Arts Selects+
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

MANET AND THE EXECUTION OF MAXIMILIAN
The Museum of Modern Art
Organized by the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, John Elderfield, this compact, politically driven exhibit about the horrors of war in an occupied foreign country is certainly topical — but it puts art first. Quietly transcending any easy labels of agitprop, the show allows for history and art and viewer all to interact on neutral ground. “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” is almost as powerful for its documentary and historical elements as for its pictures. The show centers on Manet’s depictions, made between 1867 and 1869, of the execution by firing squad of the Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian of Mexico in 1867. And yet, it gives us so much more.
— Lance Esplund (November 9)
Until January 29 (53 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).
JOSEF HOFFMANN: INTERIORS, 1902–1913
Neue Galerie
Josef Hoffmann radically reduced the entire history of decoration to its most simple, elemental form: the square. Predating the geometric neoplastic experiments of Mondrian by more than a decade, Hoffmann’s distillation of ornament was rooted in modernism ‘s rejection of historically based styles in favor of a new style that would more adequately express the character of the modern individual. Perhaps for the first time, an object’s function was considered equal to or greater than its form. More important, objects no longer served to define the owner’s personality, but instead were meant to enhance and facilitate daily life. The best way to understand Hoffmann’s formidable ideas of spatial relationship is to experience one of his interiors firstL A G hand, and the Neue Galerie has now installed four of them.
— Brice Brown (November 2)
Until February 26 (1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th Street, 212-628-6200).
CHARLES GARABEDIAN
Betty Cuningham Gallery
Charles Garabedian’s paintings, which depict surreal scenarios in a raw style reminiscent of Art Brut, have a way of garnering reluctant praise. Nevertheless, the 83-year-old California-based painter seems as disinclined as ever to impress the viewer with sophisticated technique. His naïve rendering of dolllike female nudes is neither cunning, nor quaint; it’s simply efficacious for his strange and sometimes opaque narratives.
— John Goodrich (November 2)
Until November 25 (541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-2772).
MASTERPIECES OF EUROPEAN PAINTING FROM THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
The Frick Collection
Fourteen works, every bit as eminent as anything in the Frick, come to us from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is being renovated. A number of the new arrivals are by painters already in the collection: Velázquez, Hals, Turner, El Greco, and Filippo Lippi. But the mood of these images is strikingly different. Whereas Frick himself was a somewhat secularized Episcopalian, many if not most of the Cleveland works blaze with the pietistic fires of the Counter-Reformation.
One of the finest, El Greco’s “Holy Family With Mary Magdalene,” has all the phosphorescent religiosity of an altered state. Fields of golden fire, filled with the heads of airborne putti, flood the darkness of Zurbarán’s domestic scene of Jesus and Mary. A very different kind of passion, brutal and dark, distinguishes Caravaggio’s “Crucifixion of Saint Andrew,” its foreground marked by the dirty, plebeian legs of one of the guards.
One cannot escape the impression that the Frick’s admirable and escalating ambitions are fast outgrowing their available space. It is time for the museum to expand.
— James Gardner (November 9)
Until January 28 (1 E. 70th St. at Fifth Avenue, 212-288-0700).