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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Neue Galerie
The psychic torment of Kirchner’s life aside,
there’s nothing not to love about this overview
of the German Expressionist painter, whose
uninhibited palette is played up here with
the seductive use of flamingo-pink and Prus-
sian-blue walls. Chronologically arranged, the
exhibition presents Kirchner’s early-twenti-
eth-century work with Dresden’s Die Brücke
group (notable for its bold style of figurative
abstraction); his depictions of Berlin’s bus-
tling street life; and his wartime works, in
which the modernist agitation of his sensibil-
ity dovetailed with personal and geopolitical
crises. Kirchner, who struggled with addiction
and was discharged from military service
during the First World War after a mental
breakdown, shows himself, in “Self-Portrait as
a Soldier,” from 1915, uniformed, smoking in
his studio, and holding up a gangrenous arm
stump—a projection of his dread. Kirchner
spent much of the remainder of his life in the
Swiss Alps, producing wonderfully electric
scenes of his environs. But his troubles were
not over: following Hitler’s designation of his
work as “degenerate” and the Nazi annexation
of Austria, in 1938, Kirchner, fearing Swit-
zerland would be annexed next, committed
suicide.—Johanna Fateman (Through Jan. 13.)
“Pope.L: Choir”
Whitney Museum
Two years ago, this influential African-Amer-
ican artist boiled, bottled, and sold water that
he collected from household taps in Flint,
Michigan. (Sales of the limited edition ben-
efited local charities.) Two months ago, in an
unannounced, tenderly slapstick performance,
Pope.L poured a seemingly endless bottle of
the same water into the Hudson River as dark-
ness fell. The incident—which you can watch
in a two-minute video on the Whitney’s Web
site—was a prelude to this commandingly
gnomic show, in which a salvaged drinking
fountain is suspended, upside down, from the
ceiling of a dimly lit room. (It is, among many
things, a clever retort to Marcel Duchamp’s
readymade urinal, whose title is “Fountain.”)
Water gushes from the metal behemoth into a
battered thousand-gallon plastic tank below;
once it fills, it drains through a jury-rigged
network of pipes. The process repeats ad ab-
surdum throughout the day, just as crises like
Flint’s perpetuate cycles of racial segregation.
The phrase “NDVSBL WATER,” set in black
text on a black wall, mocks the fallacy of one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice
for all.—Andrea K. Scott (Through Feb. 29.)
Ana Mendieta
Galerie Lelong
CHELSEA In 1961, when she was twelve years
old, the Cuban-born Mendieta arrived in
Dubuque, Iowa, as a refugee. The magnetic,
numinous black-and-white photographs of the
artist’s “La Tierra Habla (The Earth Speaks)”
document site-specific land works—petro-
glyphlike carvings that she made during a
visit to Cuba, in the early nineteen-eighties.
Mendieta viewed the works as a communion
with both the island’s terrain and its indige-
nous Taíno culture. The forms she inscribed
in limestone caves refer to ancient feminine
and maternal deities, but they also recall
the haunting imagery of her better-known
“Siluetas,” for which she traced her body’s
outline on the earth. An important figure in
the feminist-art movement, the artist died in
1985, at the age of thirty-six, not long after
making these mysterious and sombre works.
With their almost abstract swaths of craggy
texture, they hint at a new phase to come had
her career not been cut tragically short.—J.F.
(Through Nov. 16.)Howardena Pindell
Greenan
CHELSEA The festive look of these richly
textured shaped canvases—blanketed with
brightly colored impasto hatching or encrusted
with confetti—belie the difficulties that this
artist faced in producing them. Pindell’s
“Autobiography” series was made during a
fifteen-year period following a car accident,
in 1979, from which she suffered serious mem-
ory loss. Punctuating the surfaces of these
handsome abstractions are seams—fissures,
really—bridged by stitches resembling lit-
tle teeth, and fragments of photographs and
postcards. They lend the paint-toughened
surfaces a pieced-together fragility and form
their swirling and fanning interior structures.
The found imagery, emerging from dense
areas of acrylic color, includes disembodied
hands, a frog, and a statue of Shiva. Neither
random nor coherent, the fragments seem to
represent the impressionistic puzzle pieces
of partial recollection, which the composi-
tions dynamically integrate into a meaning-
fully illogical whole.—J.F. (Through Dec. 7.)Bill Traylor
Zwirner
UPTOWN Traylor was about twelve years a slave,
from his birth, in 1853 or so, until Union cav-
alry swept through the cotton plantation
where he was enslaved, in 1865. Seventy-four
years later, in 1939, homeless on the streets of
Montgomery, Alabama, he became an extraor-
dinary artist, making magnetically beautiful,
dramatic, and utterly original drawings on
found scraps of cardboard. He pencilled, and
later began to paint, crisp silhouette figures
of people and animals—feral-seeming dogs,
ominous snakes, elegant birds, top-hatted
men, fancily dressed women, ecstatic drink-
ers—either singly or in scenes of sometimes
violent interaction. Traylor’s style has about it
both something very old, like prehistoric cave
paintings, and something spanking new. Song-
like rhythms and a feel for scale, in how the
forms relate to the space that contains them,
give majestic presence to even the smallest
images. How should his art be categorized?
What won’t do are the romantic or patronizing
epithets of “outsider” or “self-taught,” which
belong to a fading urge to police the frontiers
of high culture. These terms are philosophi-
cally incoherent. All authentic artists buck
prevailing norms and develop, on their own,
what matters in their art.—Peter Schjeldahl
(Through Feb. 15.)