Holland Cotter

NEW YORK — On a recent Saturday there was strong foot traffic on the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art where New York artist Rachel Harrison’s exuberant midcareer survey is installed. And the traffic wasn’t moving fast. Visitors were spending time with sculpture that, despite — or because of — its enigmatic zaniness, inspired a slow look. And people seemed to be having fun looking, even if they weren’t exactly sure why.

Maybe it was because puzzlement can be fun, and Harrison has set it as one of the tasks for her work. Many of her assemblage-style sculptures suggest the kind of accidental urban still lifes you see on New York City sidewalks on trash collection day: bottles, bedding, defunct appliances, outgrown toys, discarded Christmas trees in season and, always, sealed garbage bags filled with you don’t want to know what. All of these together, once you start to look, translate into information about commerce, class, value, accident, appetite, waste, color, shape, zeitgeist — even life and death. There’s material there for stories, many. But you have to write them.

Harrison has photographed such arrays in the past and inserted the pictures in her sculpture, though the earliest piece in her current exhibition, “Rachel Harrison Life Hack,” a career survey covering some 25 years, looks like the unsavory something that the inside of a garbage bag might yield.

That piece is titled “Dinner” and is — or once was — just that. One night in 1991, the artist ordered a meal in an East Village restaurant downstairs from a gallery where she was in a group show. When her food arrived — shish kebab, salad, cheesecake — she divided it into Ziploc bags, which she took upstairs and tacked to the gallery wall as her contribution. A few days later she transferred the now-rotting food to glass jars, which remain sealed to this day and are displayed on a small shelf just inside the entrance to the Whitney show.

You can slot “Dinner” into various categories: as conceptual art, as a species of organic abstraction, as the souvenir of a career event, or as a relic of a lost place and time. In the end, it can only be securely defined by what it does: It catches your eye, pulls you in close, makes you struggle for meaning, and leaves you not knowing what to think.

The same might be said of a roomsize installation from 1996 with a block-of-type title that amounts to an object in itself: “Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an 8-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a 3-inch sphere?”

In its original form, the work, which has been recreated for the Whitney survey, was set up in a Brooklyn brownstone parlor and made up the entire content of Harrison’s first solo gallery show. There it created a room within the room through artificial, stage-flat “walls,” a theatrical device Harrison would repeatedly return to. At the Whitney, where surviving components of the original installation are included in the reconstruction, the layering is not just of space but of time, present and past.

So in a sense the work is another reliquary. And even when new, the piece had time-capsule features. Its title was lifted from a 1995 New York Times article written in the wake of an apocalypse-strength Hurricane Andrew. The “walls” are hung, now as then, with framed photos, taken by the artist, of trash bags waiting for pickup. And here and there we find colorfully labeled cans of supermarket peas (do the brands still exist, or are the cans archival?) stacked in corners or perched on shelves made in part from what look like stiffened socks.

Faced, without explanation, with such idiosyncratic elements, our organizational instinct, our default to logic, kicks in. We start to construct a narrative. So: flimsy walls, a report of damages from a storm, piled-up trash bags, a stash of canned food. Suddenly there’s tension, drama, a hint of darkness. But one look at the work’s wackier features pulls us in another direction, and we’re back with bemusement.

Again, this push-pull is a driving dynamic of this artist’s work. It withholds fixed meanings while suggesting that meanings exist. It works hard to elicit reactions, potentially strong ones, without determining what the reactions should be. You feel things will come clear if you hang out and keep looking. And people do.

Career surveys are usually arranged chronologically so as to suggest an artist’s development. The organizers of this show — Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photography at the Whitney; David Joselit, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and Kelly Long, a curatorial assistant at the Whitney — honor that convention, but only so far: They put early work, from the 1990s, in the opening gallery, but beyond that mix things up.

In general the work tends to grow more “sculptural” — in the sense of more concentrated, unitary, handmade — as time goes on. One example is “Alexander the Great” (2007), in which a nude, prepubescent department store mannequin, wearing an Abraham Lincoln mask on the back of its head, stands atop an abstract expressionist-patterned meteorite. Another is the scary “Brownie” (2005), a kind of Giacomettian column embedded with life-size skulls, drizzled with paint and topped with a silver wig.

The show’s inventories of sculptural ingredients can become quite elaborate. “Huffy Howler” (2004) includes sheepskin, foxtails, brick-filled tote bags and a studio shot of Mel Gibson in “Braveheart” attached to the brand-name bike of the title. “Nice Rack” (2006), with a found Hallmark-greeting-card rack, brings together costume jewelry, fake fruit, an ergonomic snow shovel and a photographed portrait of an imperious Ronald Reagan.

One look at the Reagan image has you scrambling for a political message. As far as I can tell, there’s no hard message to be found, but in suggesting there might be, the work has done its job. It has made us look, with a synthesizing eye, at every detail, and then, thwarted but living in hope, look again.

Although Harrison is not credited as a curator, she is largely responsible for the show’s distinctive look. It was her idea to have the floor of the big central gallery covered with black-painted plywood and marked with maplike lines drawn in chalk. The design was inspired by the minimalist studio set used in Lars von Trier’s 2004 film, “Dogville,” and whatever its significance may hold for the artist or for us, it provides a persuasive setting for sculpture, allowing each piece, like a character in a film, to retain its personality while clearly participating in a collective story.

And it was her idea, in the show’s final gallery, to turn 15 extraordinarily inventive sculptures into a multivocal ensemble by corralling them together within a circle of outward-facing metal chairs, on which visitors are invited to sit.

It might have made more logical sense, in the interest of contemplative looking, to have had the chairs face inward toward the art. But destabilizing logic is what the show — which includes a set of drawings of singer Amy Winehouse as an avenging angel of art history — is ultimately about. (Looking at art is often pitched as a learning experience; Harrison makes it an unlearning experience.)

Oh, and I’ve learned that “life hack” is internetese for myriad improvised tricks or techniques devised to make the practical crises of daily existence — how to remove ketchup stains from a shirt, how to relax with strangers — more manageable. No doubt some of these interventions work better than others, but the fact that they’re a popular phenomenon, a thing, suggests that a lot of us are looking around, seeing chaos and trying, with whatever panache we can muster, to make it productive. Harrison’s art is really good at that.

‘Rachel Harrison Life Hack’: Through Jan. 12 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St., Manhattan; 212-570-3600, whitney.org.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic’s Pick)

Trash-Stalking With Rachel Harrison

So in a sense the work is another reliquary. And even when new, the piece had time-capsule features. Its title was lifted from a 1995 New York Times article written in the wake of an apocalypse-strength Hurricane Andrew. The “walls” are hung, now as then, with framed photos, taken by the artist, of trash bags waiting for pickup. And here and there we find colorfully labeled cans of supermarket peas (do the brands still exist, or are the cans archival?) stacked in corners or perched on shelves made from gesso-stiffened socks.

Faced, without explanation, with such idiosyncratic elements, our organizational instinct, our default to logic, kicks in. We start to construct a narrative. So: flimsy walls, a report of damages from a storm, piled-up trash bags, a stash of canned food. Suddenly there’s tension, drama, a hint of darkness. But one look at the work’s wackier features — socks shelves! — pulls us in another direction, and we’re back with bemusement.

One look at the Reagan image has you scrambling for a political message. As far as I can tell, there’s no hard message to be found, but in suggesting there might be, the work has done its job. It has made us look, with a synthesizing eye, at every detail, and then, thwarted but living in hopes, look again.

And it was her idea, in the show’s final gallery, to turn 10 extraordinarily inventive sculptures into a multivocal ensemble by corralling them together within a circle of outward-facing metal chairs, on which visitors are invited to sit.

Exhibit Information:

Through Jan. 12 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St., Manhattan; 212-570-3600, whitney.org.

Peas, Socks and Sidewalk-Trash Sculptures: Just Keep Looking

NEW YORK — We’ll be lucky this art season if we get another exhibition as tautly beautiful as “Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates” at the Shed. And we’ll be right to ponder why this artist, who was born in Budapest 88 years ago and has lived in New York City for more than 60 years, is only now having a retrospective here.

Must neglect be the price paid by brilliant art that lies outside ready marketing categories, that baffles conventional critical thinking, that manages to be, paradoxically, mortality-haunted and hopeful? Too often the answer is “yes,” particularly if the art is by a woman.

I learned of Denes late, in 1982, by which time she already had a significant career. I was living in Lower Manhattan, two blocks from the Hudson River and an empty grass-stubbled urban prairie that had been formed by landfill excavated from the World Trade Center building site. (Battery Park City sits there now.)

One spring day I noticed a truck dumping fresh earth at the site, then people digging long furrows and sowing seeds. In early summer green shoots came up, grew tall, turned tawny yellow. By mid-August, 2-acres worth of waist-high wheat was ripe for cutting.

Kansas had landed in Manhattan! If you stood in the middle of the field — and anyone could — you had views of the twin towers rising nearby and the Statue of Liberty off to the south. The scent there that hot summer was pure country (as were the bugs). Then one day a thresher showed up and harvested the crop. I wasn’t around for that, but when I dropped by the landfill later I remember feeling shocked and dismayed to find the field bare, the wheat gone.

The planting was a work of environmental art conceived and produced by Denes, with the help of a small crew, on a commission from the Public Art Fund. The title she gave the project — “Wheatfield — A Confrontation” — nailed its political intent, though you understood it, without prompting, at the sight of 2 acres of breeze-swept natural bounty, accessible to all, sprouting beneath the silos of capitalist greed that were the twin towers. (The wheat ended up traveling to 28 cities across the globe in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.”)

You can still sense the power of that image from documentary photographs and a 1982 video of the artist being interviewed by the NBC newscaster Jane Pauley, all on view on the Shed’s fourth floor, where the superbly installed survey of nearly 150 works, spanning Denes’ career, begins.

Her focus on ecology, on the fear of present decay and the hope for future survival is clear from the start in sequential shots of a 1968 solo performance, “Rice/Tree/Burial,” done in upstate New York, in which she planted grains of rice, bound trees with chains and buried time-capsule copies of her own poems. Yet most of her work, early and late, is the form of meticulously executed diagrammatic drawings based on scientific and philosophical subjects: the workings of the brain, the complexities of language, the possibilities of post-Anthropocene habitation — in short, the fundamentals of what she is not afraid to refer to as “human existence.”

In certain word-intensive pieces, like “Manifesto” (1969), which appears large on a wall outside the show, a tendency to abstract loftiness is tempered by plain-style language, with results that read like concrete poetry. Other, more purely graphic drawings have the flawless crispness of digital prints. (Denes was a pioneer in applying computer technology to art and in the 1970s was already forecasting the fate of knowledge-as-truth in a coming age of information overload.)

Religion and ethics enter the picture in a work in low relief called “Morse Code Message” (1969-1975). Made from bits of white plastic attached to a dark plexiglass ground, it translates biblical passages in which God lays down the law for mankind into a language — supposedly universal — of dashes and dots.

And there’s humor. An avowed feminist and one of the founders, in 1972, of the all-women A.I.R. Gallery (then in SoHo, now in Dumbo, Brooklyn), Denes takes satirical jabs at the workings of gender in an elaborate 1970 drawing, “Liberated Sex Machine,” that reduces the grand opera of sexual coupling to a user-unfriendly instructional chart.

All of this probably qualifies in some sense as Conceptual Art, which would make Denes a rare participant in a mostly male category. Yet her work has a speculative breadth and, most important, an attention to visual presence that much classic Conceptual work does not. She has basically carved out an independent, label-free niche for herself and has been occupying and expanding it for more than 50 years.

Visionary is one label that does apply, though the art world has never been sure what to do with it, whether to trust it. Over the years, as she has taken on increasingly elaborate ecological projects, her drawings, which she calls a form of “visual philosophy” — have grown more ambitious. They include distorted world maps, in which the geopolitical relations we’re familiar with are unfixed. There are designs for cities that are also space stations, vehicles for exploration but also for escape.

Many of the designs are based on the ancient, energy-channeling form of the pyramid, but the pyramid is now relieved of weight and monumental function. Ordinarily rigid and vertically directed, the pyramid, in Denes’ drawings, stretches and twists, swells like an egg, curls like a snail, flies like a bird. Everything in the world, as this artist sees it, is in flux, subject to growth and decay, a dynamic that is dramatically embodied in her public projects.

Only a few of the many she has proposed in drawings have been realized. “Wheatfield — A Confrontation” is by far the best known, and was, of course, meant to be ephemeral. Another, still-intact public work, “Tree Mountain — A Living Time Capsule — 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years,” has a longer projected time span, though still a finite one.

Built in Ylojarvi, Finland, from 1992 to 1996, it consists of a handmade hill covered with trees arranged in a mathematically determined spiral pattern. Each tree has been planted by a volunteer who has been contractually granted ownership of it, valid for four centuries, and transferable generationally. The larger idea behind the arrangement is straightforward: Conservation is both an individual and collective responsibility, extending far into the future.

Photographs of “Tree Mountain” are in the show, as are plans for other projects that still exist only on paper or as models. One is for a system of artificial dunes to protect the storm-wracked Rockaways in Queens, New York. Another is for an air-cleansing virgin forest to be planted on landfill also in Queens. A third, and probably the least likely to be given the go-ahead any time soon, is for a Peace Park in Washington, D.C.

The qualities that distinguish such work from 1960s and ’70s Land Art, with which Denes has sometimes been associated, are the same qualities that mark her drawings: a combination of moral rigor and an uninvasive lightness of touch. And what separates her work from object-fixated, dollar-value art of the 21st century is an insistence on impermanence. (That the retrospective is happening in the cash-buttressed fortress of Hudson Yards is an irony surely not lost on her.)

Positioned almost in the center of the fourth-floor galleries is a 1969 installation called “Human Dust.” It has two main components. One is a poster-size wall text telling the story of an unnamed man’s life. “He was an artist,” it begins. “He was born fifty years ago, which means he lived app. 2/3 of his expected life span.” We get statistics: the number of his close relationships, the number of places he lived. We learn details of his appetite (“During his lifetime he consumed 4800 lbs. of bread, 140 gallons of wine”), and of his character (“He was unhappy and lonely more often than not”). The account, basically an obituary, concludes: “34 people remembered him or spoke of him after his death and his remains shown here represent 1/85 of his entire body.”

The remains are indeed on display: a clear glass bowl filled with fragmented bones.

As if in response to this somewhat unnerving memorial, the galleries on the second floor, where the show concludes, have a dusky chapel-like atmosphere. Many of the most extravagantly imagined late drawings are here, as is a model of the Queens forest, the planting of which will be financed by the Shed, and two sculptures, also commissioned by the Shed for the show.

One, “Probability Pyramid — Study for Crystal Pyramid,” is a 17-foot-tall pyramid with inward curving walls. Made from thousands of 3-D printed white blocks and lighted from within, it has the presence of a traditional monument but looks like a giant lantern. It was conceived in 1976 to be even taller: 30 feet, a height that could, with the addition of more blocks, be reached in a future setting.

The other, a smaller piece, “Model for Teardrop — Monument to Being Earthbound,” comes with complications. Physically it consists of a dark round base with a glowing nylon teardrop — or a flame — floating above it, and it really is floating, held in midair by the force of electromagnets embedded in both the base and the form itself.

This piece, too, as seen in the show, is smaller than the artist originally envisioned it. Could it, too, be scaled up? Apparently there are no magnets strong enough to permit that, making this piece a monument designed to fail. But what is it a monument to? To the paradoxical dynamic that drives this artist’s finest work: rising, and falling, and rising. Living, and dying, and living. Can a tear and a flame coexist? Even be the same thing? In Denes’ world they can.

Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates Through March 22 at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, Manhattan; 646-455-3494, theshed.org.

At 88, Agnes Denes Finally Gets the Retrospective She Deserves

(Critic's Pick)

But the marvelous show you actually see, honoring the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, is, tonally, some other thing: quieter, slower, better. It’s a succession of major painterly melodies set among ink-drawn pre-echoes and reverbs. It’s a confluence of presences and absences — art that’s there and some that’s not — both equally potent.

And it’s a biographical vapor trail of a talent who has been used as a romantic model of what a great artist should be — large-gestured, face-to-the-sunrise — but who largely departed from that ideal, who identified himself above all as a science wonk, who spent as much time writing as making art, and who ignored (and missed) commission deadlines almost till the day he died.

That day was May 2, 1519. And his death, at 67, happened in France, where he passed his last years as court artist to King Francis I. Leonardo’s residency there helps explain why so large a percentage of his surviving works — a total of only about 15 to 20 paintings are generally attributed to his hand — ended up in Louvre’s collection, which in turn helps explain why the quincentenary tribute is happening in France and not in Italy, his native land.

Indeed, proprietorial Franco-Italian tensions have made the organization of the show something of a cliffhanger. Bad enough that the Louvre possesses permanent tourist-industry gold in the form of the “Mona Lisa.” Should France be able to cash in on Leonardos borrowed from Italy too?

That’s one possible gloss on the efforts of a cultural preservation group, Italia Nostra, to legally block the loan of one of the artist’s most familiar images, the drawing of the outstretched nude figure called “Vitruvian Man.” (Endlessly reproduced, it appears on Italy’s 1 euro coin.) And it was only a matter of days before the opening that an Italian court finally gave the green light for this work to travel to Paris for a limited eight-week stay.

(There was also one down-to-the-wire no-show: “Salvator Mundi,” a painting of much debated authenticity that sold for $450.3 million two years ago, reportedly bought by a Saudi prince, and has been all but unseen since. It is place-marked in the exhibition — presumably it could still arrive — by a workshop version of the same picture borrowed from a Swiss private collection.)

Once you enter the show, though, you leave internecine politics (if not connoisseurial questions) behind. You’re now in Leonardo World, a penumbral, winding but wide-vistaed realm unto itself with roughly 160 works , and one that Louvre curators Vincent Delieuvin and Louis Frank have taken scrupulous care to make as navigable as possible.

We know something about the path of the artist’s life from contemporary sources, chiefly Giorgio Vasari’s fascinated, if factually wonky, minibiography. We learn that Leonardo was born out of wedlock to a farmer’s daughter and rising notary who never legally claimed the child as his son. Vasari tells us that young Leonardo was gorgeous, polymathically gifted and, after being publicly accused of abusing a younger man, candidly, even emphatically gay.

He was a complicated guy. Sunny and shadowed, generous and withholding, self-confident and not. Put everything together and you have a portrait of a charismatic outsider: well-met, clubbable, ultraintelligent but also both distracted and drill-bit focused. Driven, off on his own.

The show takes us straight into his early career as an apprentice in the workshop of painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio, a Florentine star and star maker whose work is now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (Perugino, future teacher of Raphael, trained with him too). And in the center of the opening gallery stands — astonishingly — one of Verrocchio’s major works, the overlifesize bronze “Christ and Saint Thomas,” on loan from the Orsanmichele in Florence, Italy.

Cast almost in one piece and an engineering marvel in its day, it’s an object lesson in the merging of realism and grace that defines 15th-century Florentine art. And so are the dozen or so small painted drapery studies ranged around it on the walls. Some are by Verrocchio, the master; some by Leonardo, the student. Can you tell which artist did which? Probably not, and neither could anyone at the time. Leonardo was ready for an independent career.

We follow that career for some 40 years as the artist moves, almost always in the protective custody of powerful patrons, from Medici Florence to an upsurging Milan to Papal Rome and finally to France.

Commissions came early and fast, and always with due dates attached. To each project Leonardo would say, “Sure, great, no problem,” then stretch the deadlines to the breaking point and well beyond. There were certain paintings that did get completed, sometimes by assistants. The altarpiece known as the “Madonna of the Rocks,” produced in two variations, was one.

The earlier, 1483-85 Louvre version, in which the artist fully participated, established a basic Leonardo “look”: a kind of magical superrealism, fantastic yet observationally exacting. Figures, often of fungible gender, are naturalistically proportioned; and every leaf in a landscape is accounted for. At the same, in the “Madonna of the Rocks,” the Virgin’s face has the glow of a tungsten lamp, and the stalagmite-style formation behind her looks like a yawning, gaptoothed mouth.

Leonardo’s portraits tend to look finished, although without a delivery history, it’s hard to tell. Confronted with the steely, appraising sideways gaze of the sitter known as “La Belle Ferronnière” (1495-99), any artist might feel compelled to wrap up the job on time. By contrast, the ready-to-be-amused face of the Mona Lisa inspires no such psychological challenge. Relax, she seems to say, this is fun.

(This painting isn’t in the show, but it is, of course, in the museum, holding court, in bulletproofed isolation, before stanchioned lines of selfie snappers, in the Salle des États upstairs. And should you yearn to spend solitary time with it, the Louvre’s newly minted, seven-minute virtual reality experience, “Mona Lisa, Beyond the Glass,” lets you.)

Leonardo kept the “Mona Lisa,” apparently in perpetual progress, with him to the end, as he did other paintings, including the “Penitent Saint Jerome,” on loan from the Vatican and recently seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You can take “Jerome” as either an unfinished painting or a highly worked sketch. And you’ll find the grandest example of such a Leonardian hybrid in the “Adoration of the Magi.”

The “Adoration,” in the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, was deemed too fragile to travel to Paris and is represented in the show by a full-scale photographic image produced by infrared reflectography, an X-raylike imaging method used by conservators to view layers of painting and underdrawing, a history of thinking, revising, editing, tweaking, erasing, and inventing.

Reflectogram images of paintings and painting-size drawings both included in and missing from the show are installed throughout the galleries and attest to the investigatory work that the show, 10 years in the making, represents. Even more important, the curators have supplemented this photographic data with dozens of the artist’s preparatory drawings, organic evidence of his labor-intensive creative method.

In short, we see Leonardo’s hand and mind in action. And we see this action in constant, searching motion in a gallery devoted to his experimental scientific work, which he considered his most significant accomplishment, the achievement he wanted to be remembered by.

This material was largely consigned to notebooks — the so-called Codex Leicester, now owned by Bill Gates, is one — which the show sorts by disciplinary category: human anatomy, botany, zoology, cosmology, engineering. The drawn images are at once precise and poetic — a personable human skull, a tumble of kittens, an undulant star-of-Bethlehem flower, the world’s first helicopter — and all are accompanied by, or entirely encased in, exquisitely penned texts, some done in Leonardo’s lefty mirror-image script.

What’s the “art” part of all this? Isn’t this work, like Leonard’s endless studies and sketches, essentially just a form of note-taking? And as such, however virtuosic, isn’t it closer to a practice of skill rather than to the making of art? Actually, no. Leonardo’s great accomplishment was that he erased the distinctions between art and ideas, putting a positive, endgame value on long-term exploring over short-term arriving.

He wasn’t, like his younger rival, Michelangelo, a determined monument maker, a product man, who gave even his craziest ideas physical form — say, making a painting of heaven as big as heaven. (Leonardo’s one semiachieved monument, “The Last Supper” fresco in Milan, quickly proved to be a self-obliterating wreck.) Leonardo was something like what we now call a conceptual artist, maybe the original one. Ideas — experiments, theories — were creative ends in themselves.

And yet a few extraordinary objects, however much he considered them to be in flux, remain.

One is the Louvre’s sublime altarpiece, from around 1500, depicting Saint Anne, the Virgin, and the child Jesus playing with a lamb. (Wonderfully, it’s accompanied here by the full-scale cartoon from the National Gallery, London.) As a family portrait, the image is inexpressibly, even goofily tender (Mary sits, like a giant child, in her mother’s lap). As theological statement of redemptive loss, it’s a heartbreaker. As a composition of color and volume set against one of the dreamiest landscapes in Western art, it’s what we come to museums to see.

So, Leonardo was an orthodox artist, an audience-pleaser, after all. Or was he? Consider the painting “Saint John the Baptist” on view nearby. Like the altarpiece, it’s a devotional image, but not entirely a religious one. He depicts St. John as a pretty, seminude young man. Smiling seductively out of darkness, illuminated as if under a streetlight, he points a finger heavenward as if to say, “Want to come up to my place?”

Is this the reading the artist was after? We’ll never know. And so an excellent, deeply considered exhibition, one at pains to make Leonardo’s life and art read clearly, closes with mystery, in this painting and in the small final images that lead you out of Leonardo World. One is a posthumous red-chalk profile portrait of the artist by his assistant, Francesco Melzi. From it, Leonardo stares impassively across the room at a drawing of his own titled “A Deluge.”

Probably done a year or two before he died, it’s a gestural explosion, a turbulent image — catastrophic? ecstatic? — of a wind-whipped, water-drenched world caught in the process of coming into being or falling apart. We don’t know which. For him both were the same. Change — light to shadow and back to light — was a form of God, and it was the engine of his art.

“Leonardo da Vinci”

At the Louvre Museum, Paris, from Oct. 24 to Feb. 24. Reservation required. Information: louvre.fr.

Leonardo, Hand and Mind, Shines at the Louvre

PARIS — To judge by the marketing hullabaloo, the Leonardo da Vinci retrospective that opens here Thursday at the Louvre should be the visual equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a trumpet-and-trombone choir. Blockbuster’s plastered all over it, and rightly so. Timed-ticket sales for its one-stop run are moving right along.

NEW YORK — When the Museum of Modern Art reopens Oct. 21 after a $450-million, 47,000-square-foot expansion, it will finally, if still cautiously, reveal itself to be a living, breathing 21st-century institution, rather than the monument to an obsolete history — white, male, and nationalist — that it has become over the years since its founding in 1929.

After decades of stonewalling multiculturalism, MoMA is now acknowledging it, even investing in it, most notably in a permanent collection rehang that features art — much of it recently acquired — from Africa, Asia, South America and African America, and a significant amount of work by women. In short, what’s primarily different about the reopened MoMA is the integrated presence of “difference” itself — a presence that takes the museum back to its experimental early days, when American self-taught art and non-Western art were on the bill.

Did we need a supersized (one-third larger), nearly blocklong multiplex MoMA — with a Diller, Scofidio + Renfro /Gensler extension tacked onto the 2004 building designed by Yoshio Taniguchi — to accommodate this presence? No. As we learn from every art fair every year, more art is not more. What’s needed is agile planning and alert seeing, and these are evident in the museum’s modestly scaled opening attractions, which include focused surveys of two African American artists (Betye Saar and William Pope.L), installations by artists from India (Sheela Gowda and Dayanita Singh), a sampler of Latin American work and a permanent collection gallery devoted to contemporary art from China.

But in every museum with an active acquisition program, the permanent collection galleries are key. They’re the heart, brain and soul of the place; its history and memory. Special, short-term shows bring people through the door. But they end, move on. If you want to know what a museum is really about, what it’s feeling and thinking, keep your eye on the art it owns and gives its walls and floors to, long-term.

Judged by this metric alone, the expanded MoMA is making obvious efforts to reshape its image without going entirely off-brand — to tell the tale of what might be called modernism plus, with globalism and African American art added.

The museum has long been famous for inventing an ironclad view of modern art as a succession of marquee “isms” (cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, etc.), and arranging its holdings to illustrate that. The very rough outline is still in place on the three floors of collection galleries: art from the 19th century through 1940 on five, from 1940 to 1970 on four, and from 1970 to the present on two. But the main route is now peppered with unexpected inclusions and interrupted by theme-based detours and byways.

Also, walls between disciplines, once firm, are down. The permanent gallery rehang, coordinated by five chief curators from departments across the museum, has been, and will be, a collaborative project. The prevailing style is mix-and-match, with sculpture, painting, design, architecture, photography and film bunking in together (something that will freak out orthodox modernists). But, rest assured, each discipline gets some space of its own.

The jumble can be confusing, as, at first, are certain features of the general floor plan. Previously, visitor traffic entering the main lobby from West 53rd Street flowed to the right, toward the Sculpture Garden and up to the galleries. Now you have a directional choice. You can still go that way or opt to go left toward the new Geffen wing, where you will find, among other things, street-level galleries to which admission is free (as it has been, since 2013, to the Sculpture Garden).

One of these holds a selection of design items chosen by Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the department of architecture and design. Another, the double-height Projects 110 Gallery, has a set of penumbral oil-on-barkcloth narrative paintings by young Kenyan-born painter Michael Armitage, in a New York solo debut. Organized by Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, this show is the first in a series to be presented here by the Studio Museum while its new David Adjaye-designed home is under construction.

Upstairs navigation is easier, familiar. As before, the permanent collection galleries begin, chronologically, in the Taniguchi building and move from there straight west into the Geffen, with black metal door frames marking the points of transition. And on the fifth floor you’re eased into a plunge into modernism with a grouping of Brancusi sculptures set just outside the galleries themselves.

The Brancusi installation is classic MoMA: white walls, lots of air, few words. The idea is that this art doesn’t need commentary; it speaks for itself, and anything added, beyond light and space, is superfluous. You can argue with this approach — I do; I like lots of take-it-or-leave-it contextual information — but it has always been the MoMA way. Inside the galleries, the old-school hands-off mode continues, though with some tweaks. Each gallery has (at least) a short thematic title, so visitors can get a sense of what connects the works of art in the room — an idea, a medium, a place, a time — and a brief explanation of the theme.

The first gallery, now labeled “19th Century Innovators,” is pretty much a painting hit parade — Cezanne’s “Still Life with Apples” (1895-98), Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy” (1897) and, straight ahead, van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1889) — with a few painterly prints (Mary Cassatt, Pierre Bonnard) thrown in. But to this familiar two-dimensional European world MoMA has introduced an American wild card: half a dozen nugget-like ceramic bowls and jugs by George Ohr (1857-1918), the self-proclaimed “Mad Potter of Biloxi.”

Ohr was turning out hundreds of these gnarly, pinched earthenware vessels in the American South at the same time Van Gogh was painting “Starry Night” in an asylum in the south of France. And in the year Ohr died, in Mississippi, even locally all but unknown, Brancusi finished his first version of“Endless Column,” on view just beyond the gallery door. In the pre-expansion MoMA, these three artists were unlikely to have met. Here they’re caught up in formal and psychological conversation.

Farther on, after you’ve passed through a mesmerizing gallery of early photographic images — including Anna Atkins’ lacy 1850s botanical studies and a 1905 film of the New York City subway, looking every bit as funky then as now — you find another meeting of artistic minds, this one a genuine startler.

The gallery itself is a virtual Picasso shrine, with his 1907 “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon” at the center, and related pictures ranged around it. But there’s a major out-of-time entry here too: a 1967 painting, acquired in 2016, by African American artist Faith Ringgold depicting an explosive interracial shootout. Titled “American People Series #20: Die,” it speaks to “Demoiselles” both in physical size and in visual violence. And just by being there it points up the problematic politics of a work like Picasso’s — with its fractured female bodies and colonialist appropriations — that is at the core of the collection. MoMA traditionalists will call the pairing sacrilegious; I call it a stroke of curatorial genius.

There are other such moments, less emphatic, on all three floors. One comes with the sight of Alma Woodsey Thomas’ incandescent 1973 “Fiery Sunset” plugged into an otherwise all-Matisse room. And there are several in a group installation evoking the matchless élan of New York City painter Florine Stettheimer.

No curatorial credits are posted anywhere. But I hope that whoever chose to include a 1981 piece by East Village artist Arch Connelly (1950-1993), will accept my personal thanks. The Connelly contribution, a mirror-shaped canvas encrusted with hundreds of fake pearls and titled “Self-Portrait,” suits the Stettheimian “extravagance-is-me ” ethos to a T.

On the long historical walkabout of some 60 collection galleries spread over three floors, there’s pretty much something for everyone. You get a big hit of Jackson Pollock, a Frida Kahlo fix, megadoses of pop and surrealism; Soup Cans, “Water Lilies” and Cindy Shermans to burn — all the things that many people come to MoMA, selfie sticks in hand, to see.

But you also get specialty shows, the equivalent of mini-seminars, on books made by artists in Revolution-era Russia (most are by women), on architecture as sculpture, and on the epic potential of Latin American Mail Art. And there’s one exhibition, smallish in floor space but large in material, focused on poet Frank O’Hara, who was a MoMA curator. To some visitors these will seem esoteric and pass-byable, but they’re a testament to the museum’s archival depths and its scholarly chops. And, once you put a toe in, they’re fun.

Finally, we get charismatic images by names that should be on every art-lover’s A-list but aren’t — yet: Geta Bratescu, Graciela Carnevale, Sari Dienes, Rosalyn Drexler, Valie Export, Beatriz González, Maren Hassinger, Atsuko Tanaka, along with Benny Andrews, Ibrahim El-Salahi, and May Stevens, all three part of the exceptionally strong installation of Vietnam War-era art, “War Within, War Without,” that brings the fourth-floor rehang to a close.

Work by many of these artists has entered the collection in just the past few years. (When you’re traveling the galleries, pay attention to the acquisition dates on the labels; they can tell you a lot about the politics of purchase.) Much of it could find no place in MoMA’s canonically gated modernist story. The current version of modernism plus is by no means an in-depth rewrite, but it has the makings of one, depending on how it’s developed.

And, in one of the most promising features of the reopened museum, the mechanics for development are there. Post-expansion plans call for regular rotation and refreshment of the collection. Every six months, a third of the galleries on floors five, four and two will be reinstalled. By the end of 18 months, everything, the promise is, will, have been rethought. Destination favorites — “Starry Night,” “Desmoiselles” — will no doubt stay on view, but what’s around them will change, which will change them too.

Such flexibility offers tremendous potential for new thinking, particularly at a museum whose curatorial staff has, in the past few years, begun to diversify (though not its board of trustees). Flexibility also, it’s worth saying, allows the option of backpedaling should the opening “new” model prove to be little too new for a healthy box-office.

My guess is that in some hopefully ever-improving version, this 21st-century MoMA will work, if only for self-preservative reasons. Multicultural is now marketable. To ignore it is to forfeit profit, not to mention critical credibility. And the new MoMA is obviously tailored to a new and younger audience, one that has no investment, nostalgic or otherwise, in the old pre-Taniguchi model, which now lives on mostly in the memories of a fading population (which itself had no direct experience of the original, progressive 1930s museum).

On the evidence of what I see in the reopened museum, a bunch of very smart curators are putting their heads together to work from inside to begin to turn a big white ship in another direction. We’re not talking revolution. With this museum we probably never will. But in the reboot there are stimulating ideas and unexpected, history-altering talents around every corner. As long as both keep showing up at MoMA, so will I.

The Museum of Modern Art reopens to the public Oct. 21 (member previews begin Oct. 12); moma.org.

MoMA Reshapes Image With 'Modernism Plus'

MoMA Reboots With 'Modernism Plus'

NEW YORK — Archaeological shows, whether large or small, are like icebergs. What you see is the tip of a mountain of history submerged in the ocean of time. “The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East,” which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday, is like that. It’s a big show, packed with surprises, and connected equally to the present and the past. And in this case the tip takes the shape of a wide-open field with a long road running through it.

The terrain is dominated by giants, ancient competing superpowers seen late in their long histories: imperial Rome to the west and Parthia in Iran to the east. But unusually for a show in which they are featured, the focus here is not on them. It’s on a patchwork of subject cultures — roughly corresponding to modern-day Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen — that lay between them.

Often those cultures are themselves presented as if shaped by the Roman and Parthian presence. This exhibition offers a different picture. Yes, imperial influence is there, and often strong, but far from being all-determining, each of the cultures considered borrows imperial symbols and styles, but partially, selectively, critically — grafting them onto local traditions. The results include distinctive new grassroots hybrids, in which conflicted responses to domination, even outright resistance to it, can sometimes be read.

Museums, with their air of balanced neutrality, tend to aestheticize conflict and gloss over the chaos and destruction it can create. This exhibition doesn’t do that. Realistically, it couldn’t. Most of the territory it covers has experienced culturally targeted violence for millenniums, up to and including the present.

The curators — Michael Seymour and Blair Fowlkes-Childs of the Met’s department of ancient Near Eastern art — keep this reality constantly visible, in wall texts and in a centrally placed video dealing with recent attacks on art in Syria and Iraq. By doing so, they acknowledge that past and present are always linked, and that objects on view in the show are powerful in ways that go beyond aesthetics.

Finally, through their arrangement of those objects — around 190, which date roughly from 100 BC to 250 AD — the curators make clear why imperial Rome and Parthia were so invested on asserting control of the Middle Eastern “world between”: because one of the most extensive and lucrative trade routes on earth stretched across it, and, gallery by gallery, culture by culture, the exhibition traces its path.

This begins in Southwestern Arabia (modern-day Yemen) and moves north to the kingdom of Nabataea — an ally of the Roman Empire — with its rock-cut capital at Petra (now in Jordan). From there the route continues through the rebellious territory of Judaea (Israel and Palestine), to the ritual center of Heliopolis-Baalbek in present-day Lebanon. Finally come the route’s grand, easternmost cities, until very recently well-preserved ruins: Palmyra and Dura-Europos in Syria, and Babylon and Hatra in Iraq. In the art at each stop, imperial influence is evident, if only as an overlay, and local traditions hold their own.

Sometimes the coexistence of styles can be startling. Southwestern Arabia was isolated from Rome and Parthia by desert, but as the source of an international spice and incense trade, was commercially bound to both. Possibly it was this positioning — intimate but arm’s-length — that encouraged Arabia to import foreign styles, but let them stay foreign, unabsorbed.

That, at least, is the impression given by a magnificent bronze sculpture of a rearing horse at the start of the show. A textbook example of Greco-Roman naturalism, it was cast in Yemen, as an inscription confirms. Yet another Yemen work nearby, a near-abstract alabaster head of a woman with enormous eyes and a small, sweet smile (she was affectionately nicknamed Miriam by the archaeologists who found her), could not look more different. It’s hard to believe both came from the same place, but they did.

Two carved goddess heads from Petra are similarly paired puzzlers. One, fine-featured and ivy-crowned, is textbook Classical. The other, identified by inscription as a native Nabatean deity, is a flat, foursquare limestone upright with what look like stuck-on lips and eyes. One thing you learn from them is that ancient Middle Easterners seem to have been far less inclined than we are to define a culture by a single style. Difference, far from being a problem, made sense to them, was what they liked.

This was demonstrably the case at the ecumenical settlement of Dura-Europos. Not only did multiple cultures, including Roman and Parthian, converge there, so did many religions, monotheistic and polytheistic. The section of the show devoted to the city includes a frieze of an Arabian god on camelback, clay tiles from a synagogue ceiling, and a wall painting that may be the earliest depictions of Jesus. Even hard-to-place items fit in fine. An oval limestone head of a man with staring, worried eyes is now tentatively identified as a god, but who cares if he is or isn’t? Anyone would be glad to have so soulful a fellow around.

Still, the city’s reputation for pluralist harmony may be inflated. Paintings depicting broken statues hint at conflicts. And conflict is built into art from ancient Judaea, particularly the small selection chosen for the show. It’s dominated by a magnificent bronze portrait of emperor Hadrian, who not only tried to force his emperor-as-god cult on the monotheistic people, but also suppressed the Jewish revolt for independence from Rome. Near Hadrian’s image in the gallery is a vitrine holding small objects — dishes, jugs, a knife, a mirror — discovered in a cave where Jewish rebels hid. One bronze jug, possibly stolen from a Roman army camp, is decorated with a figure of a Classical-style Victory. The face of the figure has been thoroughly rubbed out.

Erasure, justifiable and not, is a common fate of art in the territory the show defines. Recent satellite images have revealed that Dura-Europos, left unguarded during the current Syrian civil war, is being picked clean by looters. In 2015 and 2017, major structures at ancient Palmyra were brought down by Islamic State militants. Monuments in both northern and southern Iraq — at Hatra, Nimrud, Nineveh — have been blasted out of existence.

Destruction is also one of two main themes in the show’s 12-minute video, a taped conversation among three historians: Zainab Bahrani, professor of ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology at Columbia University; Michel Al-Maqdissi, a researcher at the Louvre, and Michal Gawlikowski, professor emeritus at the University of Warsaw. Bahrani, who is Iraqi, minces no words in describing what the erasure of art means to her. It’s a form of “ethnic cleansing,” she says. “And in many cases, really, it’s a form of genocide.”

Their second theme is preservation, and their urging of museums to protect, document and contextualize vulnerable work carries special weight at a time when questions around the restitution of cultural property are in the air. Should objects be returned even when the return might place them in danger? The issue is ethically many-sided and emotionally complicated, but at least one reaction feels clear looking around the show: You can’t help but feel relief that what’s here is safely here.

And there are magnetic things. One is a tiny Babylonian Venus, her nude body carved from milky alabaster, her eyes set with rubies, a gold crescent moon in her hair. A tomb relief of a young Palmyrene woman named Bat’a is another; traces of original paint intensify her riveted, direct-address gaze. And there’s a marvelous life-size carving of an eagle from Petra. Possibly conceived as a protector of the dead, it stands alert, wind-tousled and spread-winged, as if braced for a storm.

And a singular piece that ends the show, a late-third-century Sardonyx cameo, marks the start of a new Middle East history. Two decades or so before the cameo was carved, the Sasanian Empire rose to power in what is now Iran. Its first ruler, Ardashir I, vanquished the Parthians. His son, Shapur I, triumphed over the Roman army and, shockingly, captured its emperor Valerian.

This is the event etched in the cameo, which, like so much art in the show, sends complex political and ideological messages echoing back and forth through time. The cameo form itself was one anciently associated with the celebration of Greco-Roman imperial rule, but here, adapted for use as Sasanian propaganda, it advertises the ignoble defeat of that rule. And although the event depicted is grim — Valerian died in captivity — the object that records it is a thing of unusual beauty, with colors dark as the sea, bright as the sky.

“The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East”

March 18 through June 23 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/design/world-between-empires-review-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html" id="c802c344-953e-3830-aa5a-f45a92e6b472">The New York Times</a>.

See Ancient Trade Route Treasures at the Met

WASHINGTON — Whatever happened to “protest art” — issue-specific, say-no-to-power-and-say-it-loud art? Here we are, embroiled, as a nation, in what many in the art world regard as a pretty desperate political situation. Yet with the exception for actions by a few collectives — Decolonize This Place at the Whitney Museum, and Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, or PAIN, at the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — there’s scant visual evidence of pushback.

Has the product glut demanded by endless art fairs distracted from the protest impulse? Has the flood of news about turmoil in Washington put out the fires of resistance among artists? Has protest art simply become unfashionable?

Such questions came to mind on a visit to “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975,” a big, inspiriting survey at the Smithsonian American Art Museum here. Everything in it dates from a time in the past when the nation was in danger of losing its soul, and American artists — some, anyway — were trying to save theirs by denouncing what they viewed as a racist war.

Of the ’60s shows I’ve seen in the past few years, this one is the best, evocative of its time, and in sync with the present.

And, importantly, it comes with a second, smaller show that’s far more than a mere add-on. Titled “Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue,” it’s a view of the Vietnam War era through Vietnamese eyes, the eyes of people on the receiving end of aggression.

In the 1960s — before identity politics, before postcolonial studies — few museums would have thought to do such a show, but it absolutely needed doing.

The American involvement in Vietnam was an old and self-serving one, dating to just after World War II, when the United States began using the country, under French control since the 1880s, as a buffer, first against Japan, then against global communism. It wasn’t until 1965, though, when Lyndon Johnson sent combat troops to Southeast Asia, that most Americans, and most American artists, tuned in.

There were early responders and the exhibition, organized by Melissa Ho, a curator of 20th-century art at the museum, acknowledges them. In New York, Leon Golub was on the case, marching, arguing, painting battle scenes in which flesh looks like ground meat. So was Wally Hedrick in San Francisco. A Korean War veteran turned Bay Area beatnik, in 1957 he began a series of all-black abstract paintings which he titled “Vietnam” and conceived, he said, to “mirror the American soul.”

There was the Japanese-born On Kawara, who had been traumatized by the bombing of Hiroshima, and who, in 1966, by which time he lived in New York, would begin a clock-ticking series of paintings consisting entirely of calendar dates. His contribution to the show predates that series by a year. In form, it’s a triptych. In tone, it’s a bass note. On one panel is the hand-lettered phrase “One Thing”; on a second, a date, “1965”; on the third, the word “Viet-Nam.”

In the mid-1960s, coolness was hot, with pop and minimalism holding forth. But as war consciousness grew, all kinds of defiant weirdness warmed up in the wings. In 1966, Nancy Spero was turning out fleet gouache paintings of bug-shaped bombers, like buzzing Goyas. Drawings of star-spangled phalluses by Judith Bernstein, then an art student at Yale, could have been lifted from a men’s room wall. And Peter Saul was painting outrage large. His 1967 “Saigon,” a detonation of racist stereotypes, ruined bodies, and cartoon snark, was a kind of weaponized, offend-everyone Surrealism.

As images of the first “television war” scorched American culture, even artists who normally kept politics out of their work got into it. Philip Guston, once an abstract expressionist, returned to the figure. For sheer comedic savagery, no artist alive can match, his takedowns of Richard Nixon.

Minimalist Dan Flavin used his primary medium, fluorescent light, to create visual ambushes. And another abstract sculptor, Carl Andre, produced one of the show’s most wrenching images. From a World War II medical manual on battlefield injury he clipped a close-up photograph of a soldier whose lower face has been blown away. And after isolating the picture on a sheet of paper he penned a gut-punch of a caption: “It was no big deal, sir.”

Hypnotically repellent, the picture prompts speculation as to the effect it might have had if enlarged to poster size and displayed at anti-war protests. Some of the show’s most memorable work was designed for exactly that purpose. Martha Rosler intended the color photomontages in her “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” series to be photocopied in black-and-white and passed out at demonstrations.

Perhaps the era’s single most famous example of artist-made agitprop was similarly conceived as a giveaway. This was the poster titled “Q. And babies? A. And babies” produced in 1970 by the Art Workers’ Coalition. Its terrible image — an army photograph of slaughtered Vietnamese women and children lying dead in a ditch at My Lai — had been revealed to the American public just a year earlier. The Art Workers’ Coalition gave their poster a print run of 50,000 copies and distributed them fast, and free, to feed revulsion against the war.

The Coalition never claimed the poster as art. And in some of the show’s most potent entries the line between aesthetics and politics was left strategically opaque. Such was the case with performances, like the one staged by the Guerrilla Art Action Group in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in November 1969. After scattering mimeographed flyers, the artist-performers spattered themselves with cow blood, assaulted each other, and fell to the floor as if convulsed with pain.

Their purpose was tactical, to draw attention to what the flyers describe as “A Call for the Immediate Resignation of All the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art.” The group accused the Rockefellers of “brutal involvement in all spheres of the war machine,” including production of napalm. (Decolonize This Place is in the process of leading a series of similar protests against a current Whitney trustee, Warren B. Kanders, whose company, Safariland, manufactures tear gas.)

Theatrical too, but in a very different way, was a 1971 performance by the Chicano collective Asco. Their piece took the form of a the Christian passion play, with Jesus carrying a cross through the streets of a city, but with significant updates. The streets were in a hardscrabble Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles. The cross was ultimately used to block the entrance to a local Marine Corps recruiting station there, a gesture that pointed to the disproportionate numbers of black and Latino men being sent to Vietnam, to fight an “enemy” with whom they had, economically and socially, much in common.

The inclusion of Asco here is an indicator of the museum’s effort to revise the history of Vietnam War-era art — a history that, until recently, excluded artists who had been shut out from the mainstream art world at that time. To this end, the show brings in a number of Latino figures, including Mel Casas, Rupert Garcia, Carlos Irizarry, Malaquias Montoya, Jesse Treviño, and several African-Americans, among them Benny Andrews, David Hammons and Faith Ringgold. Their presence moves the exhibition beyond a focus on a stand-alone peace movement and links it to much older civil rights and anti-colonialist struggles.

All but left out of the picture, though, are Asian-Americans. (There are exactly three: Yoko Ono, James Gong Fu Dong and Kawara.) And this makes the separate exhibition of document-intensive work by the Vietnamese-born American artist Tiffany Chung crucial. Indeed, if Chung had presented only one component of her complex show, a set of video interviews with an older generation of Vietnam refugees to the United States, that would by itself have been an invaluable contribution.

Each interview encapsulates a lived narrative shaped by the effects of a war — in Vietnam referred to as the American War — which killed millions of people and changed a culture. Some of the speakers are tense with anger; others half mute with grief. Even the most neutral narratives are laced with laments, resentments and regrets.

Here you see the personal and political meet, which is extremely moving. You see the same meeting in the larger show, too. It’s somewhat obscured by the public rhetoric and look-at-me style that protest art often trades in, but it’s there. Look again at Andre’s image of unthinkable and preventable human damage, or Spero’s spidery warplanes, rendered in strokes as distinctive as a signature; or a mural-size painting by Jesse Treviño.

Born in Mexico in 1946, Treviño was a commercial portrait painter in New York when, in 1966, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Badly injured there, he lost his right arm. Returning home, he had to retrain himself as an artist. The painting in the show, begun in 1971 and titled “Mi Vida” — “My Life” — is a result.

It’s a kind of time capsule self-portrait set in dreamtime. Cigarettes, pills and beer cans float in the dark. The face of a long-dead friend looms large, half obscured by the form of a prosthetic hand from which hangs a Purple Heart. And in the distance is a ghostly figure of the artist himself, young, dressed for combat, holding a gun, both arms intact.

The art of protest comes in many forms, and there’s every reason for it today to keep coming.

The lens of personal history

Chung, born in Vietnam in 1969, is an example of artist-as-researcher, one who taps into many media — painting, weaving, video, photography, writing — in her investigatory tasks. For her solo show, organized by Sarah Newman, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, she approaches the American war in Vietnam, which was also a civil war, through the lens of family history.

Chung’s father was a helicopter pilot in the South Vietnamese air force when he was taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1971. He was held for 14 years. After his 1984 release, he moved with the family to the United States. Apparently, he rarely spoke of his time in combat and captivity, so his daughter tries to piece the story together herself, by assembling old photographs, painting locational maps and composing speculative accounts of her mother’s emotional life, which inevitably colored her own.

The show’s second section deals with the refugee experience in video interviews with 21 Vietnamese men and women who arrived in the United States in the war’s wake. Together they represent a history that has never become part of the American view of the conflict, and that is being forgotten, if not deliberately erased, in Vietnam itself. It’s a history of in-between-ness, of people, now elderly, who identify neither with the country they’ve come to, nor with the one they’ve left behind. Most feel abused by both.

In the show’s third and last section, the perspective goes global, and also points to the future. A 12-foot long embroidered world map covers a wall. Lines of stitched colored thread trace the paths of forced South Vietnamese migration across the world. A nearby display of documents from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva gives a sense of the archival ardor that has gone into Chung’s Vietnam project, while a set of small watercolors indicate a way to insure that research continues.

The watercolor images — of migrant camps, food lines, displaced families, crammed and capsizing boats — are paintings based on photographs taken in the 1970s and ’80s, when the fallout from war was most crushing. They were created recently by young Vietnamese artists, commissioned by Chung, in Ho Chi Minh City. Most had no knowledge at all of the past depicted. Now they do.

“Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975” (through Aug. 18)

“Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue” (through Sept. 2)

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; 202-633-7970, americanart.si.edu.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/design/vietnam-war-american-art-review-smithsonian.html" id="8e0e9542-90ee-3663-a8a6-11fb68558ad5">The New York Times</a>.

Vietnam, Through the Eyes of Artists

The cause was breast cancer, said Wendy Osloff, co-founder of the gallery PPOW, which, along with Galerie LeLong, represented Schneeman in New York. She had lived with the disease for more than two decades.

Schneemann found instant notoriety early on. In 1964, in Paris and New York, she staged an epochal performance event titled “Meat Joy.” Set to a pop-score composed by her husband then, avant-garde composer James Tenney, the work had the appearance of an orgiastic free-for-all, with men and women, including the artist, rolling around on the floor in bikini briefs, slathering each other with blood-red paint and clutching dead fish and chickens.

At regular intervals from 1963 to 1967, Schneeman and Tenney filmed themselves having sex. She then edited the footage into a film called “Fuses,” in which they are seen in close-up in their darkened bedroom — they shot their lovemaking by passing small cameras back and forth — with a rural landscape of changing seasons visible through a window.

Most radically, the entire film is framed as if seen through the eyes of an observant but unjudging third party, a feline named Kitch, the first of several “muse cats” that Schneemann bonded with and included in her art over the years.

For the startling 1975 performance piece “Interior Scroll,” Schneemann stood nude on a table, posing like a studio model, while reading from a book of her collected writings titled “Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter.” The writings included a litany of misogynistic reactions a female artist could expect to encounter in her career, like these:

BE PREPARED:

to have your brain picked

to have the pickings misunderstood

to be mistreated whether your success

increases or decreases

if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed)

they will almost never believe you really did it

(what you did do)

they will patronize you humor you

try to sleep with you want you to transform them

with your energy

She then put the book down and slowly extracted a narrow strip of typewritten paper from her vagina, reading aloud the text on the scroll as it emerged. The words included a direct address to a contemporary filmmaker and theorist — female, as it happened — who had dismissed her work as “diaristic indulgence.”

Schneemann encountered critical resistance regularly, often from what seemed to be conflicting directions. Some feminists viewed her body-positive, pro-sensual art as exploitative, not as a bold assertion of female agency. In contrast, in 1969, when she screened “Fuses” at the Cannes Film Festival, an audience made up almost exclusively of male critics greeted it with anger: The film, it seemed, wasn’t pornographic enough for them. They saw it as a tease.

Carolee Schneeman was born Oct. 12, 1939, into a middle-class family in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, then a rural neighborhood of Philadelphia. Her father was a country doctor. She remembered poring over his anatomy books when she was very young.

“There was always physicality around us,” she said in an interview, “leaking, spilling out of boundaries, wounded farmers with bleeding limbs, hemorrhages, infections. No fantasy of the sanitized body in this household.”

Schneeman had an early interest in art and the natural world, and in 1955, over her family’s objections, she entered Bard College, in the Hudson Valley, on a full scholarship to study painting. There she ran into problems. The all-male studio faculty was primarily interested in having her pose for them. When, on her own initiative, she produced nude-self-portraits, she was expelled for a year on grounds of, as she put it, “moral turpitude.”

The punitive exile — she later returned to earn a degree — proved fortunate. She enrolled in the art program at Columbia University, where she met Tenney. She continued to paint in a gestural style that borrowed something from Cezanne and a lot from abstract expressionists like Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. In her paintings of the 1950s, landscapes and bodies share a charge of organic energy. A nude portrait of Tenney could be mistaken for a tangle of tree limbs, or a garden blooming.

At the time, the high-minded anguish attributed to abstract expressionism had little appeal for her. What mattered in “action painting” was action, she thought — evidence of bodily motion. She took this aesthetic beyond wielding brushes to adding found matter to the surfaces of her canvases, then cutting them up and adding them to three-dimensional constructions, some with motorized components.

By the 1960s, these assemblages had become environments against which, and within which, she performed, smearing her nude body with paint and grease and surrounding it with props: live snakes, shattered glass, a cow skull. Such performances were captured in a photographic series titled “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera.” Shot by the Icelandic pop artist Erró, they suggest erotic archaic rituals amplified by a dadaist wit.

“In 1963, to use my body as an extension of my painting-constructions,” she later said, “was to challenge and threaten the psychic territorial power lines by which women were admitted to the Art Stud Club.”

It was a short, logical step from these studio solos into a theater. Schneemann made the transition as a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, along with choreographer-performers Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer and artist Robert Morris.

In the Judson aesthetic, everyday actions — walking, running, lovemaking — had expressive dimensions. “Meat Joy” was a natural, if operatically scaled, product of its spirit, and it was carefully choreographed. Schneemann had plotted its movements in preliminary drawings.

Carolee Schneeman, a prime mover of performance art, a feminist visionary and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century, died Wednesday at her home in New Paltz, New York. She was 79.

Holland Cotter

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