8 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
COURTESY THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK
Dorothea Lange took the powerful portrait “Migratory Cotton Picker,
Eloy, Arizona” (above) while on assignment for the Department of
Agriculture in 1940. (Imagine the current Administration hiring artists
to expose the plight of the working poor.) The photographer began her
influential thirty-year career as a social crusader doing field work with
her husband, the economist Paul Taylor, and producing reports that
the government handed out to promote the New Deal. Language—
including the handwritten notes that accompanied her pictures—was
central to Lange’s project, and the exhibition “Dorothea Lange: Words &
Pictures” (at MoMA, through May 7), deftly curated by Sarah Herman-
son Meister, gives equal respect to her photographic prints (ninety-six)
and her publications (seven, in handsome shadow boxes and vitrines).
Her best-known images are of indelible faces in hardscrabble places;
an entire wall of the show is devoted to Florence Owens Thompson,
the subject of Lange’s famous “Migrant Mother,” taken in 1936. But
she also had a humane eye for text, like the hand-painted sign she
encountered at a California gas station in 1938: “This is your coun-
try don’t let the big men take it away from you.”—Andrea K. ScottINTHEMUSEUMS
1
A RT
“A New MOMA”
Museum of Modern Art
The Vatican, Kremlin, and Valhalla of modern-
ism has reopened, after an expansion that adds
forty-seven thousand square feet and many
new galleries. Far more, though still a frac-
tion, of MOMA’s nonpareil collection is now
on display, arranged roughly chronologically
but studded with such mutually provoking
juxtapositions as a 1967 painting that fanta-
sizes a race riot, by the African-American artist
Faith Ringgold, with Picasso’s gospel “Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907). Some of the
rehangs electrify, notably in the first room of
the permanent collection, where a sequence
of Symbolist work—by the likes of Redon,
Vuillard, Ensor, Munch, Gauguin, and Henri
Rousseau—leaps, after a de-rigueur pause for
van Gogh, to Cézanne, who comes off more
than ever as revolutionary. (The room also
has six lyrical ceramics by George E. Ohr, the
nineteenth-century “Mad Potter of Biloxi”—
one of several invigorating nods to formerly
scanted outsiders.) Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway
Boogie-Woogie” (1942-43) is freshly recon-
textualized as an outrigger to an eye-opening
historical show of Latin-American art, which
includes work by the ingenious Brazilians Lygia
Pape and Hélio Oiticica. The best time to visit
the revamped MOMA is your first, punctuated
with reintroductions to old artistic compan-
ions. Masterpieces dulled by overfamiliarity in
an account that had become as rote as a college
textbook spring to second lives by being repo-
sitioned.—Peter Schjeldahl (Ongoing.)Darren Bader
Whitney Museum
The oldest known still-lifes are ancient Egyp-
tian—frescoes of figs for the afterlife. The
Assyrians carved pomegranates from ivory.
And so it continued, from Caravaggio’s grapes
to Cézanne’s apples. In the mid-twentieth
century, produce became a material, not just
a subject. In 1962, the Fluxus artist Alison
Knowles wrote a simple score for a perfor-
mance: “Make a Salad.” The greens can serve
dozens or hundreds. On the eighth floor of
the Whitney, the sharp-witted New York
Conceptualist Darren Bader offers food for
thought in the variable installation “Fruits,
Vegetables: Fruit and Vegetable Salad.” (The
museum acquired the undated piece in 2015.)
Forty pedestals are topped with a visually
striking variety of edible readymades, which
on a recent visit included a kumquat, an ar-
tichoke, rainbow chard, an aloe leaf, and a
pineapple. Every two days (before they spoil),
the sculptures transubstantiate into ingredi-
ents when a team from the nearby restaurant
Untitled chops them into a superbly weird
salad.—Andrea K. Scott (Through Feb. 17.)“Theater of Operations:
The Gulf Wars, 1991-2011”
MOMA PS
Might art afford new things to know and new
ways to feel about matters that are so dismay-
ing and depressing that they hobble the brain
and lock down the heart? Not really. That’s
the sour news in this museum-wide show of
more than two hundred and fifty contempo-
rary works, which is complicated by tangential
sensations of grotesquerie and elegance, fury
and poignance, and, perhaps, philosophical
insight. Most informative are the ruggedly
handmade dafatir (notebooks) by Iraqi artists,
whose struggle to make art becomes a subject
in itself. “She/He Has No Picture,” from 2019,
by the superb painter Hanaa Malallah (who
immigrated to the U.K. in 2006), amplifies
the dafatir aesthetic in a wall-filling array of
portraits on scorched canvas, depicting some of
the more than four hundred civilians who were
killed, in 1991, in an air-raid shelter by a U.S.
“bunker buster” bomb. Such raw authenticity
clashes with the comfortable sophistication of
works by European and American artists who
respond far more to media reportage of the
wars than to the wars themselves. Exceptions
include the British graphic artist Sue Coe, who
finds focus for her classic Expressionism and
her lifelong sorrow and anger at human barbar-
ities. But, for the most part, a sort of clammy
vicariousness reigns.—P.S. (Through March 1.)Takuji Hamanaka
Lorello
DOWNTOWN Only close inspection reveals that
this artist’s airy, geometric abstractions are
meticulously collaged rather than drawn. Ha-
manaka, who was born on Hokkaido, Japan,
and lives in Brooklyn, prints his tiny pastel
shapes with hand-inked woodblocks—the
same bokashi technique favored by the nine-
teenth-century masters Hokusai and Hiro-
shige, who used it to achieve the color gradi-
ents of their landscapes. This delightful small
show features seven subtly pulsating works,