THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 7
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETER FREEMAN, INC.
There is no doubt that Catherine Murphy is one of America’s greatest
living realist painters, but I wonder if that superlative might rub her the
wrong way. Grandiosity is antithetical to Murphy’s attentive approach.
The observational gifts that the artist has been honing for fifty years—she
paints from life, not from photographs, and can spend years at work on
one picture—uncover epiphanies in the mundane. Under her brush, the
intricate play of light on clear trash bags may call to mind the work of
the seventeenth-century French painter Chardin, another adept of the
modest sublime. Murphy is also having an ongoing dialogue with mod-
ernist abstraction. One quietly dazzling triumph in her new exhibition, at
the Peter Freeman gallery (on view through Jan. 8), is the six-foot-square
“Canopy” (pictured above), in which colorful plastic buckets of water reflect
the trees under which they’ve been placed. Yes, the canvas intertwines
still-life and landscape, but it’s also a riff on the repetitive strategies and
industrial materials of Minimalism, and even a sly evocation of Abstract
Expressionism and the question posed by Barnett Newman, in his famous
1966-70 series, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?”—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
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A RT
Vasily Kandinsky
Some eighty paintings, drawings, and wood-
cuts by Kandinsky, the Russian hierophant
of abstraction, line the upper three-fifths of
the Guggenheim’s ramp, in the retrospective
“Around the Circle.” The show’s curator, Megan
Fontanella, recommends starting at the bottom,
with the overwrought works of the artist’s final
phase, and proceeding upward, back to the sim-
pler Expressionist landscapes and horsemen of
his early career. This course is canny in terms of
your enjoyment, which increases as you go. The
teeming complexities that make Kandinsky’s
late phase are numbingly hermetic. A middle
range, from about 1910 to the early twenties,
seethes with the artist’s excitement as he aban-
dons figuration to let spontaneously symphonic
forms, intended as visual equivalents of music,
enthrall on their own. Finally, we are engulfed
in cadenzas of hue that may be the strongest art
of their kind and their time, relatively crude
but more vigorous than the contemporaneous
feats of Matisse, Derain, Braque, and other
Parisians whose Fauvism anchors standard
accounts of modernism. The mining heir Sol-
omon R. Guggenheim met Kandinsky in 1930
and began collecting him in bulk, advised by
the enthusiastic German baroness Hilla Rebay,
who also recommended Frank Lloyd Wright
as the architect of the museum’s hypermodern
whorl, which opened in 1959. Kandinsky lin-
gers in the ancestral DNA of the museum and
his equivocal majesty haunts every visit to a
building that cannot cease to amaze.—Peter
Schjeldahl (guggenheim.org)
Rene Ricard
Perhaps best known as a poet, Ricard, who died
in 2014, came to prominence as an art critic, in
the nineteen-eighties. In “A Girl of the Zeit-
geist,” Janet Malcolm’s 1986 New Yorker Profile
of the twenty-seven-year-old Artforum editor
Ingrid Sischy, he appears as a flamboyant, recal-
citrant character with undeniable Baudelairean
appeal. (“He dominates the conversation, but,
unlike most people who are nakedly interested
in themselves, he is also aware of what is going
on with others, though in a specialized way.”)
Sometimes Ricard wrote in paint, as a beguiling,
if motley, selection of works on view at the Vito
Schnabel gallery attests. The show, which spans
more than three decades, includes one scratchily
rendered picture from 1989—a thrift-store ship-
at-sea scene effaced with gold pastel and embla-
zoned with the phrase “Mal de Fin.” Another
melancholic angle to Ricard’s punk romanticism
is seen in the eight-foot-tall “Growing Up in
America,” from 2007-08, in which three cars are
partly obscured by a pink cursive text alluding to
queer childhood, love, and longing, and to “the
long highway we all hitch-hike alone.”—Johanna
Fateman (vitoschnabel.com)
Suellen Rocca
This Chicago Imagist first emerged in the
mid-nineteen-sixties, as a member of the
Hairy Who, a coterie of artists known for their
hands-on, syncretic approach to Pop art. Rocca
died in 2020, and, as revealed in a posthumous
exhibition at the Matthew Marks gallery, she
worked until the end of her life. Her formidable
output from her final year alone reflects a ca-
reer-spanning use of patterned compositions and
glyphlike silhouettes. The most prominent motif
is a female torso that is reminiscent of ancient
statuary, a goddess, perhaps, her arms merged at
the wrists to form a cradling U shape. (Rocca’s
gently unsettling imagery has clearly influenced
a new neo-Surrealist generation of painters,
most notably Caitlin Keogh.) In these pale-sage,
pink, and storm-gray canvases, cropped figures
often serve as strange containers for drifting
hands, clouds, chairs, and beds. Symbols of
domesticity have always populated the painter’s
inimitable world. In these lovely last works,
Rocca strikes a balance between agitation and
somnambulant bliss.—J.F. (matthewmarks.com)
for stylistic detours. Avalon Emerson leans
toward bold, anthemic selections that are also
highly playful—her live mixes tend to shine
with repeated, at-home listens. The Londoner
Ben UFO’s d.j. sets are similarly head-turn-
ing: his tastes tend to be more abstract than
Emerson’s, but his approach to sequencing
and pacing exerts a strong narrative pull of
its own. The two alternate on the decks from
open to close on Friday, Dec. 3, at Knockdown
Center.—Michaelangelo Matos
Ray Charles: “True Genius:
Sides of Ray”
JAZZ When it came to music-making, Ray
Charles could do anything. Even a basic
sampler such as the double-vinyl compila-
tion “True Genius: Sides of Ray” features his
multitudinous range. How could one artist
so embody American music in all its unruly
diversity—blues, jazz, R. & B., country, gospel,
mainstream pop—and then synthesize it into a
wholly personal amalgam of sound, essentially
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MUSIC
Avalon Emerson x Ben UFO
ELECTRONIC This smart pairing brings together
two dance-music d.j.s who’ve shown a schol-
arly attention to set planning and a penchant
