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art reviews from around new york

Is photography an art? Well, if not, what is it? Ask a country known for the spirit of innovation and experiment, the United States.

If not art, photography might be photojournalism as a record of its time, literally making history. It might be the portrait you once kept in your wallet before you had a smart phone, to remind you of what it means to love. It might be social media or a science experiment. Photography has taken pride in making an influencer, even as it struggled to be more than a meme. It has been struggling in much the same way since well before there were digital media to influence. Now “The New Art: American Photography” heads back to its origins, through July 20.

The art of photography was not always new and not often American, but it was always an experiment. The Met draws on a single, mammoth body of work, the William L. Schaeffer collection, which it already calls its own. Selections run from the birth of photography, in 1839, through groundwork for the first New York subway, shortly before 1910. Just outside is a pale, piercing blue that photographers today would hardly recognize. And right at the entrance is an enormous camera. Experimenters had a lot to carry and a lot to learn.

There will be other devices to come, a touch more manageable, in an exhibition divided by competition to define the medium. They differ only in the metal, glass, or paper that offers support and the light-sensitive emulsion that coats the support and makes it work. That includes first daguerreotypes, then ambrotypes and tintypes, which conquered the unreality of reversing right and left. Albumen prints on paper combined portability and a finer resolution soon enough. And that blue is the color of cyanotypes, which anticipate photograms in placing their subjects on photosensitive plates without a lens. If photographers experiments extended the process from direct impressions to street scenes with a subway soon to come, experimenters were ingenious.

Just how much did the experiments differ? Less than you might think, for many a print lost its characteristic color as photographers touched them up with a brush. They were artists after all, just good or bad artists. Alice Austen nurtured the artistry of staged portraits, much as the young model for Alice in Wonderland pouted and posed for Lewis Carroll in England. Yet others scorned Victorian artifice, like Matthew Brady during the American Civil War. War photography offered no escape from dead bodies or marks of the lashes across a slave’s back. Just the facts.

Questions have dogged photography ever since, all the more so today. By the time of Modernism, including abstract photography, photography need no longer make excuses to make art. And Postmodernism’s critique extended to artistry of all sorts, wherever institutions and collectors cast their eye. The beauty of surfaces and mind games were two sides of the same coin. It was about time someone asked what purposes photography serves, no? But did that lead to acceptance or dismissal?

Some, like Carleton Watkins, cultivated the greatness of the American West and the shimmer of its waters. Josiah Johnson Hawes and John Moran insisted on their work as American and as art. Others saw potential in cities and towns. Every shopkeeper, photographers imagined, deserved a personal record as well. Group portraits could find an audience with families and communities. Other demands were eminently practical. It was just a short step from the first small paper prints to cartes de visite or “cabinet cards” for businessmen and gentlemen.

That still leaves something closer to home—pets, children, and other cuties. The types of photographs truly were social media, long before that had a name. Is it art after all or the antithesis of art? Is it a social or scientific experiment? How about a dog trained to stand with its front paws on the top steps of short platform or ladder? Like a successful posting, it was preaching to the crowd.

Remember geometric abstraction from nearly half a century ago? For Frank Stella, it could take flight like an exotic bird. For Elizabeth Murray, shaped canvas could explode into scraps from everyday life. It could have the craftsmanship and rigor of Charles Hinman, the casual but vital cool of Richard Tuttle, or the defiance of its own logic of Robert Mangold. For Ellsworth Kelly, it need not even depart from the rectangle.

It might seem newly relevant, now that painting is back, but less as formal exercise than as a hybrid of styles and media. I keep coming back to that hybrid, not solely with shaped canvas and its heirs. I have caught art between painting and sculpture or challenging the opposition between exuberance and geometry. Still other artists, though, are putting geometry through its paces much like Stella, including Don Voisine strictly within the rectangle. Voisine looks that much more provocative a decade later. His art does not need shaped canvas to reshape the rectangle.

And Voisine is getting messier. It may seem like sacrilege coming from one of the cleanest painters in town. Few have shown off as well how much energy a design can acquire just by cleaning up its act. Voisine keeps returning to diamonds, rectangles, and squares, framing them carefully with color, with the spotlight on the image center. Sound boring? You got tired of that, I know, in the 1960s, when what you see is what you got. For him, though, symmetry is itself the key to symmetry breaking. And I wrap this together with an earlier review of Voisine’s geometric abstraction as a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

When Voisine showed exactly ten years ago, he brought to mind the shaped canvas of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray in the 1960s, without once departing from the rectangle. He evoked Stella’s Irregular Polygons without the least irregularity. All it took was oil on panel, with plenty of blue, black, and white. Setting familiar shapes on their side, in concatenation, and treating some as accents converted triangles into arrows in space. Framing strips of a single color at top and bottom absorbed their pressure. It brought out the Neo in New York Neo-Geo.

Now he all but gives up the balance, but not altogether the symmetry, at McKenzie through June 29. This is his self-conscious revision, as “enact/re(d)act.” The borders remain, as notably broad as ever, anchoring the whole. They retain their unusual colors as well, including maroon and orange. Some are off-white, with a tempting translucency, making them thicker for the eye to penetrate. Squares may gather that much further to the center of a composition, as diamonds.

Titles suggest a combination of playfulness and restraint. You are at Poolside for the summer, with a Quip. This is Tranquil but Shearing all the way Through. Juxtapositions play a greater role throughout. Triangles become taller, slimmer, and slightly tilted, like metronomes in motion. Variations on black itself come into juxtaposition, challenging you to decide whether in fact they differ.

You could end up thinking that he has ruined the whole show, and he could be fine with that, too. Such are the risks of abstraction. Such, too, is the virtuosity of opaque color and translucent black. I could not say myself whether he had put his past to rest or built on it splendidly, but I spent a long time enjoying the effects. Besides, Stella has long since made a mess of the whole painterly show himself. Still, the focus is on clarity, in sorting out a thinner rectangle or a thicker X.

There is, as ever, plenty of decent abstraction out there. Take your pick. Not all of it need be woven, as a textile. Erika Ranee applies broad brushwork on a large scale, a mix of flatness and drips, predominantly red, in what could almost pass for Franz Kline redux, at Klaus von Nichtssagend through July 11. She calls it “My Saturn Return,” a reference to astrology that I could live without. Still, she means it to highlight an act of at once transformation and renewal, and many an abstract painter could say the same.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

You have seen it all by now, which is what makes it abstract art. The up side is that it can push the artist to rethink the very nature of the image. Coming to Iva Gueorguieva, at Derek Eller through July 11, you could have no clue what you are seeing. These are more or less medium-sized paintings, but with a lot going on.

Is this formalism? Not exactly, but the more the artist works the surface the more it returns to the painting’s center in the human image.

Gueorguieva layers on the canvas, with nearly white, wide-open fields that unify the whole. They serve, though, as a packed receptacle for brushwork as drawing. It dares you to decide whether the detail lands above or below. At first glance, the broader fields flatten the canvas and bring it closer to abstraction. Over time, though, they give a sense of a human or inhuman body. As paint it looks well grounded, but as image it can fly.

The gallery speculates that the figure is the archangel Gabriel, and once representation takes visible shape it is hard to make it disappear. Is there a story here? Maybe one about the art scene now that Postmodernism has given way to something less skeptical. Artists all over are turning to modernist tropes for their energy even if they seem more than a little old. Sarah Blaustein returns to the concentric swirls and spring colors of Post-Impressionism and early Modernism itself, recently at Hesse Flatow through June 7. You might be a trifle embarrassed to feel it in motion.

Robert Janitz relishes his place in the art world, even if you had hardly noticed him. Born in Germany, based in Mexico, and on view in Tribeca, he is proud of it. His latest work, “1001 Nights [ + 1 ],” claims the power of a mythmaker with its very title—and, with the bracketed subtitle, the power to one-up Islamic myth, at Canada through July 11. He sees himself as competing with the “swirling atmosphere” of New York. Never mind that most artists I know have resigned themselves to be pretty much out of the competition and faithful to their art. Janitz would call that surrender.

His gallery did as much as any to nurture artists between abstraction and portraiture like Katherine Bernhardt, Katherine Bradford, and Lily Ludlow, and Janitz hopes he has the formula. He lays down simplified bust-length portraits against a vaguely blank, vaguely patterned field as studies in brushwork itself. Then he packs what should be the face with broad, busy brushstrokes. They can roughly take the course of facial features or, in other paintings, take off on their own. Both sets of work serve simultaneously as marks of erasure and of three-dimensional space. An admixture of flour, oil, and wax keeps the colors mute and the faces in your face.

They leave me seriously unconvinced, but they only affirm how much painting still matters. Stick to abstraction or imagery and find yourself stuck with both. Or stop with abstraction as a metaphor—or a metaphor as abstraction. A map is an old metaphor for art indeed, and Lena Henke maps Manhattan as “The City Transformed,” at Bortolami annex through June 21. It looks ever so handmade, like a relic, as a nostalgic tribute to the city. So what if you cannot pin down just what about New York Henke is mapping, least of all its art?

For a time now, artists have been turning to weaving for the craft of the ancients and the latest thing in painting. An unknown quantity has become all but a formula, a cruel observer might complain, and a tribute to “women’s work” and a diversity of cultures has become just one style among many. You might as well delegate it to AI, the voice of authority continues, along with everything else.

Really? I am not convinced, but Jovencio de la Paz already has, and the results could have you rethinking old and new. It might also have you wondering just who these days is delegating what to whom.

Computer models can now turn out a text or an image in the style of anyone you like. Indeed, it has no choice, since a program cannot act without instructions, and there is no telling a machine just to make something great. Who gets to define great? And if the instructions call for something original, can it still claim originality? I argued for a similar “postmodern paradox” in starting this Web site, and it helped me rediscover Modernism and art history. Now AI could be the ultimate postmodern.

de la Paz makes a point of recovering the past, but as a collaboration with an uncertain future, at P.P.O.W. through June 21. This comes to Tribeca from not just any textile maker, but a Jacquard loom—or rather a digital Jacquard loom, if you can imagine that. But then a loom required instructions long ago, and automation had a cost in lives and livelihoods from the first. Yet it could adapt to shifting instructions, too, like those of an artist. It also produced practicality and beauty. It is, says the artist, “El Lugar de los Milagros” (or “The Place of Miracles”).

The show’s title is not just a lie. Up close, threads pop right out of the background. Step back, and the shimmer belongs to something like Op Art, as black verticals come closer to or farther from each other. The artist works in series, including grids and flattened circles, bringing the work that much closer to late Modernism. More often than not, the coarse weave leaves plenty of fabric unused. introduces the equivalent of unpainted canvas. It also breaks the symmetry.

Who, then, broke the symmetry? The artist has a shifting identity even apart from AI. Born in Singapore, de la Paz lives and works in Oregon. If the name sounds Mexican(and peaceable), the show’s title quotes a site in Oaxaca. Oh, and he or she prefers they. I cannot swear that this is LGBT+ art, but it has many loves and many collaborators.

The show overlaps Marina Rheingantz at Bortolami, a Brazilian who produces art of the Americas and a shifting, shimmering weave of paint alone. She works large, laying a fluid background of soft colors before overlays of scattered paint. Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and color-field painting loom over everything. Once again, what was past is new. AI and a loom can compete with this, but who gets to say so? AI may yet take a miracle.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

The Queens Museum does not “do” nostalgia, at least not willingly or well. It is too busy making up for its past, with artists from the Dominican community in Corona and the greater diversity of Queens. Besides, it hardly has to. Those of a certain age will remember the building as the New York City pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair all the same—with the Unisphere, still the symbol of “Peace Through Understanding,” out front.

Ready for more of a decade long on nostalgia and, simultaneously, hopes for the future? I look next time at “Pirouette,” a show of modern design at MoMA, as part of a longer review and my latest upload, but for today the course of the World’s Fair. The elevated platforms of the former New York State pavilion still rise close by. So what if now, after sixty years, an exhibition honors the World’s Fair as “A Billion Dollar Dream,” through July 13? The fair was a titanic undertaking, marred by corruptions, with a cost to the city of at least $60 million. It was the dream of a lifetime for many, but just whom?

The museum is overdue to build an audience, and this could have been the occasion. For opening day, it served Belgian waffles, an attraction of the fair, to all comers. Yet it is still the same low-budget operation struggling for relevance, and it cannot shake off its ambivalence. It serves up neither a celebration nor a critique. It bows to both as best it can, but with a long way to go. For now, too little is left after the waffles have gone.

Those too young to remember the fair can enjoy a model city as if it were made just for them—a literal model city, the fair’s scale model of New York. As you search for your block in a half-darkened room, you can feel yourself a part of a more optimistic era. Everyone belongs, it says, but not everyone gets the message. Charisse Pearlina Weston used her 2023 exhibit at the museum to decry the fair as an indulgence, taking over the park from its neighbors. One can feel their isolation, crossing to the museum over an eight-lane highway. One can feel it, too, in an art museum that never has caught on or in the park in winter, all but deserted apart from a brave jogger or two.

Can it recreate the wonder that a child like me once felt? It has maps of almost the entire park, in two and three dimensions, but then there is nowhere to go. Photos show the entrance to an elevated rail snaking through the fair’s density of pavilions to the tune of “It’s a Small World After All.” Here there is only silence. If pavilions for emerging nations stressed local cultures or their entrance to the world stage, one would never know it. The sole local costumes are uniforms for the fair’s admissions counter.

It asks to place the fair in its time, but only so far. It was automobile friendly, like Robert Moses, the ruthless urban planner who also organized the fair (a curious omission for the museum), and each of the leading auto makers had a pavilion. So did the ugly temptations of consumer culture and “The American Interior”? Will the show have room for at least a sample of Formica, if not an entire kitchen? Do not get your hopes up. A photo pictures laborers at work, including women, but surely someone had to build all this, and the Fair Pay Act of 1963 did not single out New York.

One can sympathize with the show’s ambivalence. The times had all the optimism of a new international order, but all the fears of the Cold War that no amount of show business could dispel. The fair brought with it the hopes of the civil-rights movement, but also protests from the Congress of Racial Equality. The 1939 World’s Fair was about the arrival of modernity. That brutal eight-lane highway connecting the city’s roads and bridges fell into place just in time. The 1964 World’s Fair was about what happens when modernity becomes the norm.

The passage from industrial waste to a park had foundered before. Flushing Meadow was still what F. Scott Fitzgerald called a valley of Ashes” and Robert Caro, in his biography of Moses, “foothills of filth,” but change was on its way. Not everyone could afford a car, but the fair fostered them—and automobile culture still rules in the city’s white outer-borough neighborhoods. The fair itself attracted far more than wealth as well, like my father and me. A year later, a ticket to the Beatles at nearby Shea Stadium cost just was $5.50. I only wish I could have gone.

The fair even had a place for art. Michelangelo’s Pietá came all the way from Rome to the Vatican pavilion, although the museum does not deign to mention it . Art is itself about felt experience, not amateur sociology. Maybe a little more such experience could at last put inequality on America’s agenda and the museum on a New Yorker’s map. The two world’s fairs were twenty-five years apart, and none has come since. There is a whole world left to bring alive.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To wrap up from last time on a larger home for the Frick Collection, what has changed in all those new square feet (eighty-two thousand of them, should you be keeping track)? You may be tempted to say nothing—and a good thing, too. It would take a remarkable memory anyway to spot the new, beyond a room for drawings.

Could two of the three Vermeers have left that one large room, and could anything else has moved with them? That glass-enclosed corridor offers a clue. It now displays porcelain, as does a room just past the long one, with a surprising clarity of color and representation. They signal a renewed effort to integrate the decorative arts, but as art rather than the highly wrought luxury goods of the Eveillard and Moore gifts just months before.

That second room for porcelain used to hold a standing saint by Piero della Francesca—whose scowl, bearing, and red robe should stop you in your tracks. Beside it hung a painting by Jan van Eyck completed after his death, with the broader strokes of Petrus Christus. van Eyck’s sunlight is as intricate as his city, its urban architecture a tale of suffering and release. Both paintings have moved upstairs. While not imposing order on a seemingly untouchable collection, the second floor does now frame the whole with the Renaissance and pre- or Post-Impressionism. Art itself provides the map.

Reaching them delivers the most startling change of all. A lavish stairwell, unlike a second just past the ticket counter, was there all along, where a museum visit might once have ended. The mansion is that much more one’s own. Is Frick’s daughter coming down soon for breakfast? You can judge better when the restaurant opens in summer, but I suspect not. The rooms upstairs have found a purpose in art, but memories of home are thoroughly erased.

It is not the museum I once knew, only not in the way I expected and feared. After the luxuriant architecture of the old museum, the upstairs rooms seem modest and cold. They have a more conventional symmetry, to either side of twin corridors, in cramped quarters with no invitation to the eye between rooms. They have almost no decorative detail, and the corridors are barer still. They can make art look abandoned by mistake—and a visitor an intrusion. Rather than a museum or a mansion, one could be casing out a New York apartment.

Then, again, architecture can change only so much, and art has a visible and palpable presence all its own. It surprised practically everyone that the Frick Collection looked great in its temporary home at the Frick Madison (the Whitney’s former home and the former Met Breuer)—but a collection this good would look halfway decent on the subway. Bellini’s Saint Francis really could hold a room to itself, and it can hold its place in the mansion now. An expansion is no less needed, and the bareness also signals a proper restraint. Piero, Hans Holbein, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Goya can still send you home in fear for your life. Still, this may be only the start of hangings and rehangings yet to come.

Meanwhile, they bring home the greatest change of all. No longer my private museum, the new Frick is downright packed, even on a weekday. And the crowds may find a map right within that great hall and within the art. Jacob van Ruisdael takes care to paint alternate paths through a wooded Dutch landscape, to let you know exactly where you might go. Vermeer’s woman with a letter holds a pen with its point on the table and a space above that increases millimeter by millimeter, ending in her hand. Imagined or observed, art knows to take their measure.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.