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The DART Board: Critic's Pick 11.2016

By Peggy Roalf   Tuesday November 22, 2016

In Galleries

Philip Guston | Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975, an exhibition devoted to the late artist’s satirical caricatures of the 37th President of the United States: Richard Nixon. Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, NY, NY. Info Introduced by a mutual acquaintance a couple of years earlier, [Philip Roth and Philip Guston] shared a love of books and of what Guston called “crapola”— billboards, diners, junk shops, burger joints — and Richard M. Nixon was soon added to the list. “He was a shared delight,” Mr. Roth recalled recently. “It wasn’t just the criminal war in Southeast Asia that he was waging but his vile character that aroused the wicked impulse to satire.” Charles McGrath, NYT

 

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1971. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Carolee Schneemann | Further Evidence. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, NY, NY Info; P.P.O.W., 535 West 22nd Street, NY, NY Info Ecstatic, bloody, and viscerally sensuous, Carolee Schneemann’s iconic 1964 Meat Joy performance kicked the shit out of Abstract Expressionism’s machismo, pushing the movement’s ideas surrounding painterly facture into territory unapologetically feminist. For the artist’s solo exhibition, “Further Evidence – Exhibit B” at Galerie Lelong—which expands into P.P.O.W. with “Further Evidence – Exhibit A”—Schneemann will present a number of works from her vast oeuvre, including a two-channel video installation titled Devour, 2003 Artforum

 

Black Pulp! International print Center New York, 508 West 26th Street, NY, NY Info Corrosive racial stereotypes have always been rife in American culture, but a counterculture of corrective images has existed too. That’s the subject of this rich historical show of work in various print media. The curators, William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson, both artists, take the story back to the early 20th century. Holland Cotter, NYT

 

Calder and Picasso, through December 17. Almine Rech Gallery, 39 East 78th Street, NY, NY Info The first show at the Almine Rech gallery’s plush new Upper East Side location draws on private collections to match up Calder and Picasso. The idea, pursued with earnestly winning if not quite convincing gravity, is to document formal similarities and demonstrate mutual influence. Most interesting, though, is seeing what drastically different ends the two artists achieved with their occasionally similar means. Will Heinrich, NYT

Picassso's Picassosthrough December 17. Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, Ny, NY Info This is an exhibition of works from the collection of Maya Ruiz-Picasso, who is the daughter of Pablo Picasso and his iconic muse Marie-Thérèse Walter. Her personal collection is the result of an extraordinary legacy: Picasso left behind a vast body of works including paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, engravings and lithographs, but also personal archives and photographs which were divided between his surviving heirs. Several portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter; the famous portrait of Maya as a child, Maya à la poupée et au cheval (1938); Le Baiser(1931) are included in this exhibition. Blouinartinfo

 

In Museums

Diane Arbus | In the Beginning, closing November 27. The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, NY, NY Info These early years were her most prolific, and slaloming through [the installation], you can discern how Arbus began to favor depicting the world as a place weirder than it really is. In these early photographs, more modest and more subjective, her language of representation has not yet calcified into her distinctive brand of American surrealism. There is doubt here, and something rarer too: sympathy. Jason Farago, Guardian

 

© Diane Arbus/The Estate of Diane Arbus, Girl with a pointy hood and white schoolbag at the curg, N.Y.C, 1957, courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Francis Picabia | Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction through March 19, 2017. MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, NY, NY. Info Take a gander at Francis Picabia’s Portrait d’un couple (Portrait of a Couple), 1942–43: A pair of doofus, dead-eyed lovers gaze out onto nothingness, while in the background a man holds a woman aloft—à la Fragonard, but waaaaay sicker—beneath a particularly bad rendering of a magnolia tree. Sex machines, hookers, race cars, nihilism—Picabia’s art is the kind that, despite the dazzling march of progress, reflects the merciless imbecility of history and humanity. Artforum

 

Carmen Herrera | Lines of Sight. Whitney Museum of Amrican Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, NY, NY. Info. At 101, the artist Carmen Herrera is finally getting the show the art world should have given her half a century ago: a solo exhibition at a major museum in New York, where she has lived and worked since 1954. This compact but ravishing exhibition of about 50 works focuses on the pivotal period of 1948-78 — years in which Ms. Herrera developed her signature geometric abstractions, pared-down paintings of just two colors but seemingly infinite spatial complications. Although it’s not the full retrospective Ms. Herrera deserves, the Whitney’s show presents her as an artist of formidable discipline, consistency and clarity of purpose, and a key player in postwar art history. Karen Rosenberg. NYT

Anthony Lopez in his Carnegie Hall Studio, image courtesy of the Estate of Antonio Lopez & Juan Ramos

Antonio Lopez | Future Funk Fashion, closing November 26. El Museum del Barrio 1230 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY Info The marvelous Antonio Lopez, with his creative partner/boyfriend Juan Ramos, knocked the pasty-white starch out of American fashion illustration, then injected it with a glittering cocktail of Puerto Rican dandyism, Warholian sex, disco sultriness, and—duh—top-tier Roman candle–style queerness. From Paris to New York and back again, arm in arm with the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Tina Chow, Grace Jones, and Gianni Versace, they created a soiree that, still, few of us are cool enough to enter. Artforum

Masterworks | Unpacking Fashion, through February 5, 2017. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY Info This exhibit brings together 50 garments that represent the best the museum has managed to acquire over the past ten years. For a long time, the Institute focused on collecting pieces that would help create a comprehensive, encyclopedic archive of the best in fashion history. But, under the tenure of Harold Koda, that mentality shifted to obtaining clothing that were more like works of art, “masterworks,” if you will, that are on par with the Van Gogh’s and Degas’ found elsewhere in the museum. Michelle Honig The Observer


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