The best show I have seen so far has been at the Morgan Library. They are showing their newly donated collection of drawings and watercolors from the Thaw family, and the show is amazingly good. In two rooms, the show has superb work ranging from the Renaissance to the contemporary. It always amazes me how much a good artist can achieve with the very simple medium of paper and a pencil or another drawing tool. Another surprising thing is how contemporary some of the older drawings look. You can get slightly unmoored from time as you go through the show. Part of the reason for this is that earlier artists were often experimenting as they sketched; indeed a number of the works are preparations for larger, more polished paintings. And the idea of a sketch (unfinished) as a work of art is certainly more of a contemporary idea.
Some examples:
I also stumbled upon a wonderful show of drawings by Jacob El Hanani. I happened to see a poster in the window of the Acquavella Gallery that looked interesting, so in I went. (Even though we are supposed to have more and more access to information these days, I had never heard anything about El Hanani, at least not in our New York newspaper of record, where you can now find out the best ways to clip your toenails, or something like that, but not about the all of the latest art shows around.) El Hanani's work could succinctly be described as micro drawing; most of his works involve his making the tiniest of markings on the paper. I was reminded of the work of Agnes Martin, in that his work changes as you move closer and further away from it. The work also references topographical drawings and some of the work of Hebrew scholars. (And Muslim scribes; I remember seeing a whole Koran inscribed on a single sheet of paper at the Jerusalem exhibit at the Met a few years ago.) Like the works of Martin, these drawings are impossible to photograph properly, but here is an example;
The same, a bit closer :
The visual arts blockbuster of the fall season, though, is the Michelangelo exhibition at the Met. I happened to stumble into it the first day of member previews, so it was an ideally quiet time. The show has an extraordinary number of Michelangelo drawings and sketches (plus a few other things), and they are wonderful to see. But the show is more about how Michelangelo worked; his drawings were made for many purposes, including preparations for painting, instruction examples for students, architectural drawings, etc. Fo example, there is one room that has a large number of preparatory sketches for the Sistine Chapel ceiling. So you see him sketching out parts of what eventually emerge on the ceiling painting (which is conveniently reproduced in small scale on the ceiling). So I came away with a sense of how Michelangelo worked and a feeling for the evocative skill of a his drawings, but without a sense that I had seen some extraordinary works of art.
Another great show was a retrospective of the Indian photographer R. Singh, known for his color photographs of India. I had glanced superficially at his work before, and had unthinkingly dismissed it as a kind of National Geographic style exoticism. Seeing the exhibit changed my opinion entirely; it became clear, as the title of the exhibit indicates, that he was a modernist, and that there is a lot more going on in his pictures that we see at first glance. They are strikingly composed. And the colors, seen in high quality prints (including some dye transfers) were as vivid as you could imagine.
The exhibit was very well done, especially in juxtaposing examples of other photographers and of Indian art that Singh admired. For example, there were examples of street photography by Lee Friedlander that certainly influenced the way Singh photographed the streets of India. And, being the Met, there were also examples of Indian art on display which reflected on Singh's work. The show was a good example of how a career retrospective can enlighten the viewer.
(no photos of photos!)
MOMA had a career retrospective show of the photographs of Stephen Shore. I have usually liked his photographs of the banalities of the American streetscape; to my eyes, they share a sensibility with the work of William Eggleston. The retrospective revealed that he was a child prodigy of photography, developing his first pictures at age 9, and selling his first photographs to MOMA at age 14. But, on viewing the retrospective, I found that I didn't like much of his work. He spent much time hanging out with Andy Warhol in his factory days, and in my eyes, that's not a good thing. A lot of his work tends to be both trendy and conceptual. And at the end of the retrospective, it came as no surprise to find out that most of his work these days is focused on Instagram. I still like his deadpan photographs of the obscure corners of the American reality, like his photographs of Amercican breakfasts, with pancakes, garish placemats, and cigarette butts.
The Met Breuer had a show of the work of Munch, filling one floor of the museum. It was a stimulating experience. The works on display covered his entire career. (It could have been called a mini-retrospective, in eight rooms.) But, rather than display the works in chronological order, they were grouped thematically, with each room devoted to a theme, such as "Sickness and Death", "Despair", etc. Thus works from very different points in his artistic development were juxtaposed in the same room. Initially, I didn't really like this idea; I am used to the idea of seeing a retrospective show which lets you see how an artist develops over her career, and with the idea of a narrative of some sort. Eventually, I got with the program. Munch did develop quite a bit from his beginnings in French Symbolism. There are paintings with very broad brush strokes and dripping paint that look more like 1950's DeKooning, and there are all those expressionist colors. Ultimately, though, I would have like traditional chronological presentation.
I saw the David Hockney show at the Met. I went with low expectations, not necessarily excited to see a lot of paintings of LA swimming pools, etc. But it was interesting to see the various phases of Hockney's career, and though I don't have much interest in the pop art aspects of what he does, I was intrigued by his art historical references and his genuine interest in the art of painting and representation. I don't really like all his use of very bright and saturated colors, but underneath that there are some interesting things going on. He clearly knows a lot about painting and art history, and it shows.
For some reason I was not motivated to take photographs of most of these shows.
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