Exhibitions

More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first. “These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. “One has driving power – energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless – tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.” The point being that aging is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other. It is a process, not an event.

Few connoisseurs of the image are unfamiliar with the great French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). But his name is, unfortunately, unfamiliar to the lay person. This is a shame: his gloriously detailed, sharply focused black-and-white images of late 19th- and early 20th-century Paris evocatively conjure the shadows and lights of the boulevards, parks and alleyways of the Belle Époque. His astonishing close-ups of finely crafted architectural details are as striking as his sometimes surreal views of storefront windows and food-stall displays. Whether training his bulky large-format view camera on scenes interior or exterior, he reveals an aesthetic sensibility exquisitely sensitive to the world around him.

Recognition can be late in coming for many artists, but perhaps especially so for women whose originality and talents too often become overshadowed by their more famous romantic partners. Museums are often eager to put on shows making this very argument as women artists are rediscovered. Sometimes the thesis succeeds; other times, it does not. The latest of these is the case of the German artist Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), whose reputation, until recent decades, rested less on her own body of work than on her long-time connection to her mentor and lover, the Russian expressionist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). The Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition, Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World, attempts to rectify the imbalance.

Woody Allen once sardonically described the fans of his films as being divided between those who liked the “early, funny ones” and the later, darker pictures. Much the same might be said of another famous WA: Wes Anderson, who has established himself as one of American cinema’s most significant auteurs despite no longer living in the country – he hops between England and France. Like most auteurs, his films are more succèss d’estime than they are succèss de box office, but he has the cream of Hollywood lining up to work with him and commands respect among actors young and old. Anderson is rightly celebrated – or castigated – as a visual stylist, but he has enormous flair as a screenwriter Anderson’s visual sensibility is infamous.

Orson Welles (1915-85) considered the notion of posterity vulgar, but he knew that he’d be loved once he was dead. That death came suddenly, just over 40 years ago, on October 10, 1985. There was a poignancy to the way death took him – sitting at his typewriter after appearing on Merv Griffin’s talk show. By then, the co-writer, director and star of the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane (1941), hadn’t finished a film since 1973’s ignored but now quietly loved F for Fake. At the end of his life, he may have been better known as the guy in Paul Masson wine commercials than as a cinematic genius. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of his passing, Paris’s Cinémathèque Française last fall arranged the illuminating exhibition My Name is Orson Welles.

We meet at Adam McEwen’s apartment on the Upper East Side, a few hours before he makes a lightning trip back to London, where he was once a journalist working for the Daily Telegraph. After studying art, McEwen worked for a while writing obituaries, and his eureka moment came in 2000 with the decision to turn his day job into art. He began to write fake obituaries for living subjects, adopting the detached prose and visual design of a broadsheet newspaper. Each text was presented as a black-and-white C-print, and subjects included Jeff Koons, Marilyn Chambers, Macaulay Culkin and Nicole Kidman. McEwen’s fictitious obituaries are small masterpieces of the uncanny. In the instant of reading one, the hypothesized death seems real.

Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) is doubtless a blockbuster artist, but the Frick’s exhibition, Vermeer’s Love Letters, is the size of a postage stamp – or, maybe more fittingly, a wax seal. The Frick has three Vermeers of its own, but only one made the cut: “Mistress and Maid” (c. 1664-67). From the 37 known works by the artist, the museum has only borrowed two to bolster the show: “Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid” (c. 1670-72) and “The Love Letter” (c. 1669-70). Each depicts a woman, her maid and at least one letter somewhere in the mix. Though we don’t know exactly what’s written in those papers, it’s fair to say that these discreet works have an air of romance. The show’s effect is something of a riddle. Why has the Frick picked these three?

New York is gilded in beguiling art. It has an excess of riches and though summer is one of the best times to visit, quenching your cultural thirst can be difficult, as the arts patrons decamp to the Hamptons and watering holes ending in -an. From museums to galleries to street art at subway stations or parks, each borough is a canvas, so much so that it is often an afterthought against a landscape of pavement and honking cars. Will you be uptown for the first Monday in May? While the performances on the Met Gala’s red carpet are an art form in themselves, the exhibit the gala underwrites offers plenty to check out uptown as the tulips bloom on Park Avenue.

I arrived in the city of Figueres early one January morning to visit one of the most popular, and bizarre, art museums in the world, the Teatre-Museu Gala Salvador Dalí. It houses a dreamlike picture that, for the first time since it left over seventy years ago, has made a temporary return journey to Spain. Originally simply titled “The Christ,” the 1951 canvas depicting the giant figure of a man on a cross, shown at an overhead angle hovering over a moody seascape, was painted by the most famous son of Figueres, Salvador Dalí. Through April 30, it forms the centerpiece of a show exploring its creation, history, local connections and symbolism.

There are few topics that rankle the art critic more than “immersive exhibitions.” They must be second only to “nonfungible tokens,” whatever those are. I speak of the immersive spectacles where images of famous artwork are flashed on the walls and floors of a large white room in which you sit. Certainly, this should be outside the remit of my union card, I might think. Until now, if you were looking for some opinion on this-or-that out-of-copyright projection venue slash tourist trap, I would simply say not my job. Maybe go see the real thing. Then we can talk. And yet, with art on the walls, real or imagined, judgment always comes calling. Suddenly we seem to be immersed in immersion. It can be a challenge just to keep your head above the digital waters.

With a new show at the Whitney, Edward Hopper’s New York; a new documentary film from director Phil Grabsky, Hopper: An American Love Story; and a recent exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the work of one of the most popular yet seemingly inscrutable American artists of the twentieth century is receiving a great deal of renewed attention. In his paintings, Hopper’s hard-edged realism, impressionistic plays of light and passages of intensely saturated color compete for attention. What has always captured the public imagination is the relative isolation of the figures that appear in his work. Search for articles about Edward Hopper online, and many will describe his art as an exploration of loneliness.

One of the great achievements of Spanish art is in its use of black. No other national school harnessed the dark arts to such effect. In Spanish painting, the color black might convey shadow, or the mystery of the unseen, while at the same time presenting a brooding presence, a dark mass right there on the surface. Just look at “Las Meninas,” Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece of 1656. Now consider the subject. Is it the five-year-old infanta? Her ladies in waiting, the “Meninas” of the title? The painter portrayed at his easel? The infanta’s royal parents in the reflection of a mirror? Some unseen viewer interrupting this tableau?

"Who knew the Greeks had such bad taste?” This comment was overheard at the preview for Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, a head-turning exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This slight wasn’t targeted at the current denizens of Greece, but, rather, their ancestors of yore. You remember the type: chiton-clad Athenians — let’s not forget the ladies in their peploi! — sauntering through the agora, pondering the nature of reality or, perhaps, the role of hoi polloi within a democratic society. They’re the folks whose aesthetic sensibilities were found wanting, at least to one denizen of twenty-first-century museum culture. What most of us know about life in antiquity is, I dare say, as broadly conceived as the above description.

Pity the poor Drawing Center. Founded in 1977 — or, rather, “born into the petri dish of the SoHo art scene in the 1960s and 1970s” — the Center was the pet project of Martha Beck, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She felt that the medium of drawing, being underserved by the arts establishment, needed its own specialized venue. Over the years, this downtown gallery has proved its mettle, mounting a variety of historical and contemporary exhibitions, as well as making a point of reaching out to working artists, some of whom later went on to greater recognition. But that petri dish? It’s changed mightily since the heyday of industrial lofts rented on the cheap.

Art museums normally organize career surveys or thematic exhibitions, but this spring the Museum of Modern Art has departed from this practice to focus on a single work. Matisse: The Red Studio examines the pivotal painting of the same name that Henri Matisse (1869-1954) created in 1911. Exhibitions are normally years in the making, so while this one was in the works long before the Covid-induced lockdown, it offers a model for institutions struggling in the wake of the pandemic. Rather than expending scarce resources on an expensive blockbuster loan show, do a deep dive into something in your own collection. And what a dive this is.