The New Yorker - USA (2020-09-21)

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THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 7


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Jordan Casteel
The first solo museum show by this American
painter, who captures both likeness and mise en
scène with tender incandescence in her figura-
tive works, was open at the New Museum for
only three weeks before New York City shut
down, in March. There’s no substitute for seeing
these larger-than-life portraits in person, now
that the museum has opened again, but you can
also take a video tour, in which Casteel’s gener-
ous narration elaborates her themes of human
connection and community. In the artist’s early
nudes of Black men, from 2013, her subjects
anchor lamplit domestic interiors with relaxed,
direct gazes. The men’s balance of self-assurance
and vulnerability feels like a nuanced correc-
tive to stereotype, as does the flipped gender
dynamic of artist (historically male) and muse.
Other paintings, such as “Harlem at Night,”
from 2017, show Casteel to be a consummate
colorist, rendering the artificial light from shop-
windows to magical effect as it floods sidewalks
and illuminates faces. In the portrait “Harold,”
also from 2017, a man sits in a teal plastic chair in
front of the blazing yellow-orange geometry of a
laundromat.—Johanna Fateman (newmuseum.org)

Joe Fig
In his small paintings of people at museums and
galleries, Fig offers the vicarious pleasure of
others’ absorption, as well the direct rewards of
his own sharp, lustrous compositions. The Sara-
sota-based artist charts his travels during the past
four years—to New York, mostly—in these lovely
over-the-shoulder views, which capture observ-
ers paused before canvases by Rembrandt, Kerry
James Marshall, Alice Neel, and Kota Ezawa,
among others. There’s something melancholic
about Fig’s mid-distance perspective; we stand
with him at a remove from both the viewers and
the art. The show’s title, “Contemplation,” refers
to the meditative appreciation of art but also to
the expressive postures and the diverse backs of
people’s heads that tend to partially block the
works they regard. A half-dozen rapt visitors,
standing before a trio of Max Beckmann self-por-
traits at the Met, are a tender reminder that
people-watching can be every bit as fascinating
as looking at paintings.—J.F. (cristintierney.com)

Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver
The Museum of Modern Art reopens with this
Japanese artist’s spectacular “Cinematic Illu-
mination,” from 1968-69—a precise, immersive
installation that suggests the raucous and by-
gone (at least for now) experience of night life.
Recently acquired and restored by the museum,
the piece rings the fourth-floor studio with
elaborately sequenced stills—shots of simple
movements and images lifted from mass-me-
dia sources—that flash and ripple with color,
accompanied by a loud proto-punk, psych-rock
soundtrack. This pulsing merry-go-round of a
visual effect was achieved by surprisingly simple
means: a mirrored disco ball and eighteen slide
projectors. (The clacking of the advancing slide
COURTESY SUSAN INGLETT GALLERYcarrousels overhead underscores the low-tech


The life of the American artist Robert Kobayashi reads something like
a Zen koan. A gardener who knew nothing about gardens, he opened a
beloved gallery that was usually closed. Despite critical kudos (including
a 1958 piece in this magazine) for his early abstractions, he shifted to an
offbeat figurative style, a folkloric Pointillism-in-the-round. Born in Hawaii,
Kobayashi, who died in 2015, at the age of ninety, came to New York in
1950, after a stint in the Army, to study art and was soon hired by MOMA to
tend to a Japanese house and garden, installed outdoors. After that exhibit
closed, he stayed on, working at the museum for more than two decades. In
1977, a year before Kobayashi retired, he and his wife, Kate Keller Kobayashi,
bought a building in Little Italy, with a former butcher shop on the ground
floor. He eventually used the storefront to display his chimerical sculptures
and paintings (including “Tablescape #2,” from 1999, pictured above, fash-
ioned from ceiling tin, paint, and nails on wood) for passersby, who often
encountered them through the window thanks to the gallery’s unpredictable
hours. On Sept. 17, the Susan Inglett gallery opens “Moe’s Meat Market,”
an exhibition devoted to Kobayashi’s spirited work.—Andrea K. Scott

AT THEGALLERIES


ingenuity of the feat.) Originally conceived
for the Tokyo discothèque Killer Joe’s as part of
an arts festival organized by Gulliver’s Fluxus
contemporaries, the installation reflects a fervid
moment in postwar Japanese art when counter-
culture and Conceptualism dovetailed. Intended
as a kind of performance event—a projection to
interact with the moving figures in a club—“Cin-
ematic Illumination,” with its ambience and
energy, impresses in daylight hours, too, even
amid a safely sparse crowd.—J.F. (moma.org)

Jacob Lawrence
Who made America great when America began
making itself? That question is at the heart of
this exhibition of exquisite and harrowing paint-
ings, now on view at the Met. Organized by the
Peabody Essex Museum, the show reunites the
twenty-six extant panels of Lawrence’s thir-
ty-part cycle “Struggle: From the History of
the American People,” created between 1954 and
1956, which limn episodes from the country’s
foundational years, from the Revolutionary War
to the construction of the Erie Canal. Tran-

scendentally rendered in tempera on board—
in an earthy palette of brown, blue, mustard,
and green, almost always violently disrupted
by red—each work compresses the dynamic
sweep of a history painting into a modest twelve
by sixteen inches. Unsung American heroes
are Lawrence’s ultimate subject. In the tenth
panel, “We Crossed the River at McKonkey’s
Ferry.. .,” he relays the story of George Wash-
ington crossing the Delaware River, replacing
the figure of one triumphant general with a
collective of anonymous, wave-battered sol-
diers.—Andrea K. Scott (metmuseum.org)

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MOVIES

Mother
Albert Brooks is a sort of experimental film-
maker—he puts his tightly controlled characters
into peculiar situations crafted to perturb them
and observes the uproarious and liberating re-
sults. The very subject of this 1996 comedy is

with his origins as a “con boy” and satirizing
everything from YouTube how-to videos to
the Whiffenpoofs and “Who shot J.R.?”—S.L.
Free download pdf