it a hundred feet high, you can see it in four-point type.”

In Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68), flames are shooting out one side of LACMA. Ruscha notes, “About this time that I was painting this picture, I had some, oh, maybe personal gripes about the art world in general. And I felt like the museums were not really doing their jobs as far as opening their doors to contemporary art. I didn’t have a hatred for museums, but maybe, like, I had a healthy distrust for museums. And so I guess part of this painting grew out of that. I didn’t know how this painting would be perceived. The museum actually had a notion to possibly buy that painting, which really surprised me, and then didn’t surprise me so much when they didn’t.” The exhibit moves to LACMA in April 2024.

And Ruscha says about 2022’s Metro, Petro, Neuro, Psycho, in which the four title words are shown above one another in decreasing size against a background of tall grass, “And finally, it comes down to selecting things that sometimes lead you down strange roads, sometimes they’re nonsequiturs, sometimes they’re odd word combinations. But they have to have some sort of power or some strangeness to them for me to get on board.”

It’s easy to get on board with Ruscha’s dazzling output; other highlights are his gunpowder drawings; Spread, a two-sided work made with tobacco stain; Our Flag, an acrylic painting of a disintegrating Old Glory; Evil, in which Ruscha used his own blood on satin; a trio of exceptional graphite and pencil drawings of LA residences; a series of canvases in which Ruscha replaces words with empty spaces or redaction, taking away people’s voices; and books such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Edward Ruscha (Ed-werd Rew-shay) Young Artist, and Flipping Kicking Howling Rolling Sitting Standing Climbing Telling.

In 1998, Ruscha told Tracy Bartly, “Seeing things age is a form of beauty.” Time is a constant element in Ruscha’s oeuvre, from changing landscapes to a painting of a segment of a clock, from a canvas that declares, “It’s Only Vanishing Cream” to a portfolio of liquid stains on paper. The walls of Chocolate Room are covered with decaying chocolate on paper, meaning it will look slightly different as the chocolate decays and accumulates bloom. Three large-scale horizontal paintings of LA industrial buildings from 1992 are paired with how Ruscha imagined, in 2003–5, they will look in the future; for example, the gray Blue Collar Trade School becomes the blue, white, and yellow The Old Trade School Building, now resembling a prison or hospital behind barbed wire, as if capitalism has failed.

The exhibit takes its name from a 1973 shellac on moiré rayon piece that melds past, present, and future, saying, “Now Then, as I Was About to Say . . .”

As long as Ruscha keeps talking, the world will continue to listen.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MANET / DEGAS

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), oil on canvas, 1875–76 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); Edouard Manet, Plum Brandy, oil on canvas, ca. 1877 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon)

MANET / DEGAS
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through January 7, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

In 2003, MoMA hosted the revelatory exhibition “Matisse Picasso,” a dramatic exploration of the documented, nearly half-century rivalry between the French Henri Matisse and the Spanish Pablo Picasso.

The Met is now taking a similar approach with “Manet/Degas,” a deep dive into the personal and professional relationship between French artists Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), albeit with far less direct evidence. “Each was incredibly ambitious, and their sustained, thoughtful, and at times competitive observation of one another and their contemporaries would become vital to their enterprise,” Met director and CEO Max Hollein says in the below video. However, wall text points out, “Attempts to assess the relationship between Manet and Degas are complicated by the sparse record of their exchanges,” and the narrator on the audioguide explains, “Manet and Degas would continue to push each other to take the risks that would define their careers. But they left little evidence of their relationship in their papers. For example, though Degas speaks of Manet in his many letters to others, none of his letters is addressed to Manet. And for his part, Manet left just a few letters to Degas.”

The show opens with Manet’s Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette) and Degas’s Portrait of the Artist next to each other, setting up the side-by-side nature of the exhibit, which comprises more than 160 paintings and works on paper. The men, born two years apart, met in the Louvre in 1861–62 and both became friends with artist Berthe Morisot, who later married Manet’s younger brother, painter Eugène Manet. They both copied Diego Velázquez’s depiction of Infanta Margarita. Before they met, they had each made a self-portrait in the style of Filippino Lippi. Manet’s The Madonna of the Rabbit, after Titian hangs next to Degas’s The Crucifixion, after Mantegna. At the 1865 Salon, Manet’s Olympia created a furor, as opposed to Degas’s relatively unrecognized Scene of War in the Middle Ages; the paintings hang nearby each other at the Met.

In 1868–69, Degas made a series of drawings of Manet in addition to a painting of Manet relaxing on a couch, looking at Degas as Manet’s wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, played the piano. He gave the canvas to Manet, who quickly slashed off the right side so his wife’s face and the piano were no longer visible. Degas ended up keeping the work and hanging it on his wall, eventually adding a blank strip that perhaps signaled that he was going to restore the missing section, but he never did. Manet never drew or painted Degas, but he did paint Suzanne at the piano, perhaps as a response to Degas’s work. While Degas collected paintings and drawings by Manet, Manet did not seem to return the favor. Degas helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874, while Manet decided not to participate.

Edouard Manet, Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), oil on canvas, ca. 1878–79 (private collection); Edgar Degas, Portrait of the Artist, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 1855 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Other telling pairings at the Met include Manet’s Standing Man, after del Sarto and Degas’s Study of a Draped Figure, Manet’s Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas and Degas’s Music Lesson, Manet’s The Dead Toreador and Degas’s Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, Manet’s The Races in the Bois de Boulogne (in which the figure at the lower right might be Degas) and Degas’s The False Start, Manet’s Plum Brandy and Degas’s In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (which feature the same model, actress Ellen Andrée), Manet’s On the Beach, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Marine and Degas’s Beach Scene and Fishing Boat at the Entrance to the Port of Dives, Manet’s Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet and Degas’s Hilaire Degas, and Manet’s Woman with a Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair and Degas’s Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair.

The show is divided into such sections as “An Enigmatic Relationship,” “Artistic Origins: Study, Copy, Create,” “Family Origins and Tensions,” “Challenging Genres at the Salon,” “The Morisot Circle,” and “At the Racecourse,” tracing the many intersections of Manet’s and Degas’s personal and professional lives, which continued after Manet’s death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one, as Degas, who died in 1917 at eighty-three, purchased more of Manet’s work, highlighted by his unsuccessful attempt to bring together all fragments of Manet’s masterpiece The Execution of Maximilian.

But the Met, in collaboration with the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, has done a marvelous job of bringing together the work of the these two giants, friends and rivals whose lives overlapped in captivating ways.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ATMOSPHERES: ARTISTS ON FEMINISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Torkwase Dyson (photo by Suzie Howell), Candice Hopkins (photo by Thatcher Keats), and Joan Jonas (photo by Toby Coulson) will be at New Museum December 14 for special conversation

Who: Candice Hopkins, Torkwase Dyson, Joan Jonas
What: Artist talk inspired by Judy Chicago’s ecofeminist performances from the 1970s
Where: New Museum Theater, 235 Bowery at Rivington St.
When: Thursday December 14, $10, 6:30
Why: Between 1968 and 1974, Chicago-born multidisciplinary artist Judy Chicago staged a series of events, called “Atmospheres,” that used fireworks to bring feminist impulses to site-specific environments, sometimes involving butterflies; she revisited the works in 2012, 2015, 2020, and 2021. In conjunction with the New Museum career survey “Judy Chicago: Herstory,” the Bowery institution is hosting what should be a compelling discussion on December 14. “Atmospheres: Artists on Feminism and the Environment” brings together curator Candice Hopkins, abstract artist Torkwase Dyson, and multimedia installation pioneer Joan Jonas to discuss the incorporation of the natural world into works that explore ecofeminism, from the 1970s to today. Hopkins is the executive director of Forge Project, which “fosters relationships between the land and the built environment, creating spaces of kinship for the people who use them.” The exhibition, which covers four floors of the New Museum, continues through March 3; there will be a live virtual tour on January 9 at 2:00 and the conversation “Herstory: Responses to ‘The City of Ladies’” on January 11 at 6:30 with scholar Sophie Lewis, poet Simone White, novelist Kate Zambreno, and moderator and exhibition cocurator Madeline Weisburg.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MY HARRY

Photographer unknown, Harry Smith at Naropa Institute, gelatin silver print, 1990 (Harry Smith Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; gift of the Harry Smith Archives)

MY HARRY
Whitney Museum of American Art, Education Center and Hess Family Theater
99 Gansevoort St.
December 8-10, $18-$25
212-570-3600
whitney.org

The Whitney celebrates the legacy of American polymath Harry Smith in the three-day festival “My Harry.” Held in conjunction with the multimedia exhibition “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith,” which continues at the museum through January 28, the revelry features listening sessions, illustrated lectures, film screenings, conversations, live music, art workshops, and more, with appearances by friends and colleagues of Smith, who was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923 and died in New York City in 1991 at the age of sixty-eight, leaving behind a treasure trove of music, art, and film that he both made and collected, as well as a lifelong interest in the occult. Among those participating in the weekend are Carol Bove, Ali Dineen, Bradley Eros, Raymond Foye, Andrew Lampert, April and Lance Ledbetter, James Inoli Murphy, Rani Singh, Peter Stampfel, Charles Stein, and Anne Waldman. Below is the full schedule.

My Harry: Magick and Mysticism
Friday, December 8, $8-$10, 5:30–9 pm

Listening Session: Harry Smith’s Field Recordings, 5:30

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: A Presentation by Carol Bove, with Carol Bove and Andrew Lampert, 6:30

Screening of Harry Smith’s “Film No. 14: Late Superimpositions,” 7:30

Harry Smith and the Future of Magick: A Presentation by Charles Stein, with Charles Stein and Raymond Foye, 8:00

Harry Smith, Untitled [Zodiacal hexagram sctratchboard], ink on cardstock, ca 1952 (Lionel Ziprin Archive, New York)

My Harry: Stories, Songs, and Strings
Saturday, December 9, free with museum admission, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

Stop Motion Animation Studio and Paper Airplane Workshop, hosted by Bradley Eros, 11:00 am – 3:00 pm

Singing Circle with Ali Dineen, 11:00 am

Peter Stampfel and the Atomic Meta-Pagan Posse, with Peter Stampfel, Eli Smith, Zoe Stampfel, Eli Hetko, Steve Espinola, Paul Nowinski, Sam Werbalowsky, Heather Wagner, and Dok Gregory, 12:00

String Figure Workshop with James Inoli Murphy, 12:00

Paper Airplane Contest with Bradley Eros, 2:00

On Mahagonny: A Presentation by Rani Singh, 5:00

My Harry: Affinities
Sunday, December 10, free with museum admission, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

Listening Session: Harry Smith’s Field Recordings, 11:00 am

On Harry’s Trail: A Presentation by Dust-to-Digital, with Lance and April Ledbetter, 12:00

Screening: A selection of films and videos featuring Harry Smith by a variety of the artist’s friends and associates, 1:00

Friendly Rivals: The Art of Jordan Belson, a Presentation by Raymond Foye, 3:00

Anne Waldman, 4:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CECILY BROWN: DEATH AND THE MAID

CECILY BROWN: DEATH AND THE MAID
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
Gallery 913
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through December 3, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

London-born, New York City–based artist Cecily Brown creates paintings of deep, swirling colors that combine abstraction with figuration, echoing specific works by Jackson Pollock, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, François Boucher, Diego Velázquez, and others, in addition to double imagery and classical still-lifes, with objects and subjects slowly coming to life as viewers spend time with the canvases. This weekend is the last chance to catch the revelatory exhibition “Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,” continuing at the Met through December 3. “The woman looking in a mirror is a subject I’ve returned to so many times over and over again. It’s the world reflected back at you, but you also feel like you’re seeing into another world,” Brown explains in the below Met video. “It is that sense of looking into another world that’s so fascinating about art in the first place.”

The show consists of approximately fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes from throughout Brown’s more than twenty-five-year career, including pieces made for the exhibition. Among the highlights are Maid in a Landscape, Death and the Maid, Nature Morte, Untitled (Vanity), Selfie, and Aujourd’hui Rose. The utter beauty of the works are intense and rewarding, each one unfolding to reveal its multiple layers; for example, do not miss the black cat in Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries, and Pearls. Several of the larger paintings are simply staggering; this exhibition is not one that should be hustled through but instead savored, a fascinating look into other worlds as only Brown can see them.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]