When news first circulated that the Metropolitan Museum was to lease Marcel Breuer’s building from its original occupant, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the word was that the Madison Avenue facility would be the Met’s new contemporary wing. We should be grateful, on the evidence of its opening exhibitions, that that does not appear to be the plan. Contemporary art needs to remain visible and vital at 1000 Fifth Avenue for the Met to thrive fully as a encyclopedic museum, for there is nothing like being able to see the work of a living artist within close proximity to achievements of distant eras, to be reminded of continuities and ruptures alike, of shifting aspirations and perennial concerns.

Breuer’s architecture is sold short, furthermore, if we think these sumptuously grave galleries are exclusively suited to modernist and contemporary art. As in the museums of Louis Kahn, the dark, rich timbres of exposed concrete and raw slate beautifully offset the textures of many kinds of art and artifact. Just as high modernism looks startling and fresh in classical settings, so too, anything from medieval armor to Mughal miniatures can take on unexpected resonances in stark modernist surroundings. A case in point: Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas. Although arguably a little cramped and deserving a wall of its own, the Venetian master’s late glory is the magisterial opening salvo of Met Breuer’s inaugural survey exhibition, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” It is an incredible privilege to see this picture in New York City.

It feels unsporting to spoil the celebration with an inconvenient observation, but this painting is surely not unfinished. “Unfinished” (a title and concept that recall the New Museum’s 2007 re-launch exhibition, “Unmonumental”) is an audacious and enterprising way of connecting the satellite with the mother ship. Emphasizing art of the last 150 years while sustaining broader historical attention, the exhibition draws a thematic thread from old master tradition into contemporary sensibility. But by what specific criteria is The Flaying of Marsyas unfinished? It is a painting in the fast, loose, bravura old-age style of Titian, but if every aspect of a picture’s demeanor is meant and felt by its author (and the style of this painting is totally commensurate with contemporary works by Titian) why should its lively, self-consciously ambiguous painterliness be designated “unfinished”?

Maybe it would have been better to title the show “Unfinish” — in the present tense. This would suggest a proto-provisionalism in the colorito of Titian’s late touch and to justify the whole range of intentionality in the works this survey assembles. Provisionalism is, of course, a hot button contemporary label that makes the nonagenarian Renaissance master sound like a Bushwick hipster, but the term is no more anachronistic that the likes of “romantic” and “impressionistic” which would have been the natural ways to describe Titian’s late surfaces not so long ago. Of course, there are many works in this exhibition that were abandoned, or just meant as sketches, or in some fashion disrupted, and the process and pictorial thinking laid bare is indeed illuminating. But the key problem with “unfinish” as deployed here is that it privileges tightness, all-overness and gloss — literal “finish,” as in signed and sealed — as somehow yardsticks of artistic accomplishment, or the norm from which the plethora of artists in this show are deviating. But these are good problems for an exhibition to have because they have us pay attention to surface, think deeply about intentionality, and allow for disruption of canonical successions and period divisions.

Even more encouraging and heartening is the choice of artist for the first solo presentation at Met Breuer. Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90) was a minimalist of exquisite poise, rigor and resoluteness. This comprehensive retrospective focuses on her graphic works and monochrome paintings. The quiet austerity of her vision is the perfect complement to Breuer’s dignified architectural understatement. But more significant is the defiance of marketing expectation on the part of the Met’s curators in choosing a relatively unknown artist from outside the international mainstream and contemporary fashion: “difficult” art in “slow” mediums. It signals, let’s hope, that Met Breuer is to be placed at the service of the best that museum scholarship can come up with, defeating any sense that modern and contemporary equals flashy and populist.

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Published this month, the catalogue for “oil painting and sun,” Suzan Frecon’s impressive recent exhibition at David Zwirner, is a fine record of the exhibition and contains a thoughtful essay by David Cohen as well as short texts by the artist that reflect on her process as well as on specific sources of inspiration. During a public conversation held in the galleries toward the beginning of the exhibition, Frecon and Cohen discussed the difficult issue of interpretation through description of her abstract paintings. What follows below is my attempt to add to this by looking in detail at the paintings presented in the exhibition.

Of the eight paintings present, lapis ordering adjacent blues (2015) and dark red cathedral (tre) (2014) are the smallest, both 29 5/8 x 24 inches. The titles, color and scale of the paintings bring to mind Frecon’s longstanding interest in the history of European painting — including Quattrocento panel painting. The half halos, as form at least — here without specific divinity — radiate color. Frecon works on graph paper drawn to scale to establish compositions with colors in mind and then in some instances makes a small painting first. Take dark red cathedral and the much larger book of paint (2015), for example. The compositional similarities are clear; the colors chosen differ however, evincing the intuitive nature of the process. Throughout the exhibition, movement of the brush and bleeds of oil from one color to the next are far from hard-edge abstraction: each change at the boundaries or variation in opacity of the color crucially adjusts a painting’s reading. A painting from 2005, four directions, can be viewed, as the title suggests, in all the orientations available for the painting. Here the painting is horizontal (the only horizontal painting in the exhibition). Its soft geometry interlocks in a maze-like way. Rectangular elements turn and repeat — subtle shifts of scale occur. It is typical that the colors (reds, blues and a green) have weight, and yet resist stasis because of both the musical or architectural stepping of shape and visible brush work. They appear “ineluctably suspended,” to quote the artist, on describing a quality she looks for in painting.

The galleries are lit with natural light for as much of the day as possible, and in the largest one are four paintings — one on each of the four walls. All the paintings measure 108 x 87 3/4 inches and comprise two horizontal, equally sized oil-on-linen panels. In each of the paintings the horizontal line where one panel meets the other is also a point at which there is a change in color. The curved shapes, situated above and below, are horizontally truncated, asymmetrical and specific to the boundaries of the panels’ abutment, which are the external edge and interior passage. The measure and proportions of the paintings — using both the geometry of the Golden Mean and an intuitive searching of relationships within it — determine size of shape, the shapes’ proximity to edge, and color. The size of the paintings insists on an embodied viewing, making it possible for the works to visually enfold viewers standing directly in front of them. The experience is physical, perceptual and meditative; each painting, as it responds to changes of light, incorporates a constant transience as perhaps corollary to the permanent fluctuation of states of being.

DUST (2014), seen obliquely on approaching and entering the back gallery reflects light from areas painted using tube paint with added oil, and absorbs light in matte areas: the relationship of positive and negative space is enhanced. Consequently, light falling onto flat surfaces that have been divided into areas of two different reflective qualities. The passage of light across a given surface is always shifting in Frecon’s paintings, becoming a component part of the paintings’ aggregated meaning. The dark reds and oranges shift tonally, and modulate light as much as the shapes themselves, that recur from one painting to the next.

A horizontal, oblate and earth-colored shape touches three sides of the upper panel of terre verte (2014). In the lower half of the painting, two greens, one lighter than the other, stretch from side to side at its upper edge; a slow curve echoes and inverts the oblate shape above. Its lower edge, a horizontal that, while forming a rectangle beneath, also appears to darken this zone along the base of the painting — like a sky before heavy rain. The idea of color is a key starting point for Frecon, so this change of color range, when compared with the warm hues of DUST, makes the impact of chroma on surface and shape emphatic. Within the relatively simple vocabulary, a variation in weight, complexity and illumination occurs that generates vivid differences. Taken together, Frecon’s work materializes the ideas that generate it — ideas about color, surface, shape and scale — the desire is for painting itself to make a self-referential, visual narrative, that is evocative of, rather than representative of, experience in the world.

In Cohen’s essay, the subject of words in relation to image is dealt with subtly and with regard to the paintings included here, while acknowledging the necessary difficulty encountered in communicating experiential and intellectual responses to some works of art. The role of light and its integral importance to Frecon’s painting is also expansively and insightfully described. Altogether this is a publication well worth waiting for and will contribute to the understanding of Frecon’s work, while marking the achievement of this exhibition.

Cohen, David and Suzan Frecon. Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2015). ISBN-13: 9781941701096, 91 pages, $55

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It’s been more than 100 days since most of America learned about a small town outside of St. Louis, MO called Ferguson, and many more since a cell phone video went viral of a man dying from having his throat and chest crushed while being restrained by police on Staten Island. While Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s names have received the most attention in the popular press, there were many more Black people killed by law enforcement officials this year, a phenomenon that is not new or that unusual. It wasn’t just that “the block was hot” this summer, but it seemed like the entire nation suddenly felt the heat. Each time another racial injustice was revealed this year, it became more difficult to claim with sincerity that we are living in a post-racial America, or that race doesn’t have as much impact in daily life as it once did.

I know in the art world, it can feel like we aren’t really supposed to talk about this race stuff, but in 2014, it’s been really difficult to avoid the topic. There was the YAMS Collective controversy during the Whitney Biennial, discussions of how to critique the new Latin American wunderkind without bringing up Basquiat, a questionable exhibition in London, and an art dealer defending the exploitative work of an artist by saying there are worse things to be upset over… like global warming. Was it easier to report on and critique those and similar incidents because they were such blatant examples of racism? Why has finding words to discuss the aftermath and recent “non-indictment indictments” in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown been more difficult?

I’ve struggled with writing something that said everything I wanted to say about the images the media used to tell the story of Michael Brown’s death and its aftermath too. How do art critics talk about the framing of all Ferguson protesters as rioters and looters, the visual absence of Officer Wilson, the ghost of the deceased Brown, and the use of racially coded language like “thug”? Why do we even need to speak up? In art, we critics — unless our last names are Davis, Cotter, or Saltz — don’t always have the freedom to talk about race in concrete terms for fear of accusations that we lack objectivity or may be employing our “race card” — whatever that is — or worse. None of us want to be dismissed as crazy or hysterical, people who have nothing better to do than stir up the pot and keep sleeping dogs from lying down. Besides, isn’t art free from all of those social constructs like race and gender or economic limitations…?

Lived experience tells me that we have a lot of work to do, and that there is much at stake. Responses to the media treatment of Brown like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, where social media users paired photographs of flattering images like a yearbook portrait with something fault-finding, such as an impulsively misguided selfie to highlight the news media’s polarizing and oversimplified portrayal of black youths, is devastatingly real. If one of the roles of criticism is to reflect on the contemporary cultural moment and spark thoughtful conversations about how we experience the world, examining the visual culture associated with current events matters. Imagine how the language of critique might shift or how the range of voices and topics heard might expand if more art critics didn’t consider their primary role as that of quality control for good taste. Art objects and images have value in the world beyond their aesthetics. Objects and images help us interpret the world and give it meaning. The things we make reflect the way we see. What if we spoke of the visual language of respectability politics in these officer-involved shootings? What if we critiqued that?

There is a long and sordid history of tension between police and Black communities, a history that stretches back to the plantation overseer. So much of law enforcement practice in the U.S. has been about managing the autonomy, self-determination, and individual freedoms in a society; so much about Black community life in the U.S. has been about fighting to reclaim those same rights from those who would like to take them.

The most morally repressed and vile among us maintain the belief that people are generally hard-wired to do good. Police are supposed to protect and help the citizenry, and each time one of their number does something to shatter that assumption, most of us are still taken aback. Overgrown bullies and would-be sociopaths do not become police officers, right? Is that why CNN looped that video of Mike Brown at the corner store allegedly stealing even though the video had not yet been authenticated? It is sadly ironic that 2014 is the 50th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, during which the police and local Klu Klux Klan members colluded to cover up the murder of three Civil Rights workers, two of whom were White northerners.

Art critics are preoccupied with the connections between words and images and their connotations. We study, research, posit, analyze, reflect, and conjure, all in search of meaning. We know that while images are visual, they are emotive. We also understand that the way we see is different depending on how we feel or what’s happening around us. The events that seemed to culminate around Ferguson appeared so ripe for our critical eyes, but it’s been hard to fix our gaze there. Some of us may think it doesn’t concern us — that this isn’t about art — but we’re wrong.

Something about this cultural moment jolted our collective “we” to action. Americans are talking with strangers about the way they live their lives and we’re struggling to understand how others might experience the world. Art is a powerful tool for increasing understanding and bridging seemingly “un-bridgeable” gaps. As protests across the country continue, I’m hoping the art world isn’t caught sleeping again, but instead, makes room for more of its practitioners and participants to add critical perspective to the tidal change the entire world seeks. If art is who we are when no one else is looking, perhaps criticism can help reveal even more of what’s been hidden in the dark.

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