8 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
in the play, or what to do with the biographies
we’re offered.—Vinson Cunningham (12/6/21)
(Helen Hayes; through Jan. 16.)
Trouble in Mind
This 1955 play by Alice Childress, making its
much belated Broadway début (directed by
Charles Randolph-Wright for Roundabout
Theatre Company), slowly unravels an aging
actress named Wiletta (LaChanze), who is
reluctantly exposed to an acting approach
that asks her to find emotions to support
the actions of her character. Her director, Al
Manners (Michael Zegen), fancies himself
a social and artistic progressive. The play
they’re rehearsing, slated for Broadway, is
about small-town Black folks who, because
they want the right to vote, get threatened—
and worse—by a gathering lynch mob. Al,
who is white, expresses dissatisfaction with
Wiletta’s performance as a mother whose son
is in trouble, asking her to “justify” her char-
acter’s decisions—not merely to act them out
with rote professionalism—and Wiletta begins
asking questions that the script, and her di-
rector, just can’t answer. “Trouble in Mind” is
pessimistic about the structures that underpin
the entertainment industry, but it is bullish
about the possibilities of earnest artistic pur-
suit. Even a schmuck like Al can read some
Stanislavsky, bring it clumsily into rehearsals,
and, unwittingly, spark the beginnings of a
revolution.—V.C. (12/6/21) (American Airlines
Theatre; through Jan. 9.)
1
A RT
James Ensor
Expressions of disgust approach the sublime
in the barbed œuvre of this Belgian painter,
who attracted scandal in the late nineteenth
century with such iconic canvases as “Christ’s
Entry Into Brussels in 1889,” a brightly ma-
cabre street scene. Ensor’s preoccupations
surface less festively at Gladstone 64, in small,
mostly black-and-white works from the same
period, on view in “An Intimate Portrait,”
curated by Sabine Taevernier. The earliest
pieces here are two self-portraits from 1879,
in which the artist emerges in profile from
a candlelit gloom. A decade later, he revis-
its that pose in the tiny, grim etching “My
Skeletonized Portrait.” Ensor’s angst-tinged
renditions of the supernatural—his penchant
for skulls and masks—anticipated and inspired
the next century’s Surrealist and Expressionist
movements. But these historic works seem
particularly personal, even private, in the rare,
focussed context of this gallery presentation,
their diminutive scale conveying the psychic vi-
cissitudes of an interior life.—Johanna Fateman
(gladstonegallery.com)Catherine Murphy
There is no doubt that Catherine Murphy is
one of America’s greatest living realist paint-
ers, but I wonder if that superlative might rub
her the wrong way. Grandiosity is antithetical
to Murphy’s attentive approach. The obser-
vational 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 modernist abstraction. One
quietly dazzling triumph in her new exhi-
bition, at the Peter Freeman gallery, is the
six-foot-square “Canopy,” 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’salso a riff on the repetitive strategies and in-
dustrial 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
(peterfreemaninc.com)Helen Pashgian
Johannes Vermeer and the aerospace industry
rarely come up in the same conversation.
But they connect in the celestial sculptures
of Helen Pashgian, who should be as ac-
claimed as James Turrell or Robert Irwin.
All three artists were part of the Light and
Space movement, a loosely affiliated (and
mostly male) group, based in L.A. in the
late nineteen-sixties, that shared an interest
in geometric abstraction and luminosity, ex-
perimenting with new materials then being
developed by NASA. Pashgian first set out to
be an art historian, making close study of the
Dutch masters’ translucent layering, but when
offered a spot in a Harvard Ph.D. program,
in 1958, she declined in order to concentrate
on her own art. Within a decade, she had
pioneered a radical process of casting hot
resin with elements of solid acrylic, resulting
in small, lambent orbs that appear, somewhat
miraculously, to contain infinite shafts of
light. The transcendently beautiful exhibition
“Helen Pashgian: Spheres and Lenses,” at the
Lehmann Maupin gallery, is the artist’s first
solo show in New York City in fifty years.
Linger in the “Lens” installations, in which
epoxy disks seem to float, vanish, and rema-
terialize in two darkened rooms in the course
of five mind-expanding minutes.—A.K.S.
(lehmannmaupin.com)Sophie Taeuber-Arp
This wonderful retrospective at MOMA
tracks the multifarious achievements of a
Swiss virtuoso of many crafts—textiles, mar-
ionettes, stained glass, staggeringly labor-
intensive beading—who worked under the
radar of ruling styles until her death, in 1943,
at the age of fifty-three. My first-ever solid
take on Taeuber-Arp was via a survey, also at
MOMA, of the genesis of abstract art, circa
1910-25. I kept coming back to her smallish
wool embroidery of rectangular forms, “Verti-
cal-Horizontal Composition,” from 1916. (It’s
on view in the current show, too.) Beautiful,
utterly assured, and ineffably heartfelt, it
made Taeuber-Arp’s male associates (Kandin-
sky, Mondrian, and Malevich among them)
seem relative louts, worked up about innova-
tions that were a breeze for her. No matter
how committed she could be to geometric
order, Taeuber-Arp communicated her free-
dom. That embroidery was “woman’s work”
by the standards of the time added to my star-
tlement, upending the lazy pejorative. Good
is good whether accomplished with a brush
or with a needle. Far from incidental in her
epoch, Taeuber-Arp was integral to the whole-
sale expansion of what art could be and how
it could alter the world at large. This show
recasts assumptions of value that were long
held hostage to hierarchies of medium and
that were dominated, with rare exceptions,
by men. The story it tells liberates thinking
about what has mattered—and still does, and
henceforth will—in our cultural annals of con-
sequential genius.—Peter Schjeldahl (moma.org) HILMA AF KLINT, “TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, NO. 1,” (1913-1915) / COURTESY DAVID ZWIRNERIn 1906, the Swedish painter Hilma
af Klint received a message during a
séance: “You will commence a task that
will bring great blessings on coming
generations.” The latest boon is “Tree of
Knowledge,” eight newly discovered wa-
tercolors, on view at the David Zwirner
gallery through Feb. 5. Af Klint made
these lyrically precise works in 1913-15,
and gifted them to the Austrian es-
otericist Rudolf Steiner. An arboreal
silhouette anchors each image, attended
by spheres, pyramids, and shapes that
suggest cellular structures. Delicately
rendered birds and flowers recall both
the decorative motifs of Art Nouveau
and the filigree of illuminated manu-
scripts. The album-like cycle is a rap-
turous coda to the Guggenheim’s 2018
af Klint blockbuster.—Johanna Fateman