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New York Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Ben Shahn's Social Realist Art Feels Relevant Again in Landmark Survey
With some artists, there's one work that seems to capture their essential achievement. In the long-overdue retrospective now at the Jewish Museum in New York, the entire artistic project of the American painter Ben Shahn comes clear in a single fascinating painting from 1940 called 'Contemporary American Sculpture.' It depicts a gallery at the Whitney Museum hosting sculptures from that year's survey of the nation's artists — except that Shahn, left out of the Annual, reimagines the walls surrounding those stylized modern works as covered in his own realist paintings. Those show scenes of everyday life during the Great Depression — decrepit workers' housing; a farmer by his shack; poor Black women at a welfare hospital — depicted as though the Whitney's walls have been pierced to reveal the all-too-real world out beyond. It recalls how Renaissance murals pierced church walls to let in the more-real world of the Bible. 'Contemporary American Sculpture' captures what's at stake in the most potent works in 'Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity,' as this revelatory survey is called. Those works use the time-honored art of painting to make the modern world, and its signature troubles, as present as Shahn can manage. The effect is gripping, and feels utterly relevant for the troubled moment we are living in now. For a decade or so on either side of World War II, Shahn's achievements made him an art star, earning him a major show at the Museum of Modern Art and honors including a place in the American Pavilion of the 1954 Venice Biennale, shared with the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning. But it was de Kooning and his ilk who went on to dominate the art world; as Cold War reaction took hold, Shahn, a dedicated leftist, saw a slow but unbroken decline in his critical fortunes. There has barely been an uptick since. The Jewish Museum show is Shahn's first notable survey in the United States since one at the same museum in 1976. Featuring 175 artworks and objects, photos by Shahn and his peers as well as illuminating ephemera, it was organized abroad, at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, where it was a big hit in 2023; the curator Laura Katzman had to work hard to find an American museum to take it. Shahn was raised in immigrant Brooklyn, where his family, who were Jewish, had landed in 1906, when he was 8. They were fleeing deprivation, antisemitism and oppression in their native Lithuania, then under Russian rule. Shahn's father, a socialist and anti-czarist, had been forced into exile in Siberia. In the United States, the Shahns still had such struggles that young Ben had to drop out of high school to help fund the household. He landed in a lithographer's workshop, where he mastered the fundamentals of visual art. But his career as an artist took a while to jell, as he attended various courses in various places — New York University, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., the City College of New York. In the 1920s, Shahn, supported by a hard-working wife, Tillie Goldstein, was able to take in the high points of old master and modern art across Europe. (He arranged a meeting with Picasso but got cold feet and called it off.) By 1933, Shahn was back in New York, assisting the great Diego Rivera on his infamous mural for Rockefeller Center, soon hacked off the wall because of its portrait of Lenin. Unlike his mentor, Shahn never quite subscribed to communist doctrine, though he shared the movement's egalitarian aims. For a solo show at the prestigious Downtown Gallery in New York, in 1939, Shahn portrayed scenes from the saga of Tom Mooney, a labor leader falsely imprisoned for a 1916 bombing, who wasn't released until the year of Shahn's exhibition. If the images in the survey feel more like news than comment, that's partly because we can sense the press photos Shahn used as his sources. Though his paintings themselves aren't close to photorealistic — his technique can be potently slapdash — their subjects have the verve of seeming caught on the fly. His image of two perjurers who helped convict Mooney has the strange perspective of a wide-angle lens, as does its newspaper source, on view at the Jewish Museum alongside other documentation that gives insight into Shahn's art. The exhibition includes an earlier series on the controversial 1921 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants executed for murder despite flimsy evidence. Shahn's painting of the two handcuffed men is cropped weirdly tight; we see that it echoes a source photo that had been cropped the same way, to save space on the printed page. Shahn borrows the feel of a photograph's direct observation to make his painted subjects seem more directly observed by us. In the mid-1930s, he took up the camera himself, as part of a New Deal project to document Depression hardships. His photographs in this show stand up fine against nearby ones by famous colleagues like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, but few of his shots were made public. Instead, Shahn used them as sources for the New Deal murals he was soon making — the show mostly includes them as studies — and then for many of his later paintings. The vast majority of photographs in Shahn's day were black-and-white and very small. They couldn't have the sheer presence of scenes at life scale, in full color. That had been the territory once staked out in the 'history paintings' of the European old masters; in the best works in the show, Shahn channels the potent 'reality effect' of those paintings, but uses it to capture distinctly modern subjects and social ills, and the modern look of a photographed world. That achievement comes especially clear in the colorful posters he made during World War II for the American Office of War Information, which show figures, at life size or larger, suffering under the Nazis and their partners. Those figures might as well be Christian martyrs on the walls of a Renaissance church. (Shahn reworked one poster about Nazi slave labor into a painting called '1943 AD,' in which a stretch of barbed wire becomes a crown of thorns on one of the enslaved.) Shahn's vision was too potent for the Office of War Information: It seems to have released only two of his posters. A bit later in the 1940s, working for the Congress of Industrial Organizations — a major confederation of unions — he created other posters that used the same effects to champion causes such as colorblind hiring and voting rights. Welders — one Black and one white — loom above us in this show, as if they were just the other side of the museum wall. Unfortunately, in the decade or so before his death in 1969, Shahn could seem more interested in modern aesthetics than in modern people and their plights. His pictures became palimpsests of allusive symbols, reheating modern styles from Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. Toward the end of this show, we miss the immediacy of Shahn's earlier pictures, with their close ties to an observed world. Instead, we're offered illustrations of moral themes and spiritual subjects that can read like vaporous musings. What Shahn couldn't have realized, as he turned away from his potent visions of the 1930s and 40s, was that they would find new purchase almost a century later, when once again we face issues of racial injustice, and what our nation might do about it, and prosecutions that can seem to serve politics, not justice. Back in 1939, in an essay for Shahn's Downtown Gallery show, Rivera called his former assistant 'magnificent,' and said his paintings captured 'a complete portrait' of the reality Shahn had grown up in. At the Jewish Museum, a century later, they seem to offer a portrait of our reality, too.
CBS News
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Summer 2025 preview: On display at museums
It's hard to resist staring back at paintings by artist Amy Sherald, now on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Sherald is best known for her portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, but the exhibit gives a more complete look at her palette. "That painting is here in the show, and we're very happy to be able to share it with visitors here," said co-curator Rujeko Hockley. "But we really wanted to show the progression of her work as an artist. "Amy often paints the skin tone of her subjects, who are Black people, in what we call grisaille, or gray tone," said Hockley. "It kind of disrupts this immediate identification, perhaps even stereotyping that all of us are, you know, subject to." Rujeko Hockley with a work by artist Amy Sherald, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. CBS News It's not the only way to spot a Sherald painting. Hockley said one characteristic of the artist's work is her subjects' body language: "Very kind of solid, confident, not over-confident, but just really certain and still in [themselves]." The Sherald exhibition, said Hockley, is "a show that is really speaking to kind of overwhelmingly positive sense of connection, and kind of shared humanity, and kind of beauty that comes from being around one another, that comes from kind of seeing the humanity in another." For more info: But if you can't make it to New York, there are plenty of exhibits to visit this summer. Beloved impressionist works are on display at museums in Boston and Portland, Oregon. On view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is Van Gogh's 1889 portrait of Joseph Roulin (left). The Portland Art Museum is displaying its restoration of Claude Monet's 1914-15 "Waterlillies." Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. Major contemporary artists are featured, too, from KAWS in Bentonville, Arkansas, to Jeffrey Gibson in Los Angeles. Works by KAWS, on display at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. (left), and by Jeffrey Gibson, at The Broad, Los Angeles. CBS News And, in Cleveland, things are looking especially bright thanks to the works of Takashi Murakami … one of the many exhibits giving us reason to smile this summer. A view of the exhibition "Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow," at the Cleveland Museum of Art. CBS News Story produced by Julie Kracov and Sara Kugel. Editor: George Pozderec.
Vogue
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
A Decade at the (New) Whitney: Art and Glamour Converge on the West Side
Michelle Monaghan, Maria Giulia Maramotti Tiffany Sage/ It was art imitating life—and life, of course, dressed in designer—as guests ascended the Whitney Museum for its annual Gala, held atop Manhattan's shimmering West Side. The evening marked more than just a celebration of the institution's 10-year anniversary in the Renzo Piano–designed building: it was a reunion of artists, collectors, patrons, and power-dressers who've long championed the museum's bold, contemporary vision. As twilight fell over the Hudson, so too did a stylish spell over the proceedings. There were thought-provoking speeches from the honorees—chairman Richard M. DeMartini, artist Amy Sherald, and legendary curator Barbara Haskell. An array of notables—Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb, Laura Harrier, Andie MacDowell, Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Kathy Hilton, Claire Danes, and more—artfully intermingled in the museum's grandiose halls. But perhaps one of the real forces that brought the museum to life was the anniversary edition of Max Mara's Whitney bag. Back in 2015, Max Mara unveiled the Whitney Bag, an iconic piece created in collaboration with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop to mark the inauguration of the new Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. What began as a limited edition bag quickly became a highly sought-after accessory for women around the world. 'It's a unique piece to be honest. It's a bag like no other on the market, and that makes us very proud, as well as the idea of representing [the Whitney's] architectural design and blending that with the spirit of Max Mara's brand aesthetic,' Maria Giulia Maramotti, Max Mara Fashion Group Board Member and third generation of the Maramotti family, tells Vogue. And indeed, the bag quite literally animates the Whitney through its ribbed design, which mimics the museum's facade.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘White Lotus' Ladies, Tom Sachs and Reality Stars Lit Up the Whitney
The stars gathered at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Tuesday night for the institution's annual spring gala. Actresses, reality stars, conceptual artists, fashion designers, stylists, curators and R&B icons came together to celebrate the 95-year-old museum. During cocktails in Kenneth C. Griffin Hall, the actress Claire Danes chatted up a gaggle of men with a drink in hand. 'I love the Whitney,' Ms. Danes said, clad in a red dress by Max Mara, a sponsor for the evening. On the opposite side of the hall, the philanthropists Kathy and Rick Hilton, and their daughter Nicky Rothschild, collected fizzy drinks from a bar. 'They're here visiting from L.A., so it's a little family outing,' Ms. Rothschild said. Nearby, the actresses Leslie Bibb and Michelle Monaghan held court, fresh off their run on the third season of 'The White Lotus.' 'When you come at night and get to go around and look at art and then come out into the Meatpacking District,' Ms. Bibb said, 'it's very sexy.' In front of the large, freightlike elevators, Ubah Hassan, a star of the 'The Real Housewives of New York City,' spoke with the stylist June Ambrose. Ms. Hassan, who wore a light blue Pamella Roland dress, said it was her first gala at the Whitney. 'I'm not very familiar with it,' Ms. Hassan said of the museum. 'Whenever I'm getting invited, I'm like 'I gotta go!'' The night's honorees included Amy Sherald, the contemporary artist whose first solo show at the Whitney, 'American Sublime,' opened on April 9. The artist is probably best known for her portrait of the former first lady Michelle Obama. But reviewing the show for The New York Times, the critic Deborah Solomon described Ms. Sherald 'as a painter of one-frame short stories, of fictions that bestow recognition on people you would not recognize.' The contemporary artist Glenn Ligon, who had a retrospective at the Whitney in 2011, said he felt it was urgent for Ms. Sherald's work to be shown at the museum. 'It's important that a museum like the Whitney is showing portraits of people that look like her at this moment when there's such, you know, demonization of D.E.I., artists of color and Black representation,' Mr. Ligon said. 'It's important that the Whitney has made this commitment.' After cocktails, guests were shuffled to dinner on the seventh floor of the museum. The large elevator doors opened to rows of tables in front of a gold, curtain-like back drop. The artist Jeff Koons, who presided over a table at the side of the stage, said Ms. Sherald's work is about sharing her personal growth with the world. Ms. Sherald's career opened up after she painted Ms. Obama, and her trajectory into museum shows followed. 'Amy has transcended herself,' Mr. Koons said. 'She's transcended her own life, and she's shared that with the community and that's what we feel when we look at her work.' Richard DeMartini, a member of Whitney's board since 2007, was also recognized alongside Barbara Haskell, a curator at the museum for about 50 years, who was celebrated for her longevity and her eye. 'The museum has changed so much, but in some ways, it hasn't changed at all,' Ms. Haskell said. 'I mean, visually, it's got bigger, more important but it's the fundamental values that first attracted me and have kept me here for 50 years.' The event raised about $6 million and midway through dinner, Judy Hart Angelo, a Whitney trustee, pledged another $1 million to support the Museum's free admissions program, which provides free entry to visitors under 25. The initiative started in December and has resulted in 400,000 free visits. It has also helped bring the number of visitors, which dropped because of the pandemic, back to about a million a year, according to Scott Rothkopf, the museum's director. The Hiltons sat together close to the stage. Nearby, Tom Sachs, the New York-based artist, chatted with a friend. 'The legacy of The Whitney is important,' Mr. Sachs said. 'When I first moved to New York, I always felt welcomed by the Whitney and its programs to help make art accessible are essential to the city. It's a place that embraces artists and art, going public equally and there's nothing more important than that for creating a sense of community in the arts institution in the city.' After dinner was served — filet mignon, of course — and the honorees gave speeches onstage, there was a final surprise. From the right side of the room, the remaining members of TLC, Tionne 'T-Boz' Watkins and Rozonda 'Chilli' Thomas, appeared and the opening horns of their 1994 hit single, 'Creep' began to play. Two-thirds of the room seemed a bit confused as to who was performing and why. But at the foot of the stage, the artists, including Ms. Sherald and Jordan Casteel, sang along with the group's three-song medley, word for word.
Bloomberg
13-05-2025
- General
- Bloomberg
An NYC Art Dealer Is Opening His Wild Mansion to the Public
'Are we going to mention the building?' asks New York art dealer Adam Lindemann, standing in the polished entry hall of his Upper East Side mansion. In fact, it's kind of impossible not to mention the building. A jet-black poured concrete structure designed by the architect David Adjaye, it's hidden behind a staid, 1897 carriage house facade, which the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission dictated remain unaltered. Inside, though, the home is ultracontemporary, with a bridge connecting the street to the main structure, whose asymmetrical windows consciously mimic Marcel Breuer's original Whitney Museum of American Art building on Madison Avenue a few blocks away. Look up as you enter, and you'll see a glass catwalk leading to a small, wood-paneled second-floor library that fronts the street.
