NYC GALLERIES JULY, 2023

I started the month in NYC, a graduation trip with my mum and sister which involved a frankly unwise number of steps per day given that it was 30 degrees and 80% humidity the whole time. Luckily, galleries and museums have air-con.

My holiday book of choice was ‘The Lonely City’ by Olivia Laing and given its constancy, it seemed only right to reflect on the art that I saw under its influence in the obligatory Instagram roundup. I’d like to expand on some of those thoughts here:

🗽 The Lonely City is split into chapters each reflecting on an artist’s work and how it expanded, processed, or responded to the theme of loneliness. Andy Warhol is featured. I saw a mural of him with Frida Kahlo and Keith Haring whilst walking on the high line. It felt apt given that Warhol was an observer from the outside, and then from the very epicentre of NYC society - the high line creates a vantage point, an elevated communal space promoting inclusion and community and also far removed (in its state of natural flourishing) from the industrial past and present and very nexus of the city.

🗽 Edward Hopper is spoken about - of course. In the MET I found this painting tucked away in the very empty 20th-century. It represents a time when women were moved to front-of-house roles for spaces to be more welcoming to other women who were gaining new public independence. This was fascinating given that Hopper was a horrid sexist and incredibly belittling and stifling of his wife - also a painter - whom he barred from producing work; her only association with painting was to sit for him as all the female characters in his work. Despite this, I do love reflecting on the progress that we have made and are making as a society to welcome more people - and I like to see this painting as documenting the hospitality industry’s recognition of that too. Welcome. Welcome. We want you here. How can we make that obvious? Who needs to be at the front of the house?

🗽 The Van Gogh exhibition at the Met moved me. Focusing on his obsession and delight with Cypress trees - but more crucially, the loneliness and isolation of his time in Provence in an asylum and his passionate and tragic friendship with Gaugin which ended with him cutting off his ear. What pain, emotion, and hurt lived in those paintings of the valleys and hills? And as a little metaphor (or something like that) the exhibition was PACKED and yet I still managed to keep capturing people standing on their own with his work. - perhaps best experienced in solitude.

🗽Finally, let’s talk about the @brooklynmuseum and an epic show called Pablo-Matic curated by @hannah_gadsby Gadsby.

My quick take: Apart from this being utterly hilarious and full of truth bombs and d*ck jokes… it primarily addressed the absence of so many perspectives in favour of one. The absence of women, POC, and others with innovative, and thoughtful voices, in favour of people like Picasso who were inarguably horrible humans with highly questionable morals. I enjoyed the recontextualization of Picasso’s work alongside the second-wave feminists and those who were making art not fuelled by narcissism and misogyny.

The big-dogs-in-the-art-review-world’s take: “The show’s problem—Pablo-m, if you will—is not its revisionary mindset, which justly sets it apart from all the other celebratory Picasso shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. That is the appropriate lens for discussing much of Picasso’s oeuvre in 2023. It is, instead, the show’s disregard for art history, the discipline that Gadsby studied, practised, and abandoned after becoming frustrated with its patriarchal roots.”(https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/hannah-gadsby-its-pablo-matic-brooklyn-museum-review-1234670115/)

Ok, so they’re mad that… Gadsby is mad? In part, yes.

Now listen, there are some GAPING holes/errors/miscalculations in this exhibition; one of the artworks by a woman was created by an admirer of Picasso, (“the painting itself has “little to say about Picasso, an artist whom Brown has spoken of admiringly”) and so why this painting was chosen is up for debate - but maybe it was just because they could get their hands on it? Not a curatorial method of selection which is preferred of course, but sometimes options are limited. (“but they have almost nothing in common, besides the fact that they are all owned by the Brooklyn Museum.”)

Other missteps are the works inspired by OTHER male painters of the time (Manet and Matisse) despite the painters (Ringold in particular) directly referencing Picasso in other works, which would therefore have been a more interesting addition to the show.

I also agree that in a show which aims to decentre Picasso… the exhibition does a very good job at keeping the viewer captivated and intrigued by both him and his work. Contradictory, and a bit messy. Are we supposed to accept his monopoly on Modernism? Did he have such a great impact on the female artists? Or was he inseparable (and therefore somewhat meaningless) from a whole fleet of misogynistic artists whom they worked to prove wrong, to paint over, to rebut?

Despite the controversy and the flood of negative reviews, I maintain that this was one of the best shows I have seen in a long time and I owe that to the accessible and comedic nature of the commentary (both audio and visual text), the collection of works (engaging, surprising, awe-inspiring, crude), and the unapologetic bashing of a man whose ego was ENORMOUS and caused harm to many, and whose treatment of women was appalling.