MARVELOUS

Cultural critic Hilton Als has curated a show at David Zwirner called Uptown, that collects portraits Alice Neel made of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem during the 60′s and 70′s. It’s possible to stroll through, take it in, and reach the simple, uncomplicated conclusion, “Marvelous.” The exhibit offers all the pleasures of painting without troubling intellectual or aesthetic subject matter. The canvases are handsome, vibrantly colored, and simple to appraise. Here is a streetwise but troubled young man. Here is an older woman who must have been a knockout in her youth. Here is a distinguished gentleman, a pillar of the community. But there are richer, more uncommon currents just below the surface.

Neel’s manner of depicting her subjects, in small vertical canvases, in a simple frontal view as they gaze straight back at the painter, fuses portraiture with self-presentation — with performance. As a white woman artist living in an enclave of working class blacks, Latinos and immigrants, Neel was an outsider, and remained keenly aware of of her status. Some of the paintings’ titles wrankle: Arab, Black Spanish Family, Two Puerto Rican Boys, Cyrus the Gentle Iranian. Yet her portraits don’t have the sting of anthropology, or offer an empty celebration of diversity. Her approach is clear-eyed and painterly. These canvases document the world she moves in, just as it is, without adornment, and without drama.

Neel depicts her subjects truly, soberly noting asymmetries and blemishes in face and figure. The sitters offer themselves easily for view but not for judgment. They are preternaturally relaxed, without a need to put on airs, sitting patiently as their portraits are crafted. Neel, in return, grants them a distance and mystery that confer dignity.

Alice Neel, Anselmo, 1962. Image courtesy of Alice Neel and David Zwirner.

March 27, 2017 by Nalina Moses

The most vivid element of anthropologist Mick Taussig’s multi-media happening Berlin Sun Theater, performed at the Whitney Museum last month, were the dances by Kyle Bukhari. Taussig’s goal was "the re-enchantment of nature in the age of global meltdown.“ Specifically, he examined ways our diminished experience of the sun has ruptured elemental physical and mythological connections. The piece unfolded around a personal, poetic text that Taussig read out loud on stage. Enriching the narrative were musical passages, film clips, project images from Taussig’s notebooks, and Bukhari’s dances. Cutting through the shadowy, ground-floor atrium of the Museum, Bukhari enacted routes, rotations and repetitions that recalled planetary motion. At certain moments, moments explosive with feeling, the dancer illustrated specific details from Taussig’s stories. He became, fleetingly, a tree wrestling upwards from the ground, a cloud of fireflies interrupting the darkness, and, in a big bubble-headed mask, the moon.

I had always thought that dance was inevitably tied to human stories because of its dependence on the body, that it was, essentially, about a person moving through the world. But Bukhari’s remarkable transformations showed otherwise. The ease with which he made himself a moon, spooking and enchanting audience members as he emerged among them, got at the majesty of that celestial body. It made clear that a dancer isn’t limited to human actions – he can be anything he imagines.

March 25, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process. In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles. By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives. Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism. And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table. In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things. In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain. In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint. Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window. It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

March 19, 2013 by Nalina Moses