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'

Leonardo was a star from the start. According to 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari, his contemporaries found him terrifically attractive. (Vasari calls him “divine” a dozen times in a 20-page Leonardo biography.) Genial, gorgeous, brainy and a fashion plate (partial to pink), he had the poise of a prince and a philosopher’s ruminative mind. In his long career as artist, architect, scientist and inventor, grace and talent combined to smooth his path from rural Tuscany, where he was born in 1452, to the courts of Milan and papal Rome, to France where, as pet artist to Francis I, he died in 1519.

But that ruminative cast of mind caused problems. Basically, before Leonardo did anything he had to know everything: how his paints and varnishes were made, how the human body was internally structured and what creating art might mean in the cosmic scheme of things.

This entailed, Vasari notes, research, experimenting, lots of conversation, and long stretches of silent thinking and rethinking. In the biography, he has Leonardo himself explain, for the benefit of an importunate patron, that “when the greatest geniuses are working less they actually accomplish more.” The net effect was that relatively little painting got done, and a lot of what got started was never finished.

The painting at the Met, “Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness,” on loan from the Vatican Museums, is one of those unfinished pictures. It was likely begun around 1483, and you see instantly that it’s a work in progress: fined-tuned here, slapped down there. Incompleteness is part of its power. And powerful this picture is, as dramatically rich as a three-act opera, with a full-throttle aria of scorching anguish at its center.

Equally important, its “non finito” state is formally instructive. It lets us see Leonardo’s distracted, stop-and-start painting method in action.

The picture is one of a dozen or so works widely accepted as being, without question, from his hand. It depicts an early Christian saint who, after a self-punishing stint as a desert ascetic, settled for years in Rome, where he turned his attention to translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Many Renaissance paintings of Jerome (A.D. 347-420) show him immersed in this scholarly labor, usually accompanied by a snoozing lion, a kind of emotional support companion. The mood of such pictures tends to have a cozy Peaceable Kingdom vibe.

Leonardo’s painting does not. Here saint and beast alike are untamed. This is the Jerome of desert wildness, or maybe the one who ended up dying far from Rome in a rock-hewn cave near Bethlehem. Aged, nearly toothless and sun-scorched, he holds a stone in his extended right hand, as if about to deliver a penitential blow to his chest. At his feet is the lion, sleek, alert, tail curled like a scimitar, mouth opened wide in a growl.

We know nothing about why, or for whom, the picture was made. Carmen C. Bambach, the Met curator who organized the exhibition, proposes that it was started soon after the artist relocated from Florence, Italy, to Milan. Although it reflects Leonardo’s Florentine style — and there’s a tiny sketch of what could be a Tuscan church in the upper right corner — it’s painted on a panel of walnut, a wood commonly used as a support in Milan but very rarely in Florence.

Conservators have found evidence that Leonardo left off work at an early point and picked it up again, possibly more than once, later. Standing in front of the picture, which hangs, spotlighted, in a darkened gallery in the Met’s Lehman wing, you can get a sense of restless layers of activity.

In some areas it never progressed beyond a preliminary stage. The lion, a tawny silhouette with washy internal detailing, is a compositional place marker. The same is true of Jerome’s unmodeled rock-holding arm. But beginning just below the shoulder, this changes. Flesh suddenly gains shading; musculature develops. This naturalism spreads to the face, a construction of sinew and bone that brings Leonardo’s autopsy drawings to mind.

Even within this clinical precision, though, certain features are hard to read. At a glance, the saint’s eyes seem to be sightless or downcast. In fact, they are directed upward to a fleetly sketched, apparitional image of a crucifix seen in profile.

And, enchantingly, just behind the saint, a misted landscape appears, bringing the refreshment of color — sky-blue, tree-green — to a penumbral scene. In the exacting depiction of Jerome’s face and torso we see the hand and eye of Leonardo the anatomist. In the landscape, we see the naturalist, the botanist, the weather watcher, the world lover. It may say something about this love that we find traces of the artist’s fingerprints in the landscape passage where he dabbed and smooshed paint by hand to create a soft-focus atmosphere.

Still, the painting’s real focus is Jerome’s agonized face. And its real subject, to my eye, is inflamed spiritual grief.

What we know is that Leonardo kept the picture with him till he died, then another history took over. The work drops from the record until the late 18th or early 19th century when Swiss painter Angelica Kaufmann (1741-1839), then living in Rome, acquired it. At some point, pieces were cut from the panel — probably with the idea of selling the more finished sections — and later reassembled. At the Met, thanks to raked lighting, you can see repair lines around the saint’s head.

Why Leonardo left this and other pictures unfinished, we can’t know. Bambach, who organized the Met’s 2003 Leonardo drawing survey and whose awesomely ambitious four-volume study of the artist called “Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered,” will appear later this month, suggests that the answer may lie in his relentlessly inquisitive personality: In a now-familiar internet way, every search for information he made turned up links to other searches, which he couldn’t resist pursuing.

And in this she’s in agreement with the forgiving Vasari, who wrote: “Leonardo’s profound and discerning mind was so ambitious that this was itself an impediment; and the reason he failed was because he endeavored to add excellence and perfection to perfection. As our Petrarch has said, the desire outran the performance.”

The result, both historians seem to suggest, is an art that, consciously or otherwise, privileges process over finish, experimentation over resolution: Never having to say “done” was Leonardo’s comfort-zone mode. And in the case of the Vatican painting, this has a fantastic payoff: It leaves an expression of fever-pitch emotion ever burning. It will burn all summer, this furnace of anguished devotion. The Met better keep its air conditioning on high.

Event information:

Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Saint Jerome’

Monday through Oct. 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/arts/design/davinci-saint-jerome-metropolitan-museum.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick): NEW YORK — The 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci will bring big doings to Paris this fall with the largest-ever and one-stop-only career survey at the Louvre. And New York gets a shot of buzz in advance with the opening at the Met on Monday of a single-painting show of one of the most rawly emotional images in the Leonardo canon.

What Leonardo da Vinci couldn't finish

El Museo was founded half a century ago, in a politically agitated time, in Puerto Rican East Harlem, the Barrio. It identified itself as a community art space. Its first shows were in a public school classroom on East 123rd Street, and it stayed within the immediate neighborhood until 1977, when it moved to its present address, a city-owned building on Fifth Avenue at 104th Street.

That move to what is now called Museum Mile — the moniker was invented by one of El Museo’s early directors, Jack Agüeros — carried the germ of battles to come. An institution that had initially been a showcase for Puerto Rican art, which was unwelcome by other city museums, started to open its doors to a wider range of Latinx (the gender-neutral term for Latino/Latina) and Latin American art. Its board of trustees, once recruited from the working-class barrio, began to diversify ethnically, economically and socially. So did its administrators and curatorial staff.

For those who believed that New York needed a major platform for work from South America, which had gained an elitist cachet, the expansion seemed positive. But for those who foresaw that art by Latinx artists — particularly artists of Caribbean descent working in the United States and already marginalized along lines of class and race — would only be further pushed out of the spotlight, the shift in direction, which amounted to a change in institutional mission, felt like a betrayal.

For years, the tension continued, sometimes in quiet stretches, lately in a series of detonations. Directors have quickly come and gone. The board has experienced shake-ups. Community-based protest has escalated, inflamed by managerial gaffs.

In January, for example, the chronically financially strapped museum invited a wealthy German aristocrat to be honored at its 50th anniversary gala. When her extreme right-wing affiliations came to light, the invitation was withdrawn. Soon after, a planned career survey of the Chilean-born filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was scrapped after the museum learned that he had once boasted of raping one of his actresses.

Then in spring, the museum’s director, Patrick Charpenel, who came to the job from Mexico in 2017, announced the hiring of a chief curator from Brazil, Rodrigo Moura. Ever since, Latinx scholars, artists and activists have been up in arms.

Earlier this month some of them gathered in the galleries where “Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019” is installed to read a manifesto. It demanded that the museum “rededicate itself to its unique mission of exhibiting and collecting the art and culture of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the United States” — in other words, that it focus on the “the Nuyorican, the Dominiyorker, the first, second, and third generations of Mexicans, Colombians, Ecuadoreans, and Hondurans that make up a barrio in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, and the dreamers and the migrants who identify with a U.S. lived experience. This is distinct from Latin America.”

It’s important to note that El Museo’s 50th anniversary exhibition, drawn from the permanent collection, is a show of Latinx art. And, with contributions from nearly 80 artists, several of whom were crucial to the institution’s foundation, it had an activist charge from the start.

In the early days, photographs and prints, inexpensive to make, easy to distribute, and adaptable to a fast-changing topical content, were popular media. Photographer Hiram Maristany, East Harlem born and raised, took the neighborhood as his subject and documented the activities of the New York chapter of the Young Lords, social justice activists who modeled themselves on the Black Panthers. (For a public art project, “Mapping Resistance,” concurrent with the museum show, artist Miguel Luciano has enlarged several Maristany pictures to mural size and installed them outdoors throughout the barrio.)

The Young Lords are also recalled in an unsigned poster in which their four communal concerns — health, food, housing, education — are emblazoned on the barrels of AK-47s. When this print appeared in 1970, polemical printmaking already had a long history in Puerto Rico itself. Examples seen here from the 1950s, by masters like Rafael Tufiño and Lorenzo Homar, form the bedrock of El Museo’s collection.

The collection also has work by artists affiliated with the print collective Taller Boricua (Puerto Rican Workshop), which made its debut in the barrio the same year El Museo opened. As in so much of creative activity in that place and time, aesthetics and education were in sync, with Taller artists working in schools and on the street. Fifty years later, the workshop remains active under the direction of one of its founders, artist Marcos Dimas, and regularly schedules exhibitions at the Julia de Burgos Performance and Arts Center, a few blocks east of El Museo.

There’s one there now. Titled “Realidades Remembered,” and organized by Dimas and writer Humberto Cintron, it’s a small, fascinating blast-from-the-past with a roomful of posters and a series of episodes from the cultural news show “Realidades,” produced by WNET from 1971-77 — the only bilingual television show in the United States at the time to focus on broad-spectrum Latinx history, politics and everyday life.

El Museo’s exhibition tackles that history too, beginning with a dozen stone sculptures, carved from 1200 to 1500 A.D. by Taíno people, indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean. Taíno imagery recurs in paintings by several contemporary artists — Diógenes Ballester, Juan Sanchez and Dimas — and in sketches for a vibrant ceramic mural by Nitza Tufiño that enlivens the walls of a main barrio subway stop at Lexington Avenue and 103rd Street.

Abstraction gets a section of its own with fine paintings by Tony Bechara and the wonderful, under-known Myrna Báez (1931-2018). Ivelisse Jiménez, who lost more than two decades of work when her San Juan studio was leveled by Hurricane Maria, has a new paper-and-plastic wall hanging here. And there’s a 1959 painting, plain as a blank page, red as a valentine, by Carmen Herrera, who is now, at 104, an art market star but was barely acknowledged by the mainstream art world in 1998 when El Museo, under the direction of Susana Torruella Leval, gave her a solo show.

Looking around the galleries you can tick off the same contemporary styles and trends — abstract painting, minimalism, conceptualism and so on — that you’ll find at MoMA, or the Guggenheim, or Art Basel. In that sense, El Museo’s collection is savvy and up to speed. What distinguishes it overall, and makes it invaluable, is the content of much of the work, with its references to specific everyday lives.

Those lives encompass the pleasures of appetite. Yellow plantains in a 19th-century still life by Francisco Oller look ripe for the picking. A 2006 collage called “Barrio Boogie Movement” by Rodríguez Calero generates the free-fall elation of the sidewalk breaking it depicts. And Freddy Rodriguez’s homage to the Dominican catcher Tony Peña — a gold-leafed baseball nestled in a mink-lined glove — is a rush of pure fan love.

If you find yourself depressed on whatever island you’re on, pick up a passport designed by Adál Maldonado that will admit you, no questions asked, to El Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico, the African-Spanish-Taíno neverland he’s invented.

Or read the Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri’s handwritten, heart-singing “Spanglish National Anthem.”

Or look at Perla de Leon’s “South Bronx Spirit” photographs from 1979. It was a time when that immigrant enclave, ruined by “urban renewal,” was being vilified in the news media, but they illuminate the true beauties there.

In much of the show — organized by Susanna V. Temkin, chief curator of El Museo, and Noel Valentin, the museum’s permanent collection manager — the roles of artist, artisan and activist blend. An installation by Nicolás Dumit Estévez, “The Flag (La Bandera),” is both a one-man museum and workshop, dedicated to a Latinx artifact: a homemade Dominican New York flag. In a 2007 video, “Maquila” by Ana de la Cueva, we see a sewing machine at work, stitching, to a jaunty dance beat, a map of the United States and Mexico. Then the music stops and the machine abruptly punches out a scarlike red line: the United States-Mexican border.

When El Museo opened in 1969, its first offering was a show of needlework — embroidery, crocheting and knitting — by Puerto Rican women. We learn this from the detailed Institutional Timeline that wraps around the walls of two galleries and amounts to an absorbing show in itself. It reveals what the institution has been, and suggests what could be.

References to the museum’s internal conflicts are duly if discreetly included. The emphasis is on the record of exhibitions, the best of which have been at least as adventurous and stimulating as any done by the city’s large, rich museums over the same period.

And there is evidence that Latinx and Latin American art have coexisted in this institution, occasionally in the same exhibition, as was true in the excellent “Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis,” organized by Deborah Cullen in 2009.

I do think there’s room for both and that coexistence is the way forward. I also know that this is easy to say. El Museo’s 50th anniversary show does not right wrongs of exclusion, past or future. Latinx art, as opposed to Latin American art, remains an underprivileged field, marked with class and economic associations that keep it out of elitist collections and museums. (Tellingly, Herrera, who was born in Cuba but has lived in the United States since 1954, is rarely marketed as Latinx; nor is Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose mother was of Puerto Rican descent.)

El Museo has championed Latinx art and culture from the start. It is the major institution to do so, and must continue to prioritize that. But it is also the only major museum in a position to explore and demonstrate a Latinx-Latin America connection, which is real, rich and complex. Ultimately, El Museo’s most valuable job — which should also be its joy — will be to reveal that link. But it will only be able to do so, and mend its tattered, siloed and self-destructive state, if all sides agree to lay down their arms and work, with passion, together.

“Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019”: Through Sept. 29 at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Ave., Manhattan; 212-831-7272, elmuseo.org.

“Mapping Resistance: The Young Lords in the Barrio”: Through Sept. 30 in the neighborhood around El Museo del Barrio; elmuseo.org.

“Realidades Remembered”: Through Aug. 3 at Taller Boricua Gallery at Julia de Burgos Performance and Arts Center, 1680 Lexington Ave., Manhattan; 212-831-4333, tallerboricua.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/arts/design/el-museo-del-barrio.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook): NEW YORK — The exhibition “Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019” is a golden anniversary survey of wonderful art from the collection of a New York museum that is in the process of being torn apart.

The fraught question of roots

You probably didn’t know — and most museums weren’t going to tell you — that many of those relics were stolen goods. Or that more than a few donor-angels were plutocrats trying to scrub their cash clean with art. Or that the values embodied in beautiful things were often, if closely examined, abhorrent.

Today, we’re more alert to these ethical flaws, as several recent protests against museums show, although we still have a habit of trusting our cultural institutions, museums and universities among them, to be basically right-thinking. At moments of political crisis and moral confusion we look to them to justify our trust.

The 1960s was such a moment. At least early in that decade we had hopes that universities would take a principled stand on evils — war, racism — that were burning the country up. But when it became clear that our figurehead schools were, in fact, hard-wired into the machinery that fueled the conflict in Vietnam and perpetuated global apartheid, faith was shattered and has never really been restored.

At present, we’re locked in another crisis, what might be called an internal American war — on the environment, on the poor, on difference, on truth. And it’s the turn of another cultural institution, the art museum, now popular in a way it has never been, to be the object of critical scrutiny.

Since early March, an activist collective called Decolonize This Place (DTP) has been bringing weekly protests to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Their immediate demand is the removal of a museum trustee, Warren Kanders, the owner of a company, Safariland, that produces military supplies, including a brand of tear gas that has reportedly been used at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Another group, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), has, over the past year, staged disruptive events at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, protesting the acceptance of gifts of art and money from branches of the Sackler family, longtime patrons who have been identified as producers of the addictive opioid OxyContin.

Finally, long-existing art museum collections have been under a heightened ethical searchlight since the French president, Emmanuel Macron, proposed in 2018 that objects looted from Africa during an earlier colonial era be returned, on demand, to their places of origin — a project which, if ratified, could easily apply to a wide spectrum of Western and non-Western art.

In short, in the space of barely a year, the very foundations of museums — the money that sustains them, the art that fills them, the decision-makers that run them — have been called into question. And there’s no end to questioning in sight.

Recently, the American Museum of Natural History came under fire for renting out space for a dinner honoring Jair Bolsonaro, the outspokenly racist, homophobic, anti-environment president of Brazil. (The rental arrangement abruptly ended.) In late April, the Art Institute of Chicago took heat for planning a major show of culturally sensitive Native American pottery by the ancient Mimbres people — including sacred objects — without consulting indigenous communities with ties to the Mimbres people. (The show has been postponed while the museum seeks counsel from Native American nations.)

Politically driven museum protests are not new. In 1969, members of a collective called the Guerrilla Art Action Group gathered in the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby, drenched themselves in cow’s blood and scattered copies of a scathing manifesto titled: “A Call for the Immediate Resignation of All the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art.” It accused the brothers David Rockefeller and Nelson Rockefeller (then governor of New York) of “brutal involvement in all spheres” of the Vietnam War.

In the same year, African-American artists, under the name Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), boycotted the Met exhibition “Harlem on My Mind.” The show was advertised as bringing African-American culture, for the first time, into the museum’s august precincts. But it included no black art or curatorial participation and served to confirm race-based exclusion as an institutional norm.

There’s a parallel history of protest generated from within museums, a pioneering example being Hans Haacke’s 1970 conceptual piece, “MoMA Poll.” As part of a large MoMA group exhibition, Haacke set up in a gallery two clear plastic bins, a ballot dispenser and a sign reading: “Question: Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November? Answer: “If ‘yes’ please cast your ballot into the left box. If ‘no’ into the right box.” To the museum’s consternation, and Rockefeller’s displeasure, the “yes” bin filled up fast.

Such museum-targeted work has since earned a genre name, “institutional critique,” which, problematically, has served as a marketing handle. Once critique became collectible, as it almost inevitably did, it was absorbed into, and neutralized by, the institutions it was meant to correct. (Groups like DTP, which call their protest work art, naturally have to be alert for such co-option.)

An omnivorous, sleepless market is the defining feature of the 21st-century art landscape. Money is the universal solvent. It converts everything into itself. Aesthetic value measured in dollars has, of course, always been part of the talk about art. Now it’s pretty much the whole conversation, amplified by auctions and art fairs, and directed at a population of new big-budget buyers.

Consumption is contagious, competitive, circular. Private collectors buy contemporary work of a kind museums can no longer afford. Museums, trying to attract gifts of such work, go on expansion sprees. To pay for expansions, they have to beef up their boards with rich recruits (often collectors), the source of whose fortunes are sometimes, as in the case of the Sacklers and Kanders, of a kind best left unadvertised.

In practical terms, museums are on the spot. Even without expansion bloat, they’re too expensive and unprofitable to be fiscally self-sustaining. Government art support in the United States is less than meager (and would be zero if the current administration had its way). Which leaves private, frequently corporate, money to lean on, and the good possibility that some of that money is tainted.

What to do about Sackler patronage became easy to decide after evidence surfaced that certain family members associated with OxyContin production had known of its addictive properties but suppressed the information. When this news broke several museums, including the Guggenheim, quickly cut ties. (The Met, more cautious, said it was “engaging in further review of our detailed gift acceptance policies.” Its report is due this month.) Meanwhile, the Sackler Foundation finessed the need for further debate by calling a temporary halt to new art philanthropy.

By contrast, the reaction to Macron’s proposal to restore art pilfered from Africa has varied widely, and no consensus on action has been reached. Here Western institutions are on quaking ground with, it must seem, everything but good karma to lose. No doubt many are reluctant to even consider the idea of restitution. But if justice prevails, they’ll have to. Otherwise, colonialism rolls on and on.

In any case, at this point, generally applicable algorithms for restitution are still unformed, although one guideline seems indisputable: that the first responsibility on the part of all concerned is to ensure the safety of the fragile objects and materials under negotiation.

Where ethical debate is in full, heated progress right now is at the Whitney. The museum’s administration has stonewalled on the issue of Kanders leaving the board, even though nearly 100 Whitney staff members, and more than half of the artists in the 2019 Biennial, which opens May 17, have signed petitions demanding it. One Biennial artist, Michael Rakowitz, made a principled withdrawal from the show. Another participant, the artist collective called Forensic Architecture, plans to respond to the controversy with its contribution to the exhibition.

Early on, Kanders himself issued a statement of self-defense, arguing that he’s not responsible for what purchasers do with Safariland defense gear; he only makes the stuff. And the Whitney’s director, Adam Weinberg, has sent a fuzzy hug of a letter to staff. (“I write to you now as one community, one family — the Whitney.”) In the middle of which he lets himself off the executive hook: “As members of the Whitney community, we each have our critical and complementary roles: Trustees do not hire staff, select exhibitions, organize programs or remove board members, and staff does not appoint or remove board members.” (This church-and-state separation is hardly a firm one, but never mind.)

The letter ends up being a very long way of saying “Sorry, we need Kanders’ money.”

In his letter Weinberg walks a calculated line between boosterism and selective silence. He’s right in saying that the Whitney has championed some “progressive and challenging” exhibitions, pointing to recent Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz retrospectives and the Latinx group show “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay.”

But he’s wrong in refusing to acknowledge the moral issues raised by Kanders’ résumé, and those raised by his own decision, as Whitney director, to clear the subject from the communal table, which his letter effectively does.

Kanders, for different but comparably expedient reasons, asserts a similar position of no-fault neutrality. Yet if you are in a position to support the arts, and you accept a position on the board of a museum, and it develops that your presence is disapproved of by the staff and detrimental to the reputation of the institution, isn’t it your duty to step aside until the issues in question have been, one way or another, resolved? The answer is yes. Kanders should remove himself from the board.

In the present American political climate, with nationalism and racist, ethnic and xenophobic violence at high tide, neutrality is not an option for institutions that have ethical imperatives, represented by art, built into their DNA.

We need these institutions, which include our art museums, to be proactive alternative environments, in which standardized power hierarchies are dissolved, a poly-cultural range of voices speak, the history of art is truthfully told, and truth itself is understood as an always-developing story.

All museums have ethical practice guidelines in place, but these can’t cover the full range of potential objections to trustee appointments (which at present include issues involving arms manufacture, corporate drug production and climate change). Surely the moral intelligence of the entire institution should be brought to bear on judging, case by case, the nature of the support being offered, with the trust that a balance of idealism and pragmatism will prevail in decision-making. And that method of assessment will succeed only when an upstairs/downstairs structuring is eliminated within the museum.

In the end, the question of Kanders’ staying or going may be less important than the discussion and protest his presence has raised, which should lead to further discussions about institutional ethics, and more protest. I believe it will.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2487ede9-03d3-4a56-a201-3ad070df676d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/arts/design/museums-ethics.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook): For generations Americans tended to see art museums as alternatives to crass everyday life. Like libraries, they were for learning; like churches, for reflection. You went to them for a hit of Beauty and a lesson in “eternal values,” embodied in relics of the past donated by civic-minded angels.

Holland Cotter

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