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.

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GLITTER AND DOOM: GERMAN PORTRAITS FROM THE 1920S
Metropolitan Museum of Art

For such a ferocious exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum’s dazzlingly decadent “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s” gets off to an understated start. A dimmed antechamber presents a series of preliminary sketches for various works, including the cartoon for Otto Dix’s monumental triptych “Metropolis” (1927–28). The show is strong on drawings, as befits so graphically inclined a group as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artists. But that’s not the reason curator Sabine Rewald’s thematically organized exhibition opens the way it does. The cartoon has a gloomy, other worldly, necrophiliac relationship to its final, painted image. It signifies that we are entering a city of ghosts.

— David Cohen (November 16)

Until February 19 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-879-5500).

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 first-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).

LUCIAN FREUD
Acquavella Galleries

At Acquavella, Lucian Freud’s most recent figure paintings and etchings show him hardly missing a beat. As always, his portraits and figure paintings seem at once acidly detached and invasively intimate. “Eli and David” (2005–06) depicts a casualenough scene: a whippet resting in the lap of a bare-chested, trousers-clad man. The artist’s confident brushstrokes place colors side-by-side, tangibly rendering volumes and even the man’s distracted expression and the dog’s sleepy oblivion.

Mr. Freud’s palette, however, has a decidedly discordant edge, with caustic grays dividing vibrant yellow-pink and reddish-brown skin tones; dark reds settle eerily in the deepest shadows of face, hands, and dog legs. Even more disconcerting are the bits of crusted paint dragged and deposited by his dissecting strokes, tokens of the sitters’ transient fleshiness. And by any standards, Mr. Freud’s several etchings are masterful.

— John Goodrich (November 16)

Until December 6 (18 E. 79th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-734-6300).

SPANISH PAINTING FROM EL GRECO TO PICASSO: TIME, TRUTH, AND HISTORY
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

“Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso” is one of those rare, exhilarating shows that lets painting speak of and for itself. Curated by Carmen Giménez and Francisco Calvo Serraller, the show is about Spanish painting between the 16th and the 20th centuries. It allows us to see El Greco next to Velázquez next to Picasso next to Goya, gets at the heart of why painters paint.

The show reminds us that the roots of Surrealism and Cubism are in the fractured, compartmentalized spaces of El Greco’s fervent mysticism; that Goya’s and Picasso’s shared love of the bullfight — of the blood in the sand — speaks as much to the devout Catholicism of the Counter Reformation as it does to their love of ancient, sacrificial rites and myths; that early Cubism’s monochrome tonalities, though inspired by gray Parisian light, have their spiritual grounding in the browns and grays of Zurbarán, and that Velázquez’s profound naturalism is steeped within a culture in which religious belief and hard fact came head to head.

— Lance Esplund (November 16)

Until March 28 (1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).

ALBERT RENGER-PATZSCH: PHOTOGRAPHS
Zabriskie Gallery

Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) was one of the most important German photographers of the middle decades of the 20th century. His continued importance is apparent from even a cursory look at the work at Zabriskie. In one photograph, about 10 or a dozen substantial cylinders a few stories high with considerably taller stacks on top, and the stacks surmounted with a shape that resembles the lamps in Riverside Park. The cylinders and stacks stand at attention with their connecting pipes and valves and control mechanisms, at once impressive in the replication of an identical shape that diminishes in size as it recedes in the distance, but also somewhat foreboding. What is it that perks, and bubbles, and fizzes in these tanks? What comes out the faucet at the end?

It is the time and place that give these pictures an ominous cast: Otherwise they are quite beautiful in the clarity of their intention and the precision of their execution.

William Meyers (November 16)

Until December 9 (41 E. 57th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-752-1223).

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

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.


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