Judith Godwin, “Black Cloud,” oil on canvas, 1960 (© Spanierman Modern)
While the holiday crowds rush to MoMA to see the outstanding “Abstract Expressionist New York,” which continues through April 25, there are several free shows in the Midtown area that are ending this week and are more than worthy of a bigger audience. The eighteen works that comprise “Judith Godwin: Paintings, 1954-2002,” at Spanierman Modern (53 East 58th St.) through December 30, are easily deserving of their own room in the expansive MoMA exhibit, alongside canvases by such contemporaries and colleagues of Godwin’s as Franz Kline (whose Greenwich Village brownstone she bought in 1963), Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. “The act of painting is for me, as a woman, an act of freedom, and a realization that an image generated by the female experience can be a powerful expression for all humanity,” Godwin said in 1978, but there is no need to view her magnificent works specifically as those of a woman. Godwin’s bold brushstrokes and innate color sense, ranging from the yellows and golds of 1978’s “Tropic Zone” to the dark reds of 1979’s “Infidel,” from the vast, central white of 1977’s “Crusade” to the blues and reds that dominate 1954’s “Echoes, No. 2” and 1981’s “Harlem” and the black, brown, and cream of 1960’s stunning “Black Cloud,” result in powerful, emotional oils that both surprise and delight. Don’t miss this marvelous show, one of the best of the year.
Taryn Simon surveys her “Contraband” installation shortly before opening (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In November 2009, New York native Taryn Simon spent five days photographing items that were confiscated at John F. Kennedy International Airport, cataloging more than a thousand of the photos in “Contraband,” on view through December 31 in the glassed-in lobby gallery that is home to the Lever House Art Collection (390 Park Ave. at 53rd St.). Simon divides the contraband items into such categories as “Illegal,” “Prohibited,” and “Counterfeit,” including images of such obviously problematic goods as drugs, weapons, a dead falcon, pirated DVDs, and fake designer handbags and currency as well as various kinds of food and drink, cow manure, insect larvae, and even Russian matryoshka dolls. The photographs offer fascinating insight not only into the occasional stupidity of both travelers and Customs officials but also a telling peek into consumerism and desire run rampant. The location enhances the exhibit, as it can be viewed from the outside, as if everything inside has been taken away and stored, or from the inside, as the busy holiday traffic passes by ritzy Park Ave.
Daniel Buren’s Hermès silk scarves are on view and on sale on Madison Ave. (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The days after Christmas are followed by trips to stores to return unwanted items and purchase new things with gift cards, but it’s going to take a wealthy friend or relative to help you obtain one of the limited-edition scarves designed by artist Daniel Buren for Hermès (691 Madison Ave. at 62nd St.). French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, who in the past several years has designed uniforms for MoMA employees and covered the interior of the Guggenheim in aluminum foil, has now teamed up with the French luxury store to create a series of 365 silk scarves, combining photographs from his vast collection with his trademark colored stripes. Several dozen of the pieces can be seen through December 31 in the gallery on the top floor of the Madison Ave. Hermès store, where savvy shoppers can also purchase one of the unique items for about $7,000; each scarf comes with a deluxe book, PHOTOS-SOUVENIRS AU CARRE, part of Hermès’s carré d’artiste project, which began in 2008 with Josef Albers’s “Homage to the Square.”
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, but based in New York City for many years, Vik Muniz has been making portraits and re-creating artistic masterpieces using such materials as sand, sugar, jewels, junk, paper, and pigments and showing them in galleries and museums around the globe. In 2007, he returned to Brazil and met with the catadores, men and women who work at Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill in the world, picking out recyclable materials they can then sell to survive. He comes to know Tiaõ and Zumbi, who help run the Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gramacho, as well as such other catadores as Suelem, Isis, Irma, Magna, and Valter, each a character in his or her own right, with unique stories to tell. Filmmaker Lucy Walker (BLINDSIGHT, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) documents Muniz’s interaction with these dirt-poor people, who live in Rio’s dangerous favelas, as he sets out to capture their images by using the garbage they sift through to eke out some kind of living. Despite their surroundings, they are proud and happy, welcoming in Muniz, who is not shy about calling himself the most successful Brazilian artist in the world and sharing his determination to give something back. WASTE LAND is about art and ecology, about class consciousness and the vast separation between the rich and the poor. The film proceeds in a fairly standard, straightforward manner, putting Muniz and the project on too high a pedestal, which is not surprising given that the initial idea was Walker’s; the heartwarming subject matter, more than the filmmaking itself, is the reason it has been a hit at international festivals, including winning Audience Awards at Sundance and Berlin earlier this year. WASTE LAND is being screened at the Museum of Modern Art on December 29 as part of the series “The Contenders 2010,” a collection of influential and innovative international movies the institution believes will stand the test of time. MoMA has already shown such works as Luca Guadagnino’s I AM LOVE, Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION, Roman Polanski’s THE GHOST WRITER, and Mads Brügger’s THE RED CHAPEL, and upcoming films include Tom Hooper’s THE KING’S SPEECH, Mark Romanek’s NEVER LET ME GO, and Banksy’s EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP. WASTE LAND is also being shown December 23 and 29 at IndieScreen in Williamsburg.
Director Tamra Davis (GUNCRAZY) transports viewers back to the 1980s New York art scene in the intimate documentary JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD, which is having a special return engagement at Film Forum by popular demand. In 1986, just as the career of street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was exploding, Davis filmed him being interviewed by designer Becky Johnson, a revealing portrait that she put away in a drawer for more than twenty years. Davis finally brings out that footage, making it the centerpiece of this new examination of the ambitious, influential artist and musician who experienced massive success before falling hard and fast and dying of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven in 1988. Davis, a friend of Basquiat’s, conducts new interviews with many of the people from his inner circle, including art dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, Annina Nosei, Tony Shafrazi, and Bruno Bischofberger; Basquiat’s girlfriends Suzanne Mallouk and Kelle Inman; close Basquiat friends Diego Cortez and Fab 5 Freddy; NEW YORK BEAT cable TV host Glenn O’Brien; and fellow artist Julian Schnabel, who directed Basquiat in DOWNTOWN 81. Davis has also dug up amazing footage from the 1980s of Basquiat that shows him to be a unique, driven figure who used whatever he could — from broken windowframes and doors he’d find on the street to immense canvases — to spread his art and world view, which began with drawings in which he identified himself as Samo, criticizing contemporary art as “the same old shit.” Ultimately, though, it was his relationship with Andy Warhol that was the beginning of the end. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD is a dazzling document of a fascinating time and a cautionary tale of success that comes too fast, too soon.