Intriguing History Hits a Sour Note

WALL STREET JOURNAL, March 17, 2020

Intriguing History Hits a Sour Note

This exhibition’s thematic presentation burdens a fascinating historical subject with middling contemporary work.

A review of ‘Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition’ at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

‘Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition” is the title of the new exhibition at the Phillips Collection. “Razzes” might seem more like it. The show of 53 artists is front-loaded with contemporary work designed to “call out the canon,” according to one wall label, through loud statements and sour notes. Too bad, because, past the shrill opening gallery, this exhibition has something worthwhile to say.

Yes, in the opening room it’s hard not to pass judgment on “Judgment of Paris,” a 2018 photograph by Ayana V. Jackson. Here the artist in period clothing inserts herself into an ensemble that updates Edouard Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe)” of 1863. According to the wall labels, Ms. Jackson’s image is meant to suggest a “counternarrative to historical readings that have interpreted the black body as colonized, enslaved, or impoverished.” Nearby, Renee Cox, Mickalene Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems all offer their own sendups of Manet’s picnic lunch. Yet up against Pablo Picasso’s “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, after Manet I” (1962), a still electrifying composition here on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these contemporary photographic retakes seem more like derivative politicized statements.

Next up, “Pushing Back the Light,” a 2012 painting by Titus Kaphar, reproduces Claude Monet’s “Woman With a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son” (1875), but with canvas now ripped and smeared in tar. This time the actual offending work has been hauled over from the National Gallery of Art to face its accuser. “While we are talking and thinking about color,” Mr. Kaphar declares in his wall label’s opening arguments, “there are people on the other side of the world who are suffering because of their color.” Of course, there are people suffering here and now for having to consider this ham-fisted painting.

Ayana V. Jackson’s ‘Judgment of Paris’ (2018) PHOTO: AYANA V. JACKSON/MARIANA IBRAHIM GALLERY, CHICAGO

“Riff” is a term originally from jazz that means a repeated, elaborated or improvised phrase. “Relations” means kinship, but also retelling and comparison. The history of modern art has indeed resounded with a complexity of syncopations both riffed and related. Through a layering of old and new, modern art has pushed and pulled a wide body of influence into a new global movement.

As modernism drew from African sources, black artists were especially attuned to its formal inheritance. Alain Locke, the Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of the formative anthology “The New Negro” (to which he contributed the title essay), seized on modernism’s turn to African aesthetics as a path to liberation. The peripheral galleries of “Riffs and Relations” give a sense of the excitement this all engendered. In the 1920s, the early black modernist Hale Woodruff went to Paris to study African art and its influence on Cézanne and Picasso. His paintings “The Card Players” (1930) and “Africa and the Bull” (1958) engage with both European and African sources. At the same time, the German-born artist Winold Reiss came to New York and helped to illustrate Locke’s anthology with “African Phantasy: Awakening” (c. 1925) while influencing the pan-African aesthetics of his student Aaron Douglas, who is also on view. In the 1940s, sculptor Ossip Zadkine—born in what is today Belarus and seen here with his 1918 work “Forms and Light (Mother and Child)”—taught Harold Cousins, on view with the abstract, welded steel “Le Matador” (1955), and the always extraordinary Elizabeth Catlett, here with her mahogany figure of “Ife” (2002).

Hale Woodruff’s ‘The Card Players’ (1930) PHOTO: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

In certain works, such modernist interplay continues to the present day. Martin Puryear’s enigmatic sculpture “Face Down” (2008) owes a self-acknowledged debt to Constantin Brancusi. The black, wooden wall reliefs of Leonardo Drew remap the grids of Piet Mondrian. With examples from the “European Modernist Tradition” right next to the “African American Artists” of the title, the works ultimately speak for themselves about just who is out to riff, relate, or razz. A “Nude” (c. 1939) by William H. Johnson is a powerhouse of modernist figuration. “Xpect” (2018) by Mequitta Ahuja, however, a self-portrait that remakes Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” forgoes invention for another “intervention into the canon of art history.”

Organized by guest curator Adrienne L. Childs and the Phillips Collection, “Riffs and Relations” relies too much on a thematic presentation that burdens a fascinating historical subject with middling contemporary work. The Phillips Collection bills itself as “America’s first museum of modern art”—it opened nearly a decade before New York’s Museum of Modern Art—but this largely postmodern show often misses out on the deeper history of modernism and the Phillips’s own relations with black artists. To better understand that story and its characters—Horace Pippin, Richmond Barthé, Sam Gilliam and many others—visitors should explore the museum’s permanent collection. While the Phillips is temporarily closed, the exhibition’s scholarly catalog also offers a good place to linger.

Stayin' Alive in '75

SPECTATOR USA, January 2020

Stayin' Alive in '75

Meryl Meisler’s photographs captured the family life and nightlife of Seventies New York

‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ was the headline of the New York Daily News. To which the City said to Ford, you first. When the Daily News ran that famous headline on October 29 1975, New York was teetering on bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had declared he would veto a federal bailout. It looked like the Big Apple was stewed.

The world had written off New York. The feeling was mutual: the city had written off the world. Between 1970 and 1980, the city lost nearly a million residents, over a tenth of its population. Still, New York attracted people who, against the reigning wisdom, would not or could not live anywhere else.

In 1975, some hundred thousand new New Yorkers were born within the city limits. I was one of them. In the same year, the photographer Meryl Meisler left the middle-class comforts of North Massapequa, Long Island and moved to ‘the city’, to focus her lens on the lives of New York. ‘What’s so great about New York? I mean, it’s a dying city,’ Annie Hall says in Woody Allen’s 1975 film, a tribute to the neurotic splendor of 1970s New York.

The worlds of that New York were smaller, more contained and more vivid than today’s sprawling, serious and somewhat sanitized city. Back then, if the town was really going under, those who remained to live through the decay were determined to dance among the ruins.

Camera in hand, Meryl Meisler captured the demimonde dancing on the city’s grave and then some. But she also looked for the life and the humor of the city’s broken streets. She did not indulge herself in the spectacle of wreckage; she set out to document its many humanizing moments. Compassion radiates from her viewfinder and lights up her subjects. In a flash, the faces of the city of my youth come alive in her images.

Members of the Village People at Xenon, June 1978

In the early 1980s, Meisler turned from Downtown to the outer boroughs and became the original Bushwick beatnik. She brought her camera to the classroom when she took up her job in 1981 as an arts teacher at Bushwick’s I.S. 291. The Bronx was burning, and blocks at a time of this north Brooklyn neighborhood had burned too, leaving families to live among the ruins. Meisler set out to tell their sides of the story.

She never stopped taking pictures, even as her teaching life took over. Thousands of images came to rest on Meisler’s negatives, slides and, eventually, digital chips. Only after her retirement a few years ago did she begin to develop this archive into exhibitions and the books Purgatory & Paradise: Sassy ’70s Suburbia & the City (2015), A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick (2016) and a new selection, New York Paradise Lost: Bushwick Era Disco, to be published in the fall.

Through images that have not been seen for 40 years, Meisler juxtaposes the worlds of Bushwick and bohemia, following the highs and lows of a city in decadence and decline through day and night. Her dance-club shots, taken on a medium-format camera, are flash-filled black and white.

‘Two Queens’, Hookers Ball at the Copacabana, February 1977

Cross-dressers preen at the Hookers Ball at the Copacabana on East 60th Street, and a near-naked man gyrates at the Jungle Party at the Paradise Garage discotheque on King Street. Famous faces such as Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and the Village People are caught in Meisler’s viewfinder.

These records of a club culture gone by contrast with Meisler’s Bushwick scenes, which she took with a point-and-shoot camera and developed as full-color slides. One consequence of the destruction of Bushwick was the opening up of the neighborhood to the sun. Bushwick, unlike the shadowy canyons and caverns of Manhattan, radiates a ruinous light. As in a city after a bombing raid, the residents of 1980s Bushwick stumble through the rubble.

Despite all the outward appearances of junked cars and the rubble-strewn streets in such photographs as ‘Red Stairs’ (1982), life goes on. Kids play among the burned-over remains or wait for the school bus by a line of wrecked cars. A toddler dresses up for Halloween, an old lady picks her way across a destroyed lot. Ladies dress up for church. Families picnic next to an abandoned car while the children make toys out of the wreckage. The day redeems the night.

George Herbert, the 17th-century metaphysical poet, said that living well is the best revenge. Even in the worst of times, New Yorkers made the best of bad circumstances. This isn’t to mythologize the destruction of 1970s New York or wish for its return. The radical play-acting nostalgia among New York’s current political class mainly appeals to out-of-town hipsters who moved into their gentrified Bushwick sublets last week. The real achievement of the true urbanites of 1970s New York is that they held on and saw their city through the genuine darkness. In the end, the city never did go bankrupt. Its salvation became a testament to everyone who now looks out at us from Meisler’s photographs of paradise regained.

Stalin at Yale

SPECTATOR USA, January 29, 2020

Stalin at Yale

Art history for the age of identity politics

Are we in our own revolutionary moment? Many of our leading institutions clearly believe so. Yale University has been working overtime to prove it is on the right side of history. ‘Problematic’ colleges have been renamed. ‘Offensive’ stained-glass windows have been knocked out. Only the leadership of an Ivy League school could spread such a poisonous rash. Heading the charge against the Dead White Male has been a progressive Yale bureaucracy that is, for the most part, pale and stale.

Now the task of dismantling Yale’s famous art history survey course has fallen to a scholar I respect, Tim Barringer. British-born, Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and has been a leading curator at the Metropolitan Museum. He even mounted the Met’s exceptional 2018 exhibition on Thomas Cole.

Following a 2017 mandate to ‘decolonize’ Yale’s Department of English, Barringer is giving over the keys of Yale’s famous art survey course to the identity vandals. According to the Yale Daily News, instead of one class that will tell the story of art from ‘Renaissance to the Present’, new courses will, Barringer says, be devised to consider art in relation to a five-step history lesson, ‘questions of gender, class and race’, with further discussion of art’s ‘involvement with Western capitalism’. Of course, ‘climate change’ will also be a ‘key theme’.

Art doesn’t fare well in revolutionary times. Likewise, revolutionary sentiments are often revealed in the treatment of art. If only Professor Barringer had looked more carefully at another five-step history lesson, Thomas Cole’s ‘Course of Empire’ tableau (1833-36), he might have seen how civilizations burn down from decadence as well as assault.

Russia, after all, was once a leading promoter of modern painting. Then the Bolsheviks arrived to make sure their Picassos suffered the same fate as their Romanovs. Yet the murder of art is rarely immediate. The death occurs over time. In the early years of the Russian Revolution, the painting collections owned by the industrialists Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov were first ‘nationalized’. You could still see them, now in those new proletarian museums, but they were mainly on display for the purposes of public derision by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate.

Then Stalin came along. He declared that this art was too ‘politically harmful and is contributing to the spread, in Soviet art, of hostile, bourgeois, formalist opinions’. Want to see the Matisse? Sorry, comrade, now you were out of luck. Modern art was deemed to be ‘composed mainly of ideologically inadequate, anti-working class, formalist works of Western bourgeois art devoid of any progressive, civilizing value for Soviet visitors’. The paintings all went to the vaults of the State Hermitage and Pushkin Museums, not to be seen again for decades. In their place went up a three-year ‘Exhibition of Gifts to Comrade Stalin From the Peoples of the USSR and Foreign Countries’. A thousand busts of Stalin replaced the great modernist works. Expect a thousand busts of Comrade Thunberg at Yale.

So it’s down with ‘Art for art’s sake’, and up with art for the sake of political expediency. No surprise, but Yale undergraduates have rushed to sign up for the final survey course taught in the traditional sequence. The story of Western art is the story of Western civilization, and that’s just the problem. Perhaps Barringer, like those early Soviet curators, believes that his art will be saved by the new political order. Or maybe the move was merely a prerequisite for Yale’s 2020 receipt of a $4 million bequest from the Mellon Foundation to support ‘race studies’.

It’s only a matter of time before the history of art ends up underground. Maybe even next semester. Meanwhile, the students surely know better and are voting by signing up for the old course, capitalism and all. As Stalin would have said, wisdom is sometimes with the people, not the commissars.