‘Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment’
This year is the 150th birthday of Impressionism, a movement so popular and so familiar that it can seem like some preordained crowd pleaser — all those sunsets and tutus, ready for their blotchy close-ups.
But once, those haystacks were rebellious. Once, those ballet dancers delivered a shock. And the National Gallery, which organized this show with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is now showing the first Impressionist works by Monet, Renoir and Degas alongside the shellacked paintings that appeared at the Salon of 1874. Can we rediscover what was so revolutionary about impressionism back in 1874? Can we still see the defiance in its beauty, and even its schmaltz? JASON FARAGO
‘Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350’
The magnificent glow-in-the-dark exhibition called “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” is a visual event of pure 24-karat beauty and a multi-leveled scholarly coup. On both counts, we’ll be lucky if the season brings us anything like its equal.
For centuries when it came to ranking Italian art centers, Florence took the prize, favored as the preserver and purveyor of the vaunted Western Classical tradition of naturalistic curves and spatial depths. Siena, by contrast, favored the so-called Gothic style, decorative, angular, flat. But in the hands of early Sienese artists, what an expressive style it is. And what a complex one.
A painting by the Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna, one of the Met’s great treasures is a beyond-precious nugget of Western cultural ore, veined as it is with traces of Constantinople, Paris and an Italy budding into Renaissance. HOLLAND COTTER
‘Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes’
Egon Schiele, the widely celebrated Austrian Expressionist, had one of the shortest-ever careers in art. He was only 28 when he died in the flu pandemic of 1918, and his premature death bolstered his image as a symbol of over-the-top Viennese intensity. He is known mainly for drawings of nudes and semi-nudes that can be unnervingly explicit.
But Schiele never cottoned to city life. His paintings, unlike his drawings, consist largely of landscapes. Now, the Neue Galerie has gathered about 60 works spanning his career into the first exhibition of its kind. “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” is a stirring, deeply engrossing show that acquaints us with a long-hidden part of the artist’s career. DEBORAH SOLOMON
‘Mexican Prints at the Vanguard’
The first thing you learn from “Mexican Prints at the Vanguard” is that printmaking has been central to Mexico’s art and media since Spanish colonists arrived with devotional woodcuts in the 1500s. Three centuries later, letterpress madonnas and skeletons traveled to every corner of the vast, multicultural new nation on broadsheets and newspapers; during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), it was eye-grabbing posters of menacing plutocrats that incited the peasants.
After the Revolution, the French-born artist Jean Charlot, who spent decades in Mexico, donated prints to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and eventually, acting on the institution’s behalf, bought more than 2,000 works by artists like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Julio Ruelas and José Guadalupe Posada.
Nearly every one of the 130 lithographs, screen prints and woodcuts in the show comes from this collection that Charlot built. They range from an 18th-century Virgin of Guadalupe on white silk to a series of colorful silk-screens by Carlos Mérida that document regional costumes and dances. WILL HEINRICH
‘Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All that It Implies’
They didn’t have Zoom back in 1970, so when Elizabeth Catlett was denied entry into the United States to address a conference of the Black Arts Movement, she had to deliver her speech by telephone.
The government had stripped Catlett of her citizenship eight years earlier, deeming her an undesirable alien after she became a Mexican citizen in 1962 and following years of surveillance for her leftist politics in both countries. But this hardly chilled her drive.
She made some of her most famous art during this time, including the warm-toned cedar sculpture “Black Unity” (1968), which depicts a fist from one side and two stylized faces in the manner of African masks, side by side, on the other.
This and other works, including her linocut prints and lithographs celebrating Malcolm X, Angela Davis or the Black communities that rose up in protest from Watts to Newark, crossed the border and soon entered the zeitgeist. If her advocacy made her such a threat that her country of birth refused to admit her, Catlett told the conference, “I hope I have earned that honor. For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be, a Black Revolutionary Artist, and all that it implies!” SIDDHARTHA MITTER
‘Mary Sully: Native Modern’
The Dakota Sioux artist who called herself Mary Sully is having an enchanting first survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she came close to being swept off the stage of history. When she died in Omaha, Neb., in 1963, at age 67, her primary output of around 200 color-pencil-and-ink drawings lay hidden in a cardboard box kept by her older sister.
When that sister herself died a few years later, the box ended up among piles of ephemera. Time passed. More than once the box came close to being tossed until one of Sully’s nieces, who happened to be a librarian, transferred the contents to a suitcase, which was then tucked away under a staircase.
More time passed. In 2006, the drawings resurfaced and came to the attention of Sully’s great-nephew, Philip J. Deloria, a history professor at Harvard who documented them in a terrific 2019 book called “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract.” Last year the Met acquired much of the work. And now we have this rich, strange show. HOLLAND COTTER
‘Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue’
Robert Frank never recovered from the success of “The Americans.” On its publication in the United States in 1959, the book was initially excoriated as un-American for its sour, disillusioned take on life in this country. But in a slow burn, Frank’s willful violation of the conventional rules of photography was deemed prophetic — one of the most important and influential books in the history of photography.
Frank hated that. In the early ’60s, he renounced still photography in favor of filmmaking. When he went back in the ’70s to making photographs, he eschewed the street photography that had established his reputation. Instead, he mostly made studio or landscape pictures. It’s this late work — if such a rubric can be applied to the six decades of movie, video and photo production that preceded his death at 94 in 2019 — that is the focus of “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue.”
He developed different strategies to make his pictures stand out. One approach was printing multiple negatives on the same sheet or taping prints together and rephotographing them. A montage he made in the late ’60s of a Chinatown beauty contest captures the frenzied snapping of press photographers more effectively than one image could. A photograph of his bulletin board in New York, with pinned pictures of the home he was about to move to in Nova Scotia, was another way to make one picture out of many. ARTHUR LUBOW
‘The Way I See It: Selections From the Kaws Collection’
As a young street artist, Brian Donnelly (now known as KAWS) would visit PPOW in downtown Manhattan to see work by the painter Martin Wong. A tall Chinese American who loved rodeo clothes, Wong mixed with graffiti writers in ’80s New York and painted shuttered storefronts with psychedelic intensity.
“At first I was just interested in the world he chose to focus on,” Donnelly told me. “The brick walls and the abandoned buildings and communities that existed around them.” Growing up in Jersey City, Donnelly would hone his spray painting skills in buildings like these.
Donnelly had little cash — the X-eyed cartoon characters featured in the statues and paintings he makes as KAWS hadn’t yet brought him millions. But the dealers would let him look “and pretend like I was going to buy something.”
Now 49, Donnelly owns over 4,000 pieces, enough to curate a show from his collection at the Drawing Center. His art, featuring Companion (resembling Mickey Mouse), BFF (Elmo), and Chum (the Michelin Man), is wildly popular even though critical opinion is divided. But he’s broadly respected as a collector — especially of graffitists, self-taught artists, and ’80s New York downtowners. Several standout pieces in the show, like a prickling sketch of a cat by Wong, and a multi-panel painting of cars and snakes by David Wojnarowicz, he bought from PPOW. TRAVIS DIEHL
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