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art reviews from around new york

Ever wonder why pianos are black? Oh, sure, they come in white for the cheesiest of stars and Vegas acts, the kind that stop just short of dancing on the keyboard, but still with a touch of class. Julius Eastman was both cheesy and classy enough in his day to title a composition Evil Nigger, neither reigning in hell nor serving in heaven. He was, though, a serious avant-garde musician, and don’t you forget it.

Glenn Ligon, for one, remembers, and he builds an exhibition around that composition along with baby grand pianos and his own celebrated paintings, as the very image of blackness. If piano keys are mostly white, you will understand, at David Zwirner/52 Walker through March 22.

If you cannot decipher that image or pierce the silence, fine. These artists dare you to listen up. Both, too, know their way around jazz, where Miles Davis had his Live Evil. Ligon places a neon sculpture at the very center of the installation, with the opening syllable of Toni Morrison’s Jazz repeated and scrambled. Sth already sounds like a whisper akin to silence. But then his art often bears the marks of its own defacement or, deconstruction might add, erasure. The French for “under erasure” in Jacques Derrida is in fact sous rature, or scratched out.

Eastman’s composition sounds jazzy enough, too, when you can hear it. Just past the sculpture stand four pianos, with no performer in sight. Three, though, are Yamaha player pianos that kick in once a hour. It is worth the wait. Can music be at once lilting and brooding? His layered riffs on a single note sure is, and maybe a black artist has to be. As for the fourth piano, it is an antique for that touch of class.

The show also includes a print based a later composition, Thruway—where, you might say, the traffic barrels on through. Eastman’s rhythms guide a second neon as well, a wall sculpture, with the word speak blinking on and off in response. It appears a good dozen times within an oval, on top of the blinking, for repetition twice over. Ligon, now in his sixties, is a natural collaborator, who takes pride in his blackness but betrays uncertainty with each and every word. Ligon’s Whitney retrospective in 2011 seemed to grow out of a single text painting, Today I Am a Man. Rather than start over, allow me to refer you to my longer review then.

He was deceiving himself and no one. As an adult he was always a man, and white America could always deny it. He, in turn, could measure out the toll with repetition and erasure. A large text painting is pretty much illegible, and a still larger one approaches monochrome black. It effaces itself with coal dust, just as coal effaced working-class lives. The word America appears in large type upside-down, backward, and burnt.

Eastman, who died in 1990 at age fifty, gets a full wall for sketches and prints hung high and low. His words, too, could be confessional or a lie. If you cannot read them at that height and cannot make sense of what you can read, it happens. The score to Evil Nigger hangs by the front desk. It could serve as a score should, to lean on, or as just a teaser for his larger career as composer, pianist, vocalist, and conductor. Sth could also be the sound of words caught in his throat.

The gallery has featured blackness before in shows of Bob Thompson, Arthur Jafa, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Her title, “MASK / CONCEAL / CARRY,” could speak for them all. The space risks becoming making a ghetto for so prominent a Chelsea dealer, but I am not complaining. This is still Tribeca, and Ligon is exploring the limits of community and confrontation. He is also finding himself newly at home in collaboration. This is not one but two evil niggers.

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

What do you hate most about modern architecture? The odds are good that Paul Rudolph will have had a hand in it.

Could that be why his star has faded, to the point that you may never have heard of him? The Met places him at the very heart of his generation. It asks to see his work as soaring into space in all its material form, through March 16. True, if his most ambitious plans for New York had come to be, the Lower East Side would never have become a gallery scene. Gentrification has closed more than a few hot galleries anyway.

So what is it about modern architecture that drives you crazy? Is it Brutalism, with its concrete façades and, at times, brutal assault on the viewer? Rudolph called concrete “the material that can be anything.” Is it the urban planning of Robert Moses, leveling and dividing entire neighborhoods, with highways that still cut off half the Bronx from the other half and Flushing Meadow Park from the largely Dominican community. Rudolph was there, too, as designer of highways that would have barreled through Washington Square Park and the life of lower Manhattan. If Moses has become the evil mastermind in stories of New York, surely Rudolph deserves a terrible place at his side.

Is it the isolation of apartment towers for the wealthy few? Is it their long shadow cast on Central Park and capitals of Asia? Rudolph found commissions across Asia, for skyscrapers that left landscaping, public access, and pedestrian traffic to others, should they care. Yet he never lost his love of open space and modern materials. The fine shading of his pencil sketches alone aligns his interiors with sunlight. At his death in 1997 he still sought his “concretopia.”

To tell the story of modern architecture through the eyes of Paul Rudolph is like retelling Othello from the point of view of Iago, but with a difference. In place of that arch-villain’s “motiveless malignancy,” Rudolph laid out his motives clear as can be, and they can seem downright contemporary. In fact, he may have a closer parallel in Othello himself, with a spectacular rise and fall. He became chair of Yale’s School of Art and Architecture in 1958—and proposed a new building for it four years later. His plans for Robert Moses put him on magazine covers. That includes plans for yet another highway, along the Hudson River waterfront—all too close to where the city’s wealthiest galleries stand today.

Their failure made the magazines, too. The argument, by Jane Jacobs and others, against his assault on the street grid has been central to visions of the city ever since. Had his plans for the waterfront gone through, miles of parks, sculpture by David Hammons, the High Line, and Little Island would never have come to pass. Sometimes the good guys win one, and this time they did. Washington Square Park has had a revival. Just how bad, though, were the bad guys?

Unlike Moses, Rudolph was not content with subordinating neighborhoods to suburban access. He imagined integrating highways and vital architecture in a single structure, with towers overlapping roads. In his sketches, you might have trouble spotting the cars. Nor was he averse to decoration in architecture, although he preferred to find variety in the materials themselves. He saved a panel by Louis Sullivan in the shape of an older carving—perhaps because its plaster reminded him of the potential of concrete. Colored pencil enlivens his design for a chapel, to the point that rising diagonals of color overpower the worshippers and the altar.

The curator, Abraham Thomas, places him in the “second generation” of modern architecture, along with I. M. Pei and Eero Saarinen. Pei’s entry pyramid for the Louvre has a place in public memory, so why not Rudolph? Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport has become a hotel precisely because people will not let it go. The Met does not so much as mention such older architects as Marcel Breuer, whose former Whitney Museum made Brutalism itself a marvel. Nor does he mention Louis I. Kahn, whose Yale museums upstaged Rudolph’s academic towers and showed that concrete, too, can admit the light. Rudolph has no such fans, but he can help see what connects them all.

Consider how he went about constructing a tower. He worked like a child playing with blocks, stacking and staggering. It brings rhythms and variety—and encourages the eye to rise along with it. It amounts to repeated cantilevers, as with Frank Lloyd Wright, but without asking to defy gravity. It is modular, making it adaptable and affordable. Air and light can enter freely as well. Most of all, it calls attention to Rudolph’s favorite materials.

So what if they land like a ton of bricks? His designs keep rising, but do human beings have a place? His tubular wheeled chairs recall the Bauhaus, but are rigid and uncomfortable all the same. Still he was fully a part of his time. When he allows near cylinders to run the length of a structure, he approaches Kahn’s translucent Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. His own firm, near the Plaza Hotel and since demolished, anticipates today’s fondness for open offices. You can decide whether they would be open to you.

Art was in turmoil, so why not the Eiffel Tower? In the cool hands of Robert Delaunay, it barely touches the earth with its unforgettable steel frame.

Is it rising into the sky or collapsing once and for all? When he paints it again in bright red, has it caught fire, figuratively or for real? How about all at once? So it is with “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris,” at the Guggenheim through March 9—and I work this together with an earlier report on Sonia Delaunay as a longer review and my latest upload.

It was 1911, and Cubism had shattered convention with its assault on structure and representation. Pablo Picasso had not yet introduced rope into his illusory tabletops, marking the transition from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism. Already, though, one could speak of a choice at the very heart of modern art, between Cubism’s line and, thanks to Henri Matisse, Fauvism’s color. But why choose? Robert and Sonia Delaunay wanted both line and color, and they were not alone. The tall gallery off the atrium has a startling display, from their rainbow colors to the deep blues of František Kupka and Francis Picabia.

It was color in motion at that, like Kupka’s closely packed curves of translucent whites, akin to stop-action photography years later. Marcel Duchamp dismembered a nude in much the same way, shocking New York at the 1913 Armory Show. Many an artist now at the Guggenheim exhibited there as well, including Albert Gleizes, more often remembered as a minor Cubist. Gleizes returned to New York during World War I after serving in the military. For Europe, the sense of turmoil was all too real. And still modern art’s School of Paris soldiered on.

But was it Orphism? Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, coined the term, but history books have mostly settled on Delaunay’s choice of Simultanism. The curators, Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene, want something more poetic and encompassing than he could ever have produced. They include many outside Simultanism, like Gleizes and Duchamp. They see an international movement as well, from Natalia Goncharova in Russia to Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright in America—perhaps the first in modern art. Gleizes himself painted the Brooklyn Bridge with the same broken diagonals as Delaunay’s tower. The turmoil had spread.

The shows sees the same exploration of motion in the tumbling bodies of Fernand Léger in Paris and Gino Severini in Italy—and the same approach to abstraction. In fact, Orphism got there first, before Vasily Kandinsky. It sees the same exploration of color in Paul Signac. Was Post-Impressionism more “scientific” than Orphism could ever be? Perhaps, but Signac had also painted a critic and dealer as a magician, pulling a flower out of his hat. This was turmoil, but it was still magic.

What, then, sets Orphism apart if everyone belongs? It was not just color or line in motion, but also a device to achieve it, circles. Sonia Delaunay has dozens of them, and Robert Delaunay changed the shape of his paintings to disks. They delighted in the globes of Paris street lights and in a Ferris wheel, only a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower. For Marc Chagall, the Great Wheel gathers light within its circle like a nighttime sun. The parallel to color wheels in color theory (Kupka’s Disks of Newton) must have been hard to miss.

Modernism has another pair of stories to tell besides line and color. For critics like Clement Greenberg, it meant an escape from clichés and conventions into a higher realm of art. For Postmodernism, it has meant instead putting a torch to fine art as distinct from life. It had to pass from Cubism to Dada—or, with Sonia Delaunay, from painting to fashion as a part of life. And here, too, Orphism refuses to choose. Art and its fire were in the air, like the Eiffel Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge.

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

Alexis Rockman has returned to nature. He can hardly help it, for he considers it an imperative as an artist, but it will not be easy—not when humanity itself may well be extinct.

It has run what the subtitle of his show, “Naples,” calls its “course of empire,” at Magenta Plains through March 1. Naples itself may be already underwater. Just downstairs, Tseng Stealing sees much the same threat to America, without the halfway comic allegory. Yet his barren landscapes seem no less familiar and true. For an unforeseen context, I work this together with a report from nearly twenty years ago on “Monuments for the USA,” of artists obsessed an American Empire and its course as a longer review and my latest upload.

Only a year ago at the same gallery, Alexis Rockman seemed a true Romantic, with a capital R. He turned to bright, true colors on watercolor, a traditional medium for nature studies in close-up—much as for artists from John Constable to Beatrix Potter. Search the Web for the likes of them and you will find images of Italy and, yes, the course of empire. Thomas Cole, a founder of the Hudson River School, made it a five-part allegory for past Europe and an emerging America. He also made it a model for a new American art. Scientists may have made the medium their study, too, but these were the facts of culture, art, and myth.

Cole’s allegory opens with a pastoral ideal and ends in terminal decline. America, he thought, could outlast Europe, but it needed a course correction. The work may reveal its own near-fatal struggles with expansion between banks, railroads, and slavery as well. Rockman, too, is making a course correction. He has once again a dense wall of works on paper, well observed, but in brown like an old photograph, and the brushwork has taken on stippling like an encrusted surface. And that texture carries over into his first large painting, of a whale breaking the surface. It creates roiling, bubbling waters, its nose towering high above.

It also dares you to know what is real, what is human, and just what is going on. A curved band at the bottom in black distances the scene, and, easy to overlook, a yellow-orange palace rests at the right on the sea floor. You will see many more of its like in sunlight as the show continues, but then you may never know for sure what counts as broad daylight. The whale dwarfs the palace entirely, as does the wall behind a second scene, with lampposts, fish swimming past and nosing about in front. Is that a street scene, sunken for good, or are the fish inheriting the air? Is the glimpse of a grand villa behind the wall part of the same scene or not?

It gets either better or worse. Comets dive through the rest of the show, and another fish swims through the sky trailing a shower of gold behind. It could be an advertising banner for empire trailing behind an airplane or a discharge from its rear end. Rockman can overdue it, in his imagery and garish colors, and I hate to start over on him with a second review. Still, he is newly vivid in his return to nineteenth-century Italy and America. He also complements his last show and keeps you guessing what comes next.

Tseng Stealing skips right ahead to American decline, just in time Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration. He may seem, like MAGA, most at home in the debris and the show’s “Mouthful of Dirty Copper.” Environmentalists may cringe at his acres of abandoned trailers and discarded trucks—or at least call for land-use management. Others may claim it as their own. Yet it looks familiar for good reason. It has muter color than Rockman’s, like many ordinary cars, homes, lots, and open sands.

He also uses the density or emptiness of to construct a painting. Objects may spill onto or into one another, while successive plains may continue out into the distance, textured by bare trees, with titles like Open Wound. So much for affordable housing. It may be a map of empire, but try not to panic. America is always building and destroying more. Its very muteness seems true to life and its construction akin to painting.

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

So little seems to be going on—a woman alone in a private room, few props, no motion, no overt emotion, the letter itself a slim ribbon of light. Jan Vermeer makes no fuss about what she might be reading and why it deserves to be painted. He seems to lavish all the subtleties of a great colorist and observer on next to nothing.

I kept looking for meaning in Vermeer’s gesture. And I kept returning to the same characteristics—reflected light, intricate but confined spaces, and the slow movement of the eye across a flat surface. He captures only the nuances of reflected light, the edges of a stark room of indefinite dimensions, and a surface almost compulsively divided by a window pane and green curtain. Its implied grid calls to mind the explicit cast-iron grid of the window. In his Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, a blemish in the wall captures the light. In room after room of his 1996 Washington retrospective, they have filled a museum with clarity and light.

It is an old debate: is art best defined as symbol making or as something that resists interpretation? Does its allegory have a subtext? Has contemporary art triumphed over old narratives with “pure painting,” or is it telling new stories entirely? Do true artists never explain their work, or are they the only ones with the right to try? Both sides beg for the vast institution called art history, and neither side is ready to ask how uniform and coherent that institution really is.

I want to make the question more concrete in a context of real history. I want to follow my own adjustments as I faced the mutest artist of all. Maybe my favorite work from a visit to Dresden is one of the city’s two by Vermeer. It shows a woman reading a letter. What if I could stand at her shoulder and read along with her? I shall never know for sure, but that resistance to reading is a kind of meaning, too—one that could never have existed without Vermeer.

In the twenty-five years since this Web site began, it has become a reference in contemporary art and art history on a scale that I never imagined. When I started, I could only share my thoughts on exhibitions then and some of my most treasured artists. Vermeer was one of them, and in those pre-Google days you could search the Web for him and find me among the top three or four hits. It seemed all the stranger to me, since they were personal, even private thoughts, much like the woman’s reading a letter. If mine could become so public, could I somehow share in hers and share it with others, too? I had to explain to myself the painting’s narrative and its apparent reserve.

Back then, too, I was making up for lost time, with thoughts from before I began to write. That included more “theory” than I would dump on you today. My answer had to reconcile symbolism and “pure painting”—the tools of art history and everything that art had learned since Modernism. It meant facing how much Vermeer owed to tradition and how much he changed it. It meant asking how the consummate artist of light and space could also be painting love. Something has entered along with the sunlight and letter, flung aside the small, red curtain above the window, and asked to enter even into her bed.

Every so often, let me use this page to return to a much earlier article, with apologies that it is longer and more ambitious than I would allow myself today. With a little luck, I can still evoke the work at hand (aided by some present-day revisions with just that in mind). I am talking about a seventeenth-century girl on the threshold of seduction or marriage—but not only that. From hidden religious doctrine, I wrote, Vermeer moves to the secrets of the heart. From the experience of a sacred figure, he moves to the sacredness of experience. By refusing to let you or I read his symbols and his letter, he has found a greater realism and a more modern art.

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

John Divola keeps returning to abandoned buildings in California for the sunsets, a photographer’s studio, and almost, just almost a sense of home. Any one of these is just a hole in the wall, with many real holes in its walls, but his photography fills them with a history and with light.

Like his show at the same gallery just three years ago, he draws on two series, one from many years past now, with much of the same geography. He is bolder than ever with his own additions and manipulations, at Yancey Richardson through February 22, to the point that sunrise or early evening light seems to shine right through those holes. He again makes one take stock of nature and culture. Still, rather than start again on a review, allow me to draw on my old one, revised in light of the new, so here goes. You still may look twice at those holes to know whether you are inside looking out or outside looking in.

Some things never change. When Divola exhibits two series together, from forty years apart, one could merge their one-word titles into a single revelation, Zuma Daybreak. In the first, photos overflow with light and color from sky and sea. The view from an abandoned building can hardly contain them, although windows and walls have an intensity of their own. And then a second series turns to black and white with much the same perplexity of inside and out, rebirth and decay. If you no longer know which is which, the photographer himself, the show’s title has it, is “Swimming Drunk.”

Daybreak here lasts a long time. Divola came upon the first property in 1977, in his late twenties, and he kept returning to it over the course of a year. It stood in Zuma Beach, in Malibu, better known for expanses of sand and surf than for abandonment, but they flow easily together. Photography can transform one into the other at that. Churning waters all but merge with the the ratty frame of a door or window. Interior light and paint compete with the white of clouds and sky. Together, they send the ultimate in mixed messages—but then Neil Young, who recorded Zuma two years earlier, had an aversion to unspoiled pleasure, too.

Divola persisted through the course of a day, from the crack of dawn to afternoon sunlight and a wilder sunset. As months passed, he made his own additions as well, including spray paint and artificial lighting, for patterns that seem to float or to burst off the walls. He had an assist from vandalism, wear and tear, and the fire department, which had used the building for training exercises. It is hard to know who took an axe to particular scenes—they, the photographer, or no one at all. Nature and human intervention each has its glorious excess, while the sobriety of black paint and interior shadows helps rein an unnatural nature in. So does the grid of architecture and windows.

A second series makes use of smaller sheets, the kind used for contact prints, in a gallery room often set aside for a different artist entirely. One could mistake it for Divola’s first approach to the theme or his inspiration in photography’s past. That would overlook how color entered the mainstream precisely in the 1970s, thanks to such photographers as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore who harped on saturated hues and unnatural light. That was also the time of Minimalism and the grid. Divola largely abandons those points of reference for “Daybreak” in black and white. He began in 2015, right after a show on very different themes, and he took until 2020 to complete the series. Still, one can wonder just how much in forty years has changed.

The setting in an abandoned building is back, but more confining, and his interventions intensify. Graffiti is that much harder to tell from a shower of sunlight or a density of shadow. Windows are fewer, and he may give over a print to an interior wall draped with what might pass for a work of art. Rather than a grid, it may display raw cuts like those of Lucas Samaras in paint. Samaras, though, never shreds the display space or calls it home. In the course of five years, Divola has made the room his studio, and a ghostly self-portrait appears faintly at least once.

It is still swimming in light and excess, though without the sea. Divola has moved inland to a cold war relic and abandoned air force base, for “The Ghost in the Machine.” Where the earlier series has the color of a psychedelic dream, this scene looks like a war zone, apart from bursts of sunlight, vegetation, and his own startling sprayed colors showing through real holes in the walls. In reality, it was once housing for men on the way to war. The one bit of verbal graffiti calls it Sleep Without Dreams. It is past daybreak all the same.

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