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New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
British Art in a New Light
On the campus of Yale University, two art museums housed in landmark modernist buildings — each designed by Louis I. Kahn — sit directly across the street from one another. One, the Yale University Art Gallery, with an encyclopedic collection of about 300,000 objects, draws close to a quarter million people annually. The other, the Yale Center for British Art, with its specialized collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to the present, brings in less than half that traffic. The British center is now aiming to even up those visitor numbers. It reopened in March after a two-year closure for conservation of the skylights and lighting throughout the building — the acclaimed architect's last realized project, which opened in 1977 and is widely considered an artwork in itself — and with a fresh exhibition philosophy. A piece by Tracey Emin, who came to fame as one of the so-called Young British Artists in the 1990s alongside peers like Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, inaugurates a new program of contemporary works in the lobby. Her glowing sculptural installation, with yellow neon lighting proclaiming in script 'I loved you until the morning' on a mirrored wall in the museum's entrance court, is visible from the street. It serves as an 'invitation' at the front door, said Martina Droth, the center's director, who was appointed in January after working with its collections for 16 years, most recently as chief curator. 'The envelope of the building doesn't scream museum; it's a little austere,' she said. 'I'm hoping that it signals to people there are things here for them.' In two inaugural exhibitions upstairs, large gestural paintings on the second floor focused on the female body by Emin — who established her reputation with confessional, ramshackle sculptural installations — have unexpected resonance with atmospheric landscapes on the third floor drawn from the center's almost 3,000 works by J.M.W. Turner, who was born almost 200 years before Emin and, like her, counted the English seaside town of Margate as an important second home. This pairing reflects the center's new curatorial approach, Droth said, showcasing the depth and richness of its historical collections 'and then taking those threads into the present moment with someone like Tracey, who absolutely sees herself in the lineage of Margate, famous for Turner and now famous for Tracey, and in those sort of painting traditions.' Emin's show, her first solo museum exhibition in North America, may introduce the artist to younger viewers or reintroduce her to those who remember 'Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,' an exhibition that caused a public stir when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. There, Emin showed a tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had ever shared a bed with. 'Showing Tracey here is just a completely different proposition to showing her in Britain, where she's really a public figure and there's so much baggage around her,' said Droth, who organized the show. She has chosen to focus on Emin's painting, which she had struggled with at the Royal College of Art and abandoned early in her career. She resumed the medium after being selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007, when she began to make paintings that center on the subjectivity of the female figure. Since the death of her mother in 2016, Emin has devoted herself to painting and bronze sculpture. In 2017, Emin bought a home and studio in Margate — where she had a difficult upbringing and was raped at 13 — and has spent most of her time there since 2020. (She also has a home in London.) 'She's depicting the body usually, but it's about the feeling of the body and an atmosphere and a mood,' said Droth, of Emin's paintings that make analogies between her own expressive brushwork and Turner's squalling seascapes. In the painting 'And It Was Love' (2023), which depicts a naked woman splayed across the canvas and a dark form in a wash of deep sunset red between her bent legs, 'you don't really know whether this is a medical emergency, a sexual scene, pleasure, pain,' Droth said. 'It's all of those things.' She noted the faint trace of the stoma on the figure's abdomen connected to a urostomy bag. (In 2020, Emin was diagnosed with bladder cancer and had radical surgery.) Reached by phone in Margate, Emin, now 61, described Turner — who lived part-time with his mistress just minutes from Emin's studio — as 'an early expressionist' and said she loved the 'modesty involved' in showing her work in the context of the British center's collection. 'There's a lot of people who might take my work more seriously now, simply because of the subject matter,' she said. 'I have a very strong opinion on being a woman and I think people understand now that I'm not screaming — I'm just making a point of showing the experiences that women go through.' She wrote a poem to Turner, and to their shared love of Margate's winter sunsets, which is included in a 2024 publication by the center that reproduced his last sketchbook. If Emin thinks about Turner, obviously Turner — born 250 years ago this year — didn't think about Emin. Lucinda Lax, the center's curator of paintings and sculpture who organized the Turner exhibition — the center's first since 1993 — called him 'the father of modern art.' She has included 'Margate' (circa 1822), Turner's view of the newly built seaside resort, with broken ships and workers eking out a living in the foreground, and 'Wreckers' (1834), featuring a tumultuous sea and abbreviated figures scavenging what they can from wreckage. 'He's really trying to bring out the experience, both physically and psychologically, of being part of a particular environment,' Lax said, 'where there's a real sort of sense of the splash of the sea and the whip of the wind.' Lax has also led the fourth-floor re-installation of the permanent collection. 'For the first time, we've got the whole chronological span of British art that's represented in our holdings here on one floor,' said Lax, who has integrated contemporary works by artists including Yinka Shonibare and Cecily Brown into galleries that used to end with the 19th century. She hopes to 'open up questions about empire, gender, the role of women.' As universities are in jeopardy of having funding cut by the government, which has flagged the use of words including 'gender' or 'women' on institutional websites, the British center is not shying away from 'engaging a diverse range of perspectives in dialogue with British art and history,' Droth said. The museum's annual operating budget of almost $39 million is funded almost entirely from the Paul Mellon endowment, the center's founder who donated his holdings of British art that account for almost 80 percent of its collection. Yale is widely regarded as having the greatest collection of British art outside of Britain, said Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum in London, who views the pairing of Emin and Turner as inspired. 'For a younger generation, Tracey's work and way of talking about difficult and uncomfortable things with complete honesty is probably very resonant,' Cullinan said, referring to topics such as abortion, surviving abuse and working-class struggles. 'I think that there was a lot of snobbery around those conversations and an attempt to shut them down as being embarrassing or vulgar,' Cullinan added, noting how the art establishment had put Emin in a box early on. 'Now we recognize that those are not just important, but necessary.'
Wall Street Journal
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive' Review: The Aura of Apartheid
New Haven, Conn. There are some works of art so magisterial that the only appropriate response to them is silence, because anything one says will be inadequate and could potentially diminish them. The photographs of David Goldblatt are of that order, so I proceed with trepidation in discussing 'David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive' at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 22. Judy Ditner, curator of Photography and Digital Media at Yale, ably organized the roughly 150 mostly black-and-white prints. Ms. Ditner, with Leslie M. Wilson and Matthew S. Witkovsky, also edited the excellent catalog.
Boston Globe
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
At Yale, a David Goldblatt retrospective bears eloquent witness to apartheid-era South Africa and beyond
All of which is to say that the medium has known few greater bearers of witness than Satisfyingly extensive, the show includes nearly 125 photographs by Goldblatt, work by South African photographers who were his contemporaries or friends or students, maquettes, contact sheets, vintage magazines, and various documents, including text for a classified advertisement from the early ′70s. The ad asked interested readers to let Goldblatt photograph them, offering assurances that the photographer had 'no ulterior motive,' hence the exhibition subtitle. Advertisement Goldblatt's artistic stature makes the relative unfamiliarity of his surprising. That's owing in large part to his having faced a kind of cultural double bind. He lived in a society, apartheid-era South Africa, that needed witness borne as have few others. Yet the ostracism of that society meant his work lacked the prominence and recognizability enjoyed by lesser photographers elsewhere. Advertisement David Goldblatt, "At Kevin Kwanele's Takwaito Barber, Lansdowne Road, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, in the time of AIDS, 16 May 2007." Yale University Art Gallery Also, the work doesn't fit easily into a particular genre or category. There are portraits, landscapes, reportage, though that's too limiting a term. In the late ′90s Goldblatt fully embraced color, a further diversification. Color had the effect, however paradoxical, of softening, at least somewhat, the harsh South African light. Note the delicate blueness of the cloudless sky in a 2007 photograph of an outdoor barber in Cape Town. Goldblatt photographed mines, churches, people in their homes, people on the street, workers on the job, Soweto, scenes of wealth, scenes of poverty, and most tellingly perhaps, how those scenes could overlap and confound an observer. Yet he avoided cheap incongruities, even if ever there was a society of not just cheap but grotesque incongruities it was South Africa during those years and beyond. What unites such variousness is a consistent scrupulosity of vision: unfussy, unfancy, unblinking, unfailingly humane, and no less unfailingly curious. David Goldblatt, "Methodists meet to find ways of reducing the racial, cultural, and class barriers that divide them, 3 July 1980." Yale University Art Gallery Being white put Goldblatt in the minority in South Africa, albeit a minority with overwhelming power and no hesitation to use it. Being the grandson of Lithuanian Jews made him an outsider within that minority. It was a status that allowed him to notice things — that made him need to notice them — others might overlook or, far more commonly, choose to ignore. What Goldblatt found himself photographing was, as he once put it, 'the quiet and commonplace, where nothing 'happened' and yet all was contained and immanent.' The show is arranged thematically, under the headings 'Informality,' 'Near/Far,' 'Disbelief,' 'Working People,' 'Extraction,' 'Assembly,' and 'Dialogues.' The abstractness of the groupings underscores how the images are anything but abstract. 'Dialogues' deserves special mention. It consists of the work of those other photographers, including Ernest Cole, Jo Ractcliffe, and Santu Mofokeng. The section comes midway through the show, a nice placement and indicative of the care devoted to the retrospective, jointly put together by YUAG, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Fundación MAPFRE,, in Madrid. Advertisement Other than 'Extraction,' about mining (Goldblatt's first photographic job was working for South Africa's largest mining operation, Anglo-American Corporation), the categories are usefully elastic. They organize but don't confine. That's appropriate, as confinement registers throughout the show in other ways: not just in the innumerable restrictions on Black South Africans evident in so many of the photographs but also the way Goldblatt captures space. David Goldblatt, "Tailings dump after reclamation, Owendale Asbestos Mine, Northern Cape, 24 December 2007." Yale University Art Gallery Part of the fascination of the show is seeing how little Goldblatt owes to other photographers. Artistically, he's very much his own man. His photographs of Afrikaner farmers have drawn comparisons to Walker Evans's of Southern tenant farmers. Actually, all they have in common is arduous agriculture (endured by the subjects) and human sympathy (extended by the photographers). Maybe that's another reason Goldblatt doesn't have the fame he deserves: He doesn't constellate, and constellations can make the work of art historians, curators and, yes, reviewers, far easier. David Goldblatt, "Wedding party, Orlando West," 1970. Yale University Art Gallery In that treatment of space, though, one does see an affinity, and it's thrilling, with Robert Frank. Frank's 'The Americans' is less about the people in his photographs than the space that contains them. Something similar is going on in Goldblatt's images, his rural ones especially. The land and sky — the amazing, pitiless South African sky — take on an eloquence to rival that of the faces of the people Goldblatt photographs, and that is eloquence of a very high order. Advertisement These photographs are in no way modest — excellence, always, is its own, justified, immodesty — but the photographer is. 'I let my subjects place themselves and I try to photograph quite literally what is in front of the camera,' Goldblatt said in 1974. 'You could call it a quality of deliberate accident.' David Goldblatt, "Sunday morning: A not-white family living illegally in the 'White' group area of Hillbrow, Johannesburg," 1978. Yale University Art Gallery That personal modesty, which is to say an absence of self-importance, extends to an absence of self-righteousness. 'Over time, it grew evident that the real conflict was … how to square one's conscience with being white in this country. This was not hair-splitting. It was a moral dilemma that arose in numerous ways in daily life.' That numerousness is seen throughout the show, and that dilemma felt throughout it. Bearing witness does not mean preaching or making judgments, except, it may be, of oneself. David Goldblatt, "Wait-a-Minute Photographer, Braamfontein, Johannesburg," 1955. Yale University Art Gallery Goldblatt's work has a fundamental visual simplicity, even to the point of austerity. This helps contain the emotional power of so many of the images while also deepening it. Injustice and pain and exploitation when presented as INJUSTICE and PAIN and EXPLOITATION are announcements, and announcements are quickly moved on from. Goldblatt offers simple declarative sentences, not that there's anything simple about them. Emphasizing the significance of description and documentation are the increasingly long titles Goldblatt gave his photographs. That's part of the deliberateness of the accident. Mark Klett, "Storm Clouds Moving Fast, One Hour." Yale University Art Gallery YUAG has a nice surprise for visitors, since 'Photography and the Botanical World' isn't listed on the gallery website. It's a terrific little show, with more than 40 photographs of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. It runs through June 8. Advertisement As one might expect with such subject matter, there are photographs from Karl Blossfeldt, Imogen Cunningham, and Anna Atkins, as well as André Kertész's Goldblatt's here, too, with an agave so large the frame crops its leaves (another instance of confinement). He offers the picture as an homage to the Mexican master Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Such a tribute is a reminder that bearing witness can have another, happier aspect: offering praise. DAVID GOLDBLATT: NO ULTERIOR MOTIVE PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BOTANICAL WORLD At Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven, through June 22 and June 8, respectively. Mark Feeney can be reached at
