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From the start, Thomas Schütte was destined to be the next big thing, and he delivers big things as well. Now if only the little things mattered along the way. For conceptual art that keeps you thinking, turn instead to Rodney Graham. And I work this together with a recent report on Graham and another class clown, KAWS and the KAWS collection, as a longer review and my latest upload. Is Graham, too, just clowning around? I am not so sure, but first to Schütte.

One can hear the expectations in his titles—Large Wall, Large Wallpapers, Large Spirit, Father State, and Mother Earth. One can see it in his care to recycle his themes often enough to spread the word. One can hear it words, traced on the wall above the entrance to his exhibition at MoMA, through January 18. Alles in Ordnung, he writes in simulated jet trails, perhaps on his way to an international career. “All Is in Order,” which is only fair when all is in his hands. Once inside, things can only get bigger.

That large wall simulates a brick wall, interrupted by another wide passage between rooms, in simulated bricks akin to dozens of monochrome paintings. Just before it, the twelve and a half foot bronze of the father state faces visitors with an ample robe and impassive smile. Trust me, it says, but do not even think to get past me. Born in 1954, Schütte lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a larger state, with grand new construction and memorials to match. The artist has no patience for such politics, power grabs, and platitudes, but he matches them in every way. It is what makes his work conceptual but reassuringly material.

Schütte has not had nearly the presence in New York that he has found with European fairs and collectors. Even close followers of contemporary art may be surprised to find him in the museum’s largest exhibition space. His large work and frequent repetition make a visit quick and easy all the same. Works appear in no obvious order, least of all chronological, which is only fair. The greatest number date from close to when his expectations began. He painted and sculpted his own grave in 1981, with a death date of 1996, because he gave himself fifteen years to make it big, and that’s that.

He came up just when art was taking on its own new expectations, which could easily have excluded him, but Schütte caught on and made it his subject. For the curators, Paulina Pobocha with Caitlin Chaisson, art was seeing the decline of Minimalism and a surge of conceptual art, but plain old realism was just too appealing for him to pass up. Perhaps, but he could never let go of anything. He studied at the Academy in Düsseldorf with Gerhard Richter and a stellar cast, including Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth. Richter could have shown him how the lushest of paintings, abstract or representational, could pose intellectual puzzles. Struth showed how the art of museums could pose the same questions, Gursky how large projects could remake the human landscape.

He was fine all along with Minimalism, but it had to be at least halfway conceptual. He paints with a single color on swatches of fabric or plaster, and his wallpaper has delicate verticals that recall Daniel Buren, but with an overlay of stains and brush marks. He starts with more strictly conceptual art, but it has to be skillful as well. He gives himself a day apiece and no more for self-portraits, just as he gave himself fifteen years to succeed. He sketches Valium, like Andy Warhol with a heavier dose of anxiety and irony. Don’t worry, and for god’s sake be happy.

Still, he built his reputation on sculpture. Genzken had shown how portrait busts can look makeshift and sloppy, and Schütte fashions a man lost at sea from oozing polyester and clay. Almost immediately, though, busts acquire a fine polish in ceramics or bronze. Most are of women, with their heads down in a vain search for comfort and rest. Some are men, as Strangers or Jerks. Both are an assault on the pretensions of public sculpture.

Schütte is less well known for full-length figures like Father State and Mother Earth, but they, too, can look grand while refusing to play the hero. Some have a silvery finish on comic-strip body armor or bulging muscles, but in poses that all but shout torment. The busts can rest on pedestals or shipping crates. He has much the same love-hate relationship with architecture old and new, including models of museums and mansions that will never be built. A concrete cylinder could be a bomb shelter, but then it emits dog yelps like another kind of shelter entirely.

From realism and public works to conceptual puzzles and Modernism’s last gasp, Schütte is showing off. Long after his self-portraits, his real subject is himself. He obsesses over it, with no end of sketches and prints. Take what pleasure you like in oversized slices of watermelon as Melonely, and do not take too seriously the hints of melancholy and loneliness. Do take seriously or comically an artist at home and in his studio, with a clothes closet, a rack for socks, miniature easels, and pitifully small collectors. It is not easy being a great artist, but Schütte will do, he promises, whatever it takes.

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What better way to welcome the new year than with my least favorite show of the past one? And it is not quite gone. Ring out the old as best you can.

Could KAWS be a serious collector? Your answer may depend on whether you accept him as a serious artist. I am not so sure, but the Drawing Center is counting on it, through January 19, with the KAWS collection.

To be sure, his work is an assault on the whole idea of seriousness, in or out of art. His cast of characters, from the Simpsons to the Michelin Man, is always smiling. He can hardly restrain a smile himself with his second museum appearance in barely three years. Yet he is a collector, of thousands of pieces in an eclectic mix of art-world regulars and the comics. If you cannot tell the difference, that could be the point, and mainstream critics are eating it up. The KAWS collection searches for art high and low, in more than one sense, but its heart is in the comics and the comedy.

Right on the way in, to both sides of the entrance, KAWS includes colorful evil creatures out of an epic battle and reserved faces bearing the subtitle Original. But then you know not to look at either evil or claims for originality without smiling. Postmodernists questioning the “originality of the avant-garde” and post-Siri-alists can only agree. The collection includes self-taught artists like Adolf Wölfli along with street artists like FUTURA 2000, but then no one, however naïve, is immune to convention. What counts as outsider art anyway? Inquiring minds want to know.

KAWS himself (in real life, whatever that means, Brian Donnelly) began with graffiti and graduated to commerce. The highlight of his Brooklyn retrospective may well have been the gift shop, and the show was an exercise in branding for the museum as much as him. Even now, passing his huge cartoon Companions in the museum lobby, in polished wood, I cannot eradicate the pit in my stomach. The Drawing Center has only a modest lobby gift shop (with its own merchandise, not his), but it has succumbed to commercialism all the same. That still, though, leaves the real question: can it keep you smiling and get you thinking?

The results are mixed. KAWS could make Banksy, with his own museum just two blocks away, a model of self-sacrifice and Jeff Koons a model of integrity. And the layout can keep one guessing or get one giving up. The collection fills the entire Drawing Center in no obvious order, by theme or anything else. Three sections identify artists and titles only on plastic cards, and even those take an effort to find. Who needs artists anyway?

Taken differently, though, they create their own context for art. Two of the three resemble the living rooms and study centers favored by museums today. Works there hang on the wall and occupy platforms much like furniture, including robotic sculpture. And artists do cross over into the mainstream, including Joyce Pensato, Lee Lozano, and Willem de Kooning. Each has the fierceness of the artist’s own battles between forces of darkness and light. They leave open what to call demonic, sophisticated, or funny.

Too much else does not. R. Crumb has his usual high anxiety, and Peter Saul gets to misspell KILL, but you know their routine cold. Is there still something special about popular culture, alienation, or art? Just wait for the next installment in the series. KAWS is smart enough and dedicated enough to keep them coming. And for goodness sake keep smiling.

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Egon Schiele grew up in the shadow of sex and death, but it took him until he turned twenty to make them the stuff of his art. He hardly changed for the rest of his life. He had little choice, for he never reached age thirty. Besides, sex and death kept him busy enough along the way.

His father died of syphilis, and his parents suspected him and his sister of playing around. He formed relationships on his own terms and expected an open marriage. When that failed, he and his wife left Vienna for a town where their house became a haven for teenage girls. Arrested for seduction, he could have spent the rest of his life in prison, but the authorities settled for a charge of possession of pornography—more than a hundred drawings from his own hand. He walked free just in time for conscription in World War I. He died of the flu epidemic in 1918.

You may remember him for a painting of Death and the Maiden. Suffice it to say that they are in bed together, and the Schubert string quartet goes unheard. You may remember him that much more for obsessive self-portraits, often nude. Gaunt arms and hands extend to frightening proportions, their joints red with pain and the little flesh that remains touched by a gangrenous green. The Neue Galerie, though, sees his move from the big city as a return to a more idyllic childhood. It sees landscape painting and drawing as the one constant in his art, “Living Landscapes,” through January 13.

The exhibition includes photos of Schiele and poems expressing his dark, conflicted relationship with earth and sky. In reality, he was a handsome, charismatic young man, although always brooding. On coming to Vienna, he sought support from Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, and he got it. He exhibited with the first wave of Austrian Expressionism, the Vienna Succession, in 1909. Administrative duties in World War I kept him from painting, but also from combat, and he continued to exhibit widely, in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. If he had settled outside Austria’s legal and cultural capital as well, no one more relished the pose of the outsider in art or life.

A room for his early years does not look all that promising. Had Schiele died in 1910, like Paula Modersohn-Becker three years before, he might be remembered today as a Symbolist or not at all. When he paints landscape as a teen, it has little to do with nature. Dark compositions flecked by light look like nothing so much as Le Moulin de la Galette, from Pablo Picasso in 1900, when he, too, was anything but revolutionary. Schiele himself might have wondered if he would ever lighten up. Fortunately, he rediscovered sex and death.

For the 1909 Vienna art show, he contributed a painting of Danaë—smushed to the ground, but still a bloated white. Zeus came to her in a golden shower, but Schiele cuts out the gold and the rejuvenating rain. Soon enough, too, he introduces men. Lovers share a bed, seen from above or from nowhere at all, their long limbs at impossible angles. When he works on paper, the ground is as stained as the bodies. All he lacks is the gangrene, and that, too, is on its way.

Just months ago, the museum boasted of Klimt landscapes, but the show delivered far more than it promised. So does this one. A central room has landscapes to either side of the mantel, but with a visitor’s back to them coming in. Check out one, though, and its trees cast their branches everywhere—continuing as cracks in the soil, like a self-portrait with cracked skin. On paper, a thin, bare tree bears a spot of red, much like the artist’s knuckles. Could landscape have played a central role after all?

The last room follows him to the towns where he moved, and there, too, he has mixed feelings about the land. He lingers over a medieval town with its houses and spires, but with nowhere for him to stand, to observe, or to live. Distant hills have the angled blue facets of an iceberg. The town itself becomes a confusion of colors and geometries. And that confusion continues into paintings of a steel bridge and an equally massive mill. This may be landscape, but, yes, a living landscape, a place for the stubborn desires of modern life.

More than once, he returns to sunflowers. Had he developed a fondness for Vincent van Gogh and the gentle light of southern France? Yes again, and he admired van Gogh no end at an exhibition in Vienna. Still, he sticks to muter colors, and a rising or setting moon looms on the horizon like a distant eye. But then van Gogh, too, had his private terrors. And Schiele’s flowers, unlike those in a still life, are rooted in the earth as he could never be in art or in life.

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So many Eastern religions have embraced mandalas as connections to something beyond everyday pleasures and everyday cares. So many everywhere have marveled at their decorative richness.

Followers of Carl Jung have weighed in as well, because what Jungian can resist universal truths? So take a deep breath before entering the Lehman wing at the Met. “Mandalas” asks to appreciate them for what they are—not just catch phrases and aids to meditation, but literal guides to the spiritual universe. As the show’s subtitle has it, it is “Mapping the Buddhist art of Tibet,” through January 12.

You may need a map, a believer all the more so. This intricate universe reads outside-in, with concentric rows, columns, and circles of symbols like stamps or playing cards for the many steps in Vajrayana Buddhist practice. Over time, the rituals became more and more distinct, corresponding to distinct Tibetan sects. And the show also displays accessories to practice, most over a hundred years old. They are the practices of a warrior, with swords and shields. They are the practices of a celebrant, with masks, drums, and a trumpet so long that it could easily outstrip the trumpeter.

Oh, and what a universe it is. Buddhism has had its appeal to Westerners like Herman Hesse for its simplicity, especially in the spirit of the 1960s. It has seemed to tell a very human story, of the man who walked away from worldly temptations to become Siddhartha (or he who has achieved his goal) and the Buddha. Here you will encounter the five Buddhas, countless gods, their retinue, and their consorts. By that point, you may need an intercessor, and this form of Buddhism has plenty. They include goddesses, but also bodhisattvas, those who have achieved enlightenment but not yet become gods.

If they sound foreign to the jealous gods of the West, just wait until you meet them. They can be protectors, a source of hope as your karma determines who you will become in the next life. After a couple of centuries of Himalayan Buddhism, they begin to offer hope, too, to escape the endless cycle of reincarnation. Still, the most merciful gods are the ones with deadly weapons in the battle for enlightenment. But then the most austere in reputation are the sexiest. By all means, then, grab a map.

The Met has only a room for mandalas, off to the side. Rather, the show’s three main stages introduce the gods, the intercessors, and the rituals. The curator, Kurt Behrendt, sees them as getting you comfortable with the cast of characters before you reach the show’s true subject. In effect, they are maps to the maps. They all surround a central atrium with its own payoff—murals and carpets by a contemporary artist, Tenzing Rigdol. They present calm seas and rising or sinking suns in gloriously bright colors. They offer space to breathe and a place to rest.

Traditional paintings and sculpture are packed with detail. Ten heads rise up from one deity’s shoulders while samples of a thousand arms fan out. Patterns lend color—a predominant red, but alternating with blue, yellow, and green. A sun-struck yellow may serve as skin tone, but so may blue, sometimes faded to black. Pigment applied directly or mixed with glue, as distemper, adds intensity. The works may date back to the eleventh century, but they peak around 1350.

No question they take adjustments from ignorant Westerners like me. The cells of color flatten surfaces, but gods have a turn at the waist almost like Renaissance contrapposto, which announced a new humanism and a new approach to mass, motion, and depth. That turn at the waist can approach a dance as well, sometimes a wild one. Surviving practices include human dancers with loose robes and demonic, animal, or downright comic heads. All of these are about as far as can be from Chinese art or a show last year of not so early Buddhism. You may wish for more, like, say, mandalas traced in sand, but you could never have imagined a distinct north Asian universe.

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Exactly halfway through a show subtitled “Material and Motion” is a near empty room. A table set for a frugal meal nestles into a corner as if abandoned long ago.

Do not, though, not try to sit down. Mona Hatoum has left the sole chair empty, but its occupant’s unseen presence is not going anywhere, and her veins and flesh stare back from the center of the empty plate. The video recalls Hatoum’s actual colonoscopy, but that, too, has passed. So much for materials and motion, at the Guggenheim through January 11. And I work this together with past reports on sculpture by Dorothy Dehner and Alice Adams as a longer review and my latest upload.

The title proper, “By the Way,” sounds like a mere aside or a means to an end, and it returns often to assemblage, as object and act. Selections in 2021 from the museum’s holdings, as “Knotted, Torn, Scattered,” featured Senga Nengudi, her stockings and ropes sagging under their own weight. She is back now, and again the Guggenheim relies solely on its collection and largely on mixed-media constructions. (The museum rounded out its picture of collecting abstraction in 2022.) Materials and motion call for large work, and the present show has not two but three tower galleries. Hatoum’s table is small enough for a doll’s tea party, but the room itself looms larger and larger.

Still, it defies materials or motion. So does the poverty of Arte Povera in Italy. Gilberto Zorio leaves a scrap of PVC by the ceiling, while fiberglass from Piero Manzoni might have dissolved in a cloud. A motorcycle high on the wall from Mario Merz is going nowhere fast, too. Jannis Kounellis leaves a steel plate at an angle, casting its weight on sacks of coal. If you mistook them for coffee beans, you are reaching too hard for meaning.

The Guggenheim is as well. Each floor has its own theme—”On the Move,” “Gargantuan Appetites,” and “Material as Meaning.” Yet motion and meaning are hard to articulate, leaving only the gargantuan. Xaviera Simmons sets her snapshots beneath a strange black bundle, but her faces withhold their story. Kevin Beasley cakes sneakers, mics, and speakers in resin that both hints at a lost glamour and refuses it. When Mildred Thompson assembles wood into a flat picture, she might have slammed the door in your face.

As with these three, the show does not lack for talented African American artists—but not as you might expect. David Hammons, too, questions the material presence of the artist and his work. He has used such materials as shoe polish, a flag, and a hoodie—and all appear in a larger show of “Going Dark” on the museum ramp. Here, though, he leaves only the elusive traces of his “body prints.” Shinique Smith and Rashid Johnson are a closer match to the themes, with her bulging black fabric and his painting in black soap. It looks just right near the thicker surfaces of a white artist, Mark Bradford.

So does the mass of leather torn from the chairs of a Cold War secretary of state, by Danh Vo, or of a rug by Mike Kelley, draped over stainless steel pots. So, too, does the more modest mass of blue jeans from Joseph Beuys or a light sail from Robert Rauschenberg, in memory of India and his home on the Gulf Coast. The first thing one sees may be the most massive of all, coarse red mountains by Maro Michalakakos. They might have erupted that very moment, covering themselves in lava. As Dehner and Adams know so well, scale alone is mass. It just may not be going anywhere fast.

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Every self-portrait is a boast—a double boast. Yes, says the artist, I am a worthy subject, and yes I can pull it off with my art.

With “What It Becomes” at the Whitney, make that a triple boast, through January 12. Yes, its adds, I am worth hiding as well. There was more to me than you saw all along, and it is up to you, the viewer, to find it. As David Hammons has it, Close Your Eyes and See. .

Self-portraiture’s dual or triple nature goes back to its origins, in the Renaissance. An artist like Albrecht Dürer could boast not just of his skill, but of a new-found status relative to his patron as well. For Dürer in silverpoint at age thirteen, he had not yet even earned a patron. With “Hidden Faces,” covered portraits of the Renaissance at the Met last spring, every portrait was also a mask. Its sitter, after all, had an image to convey, too. By the end of 1960s, though, when the Whitney begins, the mask itself became a place to hide.

“What It Becomes” does not speak of masking. It calls art a way “to reveal the unseen” and to “make the familiar unrecognizable.” In other words, it is about self-creation. The curator, Scout Hutchinson, also speaks of art’s material presence, even in a space largely dedicated to works on paper from the museum’s collection, just outside the education department. It is about “inscription, erasure, and tactility.” It is a vanishing act all the same.

Presence is as presence does, starting with David Hammons. His body prints put himself into the act, but not to show his face. A famously reclusive artist, he reveals nothing, least of all his skill in drawing. They might as well be tire treads. He confronts, too, a black man’s invisibility to white eyes or, worse, violent removal. Body prints by Yves Klein in blue, not in the show, seem an empty boast by comparison.

The small show could be a catalog of strategies for vanishing. Some play the part of others, like Darrel Ellis in black wash, posing after a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Wendy Red Star leaves herself out entirely in favor of a leading Native American around 1880. The same red outlines in ink-jet prints frame her text and a hatchet in his hands, both as weapons. Toyin Ojih Odutola gives black skin to “famous whites.” Jim Hodges works with his own saliva, but the results look more like pond scum than a portrait.

Naotaka Hiro promises to Map His Body, with pretty enough colors but not much else. Others appear explicitly, but masked. Rick Bartow takes on the teeth and smile of a wild animal, in pastel and pencil. Maren Hassinger takes pains to apply her mask, like a woman applying makeup, but as blackface. I cannot say for sure whether her video celebrates, defies, or condescends to gender and race, but it resonates. Blythe Bohnen acquires her mask simply by time-exposure, so that the blur of her features serves as a beard.

Catherine Opie hides behind nothing more than her back and its blood-red incisions. And Ana Mendieta, never one to hide, brings one last strategy for vanishing. She sets an effigy on fire, leaving her very body image in flames. Self-portraits have become all but a ritual these days, as an affirmation of personal and cultural identity. These eleven artists look back to a time after Modernism when such things came with irony and pain. For all their flaws, they could still mean more than what it all became.

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