Jack Whitten: The Messenger
Through Aug. 2 at the Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan; moma.org.
Jack Whitten, who moved from Alabama to New York in 1960, was not just a painter but a sculptural painter. Swaths of acrylic paint are swooped and layered across canvas. Cubes of dried paint conjoin in a textured mosaic, resembling glimmering stars against a night sky. Look closer, and “suddenly the glops and drips look sonic, like musical bursts and pings,” the critic Holland Cotter wrote in his review for The New York Times. The exhibition showcases 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, and scintillates through the Museum of Modern Art’s galleries, Cotter writes, in a refreshing career retrospective of “a radically inventive artist who ranks right at the top of abstraction’s pantheon.” Read the review.
Sargent and Paris
Through Aug. 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan, metmuseum.org.
The portrait painter John Singer Sargent lived and traveled across Europe, North Africa and the United States, but it was his work during a formative decade in 19th-century Paris that catapulted him to recognition.
In a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay, where the exhibition will appear in the fall, the show charts Sargent’s success in his early career. “We see just how he did it,” the critic Karen Rosenberg wrote in her review. “With a lot of savoir-faire and a touch of the enfant terrible.” The exhibition builds to a climax around Sargent’s scandalous “Madame X,” in which the American expatriate Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, heavily powdered and daringly dressed in a cinched black gown, looks seductively over one shoulder. The close look at Sargent’s cosmopolitan ascent as he found his footing adds up to, Rosenberg wrote, “an evocative look at the belle epoque city where a young Sargent hit his stride.” Read the review.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime
Through Aug. 10 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Manhattan; whitney.org.
The artist known for her portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor is not primarily a recorder of well-known figures (be it fame or tragedy). Amy Sherald’s oeuvre, rather, centers on the everyday lives of Black Americans, presenting them in brightly saturated paintings and pristine geometric designs. A man perched on a John Deere tractor. A woman holding an oversize teacup. A child in a moment of stillness at the top of a metal slide. Each scene is a snippet of the subject’s interiority. “Sherald is a painter of one-frame short stories,” the critic Deborah Solomon wrote in her review, “of fictions that bestow recognition on people you would not recognize.” Read the review.
The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt
Through Aug. 10 at the Jewish Museum, Manhattan; thejewishmuseum.org.
Queen Esther, the courageous biblical figure who saved the Jews of Persia from annihilation, and Rembrandt van Rijn, might not seem like a natural pairing, but the Jewish heroine was a source of inspiration for the Dutch master. Rembrandt was not Jewish, but he lived on the periphery of Amsterdam’s epicenter of immigrant life and befriended his neighbors, largely Portuguese and Spanish Jews who fled the violence of the Inquisition.
Esther’s heroism against oppression struck a chord with the Dutch plight for freedom from Spanish rule. The “delectably wonky show,” Solomon wrote in her review, “explores a little-known chapter in art history when artists of the Dutch Golden Age made a cult of Esther’s exemplary story.” Read the review.
Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop
Through Aug. 10 at El Museo del Barrio, Manhattan; elmuseo.org.
The 70-year-old kaleidoscopic painter Candida Alvarez’s five-decade career is in full bloom in 102 paintings, drawings and sculptures in this sweeping museum survey. Bold-hued figurative family portraits resemble spirited abstractions; embroidered dinner napkins chronicle microscenes of personal history; and contemplative works in paint and pencil present a stillness. In the first large-scale museum retrospective of her work, Alvarez’s artistic practice comes alive through her relationship to color and her “singular ability to unspool memory, migration and material,” the reporter Elly Fishman wrote in her profile of the artist. Read the profile.
Diane Arbus: Constellation
Through Aug. 17 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org.
The largest and most complete showing of her body of work to date reveals the innovative photographer Diane Arbus’s restless eye for capturing people on the fringes of society. More than 450 photographs — many unseen until now — document her obsession with the aesthetically uncanny: twins and triplets, eerily placed masks, nudists, pin-piercing facial adornments, circus performers. The sprawling exhibition includes every black-and-white silver gelatin print that the photographer Neil Selkirk — Arbus’s former student and the only person authorized to print her photographs — has made from Arbus’s negatives since her death in 1971.
It’s a kind of chaos, but also an opportunity to find the connective tissue behind Arbus’s stark, documentary style, and to see all at once her “taste for arranging people in groups that don’t quite cohere, or the consistently disillusioned expression she found in her subjects’ eyes,” the critic Will Heinrich wrote in his review. Every one of her portraits, Heinrich wrote, “is its own primordial encounter with otherness.” Read the review.
Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits
Through Sept. 7 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; mfa.org.
Vincent van Gogh’s passion for portraiture blossomed in 1888-9 when, after leaving the Parisien art world, he lived in a small river town in the South of France. After months of painting landscapes, he longed for someone to sit for him but lacked the means to hire a model. That changed when he met Joseph Roulin, a postal worker, at a bar. Roulin modeled in exchange for drinks, meals and conversation, and van Gogh began to paint the neighboring family, including Roulin, his wife, Augustine, and their three children, which helped temper the artist’s depression. It’s a “muscular show,” the critic Walker Mimms wrote, and the largest exhibition dedicated to the Roulin portraits.
In blushed pink, Dijon yellow, clashes of primary color, and in carrot-colored strokes and powder blue, van Gogh’s faces are alert, amused, doughy, steely. “What he possessed, all these faces remind us, was an intensity and compulsiveness of looking that, when spent on canvas, could elevate a thing in space to its loudest possible reality: a sunflower, a mother, a constellation,” Mimms wrote. “When directed inward, that intensity felled him.” Read the review.
The Reach of Faith Ringgold
Through Sept. 14 at the Guggenheim, Manhattan; guggenheim.org.
Faith Ringgold, who died last year, was an artist of “protean inventiveness,” Cotter wrote in his appraisal after her death. For more than a half-century, Ringgold wove Black life, explorations of class and gender and the idiosyncrasies of urban childhood into semi-autobiographical paintings, sculptures and narrative quilts. One of those quilts, “Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach,” in which a Black family dines and sleeps al fresco on their roof in Harlem, is on display at the Guggenheim. “Tar Beach,” one of her most celebrated story quilts, led Ringgold to write and illustrate her first of 20 children’s books. As the family, content and at ease, enjoys their rooftop dinner, a young girl floats overhead in the open night sky, her arms outstretched, soaring above the city. Read the appraisal.
Rachel Sherman reports on culture and the arts for The Times.
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