Two of last century’s revered artists are having major shows in New York at the same moment: Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) at the Whitney, and Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) at the Guggenheim. The coincidence of the two exhibitions offer some interesting parallels and divergences, not to mention a look at a wealth of revolutionary artwork that altered art history’s path.
The O’Keeffe show, through January 17 (score one for O’Keeffe—her show runs four days longer), is subtitled Abstraction, and so excludes the best-known icons of her oeuvre depicting her identifiable New Mexico surrounds. It’s a revelation, like being able to have a meaningful conversation after deafening music stops. Certainly some work is familiar—imagery of crevasses, flowers, skies. But much of it is fresh, permitting an appreciation of O’Keeffe’s talents as an abstract painter. Elegant lines in spare compositions, intriguing hints of source imagery, and a gorgeous, clear palette. Dense shapes reminiscent of storms, waves, and geology mix with lighter ones of skies, clouds, plants. read more
If Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) artwork were a movie, it would no doubt captivate that mythical “ideal” demographic—males 18-49. His work is scary, brutal, graphic, hallucinogenic, and muscular, like so many blockbuster films nowadays. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That’s partly why the Met’s retrospective of the British artist seems in tune with the moment. The exhibition, on view through August 16, was curated by Gary Tinterow of the Met, and Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens of the Tate Britain, London.
Walking through Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, it’s striking how many of Bacon’s 66 paintings on view seem very familiar already. Perhaps it has something to do with how accurately he portrayed nightmares of the subconscious, or how quickly those images immediately shot into the part of the brain that files fear. read more
Yayoi Kusama, born in 1929, has been a fixture in contemporary art circles for decades, and rightly so. Her obsessive canvases (“infinity nets”) and humorous, eye popping installations allow her work to traverse the verdant median between rigorous abstraction and loosely knit narrative. That her personal backstory, dealing with dark psychologial impulses and obsessiveness, manifests itself in her work and makes it all the more rich. Her popularity, in fact, is so widespread that her work suffers a bit from overexposure, even predictability. It can fit in just about any group show for the reasons above.
That’s partly why her current show at Gagosian is so impressive. read more
It’s hard enough for anyone to make sense of historical events as they unfold, but imagine trying to create art out of them. That is, of course, what political artists try to do, though not without the danger of succumbing to tendentiousness. For the past three decades, however, Jenny Holzer has managed to avoid this pitfall precisely because she’s generally avoided references to current affairs. Instead, she’s focused on the broader issue of how language itself is used a political tool. Thus, her signature “truisms”— “strong sense of duty imprisons you,” “an elite is inevitable”—deconstruct the dynamics of authority by aping its voice; yet they don’t really say anything. That is the genius of her approach.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of “Protect Protect,” the 15-year survey of Holzer’s work now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 31, is that much of it departs significantly from her usual reliance on ambiguity. While the show features plenty of the L.E.D (Light Emitting Diode) installations for which the artist is rightly famous, it also includes oil on linen paintings based upon redacted government documents that pertain to our invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. There are, for example, field reports of civilian killings, as well as a letter from a father pleading for leniency for his soldier son about to be court-martialed. There are fingerprints and handprints of suspected terrorists and enemy combatants. Though heavily censored, the meaning of these papers are abundantly clear. I contacted Holzer, and she was kind enough to answer a few questions about this material via email. read more
Impressionism occupies a funny space between bourgeois blah and revolution. A Monet can come across as genre-changing or as wallpaper; a Degas, visionary or musty, depending on the viewer’s mood. This is one of the more intriguing aspects of the movement—the Trojan horse aspect in which it brought pivotal change to modern art while often seeming simply lovely. Gustave Caillebotte’s (1848—1894) artwork is a good example of this, and the subject of Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea at the Brooklyn Museum, through July 5.
This exhibition comprises more than 30 paintings, including a number of significant works from private collections, such as Oarsman in a Top Hat (1877-78). It comes three decades after BMA hosted the first significant American show of his work. read more
Kehinde Wiley’s painting show, Down, at Deitch Gallery’s Wooster Street space, has the unique effect of stretching time – taking you back a couple of centuries while keeping a foot firmly planted in the present. The most immediate impression of the show is its monumentality. The space itself is cavernous, better suited to showing large sculpture or installations rather than paintings. But Wiley’s paintings range from large to ginormous (up to 300” wide), and look entirely proper in the gallery — even the awkward platform viewing area reached by steps.
The title refers to the fact that all of the figures in these paintings are of “fallen characters” painted by old masters such as Velasquez and Mantegna, and other less-known technical wizards such as Maderno and Clesinger. Some of the subjects simply recline in sleep or repose; others are dead. read more
The Met Museum’s exhibition, Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964, is like a primer on how to appreciate painting. It’s also the first comprehensive retrospective on the artist in this country, unbelievably.
Morandi has a reputation as an artist’s artist, lionized by art students and scholars, but in the shadow of household name artists. This most likely would have pleased a man who gave two interviews in his lifetime. Like a bottle in the back row of one of his still lifes – essential to the overall picture, but obscured.
He created relatively small-sized works, concentrating on unsensational subject matter, most often still lifes of bottles and geometric shapes. Similarly, he used a sedate palette, the mid-range colors of a desert’s four seasons.
But make no mistake, a tour of this unflashy but major artist’s work is not only pleasurable by the basic technical standards of art appreciation – color, composition, execution – it is an amazing chronicle of the development of artist finding his distinct voice and trusting it. This, even though the heart of his oeuvre, the still life, is an artworld trope. read more
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