May 21 – September 12, 2021
1099 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

I had heard of the “bloody Sundays,” as the salons hosted by Louise Bourgeois at her Chelsea townhouse were termed for the intimidating quality of her critiques on art brought by visitors. The phone number was listed and I called to ask permission to attend. “Yes, three o’clock” she herself answered and slammed down the receiver. A full house assembled in her parlor, admitted by an assistant who was also filming the proceedings. We sat on a faded banquet and on an odd collection of chairs against the walls in an L-shape. There was  a small table in the middle offering a box of supermarket chocolates, a bottle of whiskey that no one touched, and some plastic cups.

The room looked unpainted down the decades, the back garden a dense thicket of green, and a large inspiration board was heavily layered with all manner of invitations and images. When Louise slowly entered from the kitchen through French doors with the aid of a walker, her damp, short hair combed back, wearing a white long-sleeved Helmut Lang T-shirt, the room fell silent. She sat at another small table with some fresh watercolors in a white plastic cupped container off to the side, suggesting she had been working there recently. Visitors gradually came forward with an example of their art and sat at the small table facing her and so went the afternoon. Steeled a bit, I got up and placed a smallish bronze figure on the table between us. Her sole remark was “Impressive” and I felt lucky it had escaped her wrath.

Hurtle forward to the Jewish Museum 2021. Freud’s Daughter is the first exhibition in the United States to focus on the Bourgeois’ psychoanalytic writing, shown with a selection of her art from all its epochs curated, and artfully installed, by Philip Larratt-Smith, her literary archivist for eight years. An example of his installation prowess is the small utility closet that he recommissioned for three early wood Personages, (1946-1954) now cast in bronze which nestled within light grey walls reminiscent of the kind of enclosed spaces favored by the artist.

In 1952, at age forty, during an intensifying psychological crisis, Bourgeois began psychoanalysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, seeing him four to five times a week until 1967 and then off and on until his death in 1985. For eleven of those years she had no solo exhibitions, and from 1955 to 1960 she seems to have made no art at all. During this time she read extensively from psychoanalytic literature, transcribed dreams, scrutinized her psychic life with its inner truths, kept journals, and notated ideas for art.

Her sample jottings on loose sheets displayed here include the following: “3:15 am. olives, radishes with salt and butter. I would like to eat some anchovies for something salty.” “he talks like a bottle of glue. she talks with a hatchet,” “when i do not ‘attack’ i do not feel myself alive,” “futility of effort, failure, loss.” A diary page notes, “All day sitting in a chair/I could not lift a feather/nor make a phone call/depression……”  These personal writings show the viewer that her sculpture emerges from an inner, psychological life instead of from a one-dimensional intellectual approach.  It a challenge to current norms that such intimate materials, revealing her naked distress and violence, are presented to a male-dominated public sphere where armor is the rule and the vulnerable is attacked or ignored. In this way we can see that her art takes a stand for another perspective and values. 

Freudian theory framed the challenging events of Bourgeois’s life, its hidden emotions and anguish. Although many aspects of Freud’s theories have been contested, there’s general agreement that he brought into prominence the idea of the unconscious, a focus of great consequence for culture and the individual. Freud’s contemporary Erich Fromm, though a psychoanalyst himself, has said that most people resist the idea of unknown parts of themselves and moreover, if everyone knew what they could know about themselves, it would shake society to its foundations. Freud’s empirical recovery of his patients’ repressed wishes, fantasies, emotions and instincts was thus very radical, embraced by cultural avant-gardes but off-putting to a world intent on bending humans to the machine and consumption.

For Freud, self-knowledge meant becoming conscious of what is unconscious, a difficult process that is both emotional and intellectual. This lifetime process pays off by releasing energy from the efforts of repression, energy available to be awake and free. His most controversial and misunderstood idea, the Oedipus Complex, involves psychic work with a prime symbol of authority and fertility, the phallus. Some have extended its Freudian meaning to point out that his correlative theory of penis envy symbolizes female social envy of the freedom, power, and prestige of men under patriarchy at the cost of the subordination of women. “Part of the argument of this show,” according to Larratt-Smith, “is that Louise’s work and Louise’s writings, represent a contribution, and in some sense a corrective, to classical Freudian psychoanalysis.”

Bourgeois’ art neither illustrates theory nor manifests neurosis, as Freud might believe. Instead one could say, alchemy points toward a process in which the autobiographical and unconscious is rendered into artistic form. The process, occasionally described by contemporary artists, is a kind of trance while working in the studio, that allows the unconscious to flow outward to confront the materials, while bringing into play techniques and decisions exercised by aesthetic power. In both cases the ego is subordinate to other energies. T.W. Adorno argued that real art entails risk-taking, genuine experimentation, bringing to life fresh perceptions, new feelings and alternative values, in a struggle for individuation–all qualities that Louise Bourgeois exemplifies.

The artist often remarked that her childhood never lost its magic, mystery, and drama. The materials of memory and the unconscious ignited the physicality of her sculpture that could include a gamut of found and appropriated objects and materials. Her techniques, including sewing, carving marble and wood, and modeling clay and plaster, arose from uncovering expressive possibilities of these materials. “I transform nasty work into good work. I transform hate into love.”

A Cell sculpture in the exhibition, Passage Dangereux (1997) is an approximately 28 foot long, theatrical cage, made from woven iron mesh with a locked doorway, that the viewer walks around and enters visually. It includes the materials metal, wood, tapestry, rubber, marble, steel, glass, bronze, bones, flax, and mirrors. The art work is populated with objects such as chairs hanging from the ceiling (a French custom in attics), the raw depiction of a sex act  in steel and bronze , a small bronze spider (symbol of her mother’s industry and protection), a tiny child’s school desk, a tapestry from the family workshop, a large wood electric chair, and others.

Experiencing this artwork is somewhat akin to being in the midst of a dream with its condensed vibrations, with objects that light up a larger realm than the individual. The artist stated that her cells represent “….different types of pain; the physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. Each cell  deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at.”

Arched Figure No. 3, (1997) is constructed with a thick slab of steel partly revealed, partly covered by a sewn volumetric female form in black fabric. Its backward arching figurative pose simultaneously connotes hysteria and sexual ecstasy.  Knife Figure, 2002 made from fabric, steel and wood forms an amputated coral-colored cloth figure with a large, sharp kitchen knife poised over it, threatening violence. Mother and Child, (2007) made from dark blue fabric and thread, constructs a rounded, voluptuous female torso with a tiny dark blue head tranquilly resting on its maternal middle. These sculptures reveal the body as a sensing, feeling entity whose knowledge and wisdom channel significant experience.

By the time of her death in 2010 at age ninety-eight many considered Bourgeois the foremost female artist of our time. She managed to give suffering a voice in complex yet accessible sculptures that summon the sting and bite, the vitality and shock of earlier modernists. Philip Larratt-Smith has noted how Bourgeois is a symbolist and storyteller. As she herself said, “The connections that I make in my work are connections that I cannot face. They are really unconscious connections. The artist has the privilege of being in touch with his or her unconscious, and this is really a gift. It is the definition of sanity. It is the definition of self-realization.” Empowered by Bourgeois’s writings and sculpture we can say more: that the unconscious provides a foothold from which to imply critique of the culture, asserting a tangible resistance to an administered society and its suppression of the individual, from the deepest registers of the psyche, a utopian anticipation of social freedom.

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November 2, 2018 to March 3, 2019
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
New York City, jewishmuseum.org

Martha Rosler consistently challenges power structures, particularly in relationship to class and gender. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, power passes thorough the powerful as well as through the powerless. Her long overdue New York City mid-career retrospective embraced the breadth of her oeuvre with works that ranged from sculpture, installation, video and photography. It should be said, however, that while opening wall text states that the show is in close chronological order, the visitor’s path is not clearly defined, nor is chronology followed.

One gallery, for instance, dedicated to text related pieces contains works from 2006 to the present. “Reading Hannah Arendt” (2006) is an installation consisting of clear plastic ceiling-to-floor panels with large black text excerpts from Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” set up as a maze-like structure. Opposite is a wall of large-scale photographs of bookshelf groupings with titles such as “Debt,” “The “Anatomy of Fascism” and “What Really Happened in the 1960s.” These book images range from 2008 – 2018 and serve as an archive of Rosler’s artistic and pedagogic research. The photographs pay homage to the book form, employing a constructed documentary strategy. The labyrinth piece is difficult to navigate or make sense of in a gallery setting. The book photographs do inspire one to take notes for future reading, underscoring the theoretical and historical foundation of Rosler’s artistic practice.

It is evident that Rosler occupies a feminist position in many of her works. Vital Statistics Simply Obtained (1975), for example, a video depicting the artist’s body being measured in a regimented manner, equates raw statistical data to an idealized female body type. This objectification highlights unequal power relationships within gender politics. However, to label Rosler solely as a feminist artist delimits her prescient and powerful contributions to both art history and theoretical discourse. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974), for example, challenges the photographic gaze of the social documentary genre and the asserts the force of Conceptual Art strategies.

The groundbreaking work of well-meaning historical figures such as Jacob Riis, Louis Hine and Dorothea Lange, at times, debase the lower-class subjects through the photographic gaze. Rosler critiques the photographer’s power position by substituting cliché images of skid row alcoholics with images where there is a deliberate absence of human subjects, deliberately frustrating viewer expectations. The unpeopled spaces are paired with derogatory descriptive terms of that malign the individuals and their inebriated state with words in two different font styles. Pejorative terms such as “drunk, derelict, bum” questions the objective stance of the social documentary project that at once brings attention to social ills while concurrently objectifying subjects that lack social agency. In an ironic historical twist, the current gentrified Bowery renders the piece an historic document much like Atget’s photographs of Old Paris. This theme reoccurs in Rosler’s recent project that records the transformation of her Brooklyn neighborhood from a working-class community to a bourgeois enclave.

Greenpoint Project (2011), the city exemplifies the role of gentrification in the rise in income inequality. She photographs and interviews numerous local merchants creating photographic portraits that are juxtaposed with quotes from the interviewees. As an inverse to the word text of The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems the subjects here speak for themselves. One notable tension within the artwork is the artist Carlos Valencia, a barista at Five Leaves restaurant. His words reveal a conflicted role as he states that he is a “Friend of the Owner, not an Owner.”

Rosler’s landmark early video work, Semiotics of the Kitchen, (1975), inadequately displayed on a small television monitor in the corner of a gallery, parodies TV cooking shows and essentialist definitions of women’s domestic roles. Rosler wryly invokes semiotic theory to explode the limitations of such social constructs. In this black and white video, the artist boldly addresses the camera reciting the alphabet, pairing each letter with a corresponding kitchen implement.

The elegiac series, Bringing the War Home (1967-72) utilizes home decor magazine editorials combined with Vietnam War news images in a photomontage format. Rosler reproduces the phenomenon of the horrors of this unpopular war entering American homes through the mass media in using those same print materials in a remarkable example of both image appropriation and recontextualization. Notable is the photograph of Pat Nixon within an ornate interior, dressed in a ballgown, where in a picture frame on the wall of the White House drawing room Rosler inserts the image of a war victim.

Overall, this exhibition rightfully situates Rosler as a standout visionary figure who perpetually interrogates the social and political dynamics of contemporary culture. She often highlights the manner in which the mass media manipulates and reinforces social norms by utilizing the same source material to bear witness to social and political inequality. In an age of the #metoo movement, Time’s Up and gross economic inequality with the rise of the 1% “Martha Rosler: Irrespective” speaks volumes to the perils of our current state of affairs. Rosler forcefully challenges viewers to adopt an activist consciousness.

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May 4 – September 16, 2018
1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street,
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

In 1950, a Chaim Soutine exhibition at MoMA attracted a serious response from the New York art world. Willem de Kooning expressed great admiration for Soutine, arguing  that “[he] builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance.” Indeed, three years later de Kooning’s own figurative works responded to that show. Subtitling this year’s small exhibition of thirty-some Soutine still lifes “Flesh,” the Jewish Museum subtly (perhaps unconsciously) alludes to de Kooning’s famous statement, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented”?

In our very different contemporary art world, this show will surely fascinate figurative and abstract painters alike. (I would be surprised, for instance, if Bill Jensen is anything but riveted by it.) Soutine appeals to our present sensibility in ways that his once more famous near-contemporaries, Picasso or Mondrian, do not. Where Cubism, Surrealism and modernist abstraction are now of essentially historical curiosity, Soutine’s painterly manner remains a live option. That is surprising, for he wanted to work within the old master and early modernist museum-based tradition – he expressed great admiration for Chardin, Courbet and Rembrandt. But the way he radicalized that tradition remains galvanizing.

Soutine is a surprisingly varied artist.  Still Life with Artichoke (1916) sets a dinner on a tilted table in a traditional still life format while Still Life with Fish (1921) lines up the fish in an opened up dish. He paints a number of hanging fowls, Chicken Hanging before a Brick Wall (1927) being one. He does great sides of beef and, inspired by Courbet, The Fish (1933). And near the end of his life, he painted the very strange Sheep behind a Fence (1940), which isn’t a still life. All of these works (except for the first and last of these I have named) set his subject, which is painted in his expressive style, on a flat, relatively neutral close up background. To speak, then, as I do, of Soutine as an expressionist is to identify the way that his technique always draws attention to the pigment per se. Seeing his luscious intense browns, yellows and reds, we are aware at the same time of the subject that they depict. Of course, all figurative art calls for this dual-awareness. But Soutine, more than the old masters he admired, focuses attention on the physicality of pigment. In his review of a Jewish Museum show of twenty years ago, Arthur Danto offered a challenging argument, which is relevant to our present inquiry. Soutine, he argues, is an artist who could only be properly (or fully) understood after the development of Abstract Expressionism, for his goal was “to paint recognizable subjects abstractly, that is to say, without the isomorphism between the image and the subject’s visual form as traditionally sought.” In thus inspiring de Kooning, Soutine showed us how to understand his own works – and demonstrated why today they remain so challenging.

Contemplating Paul Cézanne’s still lives, you become aware of how he manipulates the table and bowls supporting his apples and other still life objects, fashioning a visually precarious, spatial harmony. Cubism, we see, is in the wings. Here, in very different paintings, Soutine’s subjects are the armatures, the pretext if you will, for his exercises in pure painting. A great colorist, he uses intense, generally dark pigments, which almost always remain luminous. His art is touching in the double sense of that word: it is intensely expressive because you feel that he has created from mere pigment, as it were, the objects which he depicts; and it is touching because it holds your attention. Some old master still life painters show precious or rare foodstuffs and artifacts, luxury goods. Soutine’s banal subjects don’t call attention to themselves. And yet, once I attend momentarily to any one of them, I can hardly tear my eyes away.

Arthur Danto’s “Abstracting Soutine” is republished in his The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York, 2000).

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May 5 to September 25, 2017
1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street,
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

Paul Gauguin once belligerently declared: “Ugliness can sometimes be beautiful; the pretty, never.” As an article of modernist faith, this sentiment was later joined by pronouncements such as the critic Clement Greenberg’s “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” Despite being qualified by “sometimes” and “at first,” these categorical statements also work as exclusionary dicta.

An ugly image is generally thought to be displeasing upon visual contact. Here it’s implicitly regarded as a sign of tough mindedness that breaches conventions and disrupts them with art that defines a new, challenging beauty. The ethics of such ‘ugliness’ may also generate an artist’s principled resistance to being understood too easily. If a picture is truly modern, viewers must look for meanings that are unexpected, imperious and hard to take.

A pretty picture, contrarily, is stigmatized as a product made to gratify or seduce viewers, in compliance with cultural norms. Also, it is associated with aesthetic modes favored by the “weaker sex.” An appetite for pretty things is enhanced if it has a sweet tooth. One can therefore easily imagine what a manly modernist might think of a painting titled “Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart.”

The words themselves carry such a heavy charge of glucose as to suggest an ironic intent. Their author, the New York artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) does employ irony, but not so much as to dilute the warm feeling she extends toward her subjects. It emerges in the way the men she depicts are as feminized as the (far fewer) women, both made amiable by the camaraderie of the salon world she presented. Even when seated, these dapper fellows are very light on their feet, as dainty as a ballerina’s. Far from treating it only as a nuance in the proceedings, Stettheimer asserted the prettiness of the men at the soirees she enjoyed and often hosted. You are invited into her relaxed socialite enclaves, fetched there by diminutive characters that resemble dolls or puppets.

What strikes the eye immediately is the rhythm of line and limb that jumps about, especially in ensembles with little narrative pretext. They’re frequently scattered across nebulous white grounds and are endowed with a gem-like aura that resembles the capitals in illuminated manuscripts. Yet, when they’re on the move, they might also recall the snap of a Fred and Ginger routine in Hollywood movies. Had he known them, Busby Berkeley, the dance choreographer, would have found them congenial—if a little loose. Stettheimer herself was beguiled by glamor, whose effects and trappings she applied to decorate private or public festivities. Fashion runways, cocktail parties, and picnics on the grass were evoked as appropriate environments for diarist memories, garnished with vines that twitch and outsized flowers that bloom.

Contemporary American figure painters of her period, roughly 1917 to the early forties, had not visualized anything so outlandish as could be called a fragrant atmosphere. Café life in the “roaring twenties” was at least well toasted by Archibald Motley in Chicago. As for the next decade, regionalists specialized in agrarian sagas, and their urbanist counterparts in carnivalesque satire or citified solitude. Think of Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, George Tooker, and the romantic Puritan synthesis achieved by Edward Hopper. One would look in vain for any of their works to feature a cigarette in a holder or a champagne flute about to be sipped. (Also, Prohibition didn’t encourage it.) Rather, the sufferings of thirties hard times induced in painters a need to take themselves seriously, propelled by austerities of style. Stettheimer was an ardent New Dealer. But if politics entered her art, it was apparently to celebrate the patriotism of Wall Street, art museums and the entertainment industry with a bouquet of fire works and flags. Her Cathedral series, which visualizes such themes, easily manages to squirt hints of institutional self-importance up from the pseudo pageant conducted on the ground. Fifth Avenue as the Garden of Eden. This artist worked hard to have fun—at short, metropolitan range.

Certainly her jocular sensibility placed Stettheimer far to the side of contemporary art mainstreams. There is, of course, no law against artists delivering such marginal reports. But when their iconography is concentrated upon a privileged, insular coterie in an era of national suffering, the result may look inhumane to people with a liberal conscience.

But what if the art itself exhibits sympathy to members of a minority group, so disparaged at the time that they could not expect to have civil rights equal to those of their fellow citizens? I refer to the depiction of gay men in Florine Stettheimer’s oeuvre.

In life, no more than a handful of those she knew were actually homosexual—a fact that scarcely mattered. She visualized almost the whole lot of them throughout her career, as essentially fellow women, regardless of their male outfits and histories. They come across as vibrant presences, alive with curvaceous behaviors. And when they swagger, they’re truly elegant. It’s a comedy of manners, whose players are perceived in almost a domestic context. Forget the dynamics of gender conflict or any idea that an ethical issue is involved or that an activist program was required to motivate the stories she tells. Everyone looks at who ever else, presumably through the embracing lens of the female gaze, come what may.

Some notion of this shift in gender inter-action has certainly trickled into the growing scholarship on Florine Stettheimer and lifted her up as an American original. The talk at those gatherings she shows might have been highfalutin and some of the accents, foreign. “This isn’t Kansas anymore”, says Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” Just as evident is the fairy tale aura that has morphed Florine’s New York into a mythical city—not that it has affected her characters, though it definitely has conditioned her viewers.

This overt figure of pictorial speech permitted the artist certain liberties, above all the camouflage of modernist innovations by outsider, “unschooled” practices. Her interest in garden, lacy, or wood bower ornament was translated into obtrusive yet attractive frames for her paintings. Her drawing style imitated those of young girls, fashioning mash notes in daybooks, yet it seems more knowing and mundane than was within the reach of its genre. As for the space fancied in her art: nominally, it results from a bird’s eye view, suggesting an aloof, buoyant perspective. But it’s really a white, pearlescent background holding vignettes in place without any general grip of logic or locale. This white stuff serves as an invisible scaffold, sometimes melted a little to reveal labels that tell of the personalities illustrated in unrelated scenarios. Such is the funky outcome of strategies that have transposed a collage aesthetic into a personal memoir.

I have so far left out two features that reward our contact with her works, as physical objects. They have surfaces built up through attentive layering by a palette knife, that in the end creates a thickness worthy of frosting on pastry. Or cake. I came away seduced by this flirtation with the human sense of taste. More dramatic, however, is the appeal Stettheimer makes to arouse viewers by color. In her vision, a marriage of color and light can take place in a deliquescent array of hues, as in stained marble, or in opaque, individual fields of heavily saturated yellows, oranges, or blues. Against the pervasive white, with which they are paired, they stand out as fiercely emotive patches of here and now, front stages of perception rather than of those far away. Seeing these pictures only in black and white reproduction would not prepare you for the forcefulness of their chromatics.

So, is Florine Stettheimer’s art a paragon of prettiness, as formulated offhandedly by modernist doctrine? Aware that one of her closer friends was Marcel Duchamp, alias “Rrose Sélavy,” I would say “maybe.” With his readymades, Duchamp played an unlikely role as metaphysical dandy. But when we turn to another of her associates, one she actually collaborated with, the case is not so simple. Gertrude Stein invited Stettheimer to design the costumes and sets for the opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” (music by Virgil Thomson), Their most vivid moment of collaboration came in the chorale (sung by an all black chorus), “Pigeons on the grass, alas!” The theatrical constituents of this scene included cellophane, feathers and lace—materials designed to banish any thought of modernist gravitas, though inescapable as avant-garde tokenism. Given that she anticipated the advent of popular forms into progressive art, Stettheimer insinuated that they were also to be enjoyed as absurdist gamesmanship. She had chops in both areas. Pretty, ugly, beautiful: she misused and mixed their modes at cost to the stodginess of their traditions. No wonder the critics of our day are want to take their hats off at the spectacle she provides.

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At the Jewish Museum, on the night of October 23, a large crowd turned out to hear “What’s at Stake for Abstract Painting Today — and Where Do We Go from Here?” The panel featured a discussion among painters Joanne Greenbaum, Philip Taaffe, and Stanley Whitney, responding to prompts from the writer, critic, and curator Bob Nickas, who was the moderator. It was followed by questions from the audience. I showed up just moments before the program’s commencement, and after an onerous check-in process I was happy to see several friends in attendance. Nickas focused the conversation especially on young abstractionists, who he identified in his opening remarks as men born between 1980 and ’89. Other critics have likewise been eager to harp on a highly visible cadre of such boys: Parker Ito, Jacob Kassay, Lucien Smith, Oscar Murillo, David Ostrowski, Fredrik Vaerslev, and others. Their work has been given many monikers, including “Zombie Formalism” by Martin Mugar (subsequently popularized by the artist and critic Walter Robinson), or Jerry Saltz’s minimally clearer and more incisive term, “MFA-clever” painting.[1]

No artist of that cohort sat on the panel, which Nickas explained by saying, “I considered inviting some of them, but it felt like setting them up and not a good thing to do in public. They can have a panel of their own and talk about how we’re wrong or don’t understand.” Neither were any of them mentioned by name during the discussion, though images of the artists and their work (as well as the work of the panelists) were shown in a slide presentation that was paged through by Nickas mostly without commentary during the conversation. In his introductory remarks, Nickas emphasized his dislike of those artists as voguish and robotic by describing their careers as suffering a Menudo Problem: every artist as a boy band (a brand), “in a rush to be famous and therefore in a rush to be forgotten.”

The conversants were affable and their sharp quips were balanced with genuine acquisitiveness — an interest in what one another saw as the predominating problems and issues of contemporary painting, and seeing what insights they had gleaned from or about younger artists. Each was sure to reiterate, unequivocally, that there are younger artists they appreciate and admire. Nickas and Greenbaum were both quick to proclaim explicitly that they’re not generational.

Criticisms of the aforementioned youths were varied and most were well deserved, albeit delivered with what to my ear sounded tinged with a kind of “what’s wrong with the kids these days?” ageism, though perhaps I’m mistaken. Whitney and Taaffe noted that there have been bad artists in every era. Whitney offered that, “Painting changes, but not very much.” Nickas remarked that in The Afternoon Interviews, a series of conversations between Calvin Tomkins and Marcel Duchamp published in 1964, that many of Duchamp’s complaints are identical to those being made about today’s arts, and that “the [arts’ economic structure] has remained continuous.” Indeed, commoditization, cynicism, and repetition were perhaps as common in that era as they are today. However, Nickas went on to say that there is little similarity between today’s art market and the one Duchamp experienced a century ago: during the Armory Show, for a short time, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) was one of the most famous and shocking new paintings in the world, after which it wasn’t displayed publicly for a very long time and Duchamp didn’t exhibit for several years. Nickas speculated that today — 50 years after Tomkins’s conversations with Duchamp, and 100 years after the first Armory Show — if a painting achieved the same level of fame it would likely be immediately repeated by the artist a dozen times over and shown as much as possible.

The panelists’ lamentations were primarily aimed at the mindless production-line work of those certain young artists: paintings that are churned out in large quantities, using the repetition of a few simple gimmicks. Such work is often described as conceptual, but with an abusive use of the term; this “conceptualism” conflates process and content, prioritizing the former at the latter’s expense. It typically employs expressive-like gestures, their formalism pre-slotted into a post-war art-historical genealogy. Greenbaum especially hypothesized that the young men are underformed and that their work is rushed from brainstorm to execution to market.[2]

The sum of all these features is decoration: canvases that are speckled or monochromatic or heavily worked into atmospheric mush or inscribed with a solitary line of colorful spray paint, pigment shot from fire extinguishers, athletic line markers, or whatever. Images that are nominally painterly, but essentially just expensive color swatches, follow not only formally but also ideologically from Abstract Expressionism, which the art historian TJ Clark lamented for its undying endurance and described as “vulgar,” the more successful for its greater vulgarity:

Seen in normal surroundings, past the unobtrusive sofas and calla lilies, as part of the unique blend of opulence and spareness that is the taste of the picture-buying [bourgeoisie] of America, a good Hoffmann seems always to be blurting out a dirty secret which the rest of the décor is conspiring to keep. It makes a false compact with its destination. It takes up the language of its users and exemplifies it … For what it shows is the world its users inhabit in their heart of hearts. It is a picture of their ‘interiors,’ of the visceral-cum-spiritual upholstery of the rich. And above all it can have no illusions about its own status as part of that upholstery. It is made out of the materials it deploys. Take them or leave them, these ciphers of plenitude — they are all painting at present has to offer.[3]

It should come as no surprise that Lucien Smith’s “rain paintings” resemble Pollock or that Jacob Kassay’s reflective monochromes allude to Barnett Newman or Frank Stella. Their work fulfills a nearly identical role.

In a recent essay for New York Magazine‘s Vulture blog, Jerry Saltz averred that the Internet, speculators, and schools are in some way coacting to make contemporary abstraction more dull and painters more conservatively similar. (He did not hypothesize a specific mechanism or motive.) By way of example, Saltz selected more than a dozen works by the cohort in question, compiling a Buzzfeed– or Huffington Post-like slideshow. Others in the slideshow included Mark Flood and Charline von Heyl, both of whom are about a generation older than the artists in question, as well as Helene Appel, whose work is spare and minimal, but trompe-l’œil, except if viewed as a 200-by-300-pixel jpeg. So the definitional boundaries of abstract painting’s contemporary problem children may be up for debate, depending on the peculiar tastes of a critic, curator, or artist. Or it may simply be dependent on the particular formal affinities that make for a contemptuously banal clickbait slideshow.[4]

Looking through back issues of arts magazines it’s easy to find faddish similarities between artists, curatorial experiments, and even exhibition advertisements from every time prior to the web’s arrival and the market’s recent rapid growth. In the 1960s and ’70s every zombified manner of grid, dash, monochrome, and unconventional canvas could be found on gallery walls and in print. Today’s scholars, critics, and curators are apparently eager to rediscover middling parishioners from the church of the grid and rectangle who have since fallen by the historical wayside. They should, and we shouldn’t be surprised if many new painters are consigned to such fates in the near and distant future. What is different about the contemporary, readily digitized era is our ability to easily index and examine a vast array of artists and their work, both past and present. Greenbaum asserted that she believes many of the young artists she speaks with are mostly looking at work that was made in the past 18 months, on their computers and at art fairs.

Perhaps even more so, as far as I can tell, a bigger problem is the profusion of superfluous rhetoric that substitutes for… uh… discourse. Published in Triple Canopy last year, Alix Rule and David Levine’s “International Art English” identified the way that fuzzy, otiose language has become the argot of arts conversations from press releases to the academy and everywhere between. The willing abrogation of critical talk to artists, consultants, and markets virtually guarantees that phony explanations will be offered in lieu of considered content, that buzzwords stand as simulacra of thought rather than leading to any idea, that every kind of nonsense is spoonfed to people willing to buy into it, and that ambiguity is prized over staking a claim.[5] That has nothing to do with the bogeymen that are more often worried over: fairs, auctions, speculators, dealers, and on and on.[6] As Nickas asserted at one point, this relatively contemporary ethos of de-skilling, and the seemingly accepted truism that anyone can be an artist, “teaches naïve people that they’re also talented.”[7] My feeling is, tangentially, that the actual sin is to try to persuade people, by way of inane jargon, that naïveté and redundancy are actually relevant.

Toward the end of the event, a young woman asked if the panelists still believe that a group of boys sits at the apex of contemporary painting. Nickas answered Yes, and then smirkingly added that he takes this from a good source: Philips auction catalogues.[8] I don’t know whether this is earnest or not, but the people who probably benefit most from the confusion of cultural capital with an investment strategy are investors. It would be far better, as I see it, to note that those young men are a symptom of lazy allowances for people seeking highbrow excuses to decorate their homes with banalities, and who might make a profit on later resale. Nickas quoted John Miller’s aphorism that painting is a “service industry,” which I think gets at this very problem — not a new one, nor an invention of young men painting today, and one that is propped up by rhetorical structure that acts like a Fuck You to any thinking viewer. One would hope, though, that the wizened representatives of earlier generations, some of whom have actively supported a few of these young men and their peers, can take responsibility in their laxity, and that we can as well,[9] and that perhaps we could all demand more from what we look at, calling out bullshit where it is found.

[1] Fashionable painting has begotten a fashionable dispute.

[2] This judgment is probably true, but is likewise applicable to earlier generations, such as Frank Stella, Richard Serra, Chuck Close and others who emerged from grad school and more or less walked straight into the gallery system. And anyway, this problem isn’t one owned by any particular party, and both the artists and galleries share in the responsibility of prematurity.

[3] Clark, TJ “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism.” In Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, 397. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

[4] The unspoken flipside of Saltz’s critique is the equally vapid and arbitrary cheerleading promotional apparatus, including much of recent criticism. Saltz even tempers his critique with an apologia, noting that while he thinks such work is a problem, he likes the way it looks.

[5] My preferred example of this kind of thing is the press release for Jacob Kassay’s 2013 exhibition at 303 Gallery, which is so riddled with typos and non sequiturs that it’s absolutely depressing that such a document can hope to explain or even entice the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on such work.

[6] In fact, despite their problems, galleries have historically done a great deal to protect the artists that they represent (again, taking into consideration the disparities in who they choose to represent and other very serious crimes). And the expansion of the art market since the 1980s, while concentrating wealth among a small class of artists, collectors, and dealers, has also sparked an enormous widening of opportunities that allows for more artists, more writers, more artist-run spaces, more non-profits, marginally greater diversity, greater museum attendance, and so on.

[7] About all of these phenomena and propositions I’m basically agnostic.

[8] In September, Nickas, with artist Ryan Foerster, released a zine made from collaged Philips catalogues, inscribed with marginalia poking fun at many of the young male artists featured therein and also discussed on the panel.

[9] This includes me, by the way.

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September 14 to November 11, 2012
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
New York City, 212-423-3200

Izhar Patkin explores history, memory and personal and collective reinvention in his powerful, fluid, illusionistic panorama, You Tell Us What to Do Act III at the Jewish Museum, the centerpiece of a show titled “The Messiah’s GlAss.” Painted tulle veils are embellished with haunting imagery, draped curtains that cinematically depict powerful stills drawn from’ the artist’sbackground. Israeli-born, Patkin has called New York home since the 1970s when he first came to prominence with his famous “Black Paintings.” Known for his monumental pieces, Patkin purposely kept a low profile since the closing of his gallery, Holly Solomon, although his work is now exhibited extensively throughout the world. In 2013 MASS MoCA will show the mid-career survey currently at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

“The Messiah’s glAss”, an elaborate clear twelve-foot high glass sculpture, five years in the making, is the crystalline heart of this show. In an allusion to biblical references to the Messiah returning as a lowly ass, Patkin creates a flat tabletop, replete with hooved legs, translucent testicles and a serrated tail, reminiscent of a sativa leaf. Similar to the palanquin that transported the Ark of the Covenant, the table holds a handsome decapitated donkey’s head, crowned with a diadem of donkey ears. The crown gracefully echoes the classical laurel wreath, or perhaps a traditional Torah ornament. The alchemy of figuration mixed with fantasy adds to the sculpture’s potency.

Patkin has said this piece addresses the subjugation of secular Israel by orthodox Jewish fundamentalism. The title refers to the parable of the secular Jew who created the state of Israel, later to be ridden by the religious Jew. Patkin’s exhibition is as brave as it is beautiful, addressing politics poetically, without overt provocation. It is fitting that “the Messiah’s glAss” debuted the week of 9/11, and hopefully its eloquent message of tolerance will be embraced in the midst of the Jewish holiday season.

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Soft-spoken, reticent-seeming eighties art star David Salle has two speaking engagements in New York this season.  He is the second speaker in the American Federation of Arts 2010/11 series at Christie’s, following Will Cotton who opened the series last month.  The event takes place at the auctioneers’ Rockefeller Center premises at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, from 6.30-8.00 pm.  Tickets are $15 ($10 students) and reservations are required at arttalks@afaweb.org.  Salle is also a panelist at a discussion about the work of Roy Lichtenstein in conjunction with the show, Roy Lichtenstein Reflections, with the Pop master’s widow Dorothy Lichtenstein and art historian Graham Bader at the Chelsea branch of Mitchell-Innes and Nash, 534 West 26th Street, on Saturday, October 16 at 4pm. This one is free but reservations are requested at alina@miandn.com.

Another historic figure subject to round-table reassesment is dealer Leo Castelli whose legacy is to be discussed at the Jewish Museum in their books in focus series by biographer Annie Cohen-Solal, who recently published Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, who will be joined by scholars Robert Pincus-Witten and Barbara Jakobson, at the museum, on Thursday, October 7 at 6:30 pm.  For tickets, reserve here

The New York Institute for the Humanities and the Gallatin School at NYU are presenting three lectures this October by the 85 year old polymath and cultural commentaror Harry Berger, Jr.  On Tuesday, October 5 his topic is “Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo’s Cve: Vasari and the Erotics of Obscene Connoisseurship,” at 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, at 6 pm, with a response from Patricia Rubin, director of New York University’s Insitute of Fine Arts.  The following Tuesday, on October 12 at 6pm. his topic is “Caterpillage,” which delves the topic of 17th-century Dutch floral still lifes.  That talk, with a response from art historian John Walsh, takes place at the Casa Italiana at 24 West 12th Street.  And finally, back at Cooper Square on Wednesday, October 27, at 6pm, Berger addresses his Shakespearean interests in a talk titled “The Mercifixion of Shylock”.  The respondent on that occasion will be Barry Edelstein, director of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare Initiative.  For more information on these three talks, which are free, contact nyih.info@nyu.edu

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The Jewish Museum’s May Ray exhibit is a blockbuster without the line, which is the result of the surprisingly little critical acclaim it has garnered.  Curated by Mason Klein, this beautifully designed show is the most comprehensive and analytical since the survey of this seminal modern artist at the Fondazione Mazzotta, Milan, in 1999. “Alias Man Ray’ includes photographs, assemblages, and paintings, and introduces little known treasures like the1911 fabric piece Tapestry made in Brooklyn before the artist left his family home; the original assemblage piece, Obstruction, a mobile of 63 wooden hangers; and the protoPop masterpiece of two silhouetted profiles kissing, Image a deux faces, (1959). The 110 cloth blocks of Tapestry, gathered from his family’s sweatshop cutting room floor, sets the standard of Man Ray’s meticulous craftsmanship, his blurring of exquisite fabrication with modernist sensibility.

As a Brooklyn Jew myself, I always knew Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) as an almost-native son. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, he soon moved to Brooklyn with his family of Russian immigrants. What I did not realize, however, was Man Ray’s fierce dedication to obscuring his origins, to the point of cropping a family photo to leave only an image of himself and his mother. Assimilation provides the premise for this illuminating exhibition, as detailed in Klein’s incisive catalogue essay: “In changing his name from the colloquial Manny to the unmoored Man, the artist lost and found himself in anonymity.”

Man Ray began his artistic career as a teenager, and these adolescent works – high school mechanical drawings- reveal a lifelong fascination with duality and concealment. An early proponent of Dada, (and a lifelong bohemian), Man Ray’s first marriage to Adon Lacroix, a Belgian poet, introduced him to French culture. In 1920 he created The Riddle also knownn asThe Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, a prescient work in view of his future allegiance with the Surrealists. An old sewing machine – aluding to the famous line from Lautreamont about the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table but also, perhaps, a reference to his sweatshop childhood – was wrapped in army blanket and rope, photographed and then discarded. Man Ray recreated the piece in 1971.

When Man Ray emigrated to Paris in 1921, Marcel Duchamp (who had befriended him in New York) welcomed him at the train station. Even before his arrival, fellow Dadaists knew Man Ray’s work. Two 1918 photos, one of an eggbeater, (L’Homme) and another of clothespins and light reflectors (Woman or Integration of Shadows) were included in Salon Dada: Exposition Internationale before the artist’s actual arrival.

It was in Paris that Man Ray became a professional photographer. Vanity Fair, under the editorship of Frank Crowninshield, published two early Rayographs for theirNovember 1922 issue. Rayographs derived from a process of solarization discovered by chance in the artist’s darkroom; they entail direct exposure of objects on the photographic plate without intervention of a camera. Man Ray used modern machinery parts,or everyday objects combined with human faces or hands, in a technique Jean Cocteau described as “painting with light.” Another early collector, famed couturier Paul Poiret made Man Ray’s portraits a chic and commodifiable entity.

The subject of many of his most beautiful photographs, the young American Lee Miller sought Man Ray out as both lover and mentor. Miller also inspired Object of Desire, a drawing of a metronome capped with a photo of Millar’s languid eye. Instructions commenced with “Cut the eye from a photo of one who has been loved but is seen no more.”

For twenty years, Man Ray worked as a Parisian artist, creating such surrealistic gems as Le Violon d’Ingres, (1924) and La Fortune (1938) with its foreboding primary colored clouds, a reaction to Europe’s increasingly dangerous political scene. His fashion and society images regularly appeared in Vogue and Harpers Bazaar.. He photographed the cool crowd –from Barbette, a drag queen championed by Cocteau to Ernest Hemingway, Meret Oppenheim, Kiki de Montparnasse (another of his lovers), Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and those tourists wealthy and connected enough to commission a portrait.

Joining European artists like Thomas Mann, Max Ernst, Luis Brunel and Salvador Dali, Man Ray fled the Nazis in 1940, and went to Hollywood where he married Juliet Browner in a dual ceremony with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Juliet was his companion for the rest of his life, and they returned to Paris in 1951. Late pieces like the magnificent screen Message to Marcia(1958/65) and the Smoking Device (1959/1970), with its surgical tubing predating today’s vaporizers, show that the artist continued a fruitful creative life.

Man Ray lived to become an inspiration for Allan Kaprow, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol whose 1974 portrait paid homage to the artist, with its unusually complex composition and deliberately blurred edges.

The premise of the artist’s desire to obliterate his history is well illustrated and further documented by the wall text, and presents an intriguing addition to our understanding of his work. But even without its investigative information or theory,  “Alias Man Ray’ is a revelation. Ray’s added artistic details are always inherently modernistic – from the solarized photos with their defining outlines, his use of inscription, to his 1947 lithograph self portrait and it’s linear bisection.

Transgressive, experimental, fiercely individualistic, Man Ray is an iconic artist who bridged European and American experience, worked creatively and commercially, and evaded any categories not of his own creation.

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Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered
The Jewish Museum

1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
New York City, 212 423 3200
March 16 to August 03, 2008

Dan Flavin: The 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition
Zwirner & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York City, 212 517 8677
March 6 to May 3, 2008

There is a new genre of art exhibition, I’ve noticed recently.  And while the genre is novel, the actual exhibitions I’m referring to are not.   The crux of this new genre –  which has found a cozy place in contemporary art history – is, basically, to re-stage a previous exhibition (though not necessarily at the original venue) several years, even decades later, and see how its effect has evolved over time.

Two examples of “recycled exhibitions,” one at a museum and one at a gallery, are up in New York right now:  Andy Warhol’s controversial show from 1980, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, has been recast in 2008 as Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered, currently on view at The Jewish Museum, the last stop of a three-city tour; and dan flavin: fluorescent light, which exhibited at the now defunct Green Gallery in the fall of 1964, has been resurrected today as Dan Flavin: the 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition, presently at the Zwirner and Wirth Gallery.

Back in 1980, Andy Warhol, in collaboration with New York gallerist, Ronald Feldman, chose ten prominent Jewish figures – including writers, actors, composers, philosophers and political figures – as the subjects for his controversial show.  Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Sarah Bernhardt, Golda Meir and Gertrude Stein are among those who made the cut.  In an effort to retain the spirit of the original exhibition design, Warhol’s Jews is located today in a small room in the museum, which grants it both a casual and intimate feel.  The works are set against a series of panels painted brown so that the architectural elements would recede into the background, bringing the vibrant and characteristically Warholian silk-screens, replete with overlays of drawing and blocks of color, into relief.

Unlike the subjects of his many of his famous portraits from the 1960’s and 1970’s, Warhol had never met a single one of his Jewish “sitters.”  All the images were taken from random sources ranging from passport photos to film stills, which are on display next to the portraits. The portraits are also accompanied by preparatory drawings and preparatory collages.  The source photographs and drawings have not been previously exhibited alongside the portraits until now, which is one of the major differences between the previous exhibition and the “recycled exhibition.” 

dan flavin: fluorescent light marked a critical period in that artist’s career.  Flavin’s ideas and experiments with hand-made lighting elements culminated in 1964 in the usage of commercially-available fluorescent lighting.  The original show was meticulously curated by the artist himself and included seven works in total.  The new show, equally well-curated with all seven works in a historically accurate recreation (in a space that bears a striking likeness to the original Green Gallery space), also offers diagrams – not previously exhibited – drawn up by Flavin of the original installation.  These diagrams – much like Warhol’s source photographs that reveal a physical and emotional distance from his subjects – are where the deferred learning comes into play.

The study of art history aside, the idea that art cannot exist (or invoke meaning) outside of the context in which it was created is not always the case.  Regarding the Warhol show – which was conceived by a Catholic artist who had never before appeared sympathetic to Jews or the Jewish cause –  many perceived it as anti-Semitic.  The colorful and kitschy silk-screens of (some of them) serious intellectual and political figures came across back then as overtly tongue-and-cheek—especially when thought of in the context of the artist’s iconic Marlyns and Jackie Os.  

It was important, therefore, to see how religious and political indignation has changed or, in this case, subsided almost thirty years later.  To highlight Jewish controversy now seems more like a badge of honor and a learning tool (for those studying the history of anti-Semitism and/or Holocaust studies) than a modern-day promotion of anti-Jewish sentiment.  And furthermore, when taking into account the controversy surrounding The Brooklyn Museum’s 1999’s Sensation exhibition and Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary,” which bore the brunt of Mayor Giulinai’s indefatigable crusade, Warhol’s Jews looks as harmless as a Renoir exhibition.

In contrast to Warhol’s Jews, the re-examination of Flavin’s show has less to do with religion and politics and more to do with the progression of art in the latter part of the twentieth century.  dan flavin: fluorescent light was the first exhibition comprised solely of fluorescent lighting and was integral in the development of the artist’s minimalist rhetoric.  Further, the newly-exhibited diagrams help the viewer better understand the artist’s ideas and intentions regarding the exhibition.

These shows are just two of many examples of this new genre, which is being practiced by curators and gallerists, who see the progression of history as a yet another tool for teaching.  To revisit older exhibitions and try and gage their aftershocks years later is a worthy exercise, speaking to social/political change as well as the progression of artistic styles.  If “recycled exhibitions” can teach us anything, it’s that there’s always more to learn.

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Alphonse Mucha, color lithographs, from left: Tragique histoire d’Hamlet, 1899; La Samaritaine, 1897; Lorenzaccio, 1896.
When “the Divine Sarah” died in 1923 a million people lined the streets of Paris between the Madeleine and the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt to see her cortege wend its way to Pere-Lachaise:  An impressive turnout for an actress in her seventy-ninth year.  But a quarter century later, Marilyn Monroe, in “The Seven Year Itch,” would contemplate Bernhardt’s attendance records in relation to her own vital statistics.  More people will view her character’s Dazzledent toothpaste ad on TV in one night, she says, than saw Bernhardt perform for her entire career.  Still, muses Monroe, “I wish I were old enough to have seen Sarah Bernhardt.  Was she magnificent?”  This clip, on a continuous loop, is the dazzling first attraction in the Jewish Museum’s suitably extravagent tribute to the actress, “Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama,” the first exhibition of its kind in America.

Actually, Marilyn might not have done her math.  Bernhardt’s performances reached phenomenal live audiences.  On her 1905-06 tour of the United States (her sixth), when she traversed the continent in a private train, she visited 156 cities.  Breaking the cartel of the Theatrical Syndicate, the Shubert brothers had her perform in such alternative spaces as circus tents and the gargantuan Hearst Greek Theatre where tens of thousands would watch her rendentions in French of Racine’s Phedre and such contemporary melodramas written with her in mind as Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca and Théodora, Edmond Rostond’s L’Aiglon, Jules Barbier’s Jeanne d’Arc, and La Dame aux camélias by Alexander Dumas *fils*.

Bernhardt was magnificent by many different standards: her own, for sure.  The exhibition chronicles not only an extraordinary talent and beauty, but an ego to  more than match.  Then there’s the expectations of the masses who not only thronged performances but took home such souvenirs as serving utensils engraved with her personal motto, “Quand Même” whose handles evoked her initials and her legendary serpentine form, not to mention buttons and postcards.  And finally, Bernhardt’s fan club numbered a roster of intellectuals including an  impressionable young Sigmund Freud, in Paris to study with Charcot, an appreciative Peter Ilyich Tchaikowsky, and of course Proust, who partly drew on Bernhardt for his character Berma in “A la recherche du temps perdu” (In Search of Lost Time).

Added to financial success, theatrical innovation, enduring legend and cult following, Bernhardt’s magnificence is also to be measured in terms of the way that her form and persona tangibly changed the course of the various arts with which she interacted: proving the point makes the Jewish Museum’s exhibition a visual treat, as well as a thought-provoking exercise in cultural history.  Marilyn’s musings reflect the transience of theatrical reputation, especially before the advent of recording devices; even with them, however, dramatic accomplishments are arguably more friable than those in creative, as opposed to interpretative mediums: Whatever might have been timeless, say, about Bernhardt’s Camille, the doomed demimondaine of La dame aux camelias, by the time Greta Garbo took the same role, the Divine Sarah’s once heightened naturalism (already deemed over the top by Checkov and Shaw who preferred her rival Eleonora Duse) would have seemed absurdly dated in its artifice, as would Garbo’s method if it were applied on stage or screen today.

Bernhardt’s career actually straddles a technological divide.  She was in a way the first movie star, performing in a number of early silents, including a staging of the duel scene of Hamlet, her most notorious trouser role on stage, as well as performances as Elizabeth of England and the first filmed Camille.  On her 1880 trip to America she visited Thomas Edison to have one of her legendary declamations recorded on his newly invented phonograph.  And she was extensively, often exquisitely photographed—the exhibition boasts around a dozen original albumen prints by Felix Nadar and his son Paul, lent by France’s Bibliotèque Nationale.

But she depended for her propaganda on original art in a way that is an anachronism for today’s stars—luckily for this exhibition, as it is what makes for such a lively, engaging show.  It can so easily happen with historical exhibitions of this kind that the museum is merely a less than comfortable or practical surrogate for a book or documentary.   The Jewish Museum show is rich in visual treats that advance an idea of how Bernhardt was perceived, and promoted herself: An exquisite Symbolist portrait by the British painter Dudley Hardy, a panel of 9-1/2 x 6-1/2 inches from 1889, captures in miniature her dusky eyes, red frizzy hair, and slinky physique.  There is also a whole set of the highly stylised posters made under contract to Bernhardt by Alphonse Mucha which made the revolutionary young Czech’s career, a lithograph of Bernhardt as Phedre by Toulouse-Lautrec (one of his two images of the actress) and a pulsating, dynamic little woodcut by the British graphic artist and painter William Nicholson from 1897 which captures some sense of her charismatic stage presence, even in maturity.

Both Mucha and Nicholson demonstrate how Bernhardt and Art Nouveau were made for each other.  The actress was notorious for—and exploited to the hilt—her serpentine form.  Caricatures pick up on her extreme skinniness, aenemic complexion, and gaunt features.  Early in her career these, along with Bernhardt’s Jewishness, were lampooned.  Although baptized and sufficiently Catholic to have wanted to be nun before entering the Conservatoire and Comedie Francaise, her courtesan mother was a Dutch Jewess.  Bernhardt blended a sense of otherness and Frenchness, playing on her exoticism in the roles she chose as much as the way she performed them, decorated her home and conducted her highly public personal life.

For the exhibition’s curators, scholars Carol Ockman and Kenneth Silver, the role of Jewishness in both her self and her imposed image was crucial to their initial interest in Bernhardt, as no doubt the Jewish Museum’s, linking to their groundbreaking 1987 exhibition on the Dreyfus Affair.  But while some early caricatures, like André Gill’s “Sarah Bernhardt as a Sphinx,” published in La lune rousse, 1878, trade in antisemitic stereotypes—giving her a hooked nose actually alien to her features—by the time of the Affair she had become such an institution already that she was not singled out for further attack.

You could say Bernhardt was the Madonna of her age,—a Svengali of  constant reinvention, a relentless self-promoter, an inveterate crosser of boundaries.  These, like the Material Girl herself, included the divide between Judaism and Catholicism and between sexualities, as she was openly bisexual and prolific in trouser roles.  Bernhardt also juggled high and low, as represented by Racine and Sardou, and to the chagrin of caricaturists, acting and creating, as she was an accomplished sculptor and painter, and as she was an active self-manager, producer, imprasario.  The show includes key examples of her own artwork: her portrait bust of her lover, the painter Louise Abbéma, in a tame beaux-arts style, but also more inventive, Symbolist sculptures such as Fantastical Inkwell (Self-Portrait as a Sphinx) 1880 and Algae, 1900, an organic septre advanced in art nouveau style.

A regret of the show is that the voices that fill the space aren’t those of Bernhardt herself, despite Edison’s efforts, but her thespian descendents: Monroe; Julie Garland, imitating the actress in the 1941 Babes on Broadway; and Nicole Kidman in her Camille-eseque role as Satine in Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge.  The svelte Ms. Kidman, with her frizzy red hair, demonically expressive eyes, and milky complexion, not to mention an at once naturalistic and stylised actorly genius, seems the reincarnation of Sarah Bernhardt.  Kidman plus Madonna: no wonder the Nineteenth Century went crazy.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 8, 2005

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