Roberta Smith

NEW YORK — The Museum of Modern Art, which opens on Oct. 21, is not what it used to be — and not yet what it may become.

While still very much in progress, the museum could be on its way to its second round of greatness, to judge by the new presentation of the core collection and, even more, a series of inaugural satellite shows drawn from the permanent collection along with five new commissions. Together they underscore the vastness of the museum’s holdings, a sight that is staggering, possibly unprecedented and probably won’t recur until its next expansion.

It now has a new building with a new wing added almost seamlessly to its 2004 Taniguchi expansion. This is the largest home it’s ever had — a place, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where you can get lost. A psychological benefit is that the large (despised) Taniguchi atrium is de-emphasized. It doesn’t seem so big when you can get farther away from it.

The new MoMA is also more physically welcoming, and in many ways more workable, than it’s ever been, whether one is looking at art, resting or refueling. It has a bigger lobby, another entrance and a pair of elevators; an inventive top-to-bottom public stairwell; more seating throughout and an expanded cafe — though it’s stuck up on the sixth floor. It remains to be seen if this expansion will suffer the overcrowding that plagued the last, but here’s hoping.

Equally important are the museum’s reset priorities, which focus on its unrivaled permanent collection rather than temporary exhibitions and on giving that collection the lion’s share of 24 added galleries. What they contain has been rethought by a team of curators — from department chiefs down to assistant curators — intent on telling a different, more inclusive, less-definitive story that will not only encompass artists from around the world and integrate media but also play down the traditional dominance of painting and sculpture.

The plan is to keep the collection as much in flux as the temporary shows. Every six months a third of the permanent collection galleries will be reinstalled. But the first iteration — with new acquisitions, unfamiliar works long buried in storage, and startling pairings and concentrations — is bound to generate surprises, some disappointments and plenty of arguments. The Euro-American narrative is still too prominent and the museum is still too enamored of conceptual and video art.

There’s not a lot of breezing through the permanent collection, inhaling the unquestioned greatness of the anointed. Each gallery has its own character, distinct from its neighbors; its own jolts and disruptions. Most galleries display works in several mediums and from different times. Some do this more successfully than others; for me, those on the fifth floor are generally better than those on the fourth. And the new dumbed-down gallery headings and word salads of the main wall texts definitely need work. All references to the “isms” — the modern art movements — have been banished except for surrealism, the most popular of them. The decision seems to be to protect visitors from what they do not know.

The rise in the number of artists who are non-male, nonwhite and non-Western is thrilling and attests to the curators’ hard work. The curators have scoured the collection and made strategic new acquisitions. On the fifth floor, where the story of modernism begins, these include Paula Modersohn-Becker’s “Self Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand,” a 1907 work by a pioneering member of the German avant-garde (showing the artist pregnant) that entered MoMA’s collection in 2017, acquired in joint ownership with the Neue Galerie in New York. Extended loans fill other gaps. The gallery labeled “Abstraction and Utopia” features a radical little sculpture from 1929 that integrates interior and exterior space. It’s by the Polish constructivist Katarzyna Kobro and is visiting for five years from the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. Also here for five years is a radiant 1915 painting by Hilma af Klint, a newly-hailed inventor of European abstraction, from the Swedish foundation that holds all her art.

Works of this quality await you in every gallery of the rethought permanent collection. The rethinking is not done. The collection will be considered and reconsidered in the months and years ahead. But give the curators a gold-plated A+ for effort — they have set a new path for their successors — and wait for the next installment. This is only the beginning of a new beginning.

This fresh start is further revealed by the extraordinary array of outlying shows drawn from the permanent collection. These exhibitions, several of which are reviewed below, clarify the museum’s ambitious reformation project and provide a valuable commentary on the permanent collection in their midst.

The Patricia Phelps De Cisneros Gift

‘Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction’

The largest display outside the permanent collection galleries is “Sur moderno,” which celebrates the transformative gift of Latin American modernism from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a longtime patron of the museum. Representing artists from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela, the show includes nearly 90 of the more than 200 artworks in the gift and vitrines displaying archival material like publications, printed matter and photographs of design and architectural projects. There are also films. The show has been organized by Inés Katzenstein, curator of Latin American art and director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin American, the Museum of Modern Art, along with consulting curator María Amalia García.

“Sur moderno” is at once déjà vu and forward-looking. Its often pure abstraction has the single focus of parts of the old MoMA but filtered through an entirely different sensibility, one whose restraint and rationalism often reflects the influence of European geometric art. It is exciting to imagine these Cisneros works integrated into MoMA’s collection, undercutting the assertiveness and scale of so much postwar American art, from Jackson Pollock to Richard Serra.

The Cisneros gift has a breathtaking sweep. It ranges from a strikingly rough back-to-basics painting from 1964 by Brazil’s Mira Schendel to the elegant painted panels of Venezuela’s Alejandro Otero, from 1955, whose patterns and high gloss fuse op and minimal art years before these movements took root. There are rare painted works by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Willys de Castro. The show culminates in a display of six (!) ephemeral hanging wire pieces by the great GEGO (Gertrud Goldschmidt), which are barely visible, yet once seen, fill the eye.

Artist’s Choice

Amy Sillman: ‘The Shape of Shape’

The Modern’s “Artist’s Choice” series rarely disappoints and this iteration is one of its best — and among the most valuable of the inaugural shows. Assembled by New York painter Amy Sillman, working with Michelle Kuo, a curator of painting and sculpture, “The Shape of Shape” points to one of the museum’s bigger curatorial blind spots, especially as it approaches the present: the fear of painting, color and form that has allowed conceptual art and its derivatives such prominence.

Sillman ranges throughout the collection, across media, generations and styles, seeking out overlooked or excluded artists and unfamiliar works. Her effort parallels the approaches at work in the permanent collection galleries, but reflects a relatively robust visual appetite — the artist’s unfettered eye — that the museum needs more of.

The show’s dense installation encourages surprising connections, like that between the horizontal black shapes that dominate Romare Bearden’s “Patchwork Quilt,” from 1970, and William Baziotes’s “Pompeii,” from 1955, each with its own ratio of abstraction and figuration. One of the best moments is the three-way exchange among Fernand Léger’s brilliant purist painting, “The Mirror” of 1925; a bright, hinged sculpture, newly acquired, by the Romanian-born Cuban artist Sandu Darie (1908-91) and a small dark yet colorful painting from 1962 (acquired in 1963) by Zimbabwean artist Thomas Mukarobgwa. It resembles an Édouard Vuillard interior until you look more closely and read the title: “Dying People in the Bush.”

Surrounds

11 Installations

The Modern’s curators excel at choosing large-scale, often environmental installation pieces that are at once immersive, challenging and accessible, as evidenced by “Surrounds,” an exhibition across the sixth floor, and by two high points in the permanent collection galleries. (See Joan Jonas’ elaborate “Mirage” on the fourth floor, and one of its descendants, Wu Tsang’s remarkable video, “We hold where study” (2017).

That talent is also intermittently evident in “Surrounds” whose 11 installation pieces, acquired over the past 15 years, are being shown for the first time. The presentation has been organized by eight curators from four departments. Look now, because who knows when you’ll see them again.

On the quiet side, there’s Rivane Neuenschwander’s understated “Work of Days,” a room with floors and walls lined with what looks like pale handmade paper, exquisitely textured with galaxies of tiny marks. In fact, they’re bits of dust and fine-grained detritus embedded in adhesive vinyl tile that can be walked on, to quietly magical effect. Much noisier and more ominous is “The Killing Machine” by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, which can evoke a hybrid of “Marathon Man” and “Alien.” If that sounds scary, avoid.

“Apex,” Arthur Jafa’s relentless animated slideshow (2013) is about life and death on Earth, and the beauty and culture of African Americans. Hito Steyerl’s installation “Liquidity, Inc.” (2014) is a characteristically entertaining, informative and ominous mash-up of language, graphics, television formats that swirl around themes of water, terrorism and climate change. In “Fault Lines,” Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s dry rocky landscape, two young singers perform every hour on the hour. From certain angles, “Surrounds” resembles a generic international biennial, but all works improve when given time and attention.

Public Space

Artists’ Commissions

The Modern’s reopening has occasioned special commissions from five artists, and one commission-like acquisition. That’s Haim Steinbach’s “hello again,” an all-purpose if ambivalent greeting of return writ large in serif font on a prominent wall in the lobby. It’s an apt welcome back for the museum’s sixth expansion.

The commissions have been overseen by Yasmil Raymond, associate curator in painting and sculpture at MoMA, and two are especially impressive. Kerstin Brätsch’s “Fossil Psychics for Christa” punctuates the walls of the new sixth-floor Terrace Café with shiny bright glasslike pieces that resemble big brush strokes, masks and crazed intarsia. They play well with the Modern’s new signature Grand Antique marble. When its two-year run in the cafe concludes, some of Brätsch’s parts might migrate to the second-floor collection galleries.

The other standout commission is Goshka Macuga’s extravagantly complex “Exhibition M,” a work of craft and conceptual art photo-based appropriation well worth seeking out (and should be more accessible than it is). It takes the form of an enormous tapestry hanging in the lobby of the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, which faces West 54th Street.

The work casts the artist as André Malraux in a well-known 1954 photograph that shows the French novelist and art theorist surrounded by double-image spreads from his trilogy “The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture.” Macuga offers a similar array of images, but each depicts an artwork in the museum’s collection or one of its exhibitions.

Like the new MoMA as a whole, Macuga’s combinations shake things up. In her case, we get a disjointed narrative of visual puns, sly criticisms and uncanny juxtapositions, most with a distinct feminist slant. It’s a perfect summation of this great institution’s new outlook.

Museum of Modern Art

The museum, at 11 W. 53rd St., Manhattan, reopens to the public Tuesday (member previews are Saturday); moma.org.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic’s Notebook)

MoMA's Art Treasure, No Longer Buried

What a difference a presidential portrait makes. Two years ago, Amy Sherald’s painting career was slowly if belatedly picking up steam. She was 44 and after a four-year hiatus from art — for family illness and her own heart transplant — had a handful of solo shows, including a four-day pop-up affair on New York City’s Lower East Side in March 2017.

A few months later, in October, Sherald’s profile began to rise when the National Portrait Gallery commissioned her to paint a portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, setting the artist on the fast track to prominence. And so here we are: Sherald is having her first full-fledged New York solo in the Chelsea space of the voracious megagallery Hauser &amp; Wirth. “Amy Sherald: The Heart of the Matter...” is a magnificent, stirring show.

Startlingly spare, in an enormous space, it shows off to good effect Sherald’s smoldering yet self-contained brand of portraiture, paintings of confident, black people whose stylish clothes and backdrops contrast with their faces, which are uniformly grisaille.

The neutral grayish tones give Sherald’s subjects a timelessness — we have always been here, deep in history, they seem to say — and reflects her attraction to old photographs. She also uses grisaille, she has said, because she wants to take race out of her paintings. In addition it conjures the early photographs by which black people, having been largely excluded from painting, joined American visual culture.

Sherald’s portrait of the former first lady and its complement, Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of former President Barack Obama, were groundbreaking images. The artists were the first African Americans to be commissioned for presidential portraits, in this case, of the country’s first black president and his wife.

Unlike most presidential portraits, the Obama paintings are also part of what is happening right now in contemporary art. Their makers belong to a varied group of youngish painters — most under 50 — who have broken with, absorbed or simply ignored modernist abstraction. Instead, they work with the figure as a way of reaching broader audiences; dealing with issues of identity, gender and sexuality; and exploring new uses of painting’s rich, mostly figurative history. The many African American artists working in this vein are also dismantling Western painting’s racial homogeneity, populating it as never before with images of black people.

The new Sherald portraits at Hauser &amp; Wirth all present anonymous young people, each of whom is a composite of Sherald’s photographs of someone she usually encountered in public, and her imagination. Five of the eight canvases in the show adhere for the most part to Sherald’s standard approach: modest-size three-quarter-length portraits of women or men facing forward, motionless as Egyptian statues before backgrounds of monochrome color.

In reproduction the portraits can seem bland and thinly painted. But in person you see the solidity of Sherald’s smooth yet subtly built-up paint surfaces, and the particularity of her near lifesize scale. It’s also important that the pictures are hung low, so that their eye level is usually close to your own. This creates the impression of meeting face to face, in an experience of mutual evaluation. With the paintings given plenty of room, they invite close, exclusive looking, a kind of communion.

As you look, each portrait breaks down into five parts that leave quite a bit of room for variety: face, hair, body, garments — whose patterns often conjure abstraction — and the monochrome background, which is abstraction in a sense. (Although it is also very much in a tradition that stretches from painters like Barkley Hendricks and Alex Katz back to Manet and Goya.) You experience each part autonomously, which is how the artist painted them, and as parts of a puzzle that fit easily together.

The paint on some of the faces is unusually thick, suggesting that the visages are hard-won. This is especially true of “Handsome,” arguably the most perfect painting in the show, with second place going to “The girl next door,” a portrait of a self-possessed woman in a white dress covered with polka dots of red, yellow, blue, green and purple.

The princely young man in “Handsome” wears a fresh-pressed short-sleeved shirt of white polka dots on dark blue that hangs like silk, in a single plane. His white jeans are rendered whiter by the cream background. His face communicates a combination of pride, vulnerability and perhaps familiarity with the saying “Handsome is as handsome does,” meaning that good looks are not as important as good deeds. This sentiment is expanded upon in another work with a name that, as with most of Sherald’s titles, is more or less allegorical. “There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart” is taken from Jane Austen’s “Emma,” and accompanies a portrait of a young woman in a yellow and white striped strapless sheath who vivifies its words.

“A single man in possession of a good fortune” takes its title from the opening sentence of “Pride and Prejudice.” It depicts a slender young man in a sweater decorated with geometric forms of houses, wittily suggesting that his wealth lies in real estate while also insinuating something darker: the tactics that have kept many African Americans from owning homes.

The remaining two paintings in the show are quite a bit larger and show Sherald ambitiously expanding her format to include settings and even props. In the wonderfully titled “Precious jewels by the sea,” she may add a few too many: white clouds dotting its blue background, a sandy beach and some ocean, as well as seashells, a picnic basket and a big eye-catching umbrella that threatens to encroach on the figures: two tall young men planted in the sand with two young women sitting on their shoulders who together have the solidity of columns.

Even more monumental, and more resolved, is “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it,” based on Charles Ebbets’ well-known 1932 photograph showing a white man sitting atop the steelwork of the RKO Building in Rockefeller Center at a slightly crosslike juncture of three girders. Here all are painted an unlikely shade of soft green, which, with the bracing blue sky, gives the setting the force of abstraction. The painting’s title comes from the final passage of Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.”

In the original photograph the city spreads away in the distance. But in Sherald’s painting the man is completely alone against the sky. He wears gold pants striped white, blue and red, an orange belt, a brilliant white turtleneck and a red knit cap — an elegant ensemble suitable for someone who is perhaps ready to ride the air. His face, which is once again the heart of the matter, is open, grave and knowing. He is here and not here, at a slight remove in time and space. As with all of Sherald’s complexly layered paintings, this one says many different things. One of them might be “We built this country.”

——

Event Information:

’Amy Sherald: The Heart of the Matter...’

Through Oct. 20, Hauser &amp; Wirth, 548 West 22nd St., (212) 790-3900, hauserwirth.com

(Critic’s Pick)

Amy Sherald's Shining Second Act

After half a century of intermittent debate and protest, the San Francisco Board of Education voted unanimously in June to whitewash the 13 murals depicting the life of George Washington that line the halls of a high school named for the first president. The murals’ offense is that they depict some ugly truths about the history of the United States, namely two of its original sins: slavery and the Native American genocide.

Scenes of slaves at work in the fields and barns of Washington’s Mount Vernon and a dead Native American that appear in three of the murals have understandably upset some minority students at the high school, and some parents. They find the images degrading, and their feelings should be taken into account. But there are other, more creative alternatives to overpainting that might be more beneficial for all concerned.

The murals were painted in 1935 and 1936 under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, which created jobs for the unemployed suffering through the Great Depression. They were the work of a Russian émigré and Communist named Victor Arnautoff (1896-1979). I’ve not seen them in person — and may not get the chance — but the eight or so I found online struck me as among the most honest and possibly the most subversive of the WPA era.

Arnautoff signaled the country’s underlying crimes by taking a more critical view of Washington’s life, portraying his ownership of slaves and his support of the genocidal Western expansion. The goal was to place him in context, against a dense panorama of history. They don’t tell the whole story — Washington changed his views on slavery dramatically over his lifetime — but for their time, the murals were daringly frank.

In a democracy, destroying a work of art is never a solution to any offense it may give. Once art has been made and released into the often choppy flow of life, it should stay there. It will live on anyway. To dictate its elimination is an implicitly autocratic move, similar in spirit, if not scale, to the deliberate demolition of ancient art and artifacts by the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

The offended parties in and around the high school assume that their feelings about the murals are permanent and paramount. Those favoring destruction think that they know what the art is about, and that they have the right to decide for everyone, now and in the future, what will be accessible, what will be known. But reactions to art are in constant flux, and the best art should contain multitudes of interpretations.

Does the Board of Education really want the destruction of an 83-year-old mural cycle on its hands? It recalls the shameful eradication of “Man at the Crossroads,” the Diego Rivera mural that was plastered over at Rockefeller Center in 1934 by the Rockefellers.

Now, like then, it raises the question: Who owns a work of art? As the angry Rivera wrote in a letter, “If someone buys the Sistine Chapel, does he have the authority to destroy it?” Art, especially effective art, is never really owned by anyone.

Working during the interwar period, when prejudice was rampant and Jim Crow prevailed, and not just in Southern states, Arnautoff did not just paint your grandfather’s WPA murals. His Communist faith evidently made him determined to avoid the typical patriotic gloss of Washington’s life and also to teach some larger lessons, and he did so with great care. After all, his designs had to pass committee approval.

Which they did, enabling him to discreetly — even gently — insert slavery and the Indian genocide into his murals without sensationalizing them. These are among the scars on this country that every American — schoolchild or adult, of any race — should learn about in detail, keep learning about and never forget.

The murals are amazing feats of storytelling, full of visual subtleties, quiet messages and jolts. The main actors in each scene are physically substantial and dignified regardless of race. The slaves wear white, signaling goodness and innocence. All the figures have different degrees of autonomy.

In “Washington and Western Expansion” the Indian lies on his chest almost as if asleep, his body free of signs of struggle. Washington extends his arm, sending a group of pioneers westward. Walking past the fallen figure, they are rendered in grays: Ghostly, deathly, they tread on hallowed ground, personifying the coming threat of Manifest Destiny. In another mural, two Native Americans are armed with rifles, while others, backed by French soldiers, attack colonial soldiers; three surrender, one lies dead on the ground.

Elsewhere, Washington confers with his white slave overseer, while a black groom — handsome, alert, handsomely dressed — holds the reins of his horse.

George Washington High School contains major works by three other WPA artists, including two 27-foot murals in the school’s library, “Contemporary Education” by Ralph Stackpole and “Advancement of Learning Through the Printing Press” by Lucien Labaudt. And at one end of the football field, there is an astounding sculptural relief initiated by Beniamino Bufano and completed by Sargent Johnson; its overlapping figures fuse elements of Egyptian, Assyrian and Greek art and art deco.

None of these more decorous works have caused the protests that have plagued Arnautoff’s government-approved realism. There have been calls for the removal of the Arnautoff murals since the late 1960s, when the Black Panthers and many students urged that they be covered up.

Instead three “response murals” were commissioned from Dewey Crumpler, an African American artist just beginning his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, and now a professor of painting there. Crumpler understood the need for the Arnautoff narrative to be balanced, but he took the commission only after the students agreed that the Russian’s murals would not be touched.

After a trip to Mexico to study its vaunted murals, and repeated consultations with the students and the Panthers, Crumpler painted his frescoes on three adjoining walls just beyond Arnautoff’s. Far more metaphorical and imposing in scale, these startlingly dynamic panoramas pay tribute to the achievements and cultures of black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian people. Their fiery images show immense chains being broken and historic figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Crumpler told me on the phone that “art’s responsibility is to tell the truth.” He added that to destroy Arnautoff’s murals would destroy his own work, too.

With Crumpler’s murals and the WPA art, George Washington High School is a national treasure, one that may not remain a high school forever. One can imagine it becoming a center for the study of art, history and politics, and their sometimes painful but necessary intersection.

In the meantime, what can be done? There certainly need to be detailed plaques or text panels that aid in understanding the murals as history and seeing them as art.

More response murals could be commissioned, if space allows. A possible subject — raised by the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, and, more recently, by Stevon Cook, president of the San Francisco Board of Education — is the history of the 5,000 enslaved and free African Americans who fought in the American Revolutionary War. The art world is teeming with talented African American painters who would be eager to submit plans.

An alternative would be to cover Arnautoff’s murals with felt or some other opaque fabric, which would shroud them but is reversible, which is crucial. This was the solution for the much more fictive frescoes at the University of Notre Dame that depict Columbus discovering America, and it was amenable to the Native American students and others who protested that Columbus’ arrival had a much darker side for native peoples.

People change, and because they do, so does art. Even Washington evolved, according to the Mount Vernon website, ultimately lamenting owning slaves and freeing his slaves at his death in 1799. There’s a good chance that future generations will find the opposition to Arnautoff’s murals actions quaint, presumptuous or infuriating, similar to the way we view the storms ignited by D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Future generations of students at Notre Dame, including Native Americans, could well demand that the murals be uncovered. They will want to see for themselves what all the fuss was about, and dissect and analyze them all over again. Human curiosity works that way.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/design/george-washington-san-francisco-murals.html" id="e7cb06d1-6ac1-3269-aa47-c8bea82328c0">The New York Times</a>.

The Case for Keeping San Francisco's Disputed George Washington Murals

The cause was complications of a stroke, said Annely Juda Fine Art, his London representative, and Mitchell-Innes &amp; Nash in New York.

Kossoff worked in a thick impasto that pitted energetic brushwork against the scenes he depicted. Subject matter flickered in and out of sight, disappearing into and then rising from the painted surface.

Kossoff’s paintings could be challenging, but they also communicated a great warmth, both for the act of painting and for everyday life.

His subjects were highly specific, and he painted them again and again, sometimes for years on end. The main ones were his family and friends, or models who became friends; the many glories of London (its pedestrians, its streets, its railway and underground stations and their trains); and old master paintings in the National Gallery. One motif for several years around 1970 was a public pool roiling with schoolchildren. His active surfaces had precedent in artists ranging from Rembrandt to Constable to van Gogh to Chaim Soutine and Willem de Kooning.

Kossoff’s work was closest in appearance and spirit to that of German-born British painter Frank Auerbach, five years his junior and a close friend during their early years. Like Kossoff, Auerbach favored a loaded brush and dense surfaces that conveyed both anxiety and largesse. They both painted construction sites that sprang up around London as it rebuilt from the Blitz, and they were both indifferent to the distinction between abstraction and representation.

Kossoff and Auerbach were students together at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art and attended a class at Borough Polytechnic taught by prominent British modernist painter David Bomberg, a dynamic teacher. They both had their first exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in the mid-1950s; represented Britain in the Venice Biennale (Auerbach in 1986, Kossoff in 1995); and declined honors from the queen. And both were overshadowed in prominence by their contemporary, realist painter Lucian Freud, who had a much more sensational personal history and a flashier painting style. In recent years, this imbalance has begun to correct itself.

Kossoff was a very private man, strikingly modest if not self-effacing. Yet he was uncompromising in his work, as reluctant to welcome visitors to his studio as he was to let paintings leave it.

He had an extended working process; he would make countless sketches and then more finished drawings of any subject “until,” he said, “something happens and you realize you can start painting.” Then, working in oil on board rather than canvas, he worked and reworked his images, often scraping them down a few times a day as the light or mood changed. “Nothing is ever the same,” he said of his process.

In the end the final painting would be made in a very short time, maybe as short as an hour.

He drew incessantly from life in many forms, making nearly daily forays with his sketchbook to various points in London or to the National Gallery, where he drew and redrew masterpieces by Poussin, Rubens, Veronese, Constable and others. He also focused on masterpieces in the form of great public buildings like King’s Cross Station, built in the mid-19th century, or Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Baroque Christ Church Spitalfields, completed in 1729, a familiar landmark from Kossoff’s East London childhood. He depicted the structure’s monumental forms as rising up and vibrating, almost ecstatic, and from a child’s low point of view, as British critic David Sylvester pointed out.

He tended to depict only people he knew well: his parents, his brothers, Auerbach, painter John Lessore. His wife, Rosalind (Pearl) Kosoff, known as Peggy, whom he married in 1954, was his most frequent model. She survives him, as do their son, David; four grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and two brothers, Chaim and Jack.

Sometimes Kossoff found his subjects near at hand, like the Booking Hall in the Kilburn Underground near his house or the faltering cherry tree in his backyard, which occasioned some of his greatest paintings. He depicted this ancient tree leaning, nearly on the horizontal, supported by two crutchlike pieces of lumber. The image communicated an unusual humanity, often evoking, a slightly abstracted combination of crucifix and Pietà.

Leon Kossoff was born Dec. 10, 1926, in Islington, London, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. He was the second of seven siblings. His father was a baker.

He developed an early interest in drawing and at 9 made his way on his own to the National Gallery — how he managed that, he said, he could not recall — where Rembrandt’s “Woman Bathing in a Stream” made an unforgettable impression. In 1939 he was one of thousands of children evacuated from London during the Blitz. He lived in East Anglia — where Constable was born — with a married couple who encouraged his interest in art. He made his first paintings there and became acquainted with Constable’s work in a local museum.

Back in London in 1943, Kossoff attended St. Martin’s. He spent 1946-49 in military service attached to the Royal Fusiliers, and then returned to St. Martin’s.

In 1957 he had his first solo show with Beaux Arts, and two years later he began teaching at Regent Street Polytechnic. He showed his work for the first time in the United States in an exhibition of figurative painting from Britain at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven in 1981 and had his first solo show at the Hirschl &amp; Adler Gallery in New York in 1983.

The Tate Gallery staged a retrospective in 1996, and in 2007 the National Gallery organized “Leon Kossoff: Drawing From Painting,” bringing together a large selection of his drawings of its masterpieces.

For that show he granted a rare interview, videotaped among the paintings he had drawn so often. Avowing his lack of natural skill as a draftsman, he said, “Every day I think, ‘Today I might teach myself to draw.’” He added, “If you love a picture, you can learn how to draw from it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/arts/leon-kossoff-dead.html" id="21c83704-0d17-34f7-a604-f8301d1c4cf1">The New York Times</a>.

Leon Kossoff, whose expressionistic portraits and images of urban life made him one of the most important painters of postwar Britain, died July 4 in London. He was 92.

Leon Kossoff, Who Painted Portraits of Urban Life, Dies at 92

<h1>Joyce Pensato, a painter who took the abstract out of abstract expressionism and added a little pop, making large-scale black-and-white paintings that transformed popular cartoon characters into ambiguous, emotionally complex and sometimes scary creatures, died June 13 in Manhattan. She was 78.</h1>

Petzel Gallery, which has represented her since 2007, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Pensato was a late bloomer: Her art did not mature until after she turned 50, in the early 1990s. Success in the form of a fully committed New York gallery arrived even later, when Petzel staged the first of several solo shows of her work in 2007.

But she possessed the irrepressible joie de vivre and irreverence needed to make up for lost time. She started dyeing her hair blond in the late ’90s and tended to dress like a punk teenager, in black leggings and black T-shirts emblazoned with band logos and often accessorized with bling.

She was frequently photographed, or photographed herself, vamping in front of her paintings, wearing mirrored aviator glasses or making gang signs. Her Williamsburg studio was well known for its piles of dirty, paint-splattered toys, stuffed animals, figurines and masks of pop culture characters: Batman, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Felix the Cat, the malcontents of “South Park” and members of the Simpson family.

Rescued from the street or thrift shops, these artifacts served as her models; in essence she worked from life. Yet she was uninterested in her subjects’ projections of innocence and happiness. She once said, during a videotaped studio visit, that she thought Walt Disney had made Mickey Mouse seem “lobotomized.” She wanted to extract much stronger, more conflicted, feelings and a sometimes demonic energy from her seemingly placid pop-culture sitters.

In a sense, her paintings are acts of liberation achieved with large-scale, aggressive, action-filled brushwork and a severe black-and-white palette. Her images often bear down on or tower over the viewer; one writer compared them to Easter Island heads. They are variously comedic, menacing or pathetic — or, confusingly, all three at once.

Painted and repainted in broad, blurred strokes, the images hemorrhage torrents of drips and splashes and appear to be made quickly, furiously. In fact Pensato worked relatively slowly, studying, adjusting and revising her compositions until she got what she wanted.

In all her work she subverted both sides of the high-low equation, ridiculing and exaggerating abstract expressionist technique while imbuing popular culture characters with raw, uncontrollable feelings that were more real and gripping than the angst of the abstract expressionists. Her 2013 survey at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California was titled “I Killed Kenny,” a variation on a line frequently heard on “South Park.”

Joyce Marie Pensato was born Aug. 29, 1940, in Brooklyn to Stefano and Anna (Lombardo) Pensato. Her father was a printmaker who worked with artists on their books; her mother was a homemaker.

She is survived by a brother, Benedict.

Pensato grew up wanting to be an artist. After graduating from P.S. 123 in Brooklyn, she ended up at the Art Students League thinking she would study commercial art, with some painting on the side.

But lacking the necessary steadiness of hand and eye for detail for commercial art, she was directed toward painting. She studied primarily with painter Morris Kantor and described his class as “love at first sight.”

“I knew this was it,” she said.

When a friend told her that she should be at the New York Studio School — something of a bastion of figuration and pure painting in Lower Manhattan — she applied but was rejected. Returning to the league, she received a travel scholarship from it and spent a year in Europe soaking up art.

On her return, she applied to the Studio School again, and this time she was accepted. She arrived in the summer of 1973, completed the school’s four-year program and stayed on as an alumna in residence. She studied with Mercedes Matter, a painter and one of the school’s founders, who supported her work unstintingly; had her efforts critiqued by painter Philip Guston, who did not initially like her work; and for a time shared a studio with painter Christopher Wool, who remained a friend. His use of enamel would later influence her decision to switch to it from oil paint.

While at the school, Pensato began collecting pop-culture detritus in her studio, and when Matter suggested that she make a still life, Pensato based a charcoal drawing on a life-size Batman cutout she had found on the street.

She continued to make charcoal drawings based on her pop culture material over the next decade, developing a vocabulary of expressionistic marks and erasures. But she did not consider exhibiting them; at the time, she was pursuing abstract, expressionistic landscapes in oil, and color, on canvas.

In 1983, Pensato began to be included in group shows in New York and elsewhere in the United States, and around 1990 she landed a solo show with the Fiction/Non-Fiction Gallery in SoHo (the Team Gallery today). But it was canceled at the last minute; the dealer felt that her work was not ready. Pensato was devastated, but she regrouped.

Recognizing that she loved making her charcoal-drawing characters more than the paintings, she decided to release these beings onto canvas, replacing oil paint and color with black, white and occasionally silver enamel, which was thick yet quick-drying and crucial to her style.

In addition to Matter, Pensato often cited abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell as a mentor during her time at the Studio School. Mitchell, known for her lush revisions of French impressionism, once bluntly asked whether Pensato wanted to paint French (meaning with light and color) or German (meaning dark and expressionistic).

French, Pensato answered, but she knew it wasn’t true. As she later said, “It took me until 1990 to realize that the color was not working for me.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/arts/joyce-pensato-dead.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Joyce Pensato, Who Made Cartoon Characters Complex, Dies at 78

Petzel Gallery, which has represented her since 2007, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Joyce Pensato, who made cartoon characters complex, dies at 78

<h1>(Critic’s Pick): NEW YORK — Not every enduring literary masterpiece inspires a thousand years of often great art. “The Tale of Genji,” written in early-11th-century Japan and possibly the world’s first novel, is an exception. A narratively rich saga of life and love at the Japanese imperial court, it spurred innovation and was in many ways foundational to Japanese art itself.</h1>

Similarly, only a few museums can do justice to such a long span of creativity. Prominent among them is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose “‘The Tale of Genji’: A Japanese Classic Illuminated,” is glorious, as sumptuous and sprawling as the book itself, full of rare loans from Japanese institutions.

“Genji,” the book, is one of the monuments of Japan’s Heian period (794-1185), widely considered its golden age. It was then that the kingdom decisively freed itself from Chinese influence, developing, for example, its own syllabic writing, called kana, in which “Genji” was executed, and which shortly became the basis for a new Japanese calligraphy. At the same time, the Japanese emperors were becoming largely ceremonial, if not decadent; in reality, Japan was ruled by a succession of aristocratic clans, headed by a shogun, starting with the Fujiwara family.

Written by a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, the novel captures the aestheticism, intrigue and mores of court life as they swirl around the irresistibly handsome, polyamorous, morally flexible (and fictional) Prince Genji — aka the Shining Prince. The story unfolds in 54 linked chapters with a large cast that includes beautiful live-in mistresses, part-time lovers, children, devoted retainers and Genji bros. (In “An Imperial Celebration of Autumn Foliage,” Chapter 7, the Shining Prince cavorts with his closest friend, To no Chujo, in a dance of the blue waves.) Genji is a playboy prince, but a neurotic one, a Don Juan with more than a touch of Hamlet, capable of remorse, guilt and depression and a kind of obsessive self-pity. He also weeps easily.

Perhaps before it was even finished, chapters of “Genji” began to circulate at court and beyond and soon its author achieved a quiet celebrity. She became known as Lady Murasaki Shikibu, after her book’s main female character and Genji’s great love. “Genji” has an emotional intensity that feels startlingly modern especially in its characters’ constant enumerations of their inner lives and mood swings. It is a romantic novel, suffused with melancholy and poetic longing and sometimes interrupted by impulsive actions with a fairly high #MeToo quotient. Genji may have raped one of his conquests; he kidnapped Murasaki virtually on first sight, when she was 10.

Within a century of its writing, Japanese artists were rising to the epic’s challenge, giving its scenes visual form in illustrated “Genji” albums, handscrolls, hanging scrolls, large folding screens and, less familiar, a dazzling, miniaturized version of colorless ink-line painting. Over the course of the show we see the country’s pictorial sensibility emerge: the delicate isometric renderings of architecture and the blown-off roof that give interiors and exteriors equal visibility (since Genji is often on the outside peeping in). And the low-lying gold-leaf clouds that accentuate the aerial view tantalizingly block out bits of action and add great decorative verve.

You can see these elements in a nascent relatively crude state in the 12th-century “Tale of Genji Handscrolls.” Among the oldest surviving Genji manuscripts, these scrolls could not travel but the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya, has sent in their stead meticulous copies made from 1926 to 1935 by artist Tanaka Shinbi (1875-1975). Real or not, seeing them is a bit like seeing Early Renaissance paintings for the first time.

The show includes Genji-related tea bowls, kimonos, household furnishings and a lacquered wood palanquin that the Met acquired in 2007. Built in 1856 for the bride of a Tokugawa shogun, its exterior is patterned in gold and silver, its interior painted with suitable “Genji” vignettes. There are also Edo period woodblock parodies, some openly erotic. Despite its many romantic assignations and encounters, “Genji” never is.

This lavishness has been assembled by John T. Carpenter, the Met’s Japanese art curator, and Melissa McCormick professor of Japanese art and culture at Harvard University, with Monika Bincsik and Kyoko Kinoshita.

Murasaki, the writer, became a legend in her own right. Early in the exhibition you’ll encounter several nearly matching hand-scroll portrait-icons of her opulently dressed, bending over her writing table — a lacquered wood example is also on view. In each her opulent robes rise around her like a small mountain range, through which her long hair often extends like a sinuous river. Although her surroundings are sparse if not nonexistent, she is at Ishiyamadera, a Buddhist temple where she may have gone to write her novel.

While there, Murasaki is said to have been encouraged in her task by the bodhisattva Nyoirin Kannon. And he too is in the show: a 10th-century sculpture in gilded lacquered wood from the Ishiyamadera Temple that was worshipped in Murasaki’s day.

Some measure of the different ways “The Tale of Genji” has been adapted by artists comes into focus when you track some of the more famous chapters through the show. For example, the first version here of Chapter 12, “Exile to Suma” — in which Genji is traumatized by being briefly banished from Kyoto to Japan’s southern coast where he endures boredom, anxiety and rough weather — is a mid-13th-century manuscript executed in beautiful tendrils of calligraphy on decorated paper, but without illustrations.

A storm is readily apparent in a late-16th-century screen dominated by enormous curling, dragonlike waves rendered primarily in ink while our hero sits bravely in a small shelter on the shore. Next, an early 17th-century hanging scroll by Isawa Matabei (1578-1650) zeros in on this structure, with Genji standing facing the wind, his kimono billowing, behind semitransparent bamboo blinds called misu that are in actual use elsewhere in the show.

Similarly, “A Boat Cast Adrift” (Chapter 51), which shows Genji’s grandson, Niou, and Ukifune, his lover, sitting alone in a skiff on the Ufi River, appears in two screens along with scenes from other chapters, while a two-panel treatment from 1966 by Sata Yoshiro (1922-97), shows only the boat and its nearly life-size passengers, who now recline. Toward the exhibition’s end, a wonderful mid-17th-century two-panel screen of three courtesans, the boat scene is diminished. It appears in a tiny painting on the sliding door to another room, where it reads as an invitation to intimacy.

“‘The Tale of Genji’: A Japanese Classic Illuminated” runs through June 16 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e4b657a6-c4e3-4887-986e-04dd8a09e50f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/arts/design/genji-met-museum-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

A literary masterpiece, and the art it inspired

Similarly, only a few museums can do justice to such a long span of creativity. Prominent among them is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose “‘The Tale of Genji’: A Japanese Classic Illuminated,” is glorious, as sumptuous and sprawling as the book itself, full of rare loans from Japanese institutions.

The cause was a stroke, his son-in-law Peter Adler said.

Heller’s sale of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles” to the National Gallery of Australia, then under construction in Canberra, the nation’s capital, was announced in September 1973. The news caused an uproar in the New York art world; in Australia it nearly brought down the Labor government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who had to sign off on the $2 million deal.

In New York, Heller was criticized for letting the painting leave the country and for blurring the lines between collector and dealer. Most startling of all was the astronomically high “Rembrandt class” price, so called because the amount paid was more typical of old master paintings. It was the largest sum offered for a U.S. painting — a record that held for 10 years — and it made the investment potential of modern and contemporary art starkly clear.

Heller said he wanted the painting to leave the country so it could be seen by an international audience and have a larger impact. It very much did.

In Australia, the purchase was controversial because “Blue Poles” was American rather than Australian, abstract rather than figurative and very, very expensive. But, with time, it would be embraced as a national treasure and a turning point in the country’s coming-of-age as a nation separate from Britain. Today it is a regular stop for Australian schoolchildren.

James Mollison, the young director of the National Gallery and the initiator of the purchase, went on to build one of the best collections of abstract expressionist paintings outside the United States.

In an email, Ann Temkin, chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture, called Heller “an essential figure in the history of abstract expressionism” and said he had “fearlessly championed the art he loved even as others found it incomprehensible.”

Andrew Fabricant, chief executive of the Gagosian galleries, said in a telephone interview: “You’re not going to see anyone like him again. He recognized something colossal in American culture. He started the whole thing.”

Heller was prominent at a time when the New York art world was extremely small, especially compared with its current size. Collectors and art dealers were scarce, and the same group of people, mostly artists, showed up at all the openings.

He was wealthy, well educated, curious and highly opinionated, and he grew up loving music and literature. A gifted writer, tough businessman, superb athlete and impressive raconteur, he was also a quick study.

Starting in the early 1950s, Heller and his first wife, Judith Ann Goldhill Heller, plunged into the nascent New York art world and its latest innovations to build what was arguably the best private collection of abstract expressionist painting that ever existed. It was especially notable for its rigorous concentration on major, often large works.

Their Central Park West apartment — which painter Mark Rothko called “the Frick of the West Side” — became a place of pilgrimage for art collectors and museum directors from around the world.

By 1961, the collection was so singular that the Museum of Modern Art curated a traveling exhibition, “The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller,” for presentation at seven major museums across the country. Its more than 30 paintings and drawings included seven canvases by Rothko and four by Barnett Newman (among them his most important canvas, the 18-foot-across, flaming-red “Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” purchased just months earlier) and three works each by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Pollock.

The Pollocks included “Blue Poles” and “One: Number 31, 1950,” a mural-size classic drip painting that Heller bought in about 1956 for $8,000. It made Pollock himself so happy that he threw in “Echo: Number 25, 1951,” one of his quasi-figurative black enamel paintings.

There were also pieces by Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, as well as Arshile Gorky’s 1947 “Summation,” in oil and pastel on paper measuring about 6 1/2 by 8 1/2 feet. It is now in MoMA’s collection.

(The thought of all these sizable pieces making their way in and out of crates to and from seven museums would give today’s conservators and insurers nightmares. When “Blue Poles” was removed from Heller’s 10th-floor apartment by riggers, it was on the evening news.)

Heller was much more than a collector. He was a friend and counselor to most of the artists he collected, and an adviser to other major collectors, including Robert and Ethel Scull and Frederick and Marcia Weisman, as well as museums.

He was also a fluid writer of catalog essays and magazine articles, including an early consideration of Jasper Johns (he would eventually own eight of his works) in “School of New York: Some Younger Artists” (1959), edited by B.H. Friedman, and the lead essay in the catalog for “Toward a New Abstraction” at the Jewish Museum in 1963.

In 1990, Heller wrote an article in Art in America that helped draw attention to the derelict condition of the estate left by Still (he died in 1980) and start the drive to create a museum of that artist’s work, now in Denver.

And he was for a time deeply devoted to MoMA, socializing and sometimes brainstorming with its curators and serving on its international council, although he was never on its board of trustees. (In an oral history conducted with Avis Berman for the museum in 2001, he remarked that he was “neither WASPy enough or wealthy enough” to be part of its inner circle.)

Benjamin Theodore Heller, the youngest of three children, was born in New York on Oct. 16, 1925, to William and Rose (Landa) Heller. His mother was a schoolteacher. His father, who started out selling razors on the street, founded Heller Jersey, a small but successful textile manufacturing company.

In 1953, Heller succeeded his father as president and expanded the company into a major firm; it was one of the first to produce double-knit jersey and synthetic polyester-cotton blends. He sold it to Uniroyal in 1970 and thereafter concentrated on real estate.

The family was well off, with a farm in Connecticut, where Heller rode horses on weekends. He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York and then its high school, Fieldston, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Painter Paul Brach, who introduced him to Pollock in summer 1953, was a fellow student.

Heller played football and lettered in track and basketball at Fieldston. He would later be a nationally ranked squash and tennis player, a scratch golfer and a founder of the Artists and Writers Charity Softball Game in East Hampton, New York.

He graduated from Fieldston in 1943, attended Yale for a semester and then enlisted in the Army, serving as a Morse code radio operator and sharpshooter. He was injured and earned two Bronze Stars. Upon discharge, he enrolled in Bard College and graduated in 1948 with a degree in philosophy.

He married a year later, and he and his wife began going to exhibitions and thinking about collecting during their honeymoon in Paris. Back in New York, they bought a 1918 cubist still life by Braque and a Congo fetish figure, establishing their collection’s dual concentration on modern and non-Western art. They also acquired works by Soutine, Dubuffet, de Stael, Soulages and Miró, but later sold their European works when they decided to concentrate on new American painting.

Judith Heller died in a car accident in 1970. The next year Heller married Patricia Rosenwald Sedgwick, a psychotherapist. He is survived by his wife; his daughters, Patti Adler, a retired professor of sociology, and Deedy Mishler, a web designer; his son, Woody, a Manhattan Realtor; his sister, Naomi Heller Rosenbloom; his stepchildren, Nico Sedgwick, a painter, and actors Rob Sedgwick and Kyra Sedgwick; 11 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. He had homes in Sharon and Manhattan.

By the late 1960s, Heller had begun to feel burdened by both his collection and the number of people who wanted to see it, and he began to sell paintings, often upsetting his family. He sold Pollock’s “One” and “Echo” and the big Gorky to MoMA.

He also offered to sell “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” to the museum. But when it became clear that the board would not approve the purchase, Heller simply gave the painting to the museum. It was as if he could not imagine it anywhere else except at the Museum of Modern Art.

Ben Heller, Powerhouse Collector of Abstract Art, Dies at 93

Ben Heller, an influential New York art collector and dealer best known for his early embrace of abstract expressionism and the sale of one of its masterworks to an Australian museum, which caused an international furor, died April 24 in Sharon, Connecticut. He was 93.

Ben Heller, powerhouse collector of abstract art, dies at 93

NEW YORK — It’s not often that the paintings of an Italian Renaissance master arrive in a New York museum unadorned by the aura of fame and towering talent, but so it is with Giovanni Battista Moroni. The art of this 16th-century painter who excelled at remarkably naturalistic portraits is having its first American survey at the Frick Collection in “Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture.” Partly because Moroni’s reputation does not much precede him in this country, the show’s 23 portraits have a stunning freshness and clarity. We have the sense of seeing for ourselves — and there is much to look at.

Part of this freshness is inherent: Moroni’s paintings themselves are unencumbered. He scrutinized reality with a new directness and tried to record what he saw. His relatively low-key style adds to his portraits’ transparency, the feeling that we are looking at real people as they existed — unidealized, meticulously observed and psychologically present, especially in their direct appraising gazes.

The grand old man thought to be Gabriele Albani, in a portrait that Moroni painted around 1572-73, wears a lavish lynx-lined robe, but he also has a prominent bump in the middle of his forehead — although its suggestion of a third eye is not without a certain grandeur. Even more strikingly honest is the wrinkled face and goiter of Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova, who holds a prayer book in hands that the catalog suggests were painted from a younger model once the painting’s subject was no longer available. That Moroni did not add wrinkles here is testament that he could not paint what was not in front of him.

A realist can have only so much painterly style or temperament. Perhaps that’s why Moroni was left out of Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists,” and, so, from the dominant narrative of Italian Renaissance art history over the succeeding centuries. Bernard Berenson slighted him by observing that Moroni “gives us sitters no doubt as they looked,” as if it were a small thing. You don’t look to Moroni for freely painted details that disintegrate into dazzling flourishes upon closer examination — as with 17th-century painters like Velázquez or Franz Hals.

Moroni honed closer to the facts of silver flecked brocade, velvet fringe, opulent jewels and fine embroidery in black or red silk thread that embellishes so many collars and cuffs in portraits of both men and women. (There’s a kind of Where’s Waldo? game to be had in ferreting out the red-on-white embroidery and the small pink bows that adorn the elaborate, often bejeweled coiffure of several of the women.)

Moroni did not stint in his attention to articles of clothing as carriers of wealth and status, but he also makes us see them as indications of painstaking craft that in many ways paralleled his own skills. His scrutiny of the real is underscored by the inclusion in the exhibition of cases of objects and printed material that appear in these paintings — admirably near-matches tracked down by the show’s curators, Aimee Ng, of the Frick; Simone Facchinetti of the Museo Adriano Bernareggi in Bergamo; and Arturo Galansino of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

The most generously accoutered figure is in the show’s first portrait, “Isotta Brembati,” a poet and a countess sitting in a Dante chair. Even her earrings have pink bows. Brembati’s many accessories include a jeweled cross with hanging pearls; a shrug made from a marten pelt with a gold-covered head and, finally, a fan of pink and white stripes of feathers (or maybe fur).

The son of an architect, Moroni spent most of his life working in Albano, in northern Italy, where he was born sometime between 1520 and 1524, and in other regional cities like Brescia, Bergamo and Trent before returning to his birthplace, where he died in 1579 or 1580. In the 1540s he trained under Alessandro Bonvicino in Brescia, better known as Moretto (or the Moor) of Brescia, and was also influenced by the precision of Lorenzo Lotto, who had spent several years in the city. Renaissance portraiture was an expanding genre: Moretto would paint the period’s first full-length portrait of a standing man. Moroni would go on to paint the first full-length standing portrait of a woman and we see it here: Pace Rivola Spini, in a red satin dress, who pulls back her black overdress, perhaps to emphasize her baby bump.

Moroni’s most famous portrait may be familiar even if his name, until now, is not. “The Tailor,” from around 1570, on loan to the United States for the first time from the National Gallery, London, is unusual for its depiction of an artisan pursuing his craft; holding shears, he is about to cut the expanse of fabric spread on the table before him. (Real iron 16th-century shears are also here.) We seem to stand just across the table from him — perhaps a client, a watchful apprentice or a friend dropping in to gossip — and it’s clear we have interrupted him. He pauses — another of Moroni’s innovations is the portrait subject shown in suspended motion rather than in a static pose — and looks at us intently, leaving no doubt that he’ll soon return to his work.

Nearby, a portrait of sculptor Alessandro Vittoria depicts a man holding a Greek statue of a small nude male torso. His bare forearm is extremely unusual for a secular portrait, although religious art bares plenty of flesh. The idea is taken to further extremes in the straining laborers and exposed limbs of Goya’s “The Forge” of 1815-20, which hangs in the Frick’s West Hall.

Another of Moroni’s innovations is the “sacred portrait,” and the three examples known to survive are united at the Frick for the first time. These paintings break with the tradition of depicting donors as minor characters within the religious artworks they commissioned. The donors have what these days is known as agency: They are now placed in real (if still painted) space, appearing as citizens of the world, unlike the smaller, flatter, spiritual creatures on whom they gaze.

The sacred portraits are no match for Moroni’s secular portraits. (For one thing, the donors almost never lock eyes with us.) But in them, Moroni shows off his ability to paint in two styles simultaneously, pays homage to his craft and also makes it clear where his loyalty lies.

“Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture”

Through June 2 at the Frick Collection, 1 E. 70th St., Manhattan; 212-288-0700, frick.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/arts/design/frick-collection-moroni-review.html" id="40d7bd04-2c5d-3621-a3c4-c47999a8741f">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

A Cult Favorite Enters the Art Canon

NEW YORK — For me, the 2018-19 art season will always belong to Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). I say this simply as a measure of the psychic and historical shift caused by the Guggenheim Museum’s extraordinary full-dress retrospective of her nearly 40-year career.

The exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” demonstrated that the genesis story of Western modernist abstraction was not an all-male adventure conducted in the mid-1910s by the revered triumvirate of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. A woman had gotten there first, largely on her own.

Roberta Smith

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