Currently Hanging

Once, the American painter Philip Guston (1913-1980) was a polarizing artist. It’s the stuff of legend: An esteemed second-generation Abstract Expressionist, renowned for exquisitely honed arrangements of fleshy brushstrokes, turns to a brutish figurative art—a nightmarish realm of Klansmen, endless hangovers and hellish rooms lit by bare light bulbs. Critic Peter Schjeldahl recalls that many in the art world saw Guston’s new paintings as “a rank indecency, profanation, a joke in the worst conceivable taste,” a sure reflection of the old Expressionist dogma that narrative content was anathema to real art. Modernist composer Morton Feldman went so far as to take it personally, ending his long-standing friendship with Guston. On the other side, New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg and fellow painter Willem de Kooning welcomed the painter’s break from abstraction, praising his freedom from orthodoxy.

From the Morgan’s perspective “Works on Paper,” the trajectory of the Guston’s oeuvre flows with continuity. Motifs recur with seeming inevitability. In an untitled charcoal drawing from 1970, for example, two Klansmen, one brandishing a stogy, stare each other down. The Ku Klux Klan first appeared in Guston’s art 40 years earlier in Drawing for Conspirators (1930) (not included at the Morgan), which depicts a Klansman fingering a rope as a group of comrades in the distance huddle beneath two lynchings. A social realist influenced by the Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, Guston portrayed the scene with care.

Arranged chronologically, the show begins with the mid-1940’s, at the end of that first figurative period. In one untitled ink wash piece from 1946, it’s as though we’re witnessing the moment when figuration melts into abstraction, the human form shunted aside for drawing unfettered by representation. By the early ’50s, pictorial space had fully emerged as Guston’s main concern: Scratchy horizontal and vertical lines quiver over the expanse of paper in the hope of locating a “place” for the eye to travel. A Cézanne-esque doubt informs the architectonic Drawing Related to Zone (Drawing No. 19) (1954), and all but succumbs to its own vagaries within the dense agitation of Untitled (1953).

The drawings undergo a shift of emphasis around 1958. Forms solidify with clunky vigor. Air and atmosphere give way to clumps of shape and mass. Head—Double View (Drawing No. 20) (1958) and a duo of pieces from 1961 are wracked with frustration. You feel Guston working toward something just out of reach. The search is slow. Only Dark Form II and Accord II (1963), slurred accumulations of gray, black and red, look rushed. Guston can’t wait to get where his art is leading him.

Impatience led Guston to a stern reevaluation of drawing itself. His late-’60s pieces are, to put it mildly, attenuated. Marks become few; the paper is hardly touched. A vertical mark, no longer than an inch or so, hovers at the top of the page. A stuttering line moves forward with grave insistence. Form (1967) barely comes to fruition; Ground (1967) is a vertical line abutting a horizontal line.

 

THEN IT COMES, at first with trepidation and then like a flood: Books, shoes, coffee cups and, in Garden Steps Roma (1971), a tree and building make a lumpish claim on our attention. The Klan reappears shuttling through town in a limo. Philip Roth and “Poor Richard”—Guston’s moniker for Richard Nixon—make appearances, as does Guston’s alter ego, a bulbous Cyclopean head with furrowed brow, chunky stubble and bloodshot eyes. A cigarette is usually in the vicinity, as is an increasing air of mortality.

Guston’s drive to make art increased as his health faded. Time weighed heavily, prompted binges of painting and drawing. Disembodied limbs, spider webs, isolated masses of heads, legs, stretcher bars and, in an odd fillip, a bacon-and-egg sandwich struggle to maintain equilibrium within abandoned landscapes. Guston’s line is as staccato and scratchy as the old-time comic strips he loved, Krazy Kat or Mutt and Jeff.

In the elegiac and prophetic Untitled (Hillside) (1980), drawn in the year of Guston’s death, there’s a tombstone inscribed with the initials “P. G.” It’s a melodramatic touch—but notwithstanding this palpable dread, we intuit it as Guston’s avowal of art as, in his own words, “the most intimate affirmation of creative life.” The late drawings never stop moving forward, never stop believing in the redemptive magic of art. They are a terrifying and beautiful denouement.

“Philip Guston: Works on Paper” at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., until Aug. 31. Mario Naves can be reached at mnaves@observer.com.

 

A few months back, I bumped into a colleague at the Met’s Courbet exhibition. After a polite disagreement about the merits of the 19th-century French painter—he’s a fan, I’m not—we extolled the Met’s stellar run of historical exhibitions mounted under the guidance of since-retired director Philippe de Montebello: Ingres, tapestries, Velázquez, the Greek and Roman galleries, the list goes on.

When the discussion turned to the museum’s forays into contemporary art, the requisite eyeball-rolling ensued. With rare exception, the museum has fumbled, allowing contemporary fads to interfere with sound curatorial judgment—the most egregious example being the three-year exhibition of Damien Hirst’s sideshow novelty The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). (Yeah, the dead shark thing.)

Now here comes the redoubtable Jeff Koons with three sculptures on the Met’s rooftop garden.

As a venue for sculpture, the Met’s roof is unforgiving and all but pointless. How can any artist compete with a spectacular bird’s-eye view of Central Park? David Smith, Joel Shapiro, Sol LeWitt and Roy Lichtenstein have all been humbled by the encompassing fairy-tale vistas the Met provides. And so it is with Mr. Koons’ slick iterations of Pop Art.

Fabricated from stainless steel and coated with industrial color, his gleefully deadpan sculptures tower over the viewer. Sacred Heart (Red/Gold) (1994-2007) is a Valentine chocolate, complete with wrapping paper and gold ribbon. Coloring Book (1997-2005) is an irregularly shaped plinth overlaid with secondhand scribble-scrabble. Balloon Dog (Yellow) (1994-2000) is a child’s party favor whose flimsiness has been made sleek and forever taut.

The latter is a relative of Rabbit (1986), Mr. Koons’ masterpiece and an icon of postmodernism. It’s a stainless steel sculpture of an inflatable bunny, the kind of thing you’d win at a carnival. With its gleaming surface and factory-made anonymity, Rabbit turns High Modernism on its head—Brancusi rendered as high-end kitsch. It’s more unnerving and beautiful than anything Andy Warhol put his silkscreen to.

But Rabbit was a fluke—the Chelsea equivalent of a thousand monkeys producing Hamlet after a thousand years of typing.

Mr. Koons’ true art is his image. With that patented shit-eating grin and Teflon demeanor, he’s an animatronic neo-Dadaist with a Hollywood budget. The porcelain Michael Jackson, the huge flower-covered dogs and, God help us, the enormous photos of the artist engaging in Hustler-style sex with his ex-wife, the porn star and former Italian Parliament member La Cicciolina—they’re idle distractions; expensive, too. That’s how Mr. Koons wants it.

There’s not much to say about the Met show. The sculptures are there, they’re blandly diverting, and that’s about it. Mr. Koons is ever thus. Admirers will likely demur and peg something like Coloring Book as a dazzlement by one of “the most important artists of … the twentieth century” (as Nation critic and philosopher Arthur Danto believes). Mr. Koons’ sculptures are easy to ignore. They’re nothing to get hot and bothered about.

 

THE MOST INTERESTING thing about Mr. Koons isn’t his art, but a rumor. According to my aforementioned colleague, word is that Mr. Koons uses the considerable sums of money he derives from sales of his work in order to collect art by the likes of early Renaissance German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider and Post-Impressionist painter Edouard Vuillard.

These aren’t typical figures of pomo adulation. You can barely imagine them occupying the same galaxy as Mr. Koons. Could the shallow artist be a front for a serious aesthete?

As I say, it’s a rumor, but Mr. Koons just might be a better con man than we think.

 

“Jeff Koons on the Roof” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Oct. 26.

In the past 30 years Thomas Nozkowski’s allusive yet enigmatically abstract paintings have gradually acquired a cultlike devotion. This patient, quietly determined artist is the anti-hype—his paintings are slow.

Lately, however, Mr. Nozkowski has been getting a lot of attention. His paintings were featured at the Venice Biennale last summer; a mini-retrospective at Long Island City’s Emily Fisher Landau Center just closed; and two of his paintings from MoMA’s permanent collection are currently on display. Now he’s been picked up by blue-chip powerhouse PaceWildenstein—a sure indicator that an artist has arrived.

Mr. Nozkowski, 64, is one of those rare figures upon whom people of different aesthetic sensibilities can agree. “He’s so damned good,” opines former MoMA curator Robert Storr. Is there anyone out there who disagrees?

I imagine Mr. Nozkowski would raise his hand. He’s a harsh critic of his own work—it’s there to see in the paintings. Each is marked by skepticism: Mr. Nozkowski’s accumulations of nudging biomorphs and fractured geometry are brought to fruition through a process of questioning.

Mr. Nozkowski’s paintings are riddled with their history. The work’s distressed surfaces, dense with incarnations come-and-gone, evince the byzantine complications of discovery and doubt. Mr. Nozkowski is heir to the improvisatory techniques of the New York School, but he paints with the wrist, not the arm. His pictures are meticulously delineated and wholly organic in resolution. The artist doesn’t impose himself on his art. The painting is the thing.

The work is modest in scale. For many years, Mr. Nozkowski didn’t stray from a conventional 16-by-20-inch format; the paintings at PaceWildenstein measure only 22 by 28 inches. The decision to go small was a reaction to the bigger-is-better school of art-making. But it was predicated, too, on necessity: Mr. Nozkowski wanted to make paintings that would fit in his friends’ New York apartments. There’s a heartening practicality to that choice.

Mr. Nozkowski’s unlikely combinations of shape, space, color and incident—Untitled (8-109) (2008), for instance, features a clunky topographical form nestled within a seemingly unrelated, irregular grid—are, in a roundabout way, representational. Each painting is predicated on some thing—an Old Master painting, say, or a novel. (Certainly, Hans Arp’s bulbous shapes have wiggled their way into his art.) Mr. Nozkowski told The Brooklyn Rail that his Aunt Thelma once served as inspiration. He may have been facetious, but probably not. The paintings are intensely specific.

Mr. Nozkowski follows the logic of his brush. Reference points go off on unexpected tangents, wander down blind alleys and undergo countless transformations. But the final image retains the character, if not necessarily the structure, of its initial impulse. Mr. Nozkowski once placed a group of paintings under the rubric “An Autobiography.” Good luck finding their source, and good luck denying their intimations of lived experience.

A Nozkowski is recognizable, not least for its integrity—but that’s not to say the artist cruises on received pictorial tropes. No two pictures are the same. The images are stubbornly independent. In one, patterns and flitting juxtapositions of space and cobbled shapes are pursued with singular intensity. In another, a halo surrounds a jittering tower of blocky shapes.

But these paintings do share a few signature characteristics—a tightly configured tension between figure and ground, for example, and objects that suggest heraldry. In each painting there is one thing, one relationship, all-encompassing yet radically condensed: Here, it insists, is everything this picture can possibly contain.

Mr. Nozkowski has never titled his paintings. You can guess why from his antipathy toward the American modernist painter Arthur Dove, who named one of his ostensibly abstract paintings Foghorns, with a single word collapsing suggestive bursts of red into crudely rendered objects—prompting Mr. Nozkowski to complain “we almost don’t have to look at the damn paintings.” Not titling his own paintings, then, is a matter of principle. Presumably, Mr. Nozkowski doesn’t want to constrain the evocative potential of his art.

Well, O.K., but Mr. Nozkowski would undoubtedly agree that Ingres’ La Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845)—a painting whose bundled, serpentine forms are likely to elicit his admiration—or Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) aren’t hampered by our recognizing their who, what and where. The refusal to title is the lone Nozkowski tic that feels programmatic. We don’t let our children out of the house without a name, right?

But the absorbing intimacy of Mr. Nozkowski’s paintings preempts such quibbles. There’s not a false note struck at PaceWildenstein—not in the bad paintings nor in the peculiarly slack works-on-paper. Mr. Nozkowski stumbles here and there, but so what? The best artists court failure in hopes of overcoming it. Several of the new paintings are miracles of grit, elegance and wit. They are reason to feel good about the art of our time.

“Thomas Nozkowski” is at PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, until May 3.

The most interesting thing about Takashi Murakami, whose paintings, sculptures and merchandise are the subject of “© Murakami” at the Brooklyn Museum, is that he’s above shame. To know shame is to realize there are standards of behavior that, when bent or broken, cause remorse or, at least, self-awareness of having done wrong. Shame is unknown in Mr. Murakami’s rarefied orbit: Art is an adjunct of capital. There’s no second thought given to this fact.

Andy Warhol is the starting point for Mr. Murakami’s cold embrace of heedless commercialism. But the scale and scope of Mr. Murakami’s enterprise would have been beyond Warhol’s ken, though he probably would have found it amusing. Mr. Murakami’s obliviousness to irony might have given Andy pause. The Factory, with its roving array of socialites, bohemians and hangers-on, was a pointed mockery of the artist’s studio as sanctum sanctorum.

Mr. Murakami’s factory is exactly that. Actually, make that factories; he’s got two in his native Japan and one in Queens. Mr. Murakami’s commercial venture, Kaikai Kiki, is “the first Japanese company looking to the future to develop and promote state-of-the-art contemporary artworks.” It employs roughly 100 artists, some of whom make Mr. Murakami’s art while others handle more esoteric tasks like—huh?—“animal- and plant-handling and sales.”

Kaikai Kiki manages up-and-coming Japanese artists, many of them Mr. Murakami’s former assistants. It sells towels, toys and God knows what else, all of which are emblazoned with Mr. Murakami’s maniacal cartoons. He’s collaborated with billionaire real estate developer Minoru Mori and with Louis Vuitton, who has literally set up shop in the middle of the Brooklyn show. Mr. Murakami is a commercial whiz kid, and more power to him. We should all possess such business acumen.

Mr. Murakami distills manga and anime—respectively, Japanese comic books and animation—and intensifies their punchy, angular and often aggressive stylizations. If you’ve never thought of what a neo-psychedelic Mickey Mouse capable of ultraviolence might look like, well, Mr. Murakami will help you. Mr. DOB, roughly translated as “Why?”, is a recurring figure and, one gathers, the artist’s alter ego; it’s a grinning orb with distinctive Disney ears, any number of oval eyes and, sometimes, spiky teeth. Vomiting Phlegm Boy is another of Mr. Murakami’s characters.

Mr. Murakami brings to the fore the sexuality latent in much anime and manga, and makes it as plastic and smooth as a Fisher-Price toy. Miss Ko2 (1997) is a teenage boy’s dream—or maybe nightmare: An eight-foot-high sculpture of a girl with innocent eyes, a French maid’s outfit and legs that go on forever. Other sculptures are more stridently sexual. Hiropon (1997) is a blue-haired girl with humongous breasts that stream a loop of milk. My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) depicts a spiky-haired superhero-type emitting a lasso of creamy white from his erect penis.

Ejaculating is all well and good, but how exactly does Mr. Murakami’s “growing multinational corporate empire” qualify as art?

His notion of “Superflat” presumably provides a rationale. Essayist Dick Hebdige describes it as “a tactical domination device” to overtake an art world that is “being redimensionalized and reterritorialized by the uber-IED known as globalization.” He likens Superflat to the “epidemic wanderlust produced by psycho-socio-sexual binarism.” Whatever you say, Mr. Hebdige.

There’s talk of “mutational dialectic,” “superhuman mastery of bodily functions” and, not unrelated, the “steady porn-etration of the public sphere.” In a 1999 manifesto, Mr. Murakami advocated for an “infantile” body politic that would abolish society’s “ultra-rich citizens.” Ultra-rich citizens nowadays snapping up Mr. Murakami’s art might want to watch their backs.

 

WHAT THIS ALL boils down to is that Mr. Murakami appropriates Japanese Pop imagery, embodies American entrepreneurship, mixes in a glut of sex and apocalypse, cutes it all up and serves it as a slick cross-cultural product—all with the goal of obliterating the divide between high and low culture. Oh, you think, that again.

Mr. Murakami’s “radical specificity and originality” is old hat. His happy dream of a plastic world is a shopworn conceit dressed in internationalist shrink-wrap. In order to waylay too much attention being paid to Mr. Murakami’s consumerist excess, comparisons are made to traditional Japanese art (subject of a concurrent exhibition at the museum). Apparently, Vomiting Phlegm Boy’s roots go way back.

Eighteenth-century Japanese print makers made art for a buying public, sure, but they didn’t capitulate to it. The profit motive was redeemed by untrammeled visual grace. Likening the zig-zag ejaculate of My Lonesome Cowboy to a Hokusai color woodblock print of roiling waves is an attempt to include Mr. Murakami in a great tradition. What bullshit. Mr. Hebdige admits as much: All you need to understand Mr. Murakami’s art is a “credit card or cash.”

Hokusai will survive the insult. As for Mr. Murakami: He’s no dummy. He makes deals with the likes of Mr. Vuitton because he knows that Significant Artists have their day in contemporary culture and that fashion is forever. In a few years or so, some savvy operator will exploit adolescence with a similar showmanlike immediacy and upstage Mr. Murakami.

That we’ve become inured to such things—now that’s a shame.

 

“© Murakami” is at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, until July 13. Mario Naves can be reached at mnaves@observer.com.

Susan Homer, whose paintings are at metaphor contemporary art in Brooklyn, works in two distinct manners predicated on two distinct scales. On large canvases—for Ms. Homer that would be around five by six feet—she paints free-floating accumulations of flora. In small formats—the paintings don’t go beyond 12 inches in any direction—Ms. Homer dedicates herself to domesticity graced by nature: birds alighting on teacups, cupcakes or a dish containing ginger cookies.

Ms. Homer’s painterly approach varies noticeably when she shifts scales. The large pictures are layered fields of atmospheric color and furtive light. Spatial consistency is deceiving: Ms. Homer doesn’t set out on a predetermined course—she explores and yields to pictorial incident as it occurs. The overlaid botanical motifs are stylized, but they unfurl with organic logic and sweep. Ms. Homer is an avid gardener; it shows in the paintings.

The small pictures are to the point and off-the-cuff. Only an experienced painter could make something fulsome out of a brisk and loaded brush—Ms. Homer seems to get it right the first time around. The images are recognizable and tactile—the objects aren’t far removed from actual size. We know what it’s like to hold a teacup.

Notwithstanding the minty blues in the whimsical Red Cherries and Bird or The Dining Room in Arlington (both 2008), Ms. Homer’s palette is welcoming and warm. A blondish tonality permeates them—a tawny ambience that’s seemingly, if not actually, monochrome. Could it be the familiarity of home, its routines and proximity, which accounts for the friendly air of quietude? Or maybe it’s a love for the Italian modernist Giorgio Morandi and his dusky paintings of bottles and boxes. Probably both.

The charm of Ms. Homer’s still lifes resides in their décor—her choice of china and tablecloths evinces a Victorian daintiness—but also in unlikely confluences of events. A wren isn’t amenable to holding a pose, but Ms. Homer captures the eye-blink moment when it lands on our breakfast table. The 18th-century artist Chardin painted soap bubbles being blown or a house of cards undergoing construction—fleeting occurrences held gently in time. Ms. Homer is similarly involved with the ephemeral.

If narrative time marks Ms. Homer’s small paintings, it’s painterly time with the large ones—the process of slowly building a picture from the ground up. Handiwork is cherished and so, too, is loving attention to pattern, but style bests the temporal. The joyous excess of Small Cradles (2008) nods to the improvisatory tack of Abstract Expressionism and to the suggestive power of ornament typical of Islamic art. Ms. Homer’s avowal of decoration is no less tender for being tough.

Ms. Homer divines within the decorative the possibility of—and, in her hands, the reality—of transcending its strictures. The perfumey rain of Lavender Roses (2008) and the Pollockian splay of vines and flowers of Small Cradles yoke nature’s multiplicity and then choreograph them into balletic movements and lilting rhymes. Crocuses in Snow (2008) is a stop-motion drift of purple and flaky white.

Mysticism filters through Ms. Homer’s work and connects it with the American tradition of distilling something otherworldly from within nature’s beneficence. The moody and sometimes glowering portent of Charles Burchfield, the homely abbreviation of Arthur Dove and the stoic emblems of Georgia O’Keefe—Ms. Homer taps into the same preternatural current.

Ms. Homer would seem an artist divided between differing tangents. The recent paintings reiterate a continuing disparity between abstraction and observation, between gradual and rapid, the meditative and the close-at-hand. So how come the two sets of work feel of a piece?

A profound connection with the natural world is part of the answer, as is a fondness for sinuous rhythms. But recurring pictorial tropes are only part of the story. It is Ms. Homer’s faith that art is capable of revealing truths, both large and small, that otherwise pass us by. She doesn’t miss a beat, whether it’s in the studio or the dining room. It’s a cheat to deny the riches and surprises of experience. Ms. Homer doesn’t make a big deal of this truth. Understatement is, after all, her métier.

 

“Susan Homer: The Traveler’s Return” is at metaphor contemporary art, 382 Atlantic Avenue, until April 27. The gallery is open Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m.

Squirreled away in the Whitney’s mezzanine galleries, far from the Biennial’s hubbub, is an exhibition of paintings, drawings and watercolors by the American modernist Charles Demuth (1883-1935). “Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster” is devoted predominantly to industrial images of Demuth’s Pennsylvania hometown.

On a basic level, the exhibition is a record of a man whose will to paint was tested by health problems. Demuth was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 38. Though benefiting from the discovery of insulin in 1923, he was plagued by sickness for the rest of his life.

Physical stress and the studio blurred into each other. “My living and work,” he wrote, “seem … quite beyond control, both smothered by trifles.” But Demuth’s frailty isn’t evident in the paintings. If anything, his pictorial rigor gained in concentration and surety. It was during his last years that he painted My Egypt (1927), a signature work of odd power.

Demuth lived for short periods in New York and Paris, but Lancaster remained home. He described the place, fondly and with irony, as “my province.” (One piece at the Whitney is titled In the Province.) Demuth’s frail condition necessitated living with his mother. The poet William Carlos Williams described her as a “horse of a woman”; she served as her son’s caretaker.

Demuth was passionate about gardening and found inspiration in its bounty, the morning pickings from the family garden prompting jaunts to the studio. The resulting watercolors are shatteringly intimate elaborations on the diasies, lilies and gladioli he found there. The handful of garden pictures at the Whitney highlight Demuth’s preternatural rapport with the natural world.

Demuth’s watercolors of flowers, acrobats and, in the tender homoerotic farce Distinguished Air (1930), culture mavens are marked by offhand trails of elegant contours and grainy surfaces. But strict geometry defines the oil paintings. On the rare occasions that they include organic forms, they’re contained and regulated—the plumes of smoke in Buildings (ca. 1930-31), for instance. Observational fidelity was sacrificed for stylistic abbreviation.

Demuth’s paintings are exemplars of Precisionism (or, as it has also been dubbed, “Cubist-Realism,” a term that identifies the school’s primary influence). The Precisionists were an informal cadre of painters including Charles Sheeler, Elsie Driggs and Niles Spencer that took Cubism’s pictorial fracturing and applied it to America’s industrial landscape. Meticulously delineated, the paintings tend toward flat colors, straight lines and blocky shapes.

The pictures aren’t altogether purist in form. My Egypt is almost Biblical in portent; the bleaching beam of light originating at the upper left corner suggests an otherworldly and harsh presence. A thin strain of alienation permeates the paintings: The bright yellow sign in Buildings, Lancaster (1930) advertises Eshelman’s feed, but its combative impact isn’t directed at anybody. There are no people to be seen in any of the canvases.

The paintings are orchestrated on perspectival logic, even if it is sometimes shifted for compositional effect. The skewed lines superimposed on Demuth’s water towers and anonymous buildings connect the work directly to Cubism. Outlined by razor-sharp black outlines, Demuth’s diagrammatic intersections fracture color and, through it, space, if not particularly shape.

The dour Chimney and Water Tower (1931) is relatively free of Cubist overlays. Demuth went crazy in Buildings, Lancaster (1930)—the lower right corner all but relinquishes itself to Cubism’s spatial ambiguity. But as much as the dividing lines activate the pictures, they nonetheless falter with self-consciousness. Demuth, mindful of Cubism’s radical reconsideration of pictorial space, imposed them on images that already benefited from modernism’s liberties. He didn’t misunderstand Cubist principles—he misapplied them.

The exhibition includes Alfred Stieglitz’s Charles Demuth (1923), a haunting photograph of an emaciated artist. Demuth was one of Stieglitz’s circle—it included Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keefe. Demuth established a close friendship with O’Keefe—he bequeathed all of his paintings to her. Demuth scholar Betsy Fahlman attributes their bond to a shared outsider status, O’Keefe being a woman, Demuth a homosexual.

Demuth was an integral component of the American avant-garde and its attendant social circuit. On his trips to New York, he attended Florine Stettheimer’s salons, and parties given by important collectors like Walter and Louise Arensberg. Demuth hobnobbed with Marcel Duchamp, Lincoln Kirstein and the art critic Henry McBride. In Provincetown, Demuth frolicked on the beach with Marsden Hartley and Eugene O’Neill. He was something of a player. Next Page >

“Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680-1860,” an exhibition at the Asia Society, is a trying experience because the awe it elicits is unremitting. Has there been a New York exhibition quite as beautiful?

The show is devoted to the art of a society all but isolated from outside influence. The city of Edo (now Tokyo) was established as Japan’s seat of power, having been transferred from Kyoto by the Tokugawa shogunate, or military government. Under its rule, Edo became the world’s largest city, and a thriving commercial and artistic center.

The exhibition was curated by the Japanese Art Society of America, formerly known as the Ukiyo-e Society. “Ukiyo” translates literally as “floating world”; essayist David Waterhouse defines it metaphorically as yielding to the attractions of the theater and (as he politely puts it) “pleasure quarters.” Most of the pictures depict immaculately poised courtesans.

With the exception of Katsukawa Shunshō’s Encounter at Night (1788)—wherein a couple with exaggerated genitalia tussle under an invasive beam of light—eroticism is implied, albeit with silky emphasis. Hishikawa Moronobu’s A Visit to the Yoshiwara (c. 1680), a 55-foot-long scroll of which only part is displayed, is a fleeting and surprisingly tender mise-en-scène of a brothel. Virtually indistinguishable landscapes appear in the distance and as ornamental designs on a series of screens. This blurring of different realities contributes to the work’s dusky quietude.

Comedy and etiquette work in tandem in Okūmara Māsonobou’s Inside the Bag, the Pleasure Quarters (c. 1710), a woodcut print in which one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune opens a roiling bag revealing a miniaturist diorama of courtesans. For the most part, elegance is the norm and sensuality is put into place through sloping rhythms—all but discernible arabesques and the precise synchronization of gesture. Sex isn’t just a rich man’s commodity, but a ritual of artifice and desire.

Suzuki Harunobu, in collaboration with the poet Okubo Jinshiro Tadanobu, elaborated upon the mannerisms of style and theater. His series of color woodblock prints, collectively titled The Eight Parlor Views (1766), are a mitate—a play on established themes—of the Xiao and Xiang rivers in China, a subject long-explored by poets and painters. The landscape, we read, is transposed into interiors occupied by two courtesans. How this motif is shifted will be a mystery to those not versed in Japanese symbolism. We’ll have to make do with an exquisite range of tawny colors and a mellow air of intimacy and solitude. They’re not bad things to settle for.

Mavens of pop culture will sit up and take notice when informed that ukiyo-e (the appended “e” means “pictures”)were an integral component of fashion and celebrity; it was, as David Pollack, professor of Japanese at Rochester University, bluntly puts it, “more or less blatant advertising.” Art and fashion have always fed off each other, but that’s not to say they’re the same thing.

High-end ukiyo-e were pitched to an elite clientele, largely samurai officials. The outrageously lavish kimono draped over Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s Hell Courtesan (c. 1850), a show-stopper in a show chock-full of them, would only have been available to the wealthy. But great art transcends circumstance. Consumer demand may have put artists in motion, but it didn’t define them. Given the exhibition’s consistency, it would appear that the strictures of the marketplace allowed for a pictorial freedom that might not have otherwise occurred for these artists.

 

THE CASUAL VIEWER is likely to recognize the names Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, the best-known artists of the Edo period. But notwithstanding the sumptuous musicality of Hokusai’s Five Beauties (1805-13), if either artist weren’t here, you wouldn’t miss him. Really, Katsukawa Shunshō’s Peony (c. 1770) is, if less Byzantine, then no less astonishing. Its portrayal of two women embracing, their kimonos forming an arousing tumble of skewed patterning, is an exquisite model of restraint and longing.

The sinuous beauty of Shunshō’s bijinga (pictures of beautiful women) are all the more amazing given their condition: They’re pristine, unfettered by time. This is pretty much true throughout the exhibition—we relish delicacy of color and meticulous surfaces as they were meant to be. The regard Japanese artists had for their materials—ink, wood grain and, not least, uninflected expanses of silk—is obvious. It’s like the things came out of the studio this morning. Next Page >

The 19th-century French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a big personality, a cultural subversive, a braggart and showman worthy of P. T. Barnum. He was also a paint-handler of exquisite grit and outrageous sensuality—traits that combined into an artist whose greatness just barely redeemed his insufferable narcissism. By the time you’re through with the first gallery of the Met’s “Gustave Courbet,” ringed with 20 or so self-portraits of the artist, you’ll have had quite enough of Courbet.

The arrogance of youth is everywhere in these pictures. Here Courbet is a wildly gesticulating madman; there he’s a cellist, a sculptor, a lover and, in the crushingly romantic The Wounded Man (1844-1854), on the verge of death—each painting a gesture toward the attitude most succinctly expressed by Self-Portrait With Black Dog (1842): Courbet gazes at us with mellow condescension.

Presumably the show’s opening gambit is meant to establish Courbet’s engagement with tradition, and his consummate ability to manipulate oils. But it’s self-regard that emerges as the essential component of Courbet’s artistry. Every scrape and slur of paint is an advertisement of his genius—Look at me! instead of Look at this! Courbet was a natural, to be sure, unafraid of testing his ambitions and competence (see, for example, how he replicates Rembrandt’s light and touch to eerie effect in a later Self-Portrait from 1850). But in the final tally, his egotism was a debilitating influence on his art.

Curator Gary Tinterow portrays Courbet, who was a foe of Napoleon III and whose involvement with the Paris Commune of 1871 led to his imprisonment and exile, in the romantic light of the artist-as-rebel. But just as interesting were Courbet’s innovations in the technique and subject matter of painting. An early adopter of “realism,” he strayed from the established notion that artists were in the business of rendering idealized images. The Stonecutters (1849), for example, depicted the harsh realities of peasant life, and worse, critics decried the young ladies of Young Ladies of the Village (1851-52) as simply too ugly for art. That it was a large painting—a scale suitable for, say, a history painting—didn’t help.

Courbet’s blunt touch was upsetting as well; the more it gained in density and independence, the more it shocked audiences. The Valley of Ornans (1858) is particularly brusque in its speedy bravura. The justly renowned Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856-57) emanates an unsettling air of post-coital drowsiness. Oils were forever the medium of desire, and this is no less the case with the paint-handling in The White Cow (1873) as it is with the in-your-face crotch shot The Origin of the World (1866).

The Met explores Courbet’s relationship with photography (and pornography), but only in passing. Nonetheless, the photos, with their lovely Victorian patina, provide a welcome shift in media. However much he was admired by fellow painters, and despite his having established the tradition of the enfant terrible, the mastery of his grease-surfaced paintings is oppressive. His touch was dictatorial, not liberating, and his aesthetic was unremittingly claustrophobic. After “Gustave Courbet,” take the long way home through Central Park.

“Gustave Courbet” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until May 18. Next Page >

Somewhere there’s an art history graduate student sitting in Starbucks, laptop and venti decaf latte on hand, writing a thesis on the Whitney Biennial. It’s bound to be a history of arrant egos, frustrated reputations, political intrigue, curatorial missteps and temporary fame.

Part of the narrative will be an inventory of reviews. Given the negative and sometimes vitriolic criticism the Biennial has engendered over the years, it should be an entertaining and maybe hilarious roundup. But then, any exhibition purporting to define the current state of American art is asking for it.

You’ve got to have some sympathy for the curators—to paraphrase R&B duo Sam and Dave, the Biennial can’t stand up for falling down. Yet it’s a perennial hit, and judging by the crush of media types that showed up for the press preview, the 2008 edition will be no exception. (The general public can expect to wait in a line trailing around the corner of Madison and 75th Street.)

The first thing I did upon entering the Whitney was race toward the second-floor restroom—not out of necessity, but out of curiosity. Would there be art displayed in there? It’s happened before, and is a pretty sure gauge of the Biennial’s free-for-all ethos. Sure enough, there was something above the hand dryer: A black metal box with an angled mirror inside.

I couldn’t find an identifying label, but a security guard assured me it was a work of art. Another guard told me there was a similar black box in the ladies’ room. The gracious press folks knew nothing about them. The Biennial image list doesn’t include the black boxes, nor does the catalog. Were they a long-term installation, a work from the permanent collection or artful bathroom fixtures?

Probably the latter, but that’s the confusion the contemporary scene poses: What isn’t art? The Biennial doesn’t answer the question because it hardly realizes the question exists. The art world elite and the culture at large take for granted that anything is fair game; artists have a liberty of means that was unimaginable 50 years ago. But the only thing heedless freedom has resulted in is avant-gardist novelty.

Take Bert Rodriguez’s elevator installation The End (2001). After stepping into the elevator, the doors close and we read on them the piece’s title; music plays from the finales of well-known films. Mr. Rodriguez’s piece is charming because it’s predictable. Oh those crazy artists, they’re at it again! At which point visitors can move on to the next distraction.

This is the blandest Biennial in memory and, in its own dithering way, the happiest. The fun-house aesthetic reigns. The easy gratifications of spectacle have replaced the rigors of engagement. Most of the featured artists plug into received conceits as if they were a new pair of socks. Proud triviality is the consequence, and the point. Racial politics are no more meaningful than dressing in Viking drag.

 

IT'S ONE THING after another at the Biennial: rickety installations, the requisite array of dark rooms, droning voices, pseudo-zoological environments and more videos than any reasonable person should experience in a lifetime. The 80 or so artists employ lots of stuff—try not stumbling over it—but little of it has been crafted with a sense of possibility or joy. Material sensuality is suspect, and avoided. What a puritanical lot.

Anxious to touch upon the full range of existing aesthetics, the curators end up with a swift blur of anonymity. This is typical of far-reaching overviews—artists get stiffed for the sake of inclusiveness. But the Biennial isn’t about hard-won individuality; it’s about striking a pose. There’s a cool elegance to it all. Pretty much everything at the Whitney looks like it should be art, but leaves no discernible impression. The Biennial is safe enough to ignore.

Jason Rhoades fills a gallery with junk—bottles of Elmer’s Glue, a poster featuring porn star Marilyn Chambers, desk chairs and a sign that reads “Filling with whole green peas by weight not volume”—but there’s nothing chaotic about it. The Grand Machine/THEAREOLA (2002) is immaculately calculated. Mr. Rhoades is a wily artist, but he’s cowed by heady intentions. He’s one example of a generation incapable of acknowledging that art is bigger than the artist. Just what are these people afraid of? Next Page >

“Reason in the grass and tears in the sky”—this lyrical sentiment was Paul Cézanne’s self-stated ambition for his art and referred directly to the paintings of the French classicist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), whose landscapes are the subject of “Poussin and Nature; Arcadian Visions,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Viewers coming into contact with a Poussin painting, let alone 40 or so, will realize how high the bar is that Cézanne set for himself. While no painting is perfect, Poussin came close, and not a few times. The unremitting clarity of Landscape With St. John on Patmos (1640), for example, is almost painful to look at. What an affront to mere expertise, what otherworldly portent and poetry. The possibilities of art seem to expand.

Poussin knew he was good and that knowledge led to risky behavior. Rather than suck up to French courtier and patron to the arts Paul Fréart de Chantelou, the artist chided him for “the frequentation of the many insensate and ignorant people that surround you” and their contribution to his faltering sense of taste. Poussin had chutzpah.

Born in Les Andelys to a family of meager means, Poussin exhibited a gift for art early on. Encouraged by a hometown painter, Poussin traveled to Paris to study art. Setting out for Rome, Poussin made it to Florence and turned back due to illness and poverty. Through the good graces of the poet Giambattista Marino, he made it to Rome, where he impressed the locals with his brush’s “felicitous fashion.”

Poussin established a rapport with Francesco Barberini, the nephew of Pope Urban VIII, and the Barberini family’s secretary Cassiano dal Pozzo, but found himself without patrons when the two men were sent on a mission to Madrid. Poussin pitched his paintings to the marketplace, thought about Roman sculpture, studied the figure and drew from nature with Claude Lorrain.

Poussin would eventually garner important patrons through the offices of Barberini and del Pozzo. Cardinal Richelieu was a client, as was Philip IV of Spain, who commissioned Landscape With Saint Jerome, and which is included at the Met. France’s minister of the arts bestowed Poussin with the title of premier peintre du roi. Shuttling between Paris and Rome, he accrued significant and sometimes possessive patrons in both places.

To get an idea of Poussin’s importance to world of art, consider Poussinisme, a stylistic category coined for paintings that shared similar attributes: linearity, local color, precision, remove, brushwork put in the service of designo and (as art historian Anna Ottani Cavina has it) “the absolute” and “geometries of silence.” “Rubenisme,” another historical grouping, is, as you might guess, everything Poussinisme was not.

The rift between the two schools is oversold—categorization is always an iffy proposition—but it proved volatile all the same. In 1671, for example, the French Academy underwent dissension within its ranks over whether color was more important than drawing. Delacroix and Ingres would continue this combative dynamic. Poussin was a drawing man, true, but he didn’t neglect his palette. It’s great in fact, filled, as it is, with crystalline reds, sumptuous greens, keening blues and, in The Nurture of Bacchus (1628), flesh tones that underline its sleepy eroticism.

Poussin’s arcadias are contrived and contained. The land isn’t tamed; it’s immaculately orchestrated. No phenomenon is indistinct. The ominous drift of clouds in Landscape With a Nymph and Sleeping Satyr (1627) is a Platonic ideal and not something to seek cover from. The three trees in Landscape With a River God (1625) tilt with Rockette-like precision. Nature’s drama is rendered immovable and its surfaces clean.

All the same, its munificence and independence is recognizable—not from artistic precedent, but from experience with the real thing. An artist set on distilling every stalk of wheat or the intricate jags of a rocky cliff had better know his botanical and geological p’s and q’s; otherwise immaculate artifice becomes cliché and our wonderment is diminished. Direct contact grounds abstraction. Poussin’s hand gave credence to nature’s integrity. Those outings with Watteau paid off.

There are no pure landscape paintings at the Met—nymphs, satyrs, Apollo, Midas, an achingly sexy bacchante and other mythological beings populate them; Biblical figures are less predominate. But in 30 or so ink and chalk drawings, Poussin brings nature to the fore with thrilling concision. Landscape With an Ancient City (c. 1645-47) is brought to fruition with whispery strokes of thinned ink. Elsewhere you see Poussin condense, rhyme and respond intuitively to the scene spread out before him.

Poussin died at the age of 71 after having not painted for a year. His shaking hand, long a problem, became pronounced; he could no longer handle a brush. This led to depression and, it would seem, obsession: Poussin told his future biographer that death occupied his every thought.

Well, not every thought—painting occupied him as well. “The goal of [painting],” he concluded, “is delectation.”

Met curator Keith Christensen, the exhibition’s co-organizer along with former Louvre director Pierre Rosenberg, is a local hero. His contributions to the city’s cultural life can’t be overestimated. Sienese painting, Mantegna, Caravaggio, Correggio, Artemisia Gentileschi and her father, Orazio, and now “Arcadian Visions”—he put these and other exhibitions together, and deserves a cheer. But, as Mr. Christensen would surely agree, you should save a bigger cheer for Poussin.

 

“Poussin and Nature; Arcadian Visions” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until May 11. Next Page >

“Parmigianino’s Antea: A Beautiful Artifice,” an exhibition at the Frick Collection, poses an interesting question: Is it more challenging to view a show dedicated to a single work of art, or one featuring several?

A comprehensive exhibition demands concentration predicated, in part, on sheer numbers. The viewer enjoys (or contends with) breadth and context. But an exhibition featuring a single work demands a different kind of attention.

Most of us engage with a work of art on public view for a matter of seconds or minutes. This runs contrary to the notion that art reveals itself more the longer a viewer spends with it. “A Beautiful Artifice” insists on that well-founded cliché. Antea (c. 1531-34), a painting by the Italian Mannerist painter Parmigianino (1503-1540), is the show’s only painting.

Is the striking young woman in Antea based on an actual person or is she, as the exhibition title suggests, an artifice? In her exhaustive and absorbing catalog essay, curator Christina Neilson doggedly pursues the painting’s history. She’s a thorough detective who relishes mystery, but not at the expense of art. Even as she digs for facts, Ms. Neilson bolsters the painting’s seductive and inscrutable allure.

Antea belongs to a select group of art historical women whose fascination lies in their resistance to interpretation. There’s Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, of course, but also Petrus Christus’ Portrait of a Young Woman, Vermeer’s Head of a Girl and Raphael’s La Fornarina (the subject of another single-painting Frick exhibition a few years back). Like any good artist, Parmigianino sacrificed control in deference to the painting’s independence. At a certain point, we stop talking about art. Antea becomes a living presence.

The earliest reference to Antea came over a hundred years after Parmigianino laid down the last brush stroke, and identifies her as the artist’s inamorata. Other sources list her as an aristocrat or a bride or a whore—whichever way, she was classy. Was Antea Parmigianino’s daughter, mistress, servant or an advertisement for chastity?

Ms. Neilson considers the symbolic heft of Antea’s raiment. The marten fur she wears connotes fertility and so appears to endorse matrimony. Rubies were viewed as a conduit to the heart and soul; using this logic, Antea’s ring is another vote for marriage. Antea’s apron? It was high fashion. Her name? Through a circuitous route back to Aphrodite, “Antea” led to theories about her being a prostitute. Ms. Neilson elaborates, cites historical data and dismisses these notions. The painting is the thing.

Against a deep, burnished green, Antea faces us with tight-lipped self-possession. Her eyes are large and open wide; they’re somewhat accusatory, but not without innocence. There’s a slight blush to her cheeks.

Antea’s bare left hand fingers her necklace absent-mindedly. Her gloved right hand, pinky finger slightly extended, holds the other glove. The slight blur of her skirt suggests movement.

Erotic intent is inescapable. Antea’s left breast presses against her gold and shimmering dress, an attribute gently emphasized by the lift of her hand. Antea’s intense expression conveys longing—this is a sternly sexual painting.

Distortion of form was an essential element of Mannerism. Parmigianino’s best-known painting, Madonna of the Long Neck (c. 1534-39), is aptly titled. Antea is nowhere near as extreme, but stay with the painting—it’s an amalgam of softly stated, snakelike tics. Her arms aren’t quite connected to her body. The waistline is too high. The eyes are enlarged and saucerlike. Antea is an exquisitely furtive investigation of style for its own sake.

Artistic precedents complicate the painting’s fetching enigma. Parmigianino may have been familiar with Raphael’s La Fornarina—appropriately enough for a painter nicknamed “Raphael redivivus (revived).” Ms. Neilson glances upon Ghirlandaio, Botticelli and Titian as comparisons, but the most fascinating comparison is to Parmigianino himself. Next Page >

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York magazine, appeared on a panel a few years back where he described the painter Rackstraw Downes as “strong conservative.” We know what “strong” is: forceful, confident and of a high quality. But “conservative”—what on earth can that mean?

Mr. Downes is a representational painter—this is to say, an artist who creates recognizable images. But so are Will Cotton, Neo Rauch and Carroll Dunham. No one runs around pegging them as “conservative,” so that can’t be it.

Mr. Downes paints from direct observation; he doesn’t use photographs, delve in to the recesses of his imagination or poach upon pop culture. He looks to the Old Masters for inspiration. Hieronymous Bosch—that’s his thing.

Mr. Downes’ canvases are devoid of irony or commentary. A painter through and through, he leaves snark and theory to others. Anyone familiar with Mr. Downes’ work or his indispensable book, In Relationship to the Whole: Three Essays From Three Decades 1973, 1981 and 1996, knows of his unwavering commitment to the art form. Could it be his steadfast aesthetic that qualifies him as “conservative”?

Whatever. It’s enough that Mr. Downes’ recent paintings, on exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery, are among his best.

They stirred not a few painters I encountered at the exhibition. One of the greatest compliments an artist can receive is the extent to which he motivates other artists to head to their studios. Mr. Downes’ paintings are doing that. The rest of us should take note of his peers’ enthusiasm.

On the cover of the exhibition catalog is a photo of Mr. Downes’ easel set up under the Henry Hudson Bridge. It’s tied down like a complicated bit of camping gear. Actually, it’s two easels holding a single canvas. Mr. Downes doesn’t need a gust of wind interfering with his putting brush to canvas. An artist of fierce concentration, Mr. Downes has enough to contend with standing on his signature turf: Unlovely and inhospitable terrain.

Mr. Downes parks himself under the tracks of the J line in Brooklyn. He does the same on Atlantic Avenue, looking up at the entrance to the Van Wyck Expressway. The Henry Hudson Parkway interests Mr. Downes less for its encompassing views of New Jersey than the substructure of its bridge. He paints the Guggenheim Museum surrounded by scaffolding. It’s a construction sight, not a cultural institution.

Mr. Downes works outside New York as well. There are paintings devoted to be a racetrack in Presidio, Texas. Scrub brush, tire tracks, rickety horse shelters, phone lines, a distant mountain range … and is that a porto-san?—Mr. Downes doesn’t miss a trick. In a suite of six canvases, he walks around a barn and paints his “circumambulation.” Returning to the city, he depicts a friend’s hangarlike Brooklyn studio.

Wherever he is, Mr. Downes is—well, “at home” isn’t the right way to put it. The paintings are marked by absence, not comfort. They’re notably bereft of humankind. The service workers at the bottom right of The El and Alabama Avenue with the East New York Bus Depot of the MTA (2007)—Mr. Downes’ titles are finicky and matter-of-fact—are negligible. They’re an architectural element of their gritty, drive-through surroundings and nothing more.

Like Monet, albeit steelier in temperament, Mr. Downes is “only an eye—yet what an eye.” He doesn’t relish what’s before him—he interrogates it. Romance is out of the question, as is the picturesque. We register Mr. Downes’ dogged isolation, but not for long, and then not at all. He renders himself intensely invisible. Narrowness of outlook serves as a motor for clarity. Observation is a challenge of no mean effort.

As a paint-handler, Mr. Downes gets the job done. He’s precise, cold and methodical. Sensuality—forget it; the very idea is alien to him. Anything approaching individuality of touch is subsumed by the vagaries of light and, most inventively, space. Mr. Downes’ paintings zoom. A Stop on the J Line (Alabama Avenue) (2007) loops like silly putty stretched to its limit. The paintings pull at the eye with almost frightening insistence.

“There is an agenda here,” he admits. “The top of the painting is usually sky, all airy and light … fleecy and vaporous. So it interests me to reverse this situation.” The extremity of viewpoint, from below an underpass or at a distance from a mountain range, renders the sky, not confrontational, exactly, but muscular. Notwithstanding the immaculate clatter of industry and subway girders, the centralized “window” of sky in Under the J Line at Alabama Avenue (2007) is its subject and, one intuits, its inspiration.

Mr. Downes’ Texas paintings are his toughest. Their formats are outrageous: Presidio Horse Racing Association Track, Presidio, TX 1. Looking North, East and Southeast: From the Entrance on Rt. 170 to the Beginning of the Track (2007) is scaled on a ratio just short of a 1:10—it’s 15 inches high and 120 inches wide. The other Texas pictures, though not as exaggerated, are similarly and absurdly cinematic. (Extremely horizontal canvases have long been Mr. Downes’ format of choice.)

Could the high, cleansing light of the desert or its forbidding breadth of space be accurately transcribed within more traditional formats? Maybe. But one can’t imagine another painter making it as integral to his art. Like Mr. Downes himself, format is, in the end, rendered irrelevant and inevitable. Our head swivels as if we were standing behind Mr. Downes’ easel. Looking, he insists, is an infinitely complicated responsibility.

As a longtime but cautious admirer of Mr. Downes’ art, I initially found the paintings off-putting. The tremendous skill in shaping them is reliably self-evident, but so, too, is his stubborn, all but autocratic vision of form—not for nothing do some consider him heir to minimalism. This time around, resistance led to invigoration and a stern brand of pleasure. I don’t know if it’s Mr. Downes or if it’s me, but such quibbles are quashed by his masterful, all but impossible art.

 

“Rackstraw Downes” is at Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, until March 1. Next Page >

Jasper Johns seems like a down-to-earth kind of guy. In an interview conducted by curator Nan Rosenthal, published in the catalog accompanying “Jasper Johns: Gray,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Johns answers questions with Hemingway-like curtness. It’s a self-effacing performance. You didn’t have to be there to register his droll, deadpan demeanor.

Ms. Rosenthal quizzes the artist on his gray paintings and often comes away with … not much. Mr. Johns isn’t belligerent or evasive. Rather, he’s an artist deeply involved in the studio; he doesn’t give aesthetic matters much thought. He’s busy.

Ms. Rosenthal attempts to pin down Mr. Johns, at times with polite exasperation. “I don’t know” is a frequent response. Mr. Johns “thinks so,” “imagine[s]” and hasn’t “paid that much attention.” He doesn’t “really often think about gray.” Do the gray canvases differ from his other monochromatic pieces? “I think if you think it does, that’s for you to say.”

Anyone familiar with the oeuvre will recognize the answers as being typically Johnsian. His art is renowned for its refined, hermetic and curiously obvious strategies. Were the paintings, with their poker-faced appropriation of mass culture imagery, a refutation of Abstract Expressionism? “There was no art historical problem [for me],” he says. “I was not that sophisticated.”

It was impossible for artists working in mid-20th century Manhattan not to be aware of Abstract Expressionism’s hard-drinking ethos—it was inescapable. Mr. Johns, along with the considerably cheerier Robert Rauschenberg, looked to Marcel Duchamp’s gadfly cynicism to halt the AbEx juggernaut. They put into motion Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and the rest.

But the “unsophisticated” Mr. Johns puts a refreshingly unpretentious spin on the standard telling of postwar art. His work, he says, was the result of “part accident and part boredom.”

“Jasper Johns: Gray” is likely to confirm Mr. Johns’ standing as the elder statesman of American art or, as one dealer has described him, “the Rembrandt of our time.” The marketplace won’t have it any other way given the cool millions doled out for the work.

The show includes archetypal motifs: Flags, maps, numbers, words and, less well-known, biographical tangents. Except they’re gray.

How this color decision affects Mr. Johns’ dry irony is a question hardly worth asking. His art doesn’t stem from pictorial exploration, but from formula; materials follow schemes. “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it,” as Johns once put it. It was with this M.O. that he established his reputation. It’s no wonder that reams of verbiage surround the work. Literature picks up when the visual putters to a halt.

For Mr. Johns, color is a device that’s as good as another. A flag that’s gray instead of red, white and blue could be considered stately, I guess, but that’s all that you can say about it. Mr. Johns’ palette has been mostly arbitrary and always unfelt. Under his calculating hand, sensuality and metaphor are absent.

Mr. Johns comments on painting from the outside in. A conceptual artist who happens to use paint, his brush stroke is a deliberate cliché, and composition is purposefully simplistic (or absent) from his work. Obfuscation is the rule—you can’t get anywhere with the stuff. That’s the point, but once his overintellectualized gamesmanship is over and out, what’s left?

In later paintings, biographical references pepper the work—Racing Thoughts (1984) features Leo Castelli, Mr. Johns’ longtime dealer, and art historical icons (Mona Lisa is seen in the same work). But retrospection, in Mr. Johns’ hands, is a urinal—it’s ready made and all but meaningless. Engagement is beside the point.

Perhaps it’s Mr. Johns’ obtuseness that causes art historian Barbara Rose to divine within it allusions to Freud, Jacques Lacan and—oh, come on!—the Battle of Antietam. Elsewhere in the catalog, you’ll find passing comparisons to Goya, Proust, Wittgenstein, Beckett and, er, a stripper and a sadomasochist.

You have to wonder what Mr. Johns thinks of such analogies. Maybe he’d reply as he did in response to a question from Ms. Rosenthal: “No, I didn’t think of that.” And then he’d raise an eyebrow, and smile.

 

“Jasper Johns: Gray” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until May 4. Mario Naves can be reached at mnaves@observer.com. Next Page >

Any event prompting a reacquaintance with The Lives of the Artists, the seminal art historical tract by Giorgio Vasari, is, almost by definition, a good one. So it is with “Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries; Drawings From the Uffizi,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Vasari (1511-1574) was a vastly important figure in 16th-century Florence; the city and era are inconceivable without him. Renowned in his own time as a Michelangelesque painter, Vasari was also the architect of the Uffizi; he helped found the Accademia del Disegno; he was a theatrical set designer and—yes, that’s right—a wedding planner.

Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici charged Vasari with the restoration of the Palazzo Novo, a municipal building built during the 13th and 14th centuries. The Duke, having come to power at the age of 17, decided that the Palazzo Vecchio, as it came to be known, would make a fine home. Spectacular quarters would confirm his authority.

Vasari had daunting precedent to build upon. He would enlarge the already imposing Salone dei Cinquecento and transform it into the Duke’s court. Decorations by Bronzino, Filippo Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Giotto, as well as sculptors like Verrocchio and Donatello, were his competition. Cosimo, ever mindful of art as a diplomatic tool, demanded that tradition be honored. Vasari, a proponent of masters past and current, was happy to oblige.

You’d think history would remember Vasari as a Florentine mover and shaker, and it does, but less for his architectural and artistic efforts than for The Lives of the Artists, his biased, sometimes gossipy, hyperbolic and indispensable volume.

Beginning with Cimabue—who played hooky from school, Vasari tells us, to learn about art—Vasari touches upon, among others, Leonardo, Raphael, Correggio and his friend Michelangelo, who was sent by “the benign ruler of heaven.” Vasari was a huckster with a stellar inventory.

“Drawings From the Uffizi” aims to recover Vasari the artist and impresario from under the historian’s shadow. Divided into three sections, the exhibition traces the masters to whom Vasari looked for inspiration; painters whose work was already extant at the palazzo; Vasari’s and his collaborators’ contributions; and painters who worked under Cosimo’s heir, Francesco de’ Medici.

Box office necessities hamper that goal, if just a bit—the exhibition’s title makes plain that Michelangelo is the star draw. His two drawings—Studies of a Male Leg (ca. 1525-31) and Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man and Bust of a Child (mid-1530’s) evince considerable flair, but not necessarily mastery. They capture Michelangelo on a bum day.

The latter sheet is particularly vexing—why the curators laud it as a masterwork is a mystery. Michelangelo’s pictorial stylizations are unctuous, and its surface manipulation, done in black chalk, is greasy in effect. Pontormo’s Male Nude Seen From Behind and Study of a Head (ca. 1545-53) beats Michelangelo at his own game of anatomical distortion in service of understated drama.

A quartet of drawings by Bronzino—a trio, really, given one attribution—is the high point. Forget accuracy: Half-Length Portrait of a Gentlewoman (ca. 1530-40), the maybe-Bronzino, is a showstopper. The subject’s thoughtful expression is uncanny, as are the silky contours with which her features have been put into place. A scholar suggests that it might be the work of Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, Domenico’s son. Degas thought enough of the drawing to copy it. We should follow his lead: It’s a drawing of sublime proportions.

The majority of artists included are known primarily to specialists, but they’re no slouches as draftsmen. There’s a lot to be said for Santi di Tito’s tender Studies of the Head, the Face, and the Bust of a Child (ca. 1570), a portrait, perhaps, of his son. The cloying expression of Head of a Young Man (late 16th century) by Girolamo Macchietti is redeemed, if just barely, by his exquisite manipulation of red chalk. Blunt architectural studies by Vincenzo Borghini are those of an exacting, intuitive hand, and Jacopo Zucchi’s Allegory of the City of Pistoia (ca. mid-1560’s) is a refreshing divergence into grotesquerie.

As for the man himself, Vasari comes across as capable but stilted, a consummate professional but uninspiring artist. He’s at his best working loosely—Study for the Decoration of a Ceiling With Virtue Overcoming Fortune and Envy (ca. 1548) is bracingly to the point—but his Pietà and Allegory of Charity (ca. 1541-42) are cornball theater. You’ve got to wonder if Vasari’s stage settings were any better.

Even on the slim evidence here, viewers won’t be impelled to seek out Vasari the artist. Within a scholarly context, however, his greater accomplishments and workmanlike expertise are impressive. It’s doubtful that history or, in its own modest way, the Morgan will alter Vasari’s standing as the essential documentarian of an astonishing artistic epoch. But that’s not to say there aren’t substantial pleasures to be had in “Drawings From the Uffizi.”

“Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries: Drawings From the Uffizi” is at The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, until April 20. Mario Naves can be reached at mnaves@observer.com. Next Page >

“Diebenkorn in New Mexico” is, as its title makes plain, an exhibition about place as much as it is about art. The degree to which geographic specificity determines the character of a work may be a moot point—for some, the globe-crossing verities of our technological age have all but trumped the local. The smoky and sometimes rambunctious paintings on display at N.Y.U.’s Grey Art Gallery are, in that light, antiquated.

But you don’t have to be a technophile to question the artistic viability of the work Diebenkorn created while earning a Master’s Degree at the University of New Mexico. With their encompassing fields of color, searching line, surface agitation and improvisatory tack, they point to the New York School. De Kooning, Rothko, Gorky, Clyfford Still and William Baziotes tower over the young Diebenkorn’s efforts. The paintings are grateful for precedent, but dusty with it, too.

Diebenkorn, who died in 1993 at the age of 71, never registered as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist. A direct connection with New York City was one of the designation’s primary litmus tests. Diebenkorn flirted with moving to Manhattan, but settled on the West Coast. He was (and continues to be) pegged as a “California painter”—a geographically accurate but condescending description.

Diebenkorn was out of the swing of things, at least after his pivotal immersion in Abstract Expressionist principles. Notwithstanding a lovely set of paintings on cigar box lids, hardly a Brillo box maneuver, Diebenkorn’s art is devoid of references to mass culture. What to do with an artist whose interests set him apart from the reigning aesthetic? For many years, a Diebenkorn painting was displayed in MoMA’s stairwell—an “oh, by the way” painter worth knowing, but only in passing.

Needless to say, that isn’t the opinion of the organizers of “Diebenkorn in New Mexico.” Curator Charles Strong describes Diebenkorn as “brilliant.” Charles M. Lovell, former director of the Harwood Museum of Art in, yes, New Mexico, describes him as “one of the twentieth century’s most important artists.” Gerald Nordland, Diebenkorn’s biographer, claims the “creative giant” as “among the most original of all modern artists.”

Cheerleading is typical of exhibition catalogs, but that doesn’t mean you’ll come away from “New Mexico” convinced by the enthusiasm. Diebenkorn’s AbEx phase was a necessary pit stop to the Ocean Park pictures, an elegantly scrabbled suite of paintings that commingle geometric scaffolding and vaporous trails of Matissean color. Named after the Santa Monica neighborhood Diebenkorn lived in for many years, the pictures, with their cleansing light, are essentially landscapes embedded within a scrim of painterly incident.

The New Mexico pictures are surreptitious landscapes as well. Though peppered with strong pinks, oranges and the stray green, the paintings are rich in wan ochres, scrubby browns and dry off-whites—desert colors. The canvases are warm and expansive. Diebenkorn had an almost visceral reaction to the landscape’s grit and aridity. Looking at the paintings, we feel his response in our bones.

Line is an indispensable part of the paintings and courses through the compositions with wiry purpose. Diebenkorn had specific ideas about its function: Line should define shape, establish itself as an independent entity and serve as pictorial girding. De Kooning was the obvious referent—“The way he used that line,” Diebenkorn exclaimed, “that was really it for me!” Diebenkorn’s line moved with similar, if less libidinal, vigor. It traverses wide planes with speedy concision, meanders as if in a daydream, glides into arabesques and evaporates as quickly as it appears.

Broad humor pops up in the paintings, and surprisingly so—Diebenkorn’s oeuvre doesn’t exactly brim with jokes. Stubby, bulblike forms stand at attention or escape from the parameters of the canvas. Niggling forms huddle up against clueless monumental slabs. A zigzagging line turns pliant in an eye blink. An anxiety-ridden cousin of Klee’s twittering machine churns and clanks within a frazzled expanse of creamy tones.

In Diebenkorn’s ink drawings, humor becomes farce; their sprightliness makes the paintings seem sludgy and staid. Cézanne-esque doubt marks the painter; crazy vigor the draftsman. Where in hell is that line zooming? The thrill is that it doesn’t know and, one intuits, neither did Diebenkorn. In his hands, Miró and Gorky are transmogrified into Daffy Duck—sophistication becomes slapstick. The drawings teeter with headlong elan.

The true surprise of “Diebenkorn in New Mexico” is a sculpture—a rickety steel armature that attempts to give body to Diebenkorn’s line and ends up looking like a militaristic praying mantis. It’s not much more than the dabbling of a painter curious to see how the other half lives. But the work is of a piece with the exploratory exuberance of the exhibition. Think of the New Mexico paintings as the work of an artist sowing his wild oats before settling into hard-won mastery. In that sense, “Diebekorn in New Mexico” is both a tease and a wild ride.

“Diebenkorn in New Mexico” is at N.Y.U.’s Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, until April 5. Next Page >

The Dadaist painter Francis Picabia (1879-1953) went through life with no shortage of self-generated noms de plume. To name a few: funny guy, imbecile, pickpocket, failure, cannibal, silly willy and “the only complete artist.” He signed off as “Napoleon,” “Saint Augustine” and “The Blessed Virgin.” Anyone familiar with Dada will recognize its nose-thumbing esprit in Picabia’s absurdist designations.

Picabia considered himself the first Dadaist. He was an indispensable component of Dadaist cliques in Paris, Zurich and New York. Marcel Duchamp was a friend, as was Guillaume Apollinaire; the poets Tristan Tzara and André Breton were like-minded anti-aesthetes and eventual nemeses; and the poet Paul Eluard, a founder of Surrealism, was a fan: Picabia, he wrote, was a “divine Marquis de Sade.” New Yorkers know Picabia as the painter of I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie (1914), a staple of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

I Am a Beautiful Monster, a new compilation of Picabia’s writings, displays a man of infuriating contradictions—an obtuse, belligerent, radical, reactionary, strangely lucid and sometimes hilarious gadfly. Luckily, translator Marc Lowenthal has done a superlative job of placing Picabia’s writing in historical and artistic context. Arranged chronologically, I Am a Beautiful Monster follows Picabia through his early involvement with, and ultimate abandonment of, Dada.

Picabia’s proclamation that “M. Picabia Separates From the Dadas” was spurred, Mr. Lowenthal informs us, over a disagreement between various members as to whether a lost wallet should be returned to its owner. Breton wanted to keep it; Eluard disagreed and returned it anonymously, heightening tensions within the group. Picabia gleaned from this encounter Dada’s “departed spirit.”

Picabia’s pre-Dadaist poetry is all jagged rhythms, haphazard juxtapositions and little punctuation. He fares best when keeping things short. But for every light and lovely homage to Apollinaire, there are a half-dozen fragments like this: “From fortune-tellers of syphilis/ This superstition in the statistics of progress/ Brings bayonets to full strength/ In the language of unpleasant roads.”

Picabia does come up with some striking turns of phrase—“the neurasthenia of peculiar obsessions” is good; “The desire to be placid in love/ Is a veritable sex crime” is better—but poems they’re not.

The doggerel continues through the Dadaist years, but gains momentum and focus. The sprawling “Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère” is, in Mr. Lowenthal’s opinion, Picabia’s “most accomplished literary work.” Despite its title, the closest Picabia’s tract comes to heresy are a few nettlesome sentiments—“Only the Jews are really energetic,” say, or “GOD WAS JEWISH/ HE WAS CONNED/ BY THE CATHOLICS.”

Elsewhere, you’ll find oddball commentary on art world eminences: Fernand Léger “declares that one must always have a foot in the shit.” Picasso was “very eighteenth century, must be completely fed up, French guy.” In “Manifesto of the Dada Movement,” you can feel the rush of an artist temporarily on the side of history: “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT WE’RE DOING DO YOU. WELL DEAR FRIENDS WE UNDERSTAND IT EVEN LESS THAN YOU DO.”

“Anti-Dada, 1921-1924” is the most vitriolic chapter. “I parted from certain Dadas because I was feeling stifled among them … [and] terribly bored.” Its “spirit only existed for three or four years, it was expressed by Marcel Duchamp and myself.” (Duchamp was one of the few people who escaped Picabia’s ire.)

Picabia’s short-lived movement, “Instantism,” was little more than a satiric broadside at Dadaism. He makes a stunningly prophetic statement: Dada “will live forever! And thanks to it, art dealers will make a fortune.”

Other than “Chi-Lo-Sa,” wherein Picabia shamelessly cribs from Nietzsche for a string of fortune-cookie nostrums, the later and posthumous writings are notable mainly for sharp flashes of impenetrable wit: “Humor is the cannibalism of vegetarians.” But if history does remember Picabia the man of letters at all, it will be for the aphorisms.

Littered throughout I Am a Beautiful Monster, they are sometimes mordant—“Every conviction is an illness”—and often laugh-out-loud funny: “To those talking behind my back: my ass is looking at you.” “Morality is ill disposed in a pair of trousers.” “Parisians ruin the French.” “If you read André Gide aloud for ten minutes, your breath will stink.”

During “Dada Cannibal Manifesto,” a performance in the early 1920’s, André Breton wore a sandwich board with text by Picabia: “IN ORDER TO LOVE/ SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO/ HAVE SEEN AND HEARD IT/ FOR A LONG TIME YOU BUNCH OF IDIOTS.” The invective here was directed at the bourgeoisie. It would, in time, encompass Picabia’s feelings about his former partners in nihilism.

I Am a Beautiful Monster traces a fascinating trajectory of artistic belief. Biographers and historians will gobble it up. The rest of us will leave it on the bookshelf, read, if at all, in bits and pieces. Still, we’ll be glad to know it’s there. Next Page >

Generosity of spirit and joyous excess are the hallmarks of Roy De Forest’s blissfully excessive art, the subject of a memorial exhibition at George Adams Gallery. (De Forest died last spring at the age of 77.) His paintings, drawings and sculptures were often classified as “California Funk,” a description foisted upon a group of West Coast artists who treated tradition with cheery disregard. No highfalutin intentions, please, we’re Californians.

De Forest wasn’t ignored by the Manhattan art scene, as numerous exhibitions by dealer Allan Frumkin attest. Nor did the artist turn a blind eye to the New York School: Its compositional strategies filter into De Forest’s kaleidoscopic arrays of cowboys, dogs and relentless ornamentation. Yet never would you have caught self-important standard-bearers of high art—Robert Motherwell, say, or Clyfford Still—indulging in such goofball fantasies.

The thing is, De Forest’s paintings aren’t fantasies; they’re real. An artist’s responsibility is to create a fiction we can enter, experience and believe in. How convincingly it’s realized and how much the artist yields to its logic determines its aesthetic viability. The inside-out, every-which-way cosmos De Forest brought to life sprawls like a topographical map and bustles like the No. 6 train at rush hour. There’s not an inch of canvas unaccounted for. Forget horror vacui: De Forest’s all-over and exaggerated pointillism, characterized by blips of acrylic squeezed directly from the tube, aren’t obsessive; they’re a celebration of life’s bounty.

The rough-hewn vigor of American folk art informs the paintings, as does the unmediated nature of children’s art. But De Forest’s sophistication precluded sentimentality—the strong coloration, surprising and intricate narratives and general air of ecstasy recall non-Western art, particularly Himalayan painting.

The flattened, topsy-turvy landscape in Silas Newcastle Goes Down (1966) has a hallucinogenic fervor that upsets its symmetrical composition. Black Horse Meadow (2004-2005), with its drowsy haze of soft yellows, is as quaint and warm as the wallpaper in grandma’s living room.

De Forest got cute with his handmade frames—kitschy self-consciousness didn’t suit him—and the drawings are too wispy to invigorate their rolling landscapes and clustered doodles. But the paintings offer glittering proof that happiness, optimism and unapologetic good will are their own reward—and ours.

“Roy De Forest: A Memorial Exhibition” is at George Adams Gallery, 525 West 26th Street, until Feb. 16.

De Montebello Departs

After 30 years as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director, Philippe de Montebello has announced his retirement.

As annoying as museum audio guides are, one has to admit that overhearing the buzz of Mr. de Montebello’s stentorian voice elaborating on the Met’s treasures will be missed. Velásquez, Renaissance tapestries, Leonardo, Byzantium and the acquisition of Vermeer’s Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 1666-1667)—would that each of us could look back on such grand ambitions so beautifully realized.

Mr. de Montebello has been rightly criticized for a lack of interest in contemporary art. How else could he have allowed his curators to let Damien Hirst’s slick nihilism—you know, that dead shark thing—inside the museum’s doors? But the majestic renovation of the Greek and Roman galleries alone redeem that slight stumble. Best of all, Mr. de Montebello has proven that populism needn’t preclude high standards, and that elitism doesn’t equal snobbery—his respect for the general audience has resulted in record audiences. His will be a daunting legacy to follow.

Picasso’s Ghost

Riddled by the ghost of Cubism and Pop’s cool ironies, painter Ron Linden’s milky investigations of surface, space and denuded biomorphism are only nominally sensual—paint-as-stuff chases after painting as intellectual pursuit. Mr. Linden’s gift is that brainy impatience doesn’t quell a fractured and elusive poetry—if anything it engenders it.

“Ron Linden” is at the CUE Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, until Jan. 26.

Solid Light

Kate Protage’s cityscapes get stranger the longer you look at them. What at first seem conventional valentines to New York gradually morph into blurry arrays of melting, tangible form. Entranced by how the night is punctuated by passing traffic, Ms. Protage renders light almost disconcertingly malleable—it’s as if you could mold it in your hands. Credit a painter capable of resonant shifts in earthy color, lucid transparencies and affection for putting brush to canvas that is handsome and true.

“Kate Protage: Urban Eye” is at Allen Sheppard Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, until Jan. 26.

Strange Ritual

Ryan Mrozows