Roberta Smith

NEW YORK — The Museum of Modern Art, which opens on Oct. 21, is not what it used to be — and not yet what it may become.

While still very much in progress, the museum could be on its way to its second round of greatness, to judge by the new presentation of the core collection and, even more, a series of inaugural satellite shows drawn from the permanent collection along with five new commissions. Together they underscore the vastness of the museum’s holdings, a sight that is staggering, possibly unprecedented and probably won’t recur until its next expansion.

It now has a new building with a new wing added almost seamlessly to its 2004 Taniguchi expansion. This is the largest home it’s ever had — a place, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where you can get lost. A psychological benefit is that the large (despised) Taniguchi atrium is de-emphasized. It doesn’t seem so big when you can get farther away from it.

The new MoMA is also more physically welcoming, and in many ways more workable, than it’s ever been, whether one is looking at art, resting or refueling. It has a bigger lobby, another entrance and a pair of elevators; an inventive top-to-bottom public stairwell; more seating throughout and an expanded cafe — though it’s stuck up on the sixth floor. It remains to be seen if this expansion will suffer the overcrowding that plagued the last, but here’s hoping.

Equally important are the museum’s reset priorities, which focus on its unrivaled permanent collection rather than temporary exhibitions and on giving that collection the lion’s share of 24 added galleries. What they contain has been rethought by a team of curators — from department chiefs down to assistant curators — intent on telling a different, more inclusive, less-definitive story that will not only encompass artists from around the world and integrate media but also play down the traditional dominance of painting and sculpture.

The plan is to keep the collection as much in flux as the temporary shows. Every six months a third of the permanent collection galleries will be reinstalled. But the first iteration — with new acquisitions, unfamiliar works long buried in storage, and startling pairings and concentrations — is bound to generate surprises, some disappointments and plenty of arguments. The Euro-American narrative is still too prominent and the museum is still too enamored of conceptual and video art.

There’s not a lot of breezing through the permanent collection, inhaling the unquestioned greatness of the anointed. Each gallery has its own character, distinct from its neighbors; its own jolts and disruptions. Most galleries display works in several mediums and from different times. Some do this more successfully than others; for me, those on the fifth floor are generally better than those on the fourth. And the new dumbed-down gallery headings and word salads of the main wall texts definitely need work. All references to the “isms” — the modern art movements — have been banished except for surrealism, the most popular of them. The decision seems to be to protect visitors from what they do not know.

The rise in the number of artists who are non-male, nonwhite and non-Western is thrilling and attests to the curators’ hard work. The curators have scoured the collection and made strategic new acquisitions. On the fifth floor, where the story of modernism begins, these include Paula Modersohn-Becker’s “Self Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand,” a 1907 work by a pioneering member of the German avant-garde (showing the artist pregnant) that entered MoMA’s collection in 2017, acquired in joint ownership with the Neue Galerie in New York. Extended loans fill other gaps. The gallery labeled “Abstraction and Utopia” features a radical little sculpture from 1929 that integrates interior and exterior space. It’s by the Polish constructivist Katarzyna Kobro and is visiting for five years from the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. Also here for five years is a radiant 1915 painting by Hilma af Klint, a newly-hailed inventor of European abstraction, from the Swedish foundation that holds all her art.

Works of this quality await you in every gallery of the rethought permanent collection. The rethinking is not done. The collection will be considered and reconsidered in the months and years ahead. But give the curators a gold-plated A+ for effort — they have set a new path for their successors — and wait for the next installment. This is only the beginning of a new beginning.

This fresh start is further revealed by the extraordinary array of outlying shows drawn from the permanent collection. These exhibitions, several of which are reviewed below, clarify the museum’s ambitious reformation project and provide a valuable commentary on the permanent collection in their midst.

The Patricia Phelps De Cisneros Gift

‘Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction’

The largest display outside the permanent collection galleries is “Sur moderno,” which celebrates the transformative gift of Latin American modernism from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a longtime patron of the museum. Representing artists from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela, the show includes nearly 90 of the more than 200 artworks in the gift and vitrines displaying archival material like publications, printed matter and photographs of design and architectural projects. There are also films. The show has been organized by Inés Katzenstein, curator of Latin American art and director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin American, the Museum of Modern Art, along with consulting curator María Amalia García.

“Sur moderno” is at once déjà vu and forward-looking. Its often pure abstraction has the single focus of parts of the old MoMA but filtered through an entirely different sensibility, one whose restraint and rationalism often reflects the influence of European geometric art. It is exciting to imagine these Cisneros works integrated into MoMA’s collection, undercutting the assertiveness and scale of so much postwar American art, from Jackson Pollock to Richard Serra.

The Cisneros gift has a breathtaking sweep. It ranges from a strikingly rough back-to-basics painting from 1964 by Brazil’s Mira Schendel to the elegant painted panels of Venezuela’s Alejandro Otero, from 1955, whose patterns and high gloss fuse op and minimal art years before these movements took root. There are rare painted works by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Willys de Castro. The show culminates in a display of six (!) ephemeral hanging wire pieces by the great GEGO (Gertrud Goldschmidt), which are barely visible, yet once seen, fill the eye.

Artist’s Choice

Amy Sillman: ‘The Shape of Shape’

The Modern’s “Artist’s Choice” series rarely disappoints and this iteration is one of its best — and among the most valuable of the inaugural shows. Assembled by New York painter Amy Sillman, working with Michelle Kuo, a curator of painting and sculpture, “The Shape of Shape” points to one of the museum’s bigger curatorial blind spots, especially as it approaches the present: the fear of painting, color and form that has allowed conceptual art and its derivatives such prominence.

Sillman ranges throughout the collection, across media, generations and styles, seeking out overlooked or excluded artists and unfamiliar works. Her effort parallels the approaches at work in the permanent collection galleries, but reflects a relatively robust visual appetite — the artist’s unfettered eye — that the museum needs more of.

The show’s dense installation encourages surprising connections, like that between the horizontal black shapes that dominate Romare Bearden’s “Patchwork Quilt,” from 1970, and William Baziotes’s “Pompeii,” from 1955, each with its own ratio of abstraction and figuration. One of the best moments is the three-way exchange among Fernand Léger’s brilliant purist painting, “The Mirror” of 1925; a bright, hinged sculpture, newly acquired, by the Romanian-born Cuban artist Sandu Darie (1908-91) and a small dark yet colorful painting from 1962 (acquired in 1963) by Zimbabwean artist Thomas Mukarobgwa. It resembles an Édouard Vuillard interior until you look more closely and read the title: “Dying People in the Bush.”

Surrounds

11 Installations

The Modern’s curators excel at choosing large-scale, often environmental installation pieces that are at once immersive, challenging and accessible, as evidenced by “Surrounds,” an exhibition across the sixth floor, and by two high points in the permanent collection galleries. (See Joan Jonas’ elaborate “Mirage” on the fourth floor, and one of its descendants, Wu Tsang’s remarkable video, “We hold where study” (2017).

That talent is also intermittently evident in “Surrounds” whose 11 installation pieces, acquired over the past 15 years, are being shown for the first time. The presentation has been organized by eight curators from four departments. Look now, because who knows when you’ll see them again.

On the quiet side, there’s Rivane Neuenschwander’s understated “Work of Days,” a room with floors and walls lined with what looks like pale handmade paper, exquisitely textured with galaxies of tiny marks. In fact, they’re bits of dust and fine-grained detritus embedded in adhesive vinyl tile that can be walked on, to quietly magical effect. Much noisier and more ominous is “The Killing Machine” by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, which can evoke a hybrid of “Marathon Man” and “Alien.” If that sounds scary, avoid.

“Apex,” Arthur Jafa’s relentless animated slideshow (2013) is about life and death on Earth, and the beauty and culture of African Americans. Hito Steyerl’s installation “Liquidity, Inc.” (2014) is a characteristically entertaining, informative and ominous mash-up of language, graphics, television formats that swirl around themes of water, terrorism and climate change. In “Fault Lines,” Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s dry rocky landscape, two young singers perform every hour on the hour. From certain angles, “Surrounds” resembles a generic international biennial, but all works improve when given time and attention.

Public Space

Artists’ Commissions

The Modern’s reopening has occasioned special commissions from five artists, and one commission-like acquisition. That’s Haim Steinbach’s “hello again,” an all-purpose if ambivalent greeting of return writ large in serif font on a prominent wall in the lobby. It’s an apt welcome back for the museum’s sixth expansion.

The commissions have been overseen by Yasmil Raymond, associate curator in painting and sculpture at MoMA, and two are especially impressive. Kerstin Brätsch’s “Fossil Psychics for Christa” punctuates the walls of the new sixth-floor Terrace Café with shiny bright glasslike pieces that resemble big brush strokes, masks and crazed intarsia. They play well with the Modern’s new signature Grand Antique marble. When its two-year run in the cafe concludes, some of Brätsch’s parts might migrate to the second-floor collection galleries.

The other standout commission is Goshka Macuga’s extravagantly complex “Exhibition M,” a work of craft and conceptual art photo-based appropriation well worth seeking out (and should be more accessible than it is). It takes the form of an enormous tapestry hanging in the lobby of the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, which faces West 54th Street.

The work casts the artist as André Malraux in a well-known 1954 photograph that shows the French novelist and art theorist surrounded by double-image spreads from his trilogy “The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture.” Macuga offers a similar array of images, but each depicts an artwork in the museum’s collection or one of its exhibitions.

Like the new MoMA as a whole, Macuga’s combinations shake things up. In her case, we get a disjointed narrative of visual puns, sly criticisms and uncanny juxtapositions, most with a distinct feminist slant. It’s a perfect summation of this great institution’s new outlook.

Museum of Modern Art

The museum, at 11 W. 53rd St., Manhattan, reopens to the public Tuesday (member previews are Saturday); moma.org.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic’s Notebook)

MoMA's Art Treasure, No Longer Buried

After half a century of intermittent debate and protest, the San Francisco Board of Education voted unanimously in June to whitewash the 13 murals depicting the life of George Washington that line the halls of a high school named for the first president. The murals’ offense is that they depict some ugly truths about the history of the United States, namely two of its original sins: slavery and the Native American genocide.

Scenes of slaves at work in the fields and barns of Washington’s Mount Vernon and a dead Native American that appear in three of the murals have understandably upset some minority students at the high school, and some parents. They find the images degrading, and their feelings should be taken into account. But there are other, more creative alternatives to overpainting that might be more beneficial for all concerned.

The murals were painted in 1935 and 1936 under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, which created jobs for the unemployed suffering through the Great Depression. They were the work of a Russian émigré and Communist named Victor Arnautoff (1896-1979). I’ve not seen them in person — and may not get the chance — but the eight or so I found online struck me as among the most honest and possibly the most subversive of the WPA era.

Arnautoff signaled the country’s underlying crimes by taking a more critical view of Washington’s life, portraying his ownership of slaves and his support of the genocidal Western expansion. The goal was to place him in context, against a dense panorama of history. They don’t tell the whole story — Washington changed his views on slavery dramatically over his lifetime — but for their time, the murals were daringly frank.

In a democracy, destroying a work of art is never a solution to any offense it may give. Once art has been made and released into the often choppy flow of life, it should stay there. It will live on anyway. To dictate its elimination is an implicitly autocratic move, similar in spirit, if not scale, to the deliberate demolition of ancient art and artifacts by the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

The offended parties in and around the high school assume that their feelings about the murals are permanent and paramount. Those favoring destruction think that they know what the art is about, and that they have the right to decide for everyone, now and in the future, what will be accessible, what will be known. But reactions to art are in constant flux, and the best art should contain multitudes of interpretations.

Does the Board of Education really want the destruction of an 83-year-old mural cycle on its hands? It recalls the shameful eradication of “Man at the Crossroads,” the Diego Rivera mural that was plastered over at Rockefeller Center in 1934 by the Rockefellers.

Now, like then, it raises the question: Who owns a work of art? As the angry Rivera wrote in a letter, “If someone buys the Sistine Chapel, does he have the authority to destroy it?” Art, especially effective art, is never really owned by anyone.

Working during the interwar period, when prejudice was rampant and Jim Crow prevailed, and not just in Southern states, Arnautoff did not just paint your grandfather’s WPA murals. His Communist faith evidently made him determined to avoid the typical patriotic gloss of Washington’s life and also to teach some larger lessons, and he did so with great care. After all, his designs had to pass committee approval.

Which they did, enabling him to discreetly — even gently — insert slavery and the Indian genocide into his murals without sensationalizing them. These are among the scars on this country that every American — schoolchild or adult, of any race — should learn about in detail, keep learning about and never forget.

The murals are amazing feats of storytelling, full of visual subtleties, quiet messages and jolts. The main actors in each scene are physically substantial and dignified regardless of race. The slaves wear white, signaling goodness and innocence. All the figures have different degrees of autonomy.

In “Washington and Western Expansion” the Indian lies on his chest almost as if asleep, his body free of signs of struggle. Washington extends his arm, sending a group of pioneers westward. Walking past the fallen figure, they are rendered in grays: Ghostly, deathly, they tread on hallowed ground, personifying the coming threat of Manifest Destiny. In another mural, two Native Americans are armed with rifles, while others, backed by French soldiers, attack colonial soldiers; three surrender, one lies dead on the ground.

Elsewhere, Washington confers with his white slave overseer, while a black groom — handsome, alert, handsomely dressed — holds the reins of his horse.

George Washington High School contains major works by three other WPA artists, including two 27-foot murals in the school’s library, “Contemporary Education” by Ralph Stackpole and “Advancement of Learning Through the Printing Press” by Lucien Labaudt. And at one end of the football field, there is an astounding sculptural relief initiated by Beniamino Bufano and completed by Sargent Johnson; its overlapping figures fuse elements of Egyptian, Assyrian and Greek art and art deco.

None of these more decorous works have caused the protests that have plagued Arnautoff’s government-approved realism. There have been calls for the removal of the Arnautoff murals since the late 1960s, when the Black Panthers and many students urged that they be covered up.

Instead three “response murals” were commissioned from Dewey Crumpler, an African American artist just beginning his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, and now a professor of painting there. Crumpler understood the need for the Arnautoff narrative to be balanced, but he took the commission only after the students agreed that the Russian’s murals would not be touched.

After a trip to Mexico to study its vaunted murals, and repeated consultations with the students and the Panthers, Crumpler painted his frescoes on three adjoining walls just beyond Arnautoff’s. Far more metaphorical and imposing in scale, these startlingly dynamic panoramas pay tribute to the achievements and cultures of black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian people. Their fiery images show immense chains being broken and historic figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Crumpler told me on the phone that “art’s responsibility is to tell the truth.” He added that to destroy Arnautoff’s murals would destroy his own work, too.

With Crumpler’s murals and the WPA art, George Washington High School is a national treasure, one that may not remain a high school forever. One can imagine it becoming a center for the study of art, history and politics, and their sometimes painful but necessary intersection.

In the meantime, what can be done? There certainly need to be detailed plaques or text panels that aid in understanding the murals as history and seeing them as art.

More response murals could be commissioned, if space allows. A possible subject — raised by the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, and, more recently, by Stevon Cook, president of the San Francisco Board of Education — is the history of the 5,000 enslaved and free African Americans who fought in the American Revolutionary War. The art world is teeming with talented African American painters who would be eager to submit plans.

An alternative would be to cover Arnautoff’s murals with felt or some other opaque fabric, which would shroud them but is reversible, which is crucial. This was the solution for the much more fictive frescoes at the University of Notre Dame that depict Columbus discovering America, and it was amenable to the Native American students and others who protested that Columbus’ arrival had a much darker side for native peoples.

People change, and because they do, so does art. Even Washington evolved, according to the Mount Vernon website, ultimately lamenting owning slaves and freeing his slaves at his death in 1799. There’s a good chance that future generations will find the opposition to Arnautoff’s murals actions quaint, presumptuous or infuriating, similar to the way we view the storms ignited by D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Future generations of students at Notre Dame, including Native Americans, could well demand that the murals be uncovered. They will want to see for themselves what all the fuss was about, and dissect and analyze them all over again. Human curiosity works that way.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/design/george-washington-san-francisco-murals.html" id="e7cb06d1-6ac1-3269-aa47-c8bea82328c0">The New York Times</a>.

The Case for Keeping San Francisco's Disputed George Washington Murals

The cause was complications of a stroke, said Annely Juda Fine Art, his London representative, and Mitchell-Innes &amp; Nash in New York.

Kossoff worked in a thick impasto that pitted energetic brushwork against the scenes he depicted. Subject matter flickered in and out of sight, disappearing into and then rising from the painted surface.

Kossoff’s paintings could be challenging, but they also communicated a great warmth, both for the act of painting and for everyday life.

His subjects were highly specific, and he painted them again and again, sometimes for years on end. The main ones were his family and friends, or models who became friends; the many glories of London (its pedestrians, its streets, its railway and underground stations and their trains); and old master paintings in the National Gallery. One motif for several years around 1970 was a public pool roiling with schoolchildren. His active surfaces had precedent in artists ranging from Rembrandt to Constable to van Gogh to Chaim Soutine and Willem de Kooning.

Kossoff’s work was closest in appearance and spirit to that of German-born British painter Frank Auerbach, five years his junior and a close friend during their early years. Like Kossoff, Auerbach favored a loaded brush and dense surfaces that conveyed both anxiety and largesse. They both painted construction sites that sprang up around London as it rebuilt from the Blitz, and they were both indifferent to the distinction between abstraction and representation.

Kossoff and Auerbach were students together at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art and attended a class at Borough Polytechnic taught by prominent British modernist painter David Bomberg, a dynamic teacher. They both had their first exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in the mid-1950s; represented Britain in the Venice Biennale (Auerbach in 1986, Kossoff in 1995); and declined honors from the queen. And both were overshadowed in prominence by their contemporary, realist painter Lucian Freud, who had a much more sensational personal history and a flashier painting style. In recent years, this imbalance has begun to correct itself.

Kossoff was a very private man, strikingly modest if not self-effacing. Yet he was uncompromising in his work, as reluctant to welcome visitors to his studio as he was to let paintings leave it.

He had an extended working process; he would make countless sketches and then more finished drawings of any subject “until,” he said, “something happens and you realize you can start painting.” Then, working in oil on board rather than canvas, he worked and reworked his images, often scraping them down a few times a day as the light or mood changed. “Nothing is ever the same,” he said of his process.

In the end the final painting would be made in a very short time, maybe as short as an hour.

He drew incessantly from life in many forms, making nearly daily forays with his sketchbook to various points in London or to the National Gallery, where he drew and redrew masterpieces by Poussin, Rubens, Veronese, Constable and others. He also focused on masterpieces in the form of great public buildings like King’s Cross Station, built in the mid-19th century, or Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Baroque Christ Church Spitalfields, completed in 1729, a familiar landmark from Kossoff’s East London childhood. He depicted the structure’s monumental forms as rising up and vibrating, almost ecstatic, and from a child’s low point of view, as British critic David Sylvester pointed out.

He tended to depict only people he knew well: his parents, his brothers, Auerbach, painter John Lessore. His wife, Rosalind (Pearl) Kosoff, known as Peggy, whom he married in 1954, was his most frequent model. She survives him, as do their son, David; four grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and two brothers, Chaim and Jack.

Sometimes Kossoff found his subjects near at hand, like the Booking Hall in the Kilburn Underground near his house or the faltering cherry tree in his backyard, which occasioned some of his greatest paintings. He depicted this ancient tree leaning, nearly on the horizontal, supported by two crutchlike pieces of lumber. The image communicated an unusual humanity, often evoking, a slightly abstracted combination of crucifix and Pietà.

Leon Kossoff was born Dec. 10, 1926, in Islington, London, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. He was the second of seven siblings. His father was a baker.

He developed an early interest in drawing and at 9 made his way on his own to the National Gallery — how he managed that, he said, he could not recall — where Rembrandt’s “Woman Bathing in a Stream” made an unforgettable impression. In 1939 he was one of thousands of children evacuated from London during the Blitz. He lived in East Anglia — where Constable was born — with a married couple who encouraged his interest in art. He made his first paintings there and became acquainted with Constable’s work in a local museum.

Back in London in 1943, Kossoff attended St. Martin’s. He spent 1946-49 in military service attached to the Royal Fusiliers, and then returned to St. Martin’s.

In 1957 he had his first solo show with Beaux Arts, and two years later he began teaching at Regent Street Polytechnic. He showed his work for the first time in the United States in an exhibition of figurative painting from Britain at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven in 1981 and had his first solo show at the Hirschl &amp; Adler Gallery in New York in 1983.

The Tate Gallery staged a retrospective in 1996, and in 2007 the National Gallery organized “Leon Kossoff: Drawing From Painting,” bringing together a large selection of his drawings of its masterpieces.

For that show he granted a rare interview, videotaped among the paintings he had drawn so often. Avowing his lack of natural skill as a draftsman, he said, “Every day I think, ‘Today I might teach myself to draw.’” He added, “If you love a picture, you can learn how to draw from it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/arts/leon-kossoff-dead.html" id="21c83704-0d17-34f7-a604-f8301d1c4cf1">The New York Times</a>.

Leon Kossoff, whose expressionistic portraits and images of urban life made him one of the most important painters of postwar Britain, died July 4 in London. He was 92.

Leon Kossoff, Who Painted Portraits of Urban Life, Dies at 92

NEW YORK — It’s not often that the paintings of an Italian Renaissance master arrive in a New York museum unadorned by the aura of fame and towering talent, but so it is with Giovanni Battista Moroni. The art of this 16th-century painter who excelled at remarkably naturalistic portraits is having its first American survey at the Frick Collection in “Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture.” Partly because Moroni’s reputation does not much precede him in this country, the show’s 23 portraits have a stunning freshness and clarity. We have the sense of seeing for ourselves — and there is much to look at.

Part of this freshness is inherent: Moroni’s paintings themselves are unencumbered. He scrutinized reality with a new directness and tried to record what he saw. His relatively low-key style adds to his portraits’ transparency, the feeling that we are looking at real people as they existed — unidealized, meticulously observed and psychologically present, especially in their direct appraising gazes.

The grand old man thought to be Gabriele Albani, in a portrait that Moroni painted around 1572-73, wears a lavish lynx-lined robe, but he also has a prominent bump in the middle of his forehead — although its suggestion of a third eye is not without a certain grandeur. Even more strikingly honest is the wrinkled face and goiter of Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova, who holds a prayer book in hands that the catalog suggests were painted from a younger model once the painting’s subject was no longer available. That Moroni did not add wrinkles here is testament that he could not paint what was not in front of him.

A realist can have only so much painterly style or temperament. Perhaps that’s why Moroni was left out of Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists,” and, so, from the dominant narrative of Italian Renaissance art history over the succeeding centuries. Bernard Berenson slighted him by observing that Moroni “gives us sitters no doubt as they looked,” as if it were a small thing. You don’t look to Moroni for freely painted details that disintegrate into dazzling flourishes upon closer examination — as with 17th-century painters like Velázquez or Franz Hals.

Moroni honed closer to the facts of silver flecked brocade, velvet fringe, opulent jewels and fine embroidery in black or red silk thread that embellishes so many collars and cuffs in portraits of both men and women. (There’s a kind of Where’s Waldo? game to be had in ferreting out the red-on-white embroidery and the small pink bows that adorn the elaborate, often bejeweled coiffure of several of the women.)

Moroni did not stint in his attention to articles of clothing as carriers of wealth and status, but he also makes us see them as indications of painstaking craft that in many ways paralleled his own skills. His scrutiny of the real is underscored by the inclusion in the exhibition of cases of objects and printed material that appear in these paintings — admirably near-matches tracked down by the show’s curators, Aimee Ng, of the Frick; Simone Facchinetti of the Museo Adriano Bernareggi in Bergamo; and Arturo Galansino of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

The most generously accoutered figure is in the show’s first portrait, “Isotta Brembati,” a poet and a countess sitting in a Dante chair. Even her earrings have pink bows. Brembati’s many accessories include a jeweled cross with hanging pearls; a shrug made from a marten pelt with a gold-covered head and, finally, a fan of pink and white stripes of feathers (or maybe fur).

The son of an architect, Moroni spent most of his life working in Albano, in northern Italy, where he was born sometime between 1520 and 1524, and in other regional cities like Brescia, Bergamo and Trent before returning to his birthplace, where he died in 1579 or 1580. In the 1540s he trained under Alessandro Bonvicino in Brescia, better known as Moretto (or the Moor) of Brescia, and was also influenced by the precision of Lorenzo Lotto, who had spent several years in the city. Renaissance portraiture was an expanding genre: Moretto would paint the period’s first full-length portrait of a standing man. Moroni would go on to paint the first full-length standing portrait of a woman and we see it here: Pace Rivola Spini, in a red satin dress, who pulls back her black overdress, perhaps to emphasize her baby bump.

Moroni’s most famous portrait may be familiar even if his name, until now, is not. “The Tailor,” from around 1570, on loan to the United States for the first time from the National Gallery, London, is unusual for its depiction of an artisan pursuing his craft; holding shears, he is about to cut the expanse of fabric spread on the table before him. (Real iron 16th-century shears are also here.) We seem to stand just across the table from him — perhaps a client, a watchful apprentice or a friend dropping in to gossip — and it’s clear we have interrupted him. He pauses — another of Moroni’s innovations is the portrait subject shown in suspended motion rather than in a static pose — and looks at us intently, leaving no doubt that he’ll soon return to his work.

Nearby, a portrait of sculptor Alessandro Vittoria depicts a man holding a Greek statue of a small nude male torso. His bare forearm is extremely unusual for a secular portrait, although religious art bares plenty of flesh. The idea is taken to further extremes in the straining laborers and exposed limbs of Goya’s “The Forge” of 1815-20, which hangs in the Frick’s West Hall.

Another of Moroni’s innovations is the “sacred portrait,” and the three examples known to survive are united at the Frick for the first time. These paintings break with the tradition of depicting donors as minor characters within the religious artworks they commissioned. The donors have what these days is known as agency: They are now placed in real (if still painted) space, appearing as citizens of the world, unlike the smaller, flatter, spiritual creatures on whom they gaze.

The sacred portraits are no match for Moroni’s secular portraits. (For one thing, the donors almost never lock eyes with us.) But in them, Moroni shows off his ability to paint in two styles simultaneously, pays homage to his craft and also makes it clear where his loyalty lies.

“Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture”

Through June 2 at the Frick Collection, 1 E. 70th St., Manhattan; 212-288-0700, frick.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/arts/design/frick-collection-moroni-review.html" id="40d7bd04-2c5d-3621-a3c4-c47999a8741f">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

A Cult Favorite Enters the Art Canon

NEW YORK — For me, the 2018-19 art season will always belong to Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). I say this simply as a measure of the psychic and historical shift caused by the Guggenheim Museum’s extraordinary full-dress retrospective of her nearly 40-year career.

The exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” demonstrated that the genesis story of Western modernist abstraction was not an all-male adventure conducted in the mid-1910s by the revered triumvirate of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. A woman had gotten there first, largely on her own.

Important revisionism, rediscoveries and resurrections concerning female artists have taken place across the history of art since the 1970s. But wresting early abstraction from exclusively male hands was a different order of magnitude.

Before the show opened, the Guggenheim doubled the length of its run from three to six months, imbuing the season with an exhilarating sense of art historical justice. No wonder it has been one of the museum’s most attended exhibitions. (The museum will be open until 8 p.m. April 19-23, the day the exhibit closes.)

The show’s biggest reveal came early, in the museum’s High Gallery: a series of 10 paintings from 1907, seven or eight years before the above-mentioned masters. Measuring about 10 feet high and named “The Ten Largest,” they were unprecedented in scale, palette and biomorphic design. They traced the life cycle from childhood through youth and adulthood to old age with two paintings per phase except adulthood, which, as only seems fair, merited four. The earlier paintings in this series received most of the attention, including “No. 7, Adulthood,” whose dominant deep yellow on lavender-pink floral motif appeared on the catalog’s cover.

But “No. 9, Old Age” will always stay with me as the most liberated of “The Ten.” I especially love the messy pile of dark pink brushwork at its bottom edge. Containing two pairs of matching sprout-like motifs, this area functions as fertile soil for the three pairs of increasingly complex geometric outlines that rise above it, culminating in two elaborate rose-window-like circles. Touchingly, these crisp linear elements are cosseted by soft brushwork, especially by the grid of pink and white cloudlike blocks across the middle.

I always think back to “No. 9, Old Age” at the show’s end, while looking at the small wet-on-wet watercolors rife with clouds, splashes, waves and wisps of watery color that af Klint made toward the end of her life. Despite their modesty, they are in some ways the most radical paintings in the show. At the time, af Klint was living and working in increasingly reduced circumstances. They make you wonder what she might have done had she had access to the large sheets of paper basic to “The Ten Largest.” Hello, Helen Frankenthaler.

Exhibit Information

“Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” runs through April 23 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; 212-423-3500, guggenheim.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/design/hilma-af-klint-guggenheim.html" id="157057ef-251b-33ca-ab37-68728ffc3f54">The New York Times</a>.

(Last Chance)

One Work, Many Layers to Love

His death was announced Saturday by Hanna Gisel, a spokeswoman for the Pace Gallery in New York, which has long represented him. No cause was given.

Ryman was perhaps peculiarly American in being an autodidact who never took a single art course. His art education consisted of seven years as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

He accordingly brought an American pragmatism to the mystical tradition of modernist abstraction, which had originated with early-20th-century pioneers like Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, both of whom gave special place to white.

Ryman extended this tradition with an insistent literal-mindedness, a tinkerer’s joy in physical minutiae and an abiding faith in the plain-spoken poetics of his materials and tools. His pared-down canvases were in many ways the painting equivalent of Carl Andre’s flat-to-the-floor minimalist sculptures using bricks and metal tiles.

Yet they were also more broadly evocative, in the manner of Walker Evans’ photographs of weather-bleached American architecture and shop signs. A shy, laconic man who largely avoided the social machinations of the art world, Ryman came of age artistically in New York in the late 1950s, when artists of several stripes — among them Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin — were moving beyond the existential angst and painterly excess of the abstract expressionists.

Ryman’s way was to take an empirical, even mechanical, approach to painting. He focused on its most basic definition as a flat, four-cornered surface covered, using a brush, with paint, frequently signed and dated and hung on a wall. He went on to prove that these physical facts could sustain a lifetime of variations by using different paints and support surfaces, different brushes and brush strokes, and an idiosyncratic range of wall fasteners.

Ryman preferred the square, he said, because it avoided representational suggestions of doors, windows and landscapes. His works could be small squares of stretched canvas alive with fat, juicy, commalike strokes of oil paint. They could be pieces of cold-rolled steel, 4 feet square, brushed perfunctorily with a thin matte enamel. They might feature thick, methodical horizontal bands of shimmering white with slivers of brownish raw linen glinting between them, a little like plaster and lath.

Ryman’s stringent approach eliminated imagery, conventional color and, to some extent, emotive brushwork. It reflected his conviction that every visible detail of a painting contributed to the viewer’s experience of it, and that each work interacted with its setting, especially the wall (usually white) supporting it, and the ambient light. He liked to say that he continued painting’s long involvement with light, except that his light was real, not depicted.

Indeed, like Mondrian and Malevich before him, Ryman called himself a realist. More commonly he was known as a minimalist. He was also grouped with the post-minimalist tendencies of conceptual and process art.

But his art transcended labels by being expansive, intuitive and richly reflective of the world, largely through its encyclopedic use of available materials. He painted with oil, acrylic, casein, gouache, gesso, rabbit-skin glue, enamel, baked enamel, enamelac, varathane, vinyl polymer, pastel, varnish, ballpoint pen and India ink. He painted on linen, cotton duck, wood, aluminum, copper, vinyl, Plexiglas, fiberglass, Gator board, steel, cold-rolled steel, Lumasite, wax paper, Bristol board, tracing paper, cardboard, newsprint, gauze, hollow-core panels and Chemex coffee-filter paper.

He attached these works to the wall with exposed nails, masking tape, screws, bolts, brackets, clips, plastic straps, pressure plates or small cubes of wood.

He often took his titles from the brand names of his materials or their place of purchase. “Winsor” came from Winsor-Newton Paints, “Acme” from a hardware store, “General” from a lumber yard.

Despite his just-the-facts approach, Ryman said that looking at a painting should be “a kind of revelation” and “a reverent experience” involving “enlightenment and delight and wonder.” And as his work developed, it encompassed a tremendous range of white tonalities and luminosities that many described as mysterious.

“It was never an intention of mine to make white paintings,” he told Art News magazine in 1986. “The white is just a means of exposing other elements. White enables other things to become visible.”

Robert Tracy Ryman was born on May 30, 1930, in Nashville, Tennessee. His father was an insurance salesman, his mother a schoolteacher and amateur pianist. He later said that he saw almost no paintings growing up. His first goal, which his parents reluctantly endorsed, was to be a jazz saxophonist. He studied music at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and then the George Peabody College for Teachers for two years and then spent another two in the Army Reserve Corps, assigned to a band that toured bases in the South.

Discharged from active service in May 1952, he went directly to New York, found a tiny apartment on East 60th Street, near Bloomingdale’s, and, supporting himself with odd jobs, began to study with jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. He also began to visit the city’s museums and found himself fascinated by painting.

Ryman got a temporary job as a vacation relief guard at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953 and ended up staying seven years. He was especially inspired there by the economy and sureness of Matisse’s paintings, but it was the works of abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, with their floating rectangles of color, that he found most startling.

“What was radical about Rothko, of course, was that were was no reference to any representational influence,” Ryman later said. He was struck by what he called “the nakedness of it.”

A few months after starting at the Modern, he went to an art-supply store near his apartment and bought some canvasboard and tubes of oil paint. “I thought I would try and see what would happen,” he said. “I wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work.”

In a sense he had found not only his calling but his whole approach to art. His first paintings were mostly green, but he eventually began to paint over his colors with white.

The job at the Modern also provided him with a circle of like-minded artist friends. His fellow guards included artists Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin, and he also became close with Robert Mangold when they lived in the same loft building.

It was also at the Modern that he met a young art historian named Lucy R. Lippard, who, as a critic, would go on to become an articulate advocate for both minimal and conceptual Art. They married in 1960 but divorced six years later. In 1969 Ryman married painter Merrill Wagner. They had two sons, Will and Cordy Ryman, both artists. He also had a son, Ethan Ryman, with Lippard; he is also an artist. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

In keeping with his temperament, Ryman emerged quietly in the mid-1960s, when he had been making mature work for several years. In 1966, his work was included in “Systemic Painting,” an exhibition organized by Lawrence Alloway at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His first solo show was in 1967 at the Paul Bianchini Gallery on upper Madison Avenue; it consisted of his 13 “Standard” paintings in enamel on cold-rolled steel. In 1968, he began exhibiting in Europe, where his work was the subject of frequent museum shows.

Ryman was the only painter included in two major overviews of conceptual art and post-minimalism in the spring of 1969: “When Attitudes Become Form” at the Kunsthalle Bern in Bern, Switzerland, and “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

He had his first American retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1972, five years after his first gallery show. The Dia Art Foundation mounted a retrospective at its Chelsea branch in Manhattan in 2015.

Ryman’s art did not have a conventional stylistic trajectory. Its premises remained fixed while its physical means changed. He occasionally executed paintings directly on walls and also built free-standing walls, painted white, that he considered paintings. In perhaps his most extreme series, he cantilevered his paintings at right angles to the wall, supporting the outer edges with spindly stainless-steel rods so that they resembled attenuated tables.

The continuing proliferation of his art seemed to substantiate his conviction, as he said in 1986, that where abstract painting was concerned, “we’ve just scratched the surface.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/09/obituaries/robert-ryman-minimalist-painter-dies.html" id="7197eca7-1a8d-3a35-a79f-55842b0f171a">The New York Times</a>.

Robert Ryman, one of the most important American artists to emerge after World War II, a minimalist who achieved a startling non-minimalist variety in his paintings even though they were mostly white and usually square, died Friday at his home in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. He was 88.

Robert Ryman, Minimalist Painter Who Made the Most of White, Dies at 88

NEW YORK — Dana Schutz’s current show at Petzel Gallery is her best in New York in a while, maybe ever.

She has loaded up her brush again, thickening her paint, and has minimized her settings. Gone are the thin surfaces and sharp-edged shapes that could make her recent works feel brittle and too cartoony. Her protagonists have gained weight and substance, and appear to be isolated in bleak empty spaces that feel mythic or postapocalyptic. Several scenes are set on large lonely rocks like those loved by Homeric poets and symbolist painters.

With her paint surfaces sometimes verging on low relief, it is unsurprising that, for the first time, Schutz is also exhibiting sculpture, a frequent subject in her paintings: five bronzes of her characteristically gnarly figures whose crazed textures amaze and will surely feed back into her painting.

Two years ago, Schutz was at the center of a firestorm ignited by “Open Casket,” one of her paintings in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The work was based on photographs of the battered corpse of Emmett Till, the teenager who was tortured and murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. Till’s mother insisted that his body be seen and photographed so the world would know what had befallen him, and the resulting images helped ignite the civil rights movement.

For many the pain and importance of the images made them inappropriate for art-making, especially by a white artist. Arguably another artist, regardless of race, might have done justice to the Till images, but not one with Schutz’s comic-grotesque vision and penchant for conflating heroes and villains. As might be expected, given the frequent autobiographical nature of Schutz’s work, several of the new paintings evoke moments of crisis, humiliation, penance and possible redemption that seem related to her recent experience.

“Painting in an Earthquake” shows a female artist from behind, clutching at a painting falling off a collapsing brick wall. In the beautiful, harrowing “Strangers,” a figure seems to attack or punish a second one who is bent over, cringing, face covered, with one large guilty, fearful eye peeking out. The arid setting seems ancient, maybe biblical: The ground is strewn with what look like jawbones, possibly of donkeys, like the one Samson used to slay a thousand Philistines. Attention to Philip Guston’s late paintings, felt throughout the show, is especially strong here, but Schutz tends to stretch rather than lean on it.

“The Wanderer” places a male figure on a dark beach with scuttling crabs (a guess); shadows make his body seem half white, half brown; the white leg wears an ankle monitor.

Humiliation is especially wrenching in “Presenter,” where we find a female figure with her panties around her ankles. As pointed out by a painter friend I ran into at Petzel, she holds a corded clicker in one hand while standing in a spotlight (lusciously painted red) and seems to pull something — maybe words — from her mouth with her other, much larger, blood-flecked hand. In the black background you can make out the lower edges of three red letters T-E-D, as in TED Talks.

“Mountain Group,” the show’s largest painting, depicts a monumental peak crawling with people, including a man with an orange comb-over who might be Guston. But the scrum also includes four versions of the artist, including one of her lying on her face, weeping, and another who is painting an unpeopled view of mountains while standing in a hole in the ground (she’s starting from behind).

The rest of the show bounces between the personal and the political. The macabre “Washing Monsters” may comment on the challenge of motherhood without resorting to using women or children. In “Beat Out the Sun,” a motley crew of warriors marches on the sun, their torsos overlapping à la Egyptian reliefs, as if beating out the source of all life is the fastest, stupidest way to destroy our planet, if not the solar system.

The strange green-eyed woman in “The Visible World” lies naked on a dark brown rock in the middle of an unquiet sea. She points at the water, which may be rising, and also at a large bird perched on her thigh; the giant raspberry in the bird’s beak may be the last genetically modified fruit on earth. “Touched” would seem to be about #MeToo and women’s anger — at its most wonderfully scary. The female dancer-butterfly phantasm of “Trouble and Appearance,” a nocturne, puts me in mind of the unknown, constantly expanding scope of women’s power and thought, whether or not you agree that the besmirched, wounded salaryman in the background is Donald Trump.

None of this would be too interesting if Schutz’s way with paint, like her way with images and details, were not so engrossing and perplexing, and did not provide so much to work with. Narrative and brushwork tangle and confuse, repel and seduce, often leaving us (or at least me) not sure if what’s going on is completely likable, or should be. Whether this has to do with “Open Casket” or not, she seems to have felt compelled to prove herself again — and she has.

"Dana Schutz: Imagine You and Me"

Through Feb. 23 at Petzel Gallery, 456 W. 18th St., Manhattan; 212-680-9467, petzel.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/design/dana-schutz-review-petzel-gallery.html" id="60357fff-396b-35c2-aa50-91fc631ee127">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

An Artist Repels and Seduces in a New Show

Her death was announced this month by her sons, Christophe and David Lanzenberg. No cause was given. She had moved to Los Angeles 18 months ago to be near her family, having lived for many years in New York City, mostly at the Chelsea Hotel.

Although well known in Europe in the 1960s and ‘70s, Nicola L — she was born Nicola Leuthe — did not have her first institutional survey until 2017, when the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens, mounted a show of about 50 of her works dating from 1968 to the present.

That relative obscurity over the years could be attributed in part to her spreading herself thin as she moved frequently among different media, including performance, film and painting; and in part to her tendency to exhibit in the nearly mutually exclusive worlds of art and furniture design galleries.

But her visibility rose with a widespread reconsideration of pop art; after 2000, what had been treated as a mostly male and American or British phenomenon began to be seen as an international style with numerous female participants.

That sea change was largely accomplished by revisionist exhibitions like “The World Goes Pop” (which included Nicola L’s work) at the Tate Modern in London, and “International Pop” (which did not) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, both in 2015.

A 1969 work of hers in the Tate show exemplified her boldness of form and commentary. The work, “Little TV Woman: I Am the Last Woman Object,” consists of a nearly life-size doll-like figure of a nude woman, made of white vinyl and wood, seated cross-legged with a Sony portable television for a midriff. On the screen, a text warns: “I am the last woman object. You can take my lips, touch my breasts, caress my stomach, my sex. But I repeat it. It is the last time.”

Nicola L specialized in conflating women’s bodies and domestic objects, as if parodying the social stereotype of the female caregiver — so ubiquitous as to be part of the furniture.

Other efforts from this period include a wood-veneer bureau, titled “La Femme Commode,” with a head, womanly curves and strategically placed drawers and knobs; a coffee table with a similarly schematized female form cut from wood and resting on a clear Plexiglas base; and a white vinyl sofa in the shape of a long, slim foot.

In the counterculture-infused art of the 1960s, Nicola L was hardly alone in flaunting the naked female body as an artistic statement; fellow travelers included performance artists like Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama and Valie Export, and painters like Dorothy Iannone, Joan Semmel and Martha Edelheit. But the underlying geometry of her forms also evokes Marisol’s blocky carved-wood figures.

Other usable forms included a plywood wardrobe with two human heads and four feet titled “The Lovers,” as well as lamps shaped like red lips or distinctly female eyes.

A more gender-neutral motif was a spare human head featured in silhouette in lamps, tables, a small aquarium and a large bookcase, as well as in the Planet Head paintings in the late 1980s.

Nicola Leuthe was born around 1935 — she was always circumspect about her birth year — in Mazagan, Morocco, the middle child of Suzanne and Jean Leuthe. Her father was an officer in the French army. Nicola grew up speaking Arabic as well as French, and she began making art at an early age.

The family returned to Europe after World War II, when her father was assigned to Germany; they later returned to France. In 1954, Nicola went to Paris to study art, first at the École des Beaux-Arts and then at the Académie Julian, where she stopped using her surname. (She added the L about a dozen years ago.)

During this period she became friends with one of her teachers, art critic Pierre Restany, and met Alfred Lanzenberg, known as Fred, whom she married in 1956. He opened an art gallery in Brussels in 1966, and his early efforts included collaborating with the powerful art dealer Ileana Sonnabend, who was based in Paris at the time (she was long prominent in Manhattan), on exhibitions of American pop art.

Nicola L and Lanzenberg divorced in 1982. In addition to her sons, she is survived by three grandsons.

Nicola L began her career as an abstract painter, but through Restany she met the French nouveau realists, artists who were shaking up Paris at the time. (Restany and artist Yves Klein had come up with the name.) She was immediately impressed by their position that art should comment on consumer society using existing objects and materials.

She was also close to the proto-conceptual Argentine artist Alberto Greco, who repeatedly questioned her pursuit of painting. Giving up paint, she began making her “Pénétrables,” rectangles of stretched canvas with canvas attachments into which viewers could insert their arms, legs or heads, becoming literally at one with art.

In 1967 she made “The Cylinder,” or “Container for 3,” a wearable piece in translucent pink plastic. It was activated onstage that year by three naked people during a performance by the experimental English rock band Soft Machine at the Paris Biennale. After seeing “The Cylinder,” Ellen Stewart, director of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York, invited Nicola L to bring the piece to La MaMa, precipitating her first trip to the city.

Nicola L’s best-known communal garment is “The Red Coat” (1969), sometimes known as “Red Coat Same Skin for Everyone.” The piece resembles a series of hooded, zippered red raincoats with sleeves that culminated in big mittens; these garments are all attached to a single horizontal expanse of the same fabric. It accommodates 11 people.

“The Red Coat” made its first public appearance onstage during a concert by Brazilian musicians Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso as part of the historic 1970 Isle of Wight rock festival. It was subsequently activated — sometimes by passing strangers — in street performances in European capitals as well as New York.

“Blue Cape,” a similar 11-person piece, was used in performances in Cuba (in 2001 and 2010), on the Great Wall of China with Chinese art students (2005), and at the 2016 Venice Biennale. “The Red Coat” was most recently performed in the streets of London for a short film to accompany that communal garment when it was displayed in 2015 as part of “The World Goes Pop” at the Tate Modern.

Nicola L’s first trip to New York was formative: She was captivated by the city’s creative energy and saw more pop art, formed a lifelong friendship with Schneemann, and discovered vinyl, which would be a signature material of hers. She took to visiting the city regularly.

Back in Paris, she began making usable furniture; one of the earliest works was the vinyl “White Sofa Foot” (1968), which also came in black and red. She had her first solo shows at Galerie Veranneman in Brussels (1968) and Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris (1969). Her first solo show in New York was at the Waddell Gallery in 1973.

Nicola L moved to New York in 1979, settling at the Chelsea Hotel in an apartment furnished with her art. For a while she concentrated on film, making a short documentary that captured the punk-rock band Bad Brains at the Lower East Side nightclub CBGB, and another about Abbie Hoffman, which was shown on PBS. Her last film was “Doors Ajar at the Chelsea Hotel” (2013).

In New York, she exhibited her usable sculpture at Art et Industrie, at the SoHo design store Moss and at Ingrao Gallery. In the teens, broader selections of her work were seen at the Broadway 1602 and Elga Wimmer galleries.

Nicola L’s feminism flowed into a series of collages on wood that were inspired by the poems of Dorothy Parker, shown at the Rempire Gallery in SoHo in 1991, and her nine “Femme Fatale” paintings from 1995, exhibited that year at the Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, also in SoHo.

These paintings honor women who had died tragic or violent deaths, among them Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday and Ulrike Meinhof, the radical West German leftist and co-founder of the Red Army Faction. Each work is a suggestive monochrome involving painted bed sheets on a large panel along with images and texts concerning the woman and her name, writ large.

Nicola L’s artistic fluidity was noted by curator Ruba Katrib in an essay for the catalog to the Sculpture Center’s 2017 exhibition. “Nicola,” she wrote, “has always worked between the borders of artistic movements, nationalities, decades, art and design, never fully entering one camp or another.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/obituaries/nicola-l-dead.html" id="6dbfc500-cc08-3482-a0ce-583720556b0b">The New York Times</a>.

Nicola L, a French pop artist who was best known for wry feminist sculpture of female and male forms that often function as furniture, died Dec. 31 in Los Angeles. She is thought to have been in her mid-80s.

Nicola L, Whose Feminist Art Had a Useful Side, Has Died

Containing several vivacious carved wood figures and more than 30 dense, luminous landscapes, the show is a revelation. As its subtitle accurately acknowledges, the canvases are seen by “Neither Day Nor Night,” but bathed in a third light, that of full moons, dreams or faith.

Dunkley, who has long been cherished in his homeland, is the second important self-taught Caribbean artist to be introduced here recently. He follows Frank Walter (1926-2009), whose work was shown by Hirschl &amp; Adler at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair, on its way to representing Antigua at the Venice Biennale that year. While Walter sometimes pushed his landscapes to the brink of jewel-toned abstractions, Dunkley aligned the expressive powers of natural form and painted textures into a recognizable but uncanny, highly symbolic world. In stylization and mood, his efforts relate to the art of American painters Edward Hicks, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Henri Rousseau.

Dunkley left little in the way of an oral or written record. Born in a village on the west coast of Jamaica, he spent at least two decades chasing jobs around the Caribbean, picking up skills and visual memories as he went. There were stints working as a photographer’s assistant and on a Cuban banana plantation. He also acquired hair-cutting experience, and when he returned to Kingston in 1931, he opened a barbershop there and within a few years turned to making art.

Dunkley’s work was almost immediately embraced by artists, historians and patrons — especially elite Jamaicans on the lookout for art that was more African and Jamaican than European and colonial, but he went his own way. He refused instruction, for example, studying art books and magazines at the Institute of Jamaica, where volumes on Rousseau and William Blake were important to him as were magazine images and advertisements, which most likely inspired “Woman on a Stool,” the most soigne sculpture here. Dunkley also probably saw African sculpture in the collections of his admirers; his attention to Chinese landscape painting is especially visible in relatively spare paintings of three mountains, one at ocean’s edge and two offshore.

Working in a faded-tapestry palette of mostly black, dark brown and white tinted with green, rose and yellow, he energized his images with disorienting shifts in scale, perspective and form. Bushes and trees suggest large vegetables or flowers; chopped-off tree trunks intimate water pipes, corncobs or phalluses. The branches they sprout are often trees unto themselves. Numerous paths and lanes disappear into dark forests or tunnels while reinforcing the flatness of the canvas.

The paint textures range from a thick stucco (used mostly for sheep) to a thinned-down impressionism (thatches of strokes that denote either grassy banks or overflowing water). Sexual tensions abound, along with a mood that has been called melancholy or gloomy. At a certain point — possibly when he knew he was dying of lung cancer — medallion-like crabs begin to dot his scenes. Ultimately nature seems both welcoming and vaguely sinister, and either way intensely spiritual, as if manifesting God as both protector and judge.

Dunkley was alive to the political and social currents of his time and place. Agitation and organization for independence began in the mid-1930s, and was granted gradually by the British starting in the ‘40s and ‘50s to be completed in 1962. He painted white people playing tennis or in full equestrian gear — doing things that black Jamaicans could not do. He made a portrait of a sneering President Franklin Roosevelt after the United States leased Little Goat Island and used it as a naval air base for three years during World War II. The United States also took nearby land on Jamaica proper for an emergency runway, displacing three villages. One of them, Sandy Gully became the title of one of Dunkley best sculptures, a seated male figure that resembles a more alert, even angry version of “The Thinker."

It could also be argued that many of Dunkley’s natural forms almost bristle with latent power waiting to be transformed into action. This seems especially the case with one of the greatest Dunkleys here — “Banana Plantation” (around 1945). It reflects on his time in Cuba with equally fecund depictions of leaves and fruit and a large, if not giant, tense rabbit in its burrow, about to eat a banana, listening for a signal.

Another artist who springs immediately to mind in front of Dunkley’s paintings is Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), a central figure in British Romanticism whose early ink drawings of landscapes, inspired by his discovery of medieval art, share Dunkley’s compressed space and intense spirituality. It would be interesting if further research into Dunkley’s travels and his exposure to art included glimpses of Palmer’s world. But only interesting. Dunkley’s powers of absorption and transformation were very much his own, as is the world he invented with them.

NEW YORK — Jamaican visionary John Dunkley (1891-1947) is the latest artist to decimate the distinctions between self-taught and trained, outsider and insider and folk and not folk. The first large museum survey in the United States devoted to the work of this gifted autodidact is now at the American Folk Art Museum, after originating at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2017, with Diana Nawi, now an independent curator, heading the organizing team.

Roberta Smith

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