Lillie P. Bliss, seen here in a photo circa 1924, is subject of new MoMA exhibit (the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York)
LILLIE P. BLISS AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN
MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through March 29, $17-$30 www.moma.org
“Dear Miss Bliss,” Bryson Burroughs, curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, began in a letter to Lillie Plummer Bliss upon her crucial support of the 1921 “Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art,” “I salute you as a benefactress of the human race!”
Born in Boston in 1864, Bliss cofounded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan. She died in New York two years later, leaving her collection of approximately 120 works by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French artists to the institution, including paintings by Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon. She also encouraged the museum to sell pieces of her bequest as necessary to acquire other works, which led the museum to expand its collection with such masterpieces as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.
Bliss is celebrated in the lovely MoMA exhibit “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” continuing through March 29. Organized by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, the show features such works as Cezanne’s The Bather, Seurat’s At the Concert Européen (Au Concert Européen), Marie Laurencin’s Girl’s Head, Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska, Picasso’s Woman in White, and Henri Matisse’s Interior with a Violin Case.
The centerpiece is The Starry Night, which, if you’re lucky, you will get to experience on your own, as it’s hanging in a different spot from its usual place, free of the usual mass of people in front of it, taking photos and videos, obstructing one another’s clear views and peaceful contemplation of one of the most famous canvases in the world.
Installation view, “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern” (photo by Emile Askey)
The show is supplemented with such ephemera as old catalogs, acquisition notices, pages from scrapbooks, photos of Bliss as a child, and a few rare letters, as Bliss requested that all her personal papers be destroyed shortly before her death in 1931 at the age of sixty-six. One key letter she sent to a National Academician is quoted in the MoMA book Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art, in which Bliss writes: “We are not so far apart as you seem to think in our ideas on art, for I yield to no one in my love, reverence, and admiration for the beautiful things which have already been created in painting, sculpture, and music. But you are an artist, absorbed in your own production, with scant leisure and inclination to examine patiently and judge fairly the work of the hosts of revolutionists, innovators, and modernists in this widespread movement through the whole domain of art or to discriminate between what is false and bad and what is sometimes crude, perhaps, but full of power and promise for the enrichment of the art which the majority of them serve with a devotion as pure and honest as your own. There are not yet many great men among them, but great men are scarce — even among academicians. The truth is you older men seem intolerant and supercilious, a state of mind incomprehensible to a philosopher who looks on and enjoys watching for and finding the new men in music, painting, and literature who have something to say worth saying and claim for themselves only the freedom to express it in their own way.”
Bliss did it her own way as well.
Clarence H. White, Belle da Costa Greene, platinum print, 1911 (courtesy the Clarence H. White Collection)
BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: A LIBRARIAN’S LEGACY
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 4, $13-$25 www.themorgan.org
“My friends in England suggest that I be called ‘Keeper of Printed Books and Manuscripts,’” Belle da Costa Greene told the New York Times in 1912. “But you know they have such long titles in London. I’m simply a librarian.”
Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879 in Washington, DC, Greene became the first director of the Morgan Library, specializing in the acquisition of rare books and manuscripts, a Black woman passing for white in a field dominated by men. Prior to her death in New York City in 1950 at the age of seventy, she destroyed all her diaries and private papers, but her correspondence with others paints a picture of an extraordinary woman breaking barriers personally and professionally as she came to be known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.”
Curated by Philip S. Palmer and Erica Ciallela, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy” consists of nearly two hundred items, from letters, photographs, yearbooks, and board minutes to illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, furniture, and books by Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Butler Yeats, and Dante Alighieri in addition to canvases by Archibald J. Motley Jr., Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Ḥabīb-Allāh Mashhadī, Albrecht Dürer, Henri Matisse, Jacques Louis David, and Thomas Gainsborough. Greene’s early holy grail was Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; she was prepared to pay up to $100,000 for the work, printed by William Caxton in 1485, but won it for $42,000 at a 1911 auction.
Re-creation of Belle da Costa Greene’s office is centerpiece of Morgan exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Just as MoMA would not be what it is today without Lillie P. Bliss, the Morgan would not be the same without Greene. While at Princeton, she became friends with Morgan’s nephew Junius Spencer Morgan, who collected rare books and who recommended Greene to his uncle; J. P. Morgan hired her as a librarian in 1905, and she was appointed director in 1924. Her starting salary was $75 a month, but she was earning $10,000 a year by 1911.
The show is divided into sixteen sections, from “A Family Identity,” “An Empowering Education,” and “Questioning the Color Line” to “A Life of Her Own: Collector and Socialite,” “A Life of Her Own: Philanthropy and Politics,” and “Black Librarianship.” It details Greene’s childhood, her successful parents, her education, and her friendship with art historians Bernard and Mary Berenson; Greene had a long-term affair with Bernard, who had an open marriage with his wife. Following Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene worked closely with J.P.’s son, Jack, to expand the institution’s holdings. The centerpiece is a re-creation of Greene’s office, with her desk, swivel chair, and card catalog cabinet, all made by Cowtan & Sons, accompanied by a quote from a letter she wrote to Bernard in 1909: “I was busily engaged hunting up particulars of a certain book & half the Library was on my desk.”
One of the most heart-wrenching parts of the exhibit explores her relationship with her nephew and adopted son, Robert MacKenzie Leveridge, who died tragically in WWII.
At the heart of it all is Greene’s dedication to her work. As she also told the Times in 1912, “I just have to accomplish what I set out to do, regardless of who or what is in my way.”
Like Bliss, Greene accomplished all that and more, in her own way.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
FRANZ KAFKA: PROGRAMS
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 13, $13-$25 www.themorgan.org
There are not a lot of authors whose name has been acknowledged as a legitimate adjective in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, and even fewer of those adjectives have been used as the name of a musical. In fact, the only one might be Kafkaesque, which is used for anything that relates to Czech-born German-language writer Franz Kafka and has “a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.”
Last fall, James Harvey’s musical comedy Kafkaesque! opened off-off-Broadway at Theatre 154 in the West Village, about one American family experiencing predicaments inspired by Kafka’s writings. The first song gets right to the point when Kafka sings, “By age forty I was dead / never had kids and I never wed / the words I wrote were hardly read / but now I’m an adjective.”
Kafka and his work have grown in stature since his passing in June 1924 at the age of forty from tuberculosis, leaving behind a literary legacy that includes the novels The Castle,The Trial, and Amerika and such influential stories as “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “The Metamorphosis.”
The Morgan Library is celebrating that legacy with the simply titled exhibition “Franz Kafka,” continuing through April 13. The show features original notebooks and manuscripts, letters about vegetarianism and his first hemorrhage, postcards, illustrated pages, family photos, handwritten aphorisms, first editions, architectural models, a diary, and other ephemera, primarily from the Bodleian Library, organized into such sections as “Life and Times: Health and Illness,” “Life and Times: Jewishness,” “Journeys: Around Europe,” and “Journeys: Of the Imagination.”
In his catalogue essay “Kafka’s Life and World,” British editor Ritchie Robertson writes, “Even during his final illness he kept writing. In March 1924 he wrote his last story, ‘Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse-People,’ and on his death-bed he corrected the proofs of the volume, A Hunger Artist: Four Stories, in which the story was included. ‘Josefine’ is a masterpiece of Kafka’s gentle, self-deprecating humour, and ends with the unexplained disappearance of the heroine and the narrator’s reflection that she will not be much missed. She ‘will lose herself happily in the numberless host of our people’s heroes, and, since we don’t go in for history, she will soon, redeemed and transfigured, be forgotten, like all her brethren.’”
Kafka often wrote about the unexplained, but he never disappeared from the public consciousness and will not soon be forgotten. The Morgan exhibition, held in conjunction with the centennial of Kafka’s death, is supplemented by a series of programs that delve further into Kafka’s life and world, ranging from panel discussions to special tours, workshops, lectures, and live music; below is the complete schedule.
Thursday, January 9 Kafkaesque: Creative Responses to Kafka, with Joshua Cohen, Maira Kalman, and Josh Luxenberg, Gilder Lehrman Hall, $25, 7:00
Friday, January 10
Virtual Spotlight Tour | Franz Kafka: The Making of an Icon, Zoom, sold out, 12:30
Wednesday, February 5
Virtual Lecture | Benjamin Balint: Kafka’s Last Trial, with author Benjamin Balint, Zoom, free with advance RSVP, noon
Gallery Tour | Franz Kafka with Benjamin Balint, Engelhard Gallery, free with museum admission, 2:00
Wednesday February 19
Winter Break Family Program | Franz Kafka Storytime and Artmaking, with readings of author Larissa Theule and illustrator Rebecca Green’s Kafka and the Doll, free with museum admission, 2:00
Thursday, March 6
Concert | Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis,” with pianist Jenny Lin, actor Saroi Tsukada, and bassist Lindsay Rosenberg, followed by a discussion with music publisher Richard Guerin, Gilder Lehrman Hall, $40, 7:00
Friday, March 14
Lecture | “Daylight at the Exit”: Women Translating Kafka, with Michelle Woods, Gilder Lehrman Hall, free (advance RSVP recommended), 6:00
Wednesday, April 9
Lecture | Nahma Sandrow: Kafka and the Vagabonds, with playwright and Yiddish theater scholar Dr. Nahma Sandrow, J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library, $20, 6:00
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who: Branjae, John Fullbright, David Amram, Red Dirt Rangers, Deana McCloud What: Livestreamed concert from the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa Where:Morgan Library & Museum online When: Wednesday, April 6, free, 7:00 Why: The Morgan Library exhibition “Woody Guthrie: People Are the Song” takes visitors on a deep dive into the life and career of Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie, the folk music legend who fought for everyday Americans through his staunch activism and protest songs. The outstanding show, continuing through May 22, features hundreds of items, from Woody’s instruments, records, letters, and notebooks to photographs, postcards, lyrics, and artworks, including a rare painting. The audioguide is narrated by country folk rock troubadour Steve Earle and features snippets of songs and archival interviews with Guthrie. Talking about moving to the West Coast, Guthrie says, “They called us ‘dust bowl refugees.’ But then there’s more than one kind of a refugee. There’s refugees that take refuge under railroad bridges, and there is refugees that take refugee and . . . take refuge in public office. But when we was out in California, all that the native sons and daughters called us was just ‘dust bowl refugees.’”
Guthrie, who was born in the small town of Okemah on July 14, 1912, and died of Huntington’s disease on October 3, 1967, in Coney Island, left behind a legacy that reaches around the world, impacting such musicians as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Wilco, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, and so many others. On April 6 at 7:00, the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa will present the live concert “Oklahoma Sings Woody!,” with performances by Branjae, John Fullbright, David Amram, and Red Dirt Rangers, playing three songs each, their own as well as Woody’s. While the in-person show is sold out, the event will be livestreamed for free by the Morgan, supplemented with a brief virtual tour of the center by founding executive director and chief curator Deana McCloud. Throughout his too-short career, Guthrie revealed the power that music can have on politics and the populace; as he famously carved into a guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” Yes, people are the song.
Philip Guston, Scared Stiff, oil on canvas, 1970 (courtesy of the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth)
There’s been much heated discussion in art circles about the postponement of a major Philip Guston exhibition for ideological reasons. Initially scheduled to open at the National Gallery this past June, it was delayed because of the pandemic to February 2021 at the Tate Modern in London. But then the retrospective, which was also set to travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, was put on the shelf until 2024 over concerns that some of Guston’s fabled imagery involving cartoonish Ku Klux Klan characters in white hoods would be misunderstood in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and other current sociopolitical issues. In a statement, the National Gallery explained, “We are postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.
“We recognize that the world we live in is very different from the one in which we first began to collaborate on this project five years ago. The racial justice movement that started in the U.S. and radiated to countries around the world, in addition to challenges of a global health crisis, have led us to pause.
“Collectively and individually, we remain committed to Philip Guston and his work. We plan to rebuild the retrospective with time to reconsider the many important issues the work raises.”
Impassioned debate ensued among art-world cognoscenti, including cries of censorship and extreme political correctness. The four institutions ultimately decided to move the exhibit to 2022 with extensive signage placing some of Guston’s images in contemporary context, which of course makes sense for almost any retrospective, especially one called ‘Philip Guston Now.’ But the controversy got me thinking about how we see art in 2020 and beyond, since these questions would not have been front and center for the Guston show prior to the events of this year.
So I visited several New York City museums to investigate whether it is still possible to look at art through a 2019 lens. For good or bad, it’s not. Will it ever be? Should it ever? Let’s go.
Héctor Zamora’s Lattice Detour is an artistic intervention on the Met roof (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster exhibition “Making the Met, 1870–2020,” which was planned and partially installed prior to the pandemic lockdown, opens with an advisory note:
“In June, in the wake of the violent deaths of George Floyd and other Black Americans at the hands of the police and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, the Met joined the nationwide call for justice. As a first step, the museum released a series of antiracism commitments, covering all of its activities, from programming to further diversifying our staff, with the goal of fostering an environment of equity, inclusivity, and dialogue.
“These events have intensified our reflections about the museum’s role in society, some of which resulted in updated and expanded texts for the show. Looking forward, we believe this moment will inspire institutional change and create new forms of engagement in the latest chapter of our history, which begins now, in 2020.”
Héctor Zamora’s Roof Garden Commission at the Met, Lattice Detour, was also well under way prior to the pandemic, but new perspectives now emanate from it as a result of what New York City has undergone since mid-March, when arts institutions, restaurants, office buildings, and other indoor venues were shut down — many of which are still closed or operating at limited capacity, as the Met is. Lattice Detour is a curved wall, echoing Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, running across much of the Met roof. The structure is composed of hollow terracotta bricks that were inspired by the celosia of Zamora’s childhood in Mexico City, building elements with geometric patterns that allow in light and ventilation. Thus, you can stand on either side of the wall and see through it; as interventionist sculpture — it is more than a hundred feet in length and eleven feet high — it blocks the usual view of Central Park and the south and west skylines, but you can still see through the bricks and take in the sun.
The only way to get to the roof is via one specific elevator, which often has a long line. For those visitors who are avoiding elevators, you’re out of luck, but there’s a maximum of two people for every trip, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go up by myself. Inside the Met, everyone is wearing masks and trying to maintain social distancing as they go room to room, some of which can get significantly more crowded than others. So the Roof Garden usually is, quite literally, a breath of fresh air, even with masks still on. But in this case, instead of being welcomed by a lovely vista of blue and green, you are instantly constricted by a large reddish-brown object blocking access to part of the space, evoking how much of New York is closed off to us.
“I find that the architecture of New York is largely designed to block the view, not to let you see in,” Zamora says in the exhibition brochure. “I think a lot about the social and legal rules that make public space inhabitable for everyone, and about their inflexibility, since those rules create an area that is totally alienated and uninhabitable for people, one where the sense of freedom is increasingly constrained. At a time when the limits imposed by political, economic, ideological, and institutional systems are restricting the freedom and rights of cultures, I propose a reflection based on what it means to build a permeable curved wall in a such a significant space for culture and history. Could it be that it is too late to try to reverse what we have decided or to unlock all those barriers that are petrifying us in the face of the need to make decisions?”
But perhaps more important than all that is how instantly pleasing Lattice Detour is, how it invites us into its space, draws us into its spell. Most visitors snap away with their cameraphones without thinking about the overtly political commentary involving Mexico, the United States, and legal and illegal immigration; does it matter, as long as the work itself engages us?
Jordan Casteel’s “Within Reach” at the New Museum features dozens of portraits of BIPOC men, women, and children (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
JORDAN CASTEEL: WITHIN REACH PETER SAUL: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
New Museum
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 3, $12-$18 www.newmuseum.org
At the New Museum, thirty-one-year-old Denver native Jordan Casteel’s first solo museum retrospective, “Within Reach,” consists primarily of more than three dozen glorious large-scale portraits of BIPOC men, women, and children. Her subjects are friends, family, and people she knows from the neighborhood or encounters on the street; each portrait is made from a photograph that Casteel re-creates as faithfully as possible. “I’m not imagining or adding language, props, or a symbology that wasn’t already there,” she notes in an online conversation with Hanya Yanagihara, which you can watch here.
Many of the works, which are named after the subjects — most of whom look back directly at the viewer, taking possession of the gaze — date from the 2013–14 series “Visible Man” and 2017’s “Nights in Harlem” in addition to more recent paintings of her students at Rutgers University-Newark. Cansuela sits on her bed, holding a stuffed panda. Jenna is poised on some rocks in a garden. Lourdes and Karina hold each other while sharing a chair. In individual portraits, Jiréh, Devan (emulating Egon Schiele), Elijah, Jerome, and Jonathan are all nude, sitting on couches, chairs, or beds.
In the interview, she continues, “The images for me become the catalyst that I don’t want to ignore, that there is a clear guideline for who this person is and what is important to them that I need to honor. But with that, I am also acknowledging my relationship to them. . . . I just don’t allow myself a whole lot of room to imagine who they are; I try to see them for who they are as they presented themselves to me and reflect back my experience of them.”
Painted with great skill by Casteel detailing every muscle, every facial gesture, every background furthering her anthropological style, the works recall August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, in which the German photographer sought to document as much of humankind as he possibly could. But in the twenty-first century, and particularly in post–George Floyd America, is it possible to see portraits of Black bodies without thinking of the many Black victims of police brutality? It clearly is not Casteel’s intent; she is celebrating each person’s uniqueness, who they are at this very moment, not who or what they may be later. It might be my own white fragility or oversensitivity, but Miles and Jojo, their skin tinted an alluring blue, do not look happy, staring out at us with accusation. One of the only canvases without a human figure is Memorial, in which a ribboned flower wreath is balanced over a garbage can on a street corner. I can’t help but connect Memorial with Miles and Jojo and the portraits throughout the rest of the exhibit, or with photographs I see in the news of murdered Black and brown men, women, and children, one after the other.
It’s also hard not to prescribe some kind of current sociopolitical bent to the works when seen in contrast to the New Museum’s other major current show, “Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment.” There is no subtlety in the eighty-six-year-old California-born, New York–based Saul’s approximately five dozen works, large-scale cartoonish paintings going back to 1963 that feature wild depictions of Mickey Mouse, Superman, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Newt Gingrich, Kim Jong-un, John Wayne Gacy, and Donald Trump, among others, as Saul shares his ferocious opinions on wealth, power, class, race, religion, and ethnocentrism. Many of the titles hold nothing back as well: GI Christ, Saigon, Yankee Garbage, Human Dignity, Stupid Argument, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and President Trump Becomes a Wonder Woman, Unifies the Country, and Fights Rocket Man. Even the name of the show, “Crime and Punishment,” evokes the relationship of police, the law, and citizens; I thought of how often white officers are not arrested, tried, and/or convicted for the killing of Black and brown people, considering whether they feel even the slightest bit of the guilt that overwhelms Raskolnikov.
David Hockney’s “Drawing from Life” at the Morgan Library includes digital portraits (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
DAVID HOCKNEY: DRAWING FROM LIFE BETYE SAAR: CALL AND RESPONSE
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 31 (Saar) and May 30 (Hockney), $13-$22 www.themorgan.org
Echoing the words of Jordan Casteel, eighty-three-year-old British artist David Hockney says about his latest exhibition, “Drawing from Life,” at the Morgan Library: “I always think the world is full of variety, and it should be reflected in my art ’cause I see it that way. When I get to know people, you see more in the face. Everything, even the smallest sketch, involves the human heart.” The two-gallery show comprises some 125 self-portraits and portraits on paper of a handful of friends, family, and colleagues from the 1950s to today, comprising multiple depictions over the years of fashion designer Celia Birtwell; Hockney’s mother, Laura; curator Gregory Evans; master printer Maurice Payne; and the artist himself. The works reveal Hockney’s development as an exquisite draughtsman and colorist, even as he moves from paper to Polaroid collages and the iPhone and iPad.
It’s exciting to follow the same figures thorugh the decades, to see them as Hockney sees them across eras of change. Yet I couldn’t help but imagine whether Casteel would be able to do the same thing, if she were ever so inclined, to revisit James, Charles, Stanley, Harold, or Q in ten or twenty or fifty years, since their life expectancy differs greatly from that of white British elites. Just check the actuarial tables. And the daily paper.
Meanwhile, upstairs at the Morgan, ninety-four-year-old LA-based Betye Saar’s “Call and Response” gets right to the point, a series of powerful assemblages and installations that confront race in America by overturning and reclaiming traditional imagery. Accompanied by the first public display of her sketchbooks, the show features such seminal works as Serving Time, a metal bird cage with locks, keys, and human figures; Supreme Quality, in which Aunt Jemima is holding a pair of pistols; A Loss of Innocence, a white dress covered in racial epithets, hanging over a small chair, a shadow on the wall adding a ghostly quality; and Still Ticking, consisting of more than a dozen stopped or broken clocks. Time might have run out on many, but Saar keeps on fighting the status quo with her artistic genius and innate ability to tell stories using found objects.
VIDA AMERICANA: MEXICAN MURALISTS REMAKE AMERICAN ART, 1925–1945
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Thursday – Monday through January 31, $18-$25 whitney.org
One of the key campaign promises Donald Trump made when running for president in 2015–16 was to build a wall across the southern border of the United States in order to keep out Mexicans. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists — and some, I assume, are good people,” he famously said.
Continuing through January 31 at the Whitney, “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945” is an expertly curated exhibit of nearly two hundred works by more than sixty Mexican and American artists that highlights the influence the former had on the latter. Curator Barbara Haskell writes in the catalog, “By portraying social and political subject matter with a pictorial vocabulary that celebrated the country’s pre-Hispanic traditions, the murals invested the age-old technique of fresco painting with a bold new vitality that rivaled the avant-garde trends sweeping through Europe, while at the same time establishing a new relationship between art and the public by telling stories that were relevant to ordinary women and men. Nothing in the United States compared.” The show might focus on art from seventy-five to ninety-five years ago, but it goes a long way to humanizing a culture that has been demonized by America’s current administration (as does Zamora’s Lattice Detour).
Among the standouts are Alfredo Ramos Martínez’s Calla Lily Vendor (Vendedora de Alcatraces), a portrait of a woman in long braids carrying several dozen giant lilies on her back, in front of a cubist background; Diego Rivera’s Lower Panel of Detroit Industry, North Wall, part of a massive mural created for the Detroit Institute of the Arts depicting men at work in a factory; David Alfaro Siqueiros’s haunting Echo of a Scream, in which a child cries out amid a massacre; and José Clemente Orozco’s Landscape of Peaks, with sharp objects forging a path to nowhere.
Divided into such sections as “Romantic Nationalism and the Mexican Revolution,” “Epic Histories,” “Rivera and the New Deal,” and “Art as Political Activism,” the works, which are placed in context alongside pieces by such American artists as Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Edward Weston, Aaron Douglas, Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Evergood, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, and Guston — several of whom are also represented in Jonathan Horowitz’s show at the Jewish Museum (see below) — have a contemporary relevance that speaks to what is happening between America and Mexico today, Black, white, and brown bodies caught up in a whirling maelstrom of change. Trump’s slurs against Mexicans only help to fuel a fierce urgency that hovers over it all.
Time and space are key to Donald Judd exhibit at MoMA (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
JUDD
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 9, $14-$25 www.moma.org
Even art that is not political in any way feels different now. In his 1987 “Statement for the Chinati Foundation,” the art museum he founded in Marfa, Texas, Donald Judd wrote, “It takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again. Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.” MoMA’s “Judd” retrospective was installed prior to the pandemic, but it is tailor-made for this time and place of social distancing. Exhibition curator Ann Temkin noted in a MoMA “Virtual Views” video in April that his works are “the original self-distancers.”
More than sixty pieces are spread across the sixth floor, from oils, drawings, and woodcuts to boxes, wall progressions, and other objects — along with his famed rejection of the word “minimalist” when referring to his work, he was no fan of “sculpture” either — composed of anodized and enameled aluminum, cold- and hot-rolled steel, plexiglass, plywood, copper, galvanized iron, and other materials, often in bright, distinct colors. Not only are the pieces themselves situated far enough apart from one another that you can have private time with each, particularly as long as MoMA is observing limited capacity restrictions, but the items contain their own unique positive and negative space in Judd’s use of form, shape, and color. You can’t walk between the twenty-one small and shiny stainless-steel squares lined up in three rows on the floor, but you are invited to wander among a series of large anodized aluminum clear boxes and peer inside to see panels of color.
The spaces in between and within are essential to experiencing Judd’s oeuvre, from his familiar vertical stacks that rise from floor to ceiling, the evenly spaced intervals as integral as the physical segments; to six plywood boxes constructed at an angle that seems to produce an optical illusion, taunting you to step inside; to narrow, horizontal enameled aluminum wall units in multiple colors that that are sometimes hollow in the center, allowing you to look through them; to Douglas Fir plywood and orange plexiglass pieces that resemble unfinished shelving crying out to be stocked with dry goods.
There is no obvious path to follow as you traverse the exhibition, lending an ease and comfort to how you interact with Judd’s organically infectious objects, offering personal time with each, although the security guard will be quick to warn you if you get too close to anything. In the 1994 documentary Bauhaus, Texas: The American Artist Donald Judd, released the year he died at the age of sixty-five, Judd said, “There is no space as in something that continues throughout everywhere, and that there is no time that goes on and on and on and is something all by itself. They’re made by something happening in them, in the case of time, or by something existing in them, in the case of space. But the time and space in themselves are just the way we feel about it.”
Jonathan Horowitz takes on racism and anti-Semitism in “We Fight to Build a Free World” at the Jewish Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
WE FIGHT TO BUILD A FREE WORLD: AN EXHIBITION BY JONATHAN HOROWITZ
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at Ninety-Second St.
Thursday – Monday through January 24, free through December 31 thejewishmuseum.org
In his introduction to “We Fight to Build a Free World,” which was nearly fully installed prior to the pandemic lockdown, fifty-four-year-old New York multimedia artist and curator Jonathan Horowitz explains, “Today violent acts against Jewish people in the United States are at a historic level. Continuing a trend of the past five years, 2019 represented the highest number of anti-Semitic hate crimes since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking them in 1979. This drastic rise in incidents — and it should be noted that hate crimes are vastly underreported — is not limited to Jewish people. Violence against Black, Muslim, Latinx, and LGBTQ individuals has increased alarmingly over the same period as well, often in acts the government does not designate as hate crimes. For instance, Black people in the United States are killed by police at three times the rate of white people, and 2020 is on pace to have the most police killings of Black people since 2013.
“Clearly, the rise in anti-Semitism is part of a broader political and cultural scourge. Ethno-nationalism has become a dominant political force in the United States, as it has around the globe. The current crop of authoritarian leaders and their xenophobic rhetoric call to mind Europe in the 1930s. It is within this broader context that I chose to think about the show.” The museum added the following note in response to the murder of George Floyd, making an already relevant exhibit that much more timely: “There is an intensifying awareness at this moment of how systemic racism functions at all levels of society. In the wake of these dramatic events, the topics and questions raised by this exhibition are seen in a new light and with ever-greater urgency.”
Named after a painting by Ben Shahn that is part of the exhibit, “We Fight to Build a Free World” features approximately eighty works that deal with social justice, bigotry, fascism, racist violence, slavery, economic inequality, and BIPOC empowerment. It ranges from Gerardus Duyckinck’s 1720–28 portrait of Jewish American painter-craftsman Moses Levy to thirty-six political posters commissioned for the show, making such statements as “Our Planet Can’t Wait,” “Using Sign Language Will Make You a Better Person,” “We Are Ruined by the Things We Kill,” and “Every Age Has Its Own Fascism,” by such artists as Judith Bernstein, Tania Bruguera, Marilyn Minter, Sue Coe, Xaviera Simmons, and Marcel Dzama.
Glenn Ligon repeats “I Do Not Always Feel Colored” over and over on a wooden board until the words become distorted. Gordon Parks’s American Gothic, Washington, D.C. Government Charwoman replaces Grant Wood’s painting of a white midwestern farm couple with the photo of a Black woman standing in front of the American flag and holding a broom and a mop. Robert Colescott reimagines a seminal historical moment in George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, recalling Saul’s twist on the same subject at the New Museum. Philip Evergood’s The Hundredth Psalm painting of four Klansmen lynching a Black man over a fire takes us right back around to Guston, bringing all of the above exhibitions full circle. (Now if only they would turn down the volume on Horowitz’s #OscarsSoWhite Best Picture two-channel video, which echoes annoyingly and repetitively throughout the floor.)
Horowitz’s show was created as a direct rejoinder to what is happening under the Trump administration — as evidenced by Untitled (August 23, 2017 – February 18, 2018, Charlottesville, VA), a sculpture that purports to be a black tarp covering the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville — but even it can be seen through new eyes in relation to the BLM protests against police brutality and the internal and external hatred and suppression promoted openly by the federal government. One of Horowitz’s 2020 pieces is titled What Am I? Who Are We?; the two-part work consists of an enlarged reproduction of anti-Nazi propagandist Arthur Szyk’s 1946 drawing Pilgrims, which contains a Jewish star, a menorah, two ships, and the Hebrew phrase “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” next to a mirror on which is screenprinted the rest of the quote: “If I am only for myself, what am I?”
As the end of 2020 nears, one of the most challenging years in American history, those are questions that artists, curators, and museumgoers will be asking for a long time to come.
Laurie Anderson and Nicole Krauss will be at the Morgan Library on December 5 for latest Le Conversazioni presentation (photos by Ebru Yildiz and Goni Riskin)
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Thursday, December 5, $20, 7:00
212-685-0008 www.themorgan.org
The ongoing series “Le Conversazioni: Films of My Life” continues December 5 at the Morgan Library with Laurie Anderson and Nicole Krauss sitting down for a discussion with moderator Antonio Monda, the artistic director and cofounder of Le Conversazioni, an Italian festival started in 2006 dedicated to literature but which has since spread to include other disciplines. Anderson is an Illinois-born, New York-based, Grammy-winning musician, filmmaker, composer, and multimedia performance and spoken-word artist who has released such records as Big Science and Mister Heartbreak, made such films as Home of the Brave and Heart of a Dog, and staged such cutting-edge shows as United States Live,Moby-Dick, and The End of the Moon. Krauss is the Manhattan-born award-winning author of Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, Great House, and Forest Dark. They will be discussing films that influenced their work. The 7:00 event is being held in conjunction with the Morgan exhibition “Verdi: Creating Otello and Falstaff — Highlights from the Ricordi Archive,” which will be open at 6:00 for ticket holders.
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 23, $13-$20 (free Fridays 7:00 to 9:00)
212-685-0008 www.themorgan.org
You might be surprised to find out that from 2005 to 2015, Wayne Thiebaud was sixth on the list of top-selling living American artists at auction, totaling more than $163 million in aggregated sales (trailing Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, and Jasper Johns and ahead of Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Robert Indiana, and Cindy Sherman). Or maybe that’s not surprising at all, given how his oeuvre is so viscerally pleasing while also technically adroit, as revealed in the lovely exhibition “Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” continuing at the Morgan through September 23. Now ninety-seven and still working, the Arizona-born, California-raised artist is best known for his luscious paintings of pies, jelly apples, ice-cream cones, and other tasty treats, but the show reveals him to be an expert draftsman through drawings and sketches not only of desserts but of cityscapes and landscapes. His influences range from Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Giorgio Morandi, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Paul Prudh’hon to Krazy Kat cartoonist George Herriman and time spent in trade school and the military and as a commercial artist, window dresser, and graphic designer for Rexall Drugs and Universal Studios. “One day [printer] Kathan [Brown] brought down lunch, which was a cheese sandwich, a couple of olives, and a beer, and I said, ‘Before we eat this, I think I’ll draw it,’” Thiebaud is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalog.
The show, the first extensive museum survey of Thiebaud’s works on paper, is a panoply of delights, from the 1964 watercolor and graphite “Nine Jelly Apples,” in which the sweet jelly seems to be dripping down the wall, to the 1983 charcoal “Three Roads,” an imaginative rendering of San Francisco streets, from a circa-1970 graphite self-portrait of Thiebaud looking serious to the 1960s-1970s “Page of Sketches with Ties,” four rectangular depictions of numerous ties, from the 1964 brush and ink “Hamburgers,” three rows of the all-American food, to the fantastical 1967-68 “Ridge with Clouds.” Thiebaud is not making any grand statements about consumption or hunger; the self-effacing artist and teacher is merely using his impressive skill to explore various subjects and styles. He also seems to have a penchant for drawing items in multiples of three, although he claims that is not on purpose and has no secret meaning. “Learning to draw is just learning to see more clearly and more organized,” he told curator Isabelle Dervaux in an illustrated talk at the Morgan. “That’s another side benefit of learning to draw. You’re going to learn to see a lot better and a lot deeper.”
Thiebaud’s works have a way of getting inside your head, offering up sweet memories. Walking through the exhibit, I was like, well, a kid in a candy store. I thought of the first hamburger I had at Wetson’s, of the candy store down the street from my elementary school, of how rarely I saw my father wearing a tie, of a cake my aunt used to make for my birthday, the first time I licked an ice-cream cone and the ice cream dripped onto my hand, of a childhood friend’s dog, and of getting lost while wandering through parts of San Francisco and New York City. Dervaux has done a marvelous job laying out the show, dividing it into such themes as “Foodstuff,” “Tradition,” “Early Drawings,” and “Cityscapes and Landscapes,” creating compelling juxtapositions that tell us yet more about Thiebaud and his methods. It’s a joy to experience these works, many of which have never before been shown publicly. “Most of these are private drawings — to find out something, to make notations, or just to experiment,” Thiebaud has said. “You want to feel that these are things that will never be seen.”
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 3, $12-$18 (free Fridays 7:00 to 9:00)
212-685-0008 www.themorgan.org www.artofbarbarawolff.com
Passover doesn’t begin until April 3, but you can get a head start on the holiday, in which Jews around the world retell the story of the exodus from Egypt, by visiting the Morgan Library and checking out its lovely exhibition “Hebrew Illumination for Our Time: The Art of Barbara Wolff,” comprising the first two illuminated Hebrew texts to join the Morgan’s celebrated collection of illuminated manuscripts, as well as its very first Haggadah. In 2011, New York artist Barbara Wolff was commissioned by the Rose family to create an illuminated Haggadah, the book used at the Passover seder that contains prayers, hymns, historical tales, biblical scenes, and other elements that expand upon the Jews’ enslavement and their battle with the Pharaoh more than three thousand years ago. Working with her unique blend of silver, gold, and platinum foils on vellum, Wolff designed beautiful artwork to accompany Izzy Pludwinski’s Ashkenazic Hebrew calligraphy and Karen Gorst’s English captions, incorporating flora and fauna native to the Middle East along with the standard elements of the Passover seder, including such symbolic food as the Paschal lamb, matzah, and bitter herbs. Each page is exquisitely designed: A large eye oversees a pyramid in which slaves are shown hard at work, more than twenty colorful ancient Egyptian gods are gathered together in the desert, and the ten plagues are depicted above and below a lush gold area featuring silver Kiddush cups spilling drops of red wine. The Rose Haggadah is a far cry from the familiar, old-fashioned blue-and-white Maxwell House Haggadah that was so prevalent throughout much of the twentieth century. Wolff’s remarkable sixty-four-page book honors Jewish tradition in a format more associated with Christianity, bringing new life to an annual ritual that honors the past while projecting hope for the future.
The exhibit also includes Wolff’s illuminated version of Psalm 104, “You Renew the Face of the Earth,” ten elegant works in which she uses platinum, silver, and gold leaf on goatskin parchment. “This great hymn to the divine in nature directs our awareness to the miracle of the world,” Wolff writes in the free exhibition handout. “The sentiments expressed in this psalm have particular relevance for our own era, a time of growing consciousness of the profound effect of human enterprise on nature, and of questioning our role as steward of our planet.” The ten illuminations include the signs of the zodiac, which represent the twelve tribes of Israel; golden Hokusai-like waves above rising mountains; a silver leviathan encapsulating smaller sea creatures; and twenty-eight Israeli birds in and around a Tabor oak, with every animal specifically identified. Wolff adds commentary about each folio; for example, in “To Bring Forth Bread,” which shows grains growing, she writes, “Wild grass, ancestor of man’s most ancient cultivated crop, became the foundation of civilization. . . . Shining fields of wheat and filled granaries are symbols of security, peace, and plenty.” The exhibition is supplemented by illuminated manuscripts from the Morgan’s collection that influenced Wolff, as well as a twenty-two-minute film that highlights her intricate, intensely dedicated working process. In conjunction with the exhibition, Vassar professor Marc Michael Epstein will deliver the talk “Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Barbara Wolff and her Place in the History of Jewish Manuscript Illumination” on April 1 at 6:30; on April 12 at 2:00, Wolff will lead the workshop “The Midas Touch”; on April 15 at 7:00, composer and accordionist Merima Ključo, artist Bart Woodstrup, and pianist Seth Knopp will team up for the multimedia presentation “The Sarajevo Haggadah: Music of the Book”; and on April 18 at 2:00, Stephanie Krauss will lead the workshop “My Very Own Illuminated Manuscript — Part 2: Putting It Together” for children eight and older.
