The Drawings of Bronzino, through april 18th at theMet

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th ave and 82 Street

January 20, 2010–April 18, 2010

Let's be clear that we're talking here about Agnolo Bronzino the 16th century Italian artist, and not Branzino the European sea bass, which other people seem to like but I think can be kind of bony. Anyway, I'm not a food critic. Back to the artist. While this show focuses on his drawings, Bronzino was a very popular figure in his day, both as a painter, teacher, tapestry designer, and poet. He was, in fact court painter to Cosimo de' Medici for the majority of his professional life, which makes you wonder why he has been for the most part overlooked at least as a major figure. Well, for one thing he belongs to the Mannerist movement which is kind of a subsection of the high Renaissance, and can be seen as a sort of foreshadowing to the baroque. Actually, the term "Mannerism" is thrown around kind of loosely and some use it to refer to any part of the renaissance after Raphael. Others use it to refer to a late Gothic style of painting. I never really understood why historians trivialized it so much. I guess it's because it's seen as a transitional movement, neither quite classical nor romantic. But you know, so what? The other thing that really hurt Bronzino is that he pissed off rival artist Giorgio Vasari. Vasari was a painter and architect, but is most known for his book "Vasari's Lives of the Artists," first published in 1550, and seen as the seminal biography of the artists of the time. In it Vasari dismisses Bronzino as a minor figure in order to get back at him for competing with Vasari over mural commissions. It's amazing how petty personal crap like that can influence our view of history over 400 years later. Christ, what a douchbag.

Anyhow, a young Bronzino was strongly influenced by his contemporary Jacopo Pontormo, and they worked together closely for a number of years, sometimes even sharing opposite sides of the same paper to draw on. Their styles were so similar that attribution has subsequently became a bit of a problem. Their relationship kind of reminded me of the one between Piccaso and Braque, and how their early cubist paintings can seem almost interchangeable. He and Pontormo worked mostly in red and black chalk, and almost exclusively drew figures, portraits, and draped cloth. Also, neither artist used drawing as an independent art form, and all the drawings in the show are studies for paintings or tapestries. In fact a number of drawings are done on top of grids to aid in the transfer of the image. The fact that they were never made to be exhibited gives the drawings a sketchy, spontaneous, work-in-progress quality. It also shows off what a light handed virtuoso Bronzino was with his materials. He was really kind of a magician with the chalk, and one drawing "Head of Smiling Young Woman" (1542-43) looks like it could have been drawn by da Vinci. Also, considering that the drawings are all studies, a lot of them seem to have a surprisingly high degree of finish and are very purposefully composed on the page, so they easily could be appreciated as autonomous works of art. Maybe that was a reflection of the artists pride in his work, or maybe he was just so good that he couldn't help himself.

I think Bronzino's most well known painting is probably "Allegory of Venus and Cupid" (1545), for obvious reasons if you've ever seen it. But, the only painting in the show is "Portrait of a Young Man" (1534-38), from the Met's permanent collection. It's a great painting, but it seems kind of stiff and lifeless next to the drawings. Few artists of his age could draw as well as Bronzino, and I can't think of any who can, or do today. He was an amazing draftsman, and hopefully this show will create a revival of interest in his work. The drawings make me want to see more of his paintings. I have to admit that I'm not that familiar with his work, but everything I have seen of his has been great.

Watteau: music and theater. through Nov 29 Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid through Nov 29

Metropolitan Museum of Art

For me Watteau seems like the kind of artist that's hard to not like. Maybe it's because I've been kind of obsessed with him for the last year or two, but this exhibition is to honor former director Philippe de Montebello, who called Watteau one of his favorite artists. So, apparently I'm not the only one. Watteau has a reputation as the master of sophisticated hedonism. I didn't make that up. I know I read that somewhere, and it seems pretty accurate. Toulouse-Lautrec may have been more of a hedonist, but Wateau was more sophisticated. I'm talking about the painting, not necessarily the subject matter. Watteau's subjects just look like they had more money than Toulouse-Lautrec's.

Anyway, this is a pretty small show that consists of just two rooms. One of drawings, and the other of paintings. Still, there are some real jewels to be found. Also, about a third of the work is not by Watteau but his contemporaries. This is to illustrate the artists influence on 18th century france, but it also draws attention to the qualitative difference between the work of some very skilled artists and that of an old master. The only artist who comes close to Watteau is Nicolas Lancret, who has some pretty impressive work in the show.

Watteau died very young at 37 which accounts for his somewhat small body of paintings, but he was a copious draftsman. Thank god for that, because he was magic with the colored chalk. Most of his drawings were done as studies for his paintings, but his light handed effortless way of rendering makes them stand out from his contemporaries, and function as independent works of art. His paintings also have a subtle elegance that makes them exceptional. He's as famous for his pallet of silvery greens and soft pinks as for his strange theatrical narratives. The interaction of his figures are enigmatic and appear almost otherworldly. These scenarios and the characters that make them up were based on the commedia dell'arte for which Watteau had once worked as a set and costume designer, and figures like Harlequin, Mezzetin, and Pierrot are staples in his work. He used these figures, and narratives to create a new genre of painting called the Fete Galante, which became very popular throuout Europe after his death in 1721.

Vermeer died soon before Watteau was born, which is just as well because I don't think they would have gotten along with each other anyway. Although, they did have a few things in common. They both died young (Vermeer at 45 and Watteau at 37). They both painted relatively small paintings with kind of dreamy ethereal narratives, and they both became hugely influential after their death. Watteau's painterliness, and exoticism though is in stark contrast to Vermeer's precise detailed studies of light and form, and his focus on humble everyday people and objects.

This show is similar though, in that it's small and made up largely of other artists work. Actually, in this case most of the work is by other artists and there are only 6 Vermeer's in the whole show including "The Milkmaid" which is on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. that's not too bad though considering that there are only about 35 Vermeer's known to exist in the world. All the other work in the show is part of the Met's permanent collection including the five other Vermeer's, which can be seen on exhibition all the time anyway. The show was put together to celebrate the anniversary of Henry Hudson doing something important. I can't remember what. Anyway, "The Milkmaid" is a beautiful painting, but I don't think it's his best. I don't think it's as good as "The Girl With A Pearl Earring", and it's certainly not as good as "View of Delft", but neither one of those are in the show.

Both these shows are closing pretty soon, so if you want to see them you've got to get off your ass and get over there. I probably should have reviewed them earlier, but you know I've got things to do.

Kandinsky. through Jan 13 @ Guggenheim

Guggenheim Museum 1071 5th ave (at 89th street)

Hey, if you like early 20th century abstract, Russian, avant-guard painting (and who doesn't) then Vasily Kandinsky is your kind of guy. If for some reason you don't, then you should, because he's an enormously important, ambitious and influential figure in the history of modernism. In fact, no study of modern art, no matter how cursory could be complete without including his work. He's probably one of the 4 or 5 most important artists of the 20th century, and he's credited with creating the first abstract painting. Although, that's a little hard to determine, since abstraction is something that happens in degrees, and with Kandinsky it happened very gradually, and over a very long period of time. So, it's kind of like how abstract does it have to be before it's abstract. Know what I mean?

He didn't actually start studying art in earnest until 1896 when he was 30 years old. His two major inspiration were Monet's "Haystacks" paintings where he felt he was more moved by the colors and forms than the subject matter, and a Wagner concert he attended. He came to believe that visual art should operate like music and be expressive in a pure autonomous form, thus laying the groundwork for abstract art. Solomon Gugganheim started collecting his work in 1929 on the advisement of artist/baroness Hilla Rebay who convinced him of Kandinskys importance. In 1943 when the museum opened it was originally called The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and Kandinsky was presented as the leading figure of the new art. The upshot of all this is that the Gugganheim has a lot of Kandinsky's, and this is one big ass show.

Kandinsky was a Russian artist who spent most of his life in Germany, and whose strongest influence came from the French. Which I guess makes him multicultural in an exclusively european kind of way. You can see the impact the impressionists had on his early landscapes and cityscapes, where the colors are rich and the forms simplified. He became a leading figure in the Russian avant-garde, and worked with composer Arnold Schonberg who was similarly experimenting with music, trying to give it a freer form of expression. In 1912 he started the "Blue Rider" movement, whos goal it was to express the power of color and form independently. The movement is strongly motivated by Kandinskys interest in mysticism and Theosophy. It's interesting to me that his work from this period still include some form of figurative imagery, which seem romantic and symbolist in nature. When there isn't a clear figurative subject there's a figurative depiction of forms, and some kind of an illusionistic space. There's one particularly beautiful little painting from the end of this period called "Moscow 1" that I'd never seen before. It was also around this time that he published "On The Spiritual in Art" (1912). Which, with his second book "Point and Line to Plane" (1926) are considered two of the most seminal written works on modern art. Having read Kandinskys books I have to say that I find his writing very dry and cerebral. It's basically essays about theory and cold annalysis of form. It seems to have very little to do with his paintings which are dynamic and improvisatory, and seem playful and even impulsive in structure. It's amazing to me that the writer and the painter could be the same person.

He moved from Germany to Moscow in 1917. During this time he internalized some of the teachings of the Russian constructivists and the Suprematists. This caused his paintings to become flatter, less figurative, and more geometric in structure. He developed a vocabulary of abstract forms, and he seems to have realized that he can create pictorial tension by simply contrasting these forms and not having to revert to conventional pictorial space. His drawing, however remains specific and he maintains a clear figure ground relationship, which today would be considered inconsistent with non-objectivity. (Speaking of drawing, there's a large gallery of Kandinskys works on paper which are kind of disappointing. They're very tight and finished looking, and seem to lack the spontaneity and energy of the paintings. I don't really know why.)

Kandinsky then moved back to Germany, and taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 to1933 when it was closed by the nazis. Then he moved to Paris, which in retrospect was a wise choice. While he was there the influence of the Surrealists becomes visible and these strange ameba forms enter his work. He planned to eventually return to Germany, but after his paintings were labeled degenerate and removed from German museums he decided to stay in France. Another wise choice.

The work from the last decade or so of his life is very beautiful, but a little complacent and kind of formulaic compared to the rest of his oeuvre. He seems to lose interest in the paint, and I think if he were making them today he would probably do it on a computer. Personally I think he was kind of running out of steam, which I guess had to happen eventually. Even this late work though doesn't seem to get bogged down in theory. That's the thing that impressed me the most about this show. Kandinsky is considered an important figure because of his revolutionary ideas. Today those ideas may not seem that revolutionary, but the consistent high quality of the paintings, that don't simply illustrate his ideas, is something that would make them stand up in any era. Maybe that's why he's such a modern giant. He didn't just have great ideas he was a great painter.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction. through Jan 17

Whitney Museum of American Art, 945Madison ave

Georgia O'Keeffe is primarily known as a figurative artist, but this show concentrates on her early work (1916-mid 1930s) when she made her name as one of Americas early abstractionists. The show starts with some early charcoal drawings, and some encouragingly messy watercolors that she exhibited in 1916 at "Gallery 291", a visionary art space that was run by the visionary photographer Alfred Stiegletz. He would become a major figure in both her personal and professional life. She would become a subject in his photos both nude and clothed, which clearly helped promote the sensual and erotic aspects of her paintings. It also promoted the commercial success of both her and Stiegletz's art.

It's interesting to me that her work was seen as so groundbreaking when it's not really all that abstract, even by the standards of the time. She usually used some clearly identifiable figurative subject matter, and always had some kind of illusionistic space with modeled forms that you can see light fall on, pass through, or reflect off of. Maybe this noncommittal approach to abstraction made her work more accessible, and gave abstract painting a broader audience. But, compared to some of the radical abstraction that was going on at the same time in Europe by artists like Wassily Kandinsky Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian these paintings seem very tame. Admittedly she was dealing with different issues than they were. Her paintings are about abstracting from nature to give a truer, more emotional experience of being in the landscape than can be reached through conventional depiction. She wanted to capture a feeling, rather than make a picture. It's an ambitious goal, but some of her colleagues here in America who were working towards the same goal like Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove were clearly doing so with more ambition, and explored the genre in much more depth . Compared to their paintings hers look timid and illustrative. Even John Marin, who would never call himself an abstract painter seems much more raw and visceral in his handling of the landscape than she. The same could be said of Charles Burchfield, or Milton Avery for that matter (although Avery painted later). You can see the influence some of these artists had in her work in terms of pallet and structure, but she seems much less committed in her soft, almost apologetic brushstrokes.

O'Keefe was a very evocative colorist, and her paintings are best when she allowed the color to carry the strength of the painting, drawing attention away from her pictorially stagnant compositions, that for all their weird amorphous forms still look decorative and structurally flat. It made me wonder what would have happened if she had moved more earnestly into abstraction, and allowed the paint to simply be seen as paint. Maybe she would have turned into an interesting colorfield painter. Instead she went in the other direction and retreated back into figurative imagery. Surprisingly in the last room of the show we flash forward to 1952 where there are two paintings, "My Last Door", and "Black Door with Red" which are flat and geometric, and the most purely abstract paintings in the show. Maybe she was exploring what could have been. I overheard a couple of young women talking about how"fearless and intense" she was. It sounded like wishful thinking to me, but of course they were looking at one of Stiegletz photos of her at the time.

So, why is she considered such an important artist? Well, some people love her. Some of that has to do with the accessibility issue I brought up before. Also, clearly a lot of it has to do with Stiegletz promotion of her paintings, and more specifically with his promotion of her as a female art icon, and her paintings as the true inner voice of women. She was the only woman around at the time painting like this (or at least the only one I'm aware of). But, does that make her work distinctly female in character? Is it because her abstractions of flowers and canyons look vaginal in structure? Maybe it's because her paintings are pretty, and her light ambivalent brushstrokes were seen as feminine at the time. Maybe they still are. How sad would that be?

Francis Bacon, A Centenary Retrospective. Through Aug. 16th

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Bacon, Through August 16, 2009

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is unquestionably one of the most important and influential British figurative painters of the twentieth century. He is also no relation to the actor Kevin Bacon, or to the smoked breakfast meat that I think tastes so good with french toast. But, I digress. When you think about the way British painters have distorted the human body since the first world war for the purpose of finding a truer less romanticized existential image of the human condition (and I'm thinking specifically of Lucian Freud, Stanley Spencer, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and more recently Jenny Saville) Bacon stands chronologically at the head of the pack. You could say that he established a content that would become one of the hallmarks of modern British painting. Another thing that makes him an historically important artist is that he was one of the first to cross reference photography, film, and old master paintings in his work. Also, he did it in a particularly imaginative and original way. His obsession with stills from the film "Battleship Potemkin" and the Diego Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X are themes that reappear throughout his life's work. We know Bacon was an atheist, but I don't know what it was about this image of this Pope that haunted him the way it did. Anyway, I can't imagine the Vatican was one of his major patrons.

That said, I have to admit that I've never been a huge fan of Bacon, and this show didn't do anything to change my mind. The show can best be described as hit and miss, but that can also accurately describe the mans career. Bacons images are arresting and powerful at best, but melodramatic and formulaic at worst. Also, his work didn't really evolve all that much. The paintings in the last galleries of the retrospective look very similar to those in the first both in subject and style. He clearly had a great gift for painterly distortion of the figure, but he frequently resorted to what I would have to call cheap expressionist theatrics, and it's the repetition of those theatrics that undermine their own authenticity. This is more obvious when his paintings are seen in a large group like this. In terms of subject matter he stuck primarily to figures in rooms, usually naked and lying on sofas or beds. There are also a lot of screaming heads, frequently belonging to the Velazquez Pope. Formally you can see the same pallet throuout the show. The same spooky burnt oranges and pinks, and the same big black backgrounds for his pale white figures to sit dramatically against. He also enjoyed drawing linear squares or rectangles around his figures which I guess was meant as a nod to the surrealists, and his use of little red arrows that crop up in his paintings over the last twenty years or so of his life is a pretty superficial compositional device that doesn't serve any intelligent pictoral function, and really annoys me.

There are some undeniable masterpieces in the show. I'm thinking specifically of the "Three Studies for a Crucifixion" triptych done in 1944 and the second version painted in 1962. These are as powerful and disturbing as anything I've seen in modern art. In fact, the triptych format is something Bacon really shines at, and are the most consistently good work in the show. Some of his early figure study paintings are also wonderful, like "Figure in a Landscape" from 1945. Also, the portraits of his late lover George Dyer painted in the 1970s are very moving and emotional images. it's interesting how his obsession with certain lovers seem to mirror his obsession with certain photographs and paintings. When he was on, Bacon was clearly a modern master of great importance. The problem as I see it is that half the time he painted like a lesser, less motivated artist trying to imitate Frances Bacon.

Metropolitan Museum of Art,1000 5th ave at 82nd streetBonnard: late interiors. Through April 19

You've got to love Bonnard! How can anyone not love Bonnard? Well Picasso didn't, but that's just something else to love about Bonnard. They both grew out of the same modernist roots, but while Picasso was creating his own style that so many subsequent artists embraced Bonnard branched out in a totally different direction that even Picasso couldn't appreciate. He was, and to some extent still is one of the most misunderstood artist of the modern era. He's considered by most to be the last of the bourgeois lyricists, and it is easy to initially see his paintings as playful decorative exercises, even "piddling" ones as Picasso said. But, if you keep looking you see how spatially conflicting and structurally complicated his images are. Complicated but never detailed, and slow but never labored. He also liberated color from subject matter in a way so radical that he has to be seen as one of the early modernists that prefigured abstraction.

One of the ways that he separated form from subject matter is that he almost never painted from life. Instead he worked from small spontaneous pencil sketches that had very little detail. Some look almost like Cy Twombly doodles. These gave him very little information to work from, thus forcing the painting to take on a life of its own. Bonnard sketched religiously, and kept a daybook with him at all times making visual notes of the things he saw. Most of those things are pretty mundane, but you'd never know from the drawings. There are a series of these day books in the exhibition that are absolute jewels.

The show focuses on his late interiors, but there are a lot of still lifes to be seen. I suppose a still life technically is an interior unless it's set up outdoors, but...whatever. Anyway, I think it's interesting because these are the same galleries that held the Morandi show a few months ago. I couldn't help but think how different Bonnard's still lives are from Morandi's in terms of pallet, composition, and general paint handling. In some ways though they're strangely similar in their intimacy, and the way they ask the viewer to slow down and navigate through the groupings of commonplace objects.

It is, however the larger more complex interiors that are the most effective and powerful. The way he combines and renders complicated objects and spaces, and transforms them into rich strokes of paint, bringing them back up to the surfaces of these larger canvases is endlessly fascinating.  A still life on a table will be set next to a figure, next to a door leading to another room. Then there will be a window leading out to a terrace, which will in turn lead to a landscape. It's like he wanted to fit as many things into the painting as he possibly could for the sheer joy of painting them, and seeing how they play off one another. I noticed something about Bonnard a few years ago. The scale of his subject matter doesn't usually grow when he paints larger paintings. He just paints more things, like he's opening the lens of a camera to include more. So, it's not the scale but the structural complexity of the image that grows with the size of the painting.

One of the last paintings in the show is "Interior Dining Room" which was finished soon before the artists death. Bonnard never had any trepidation about using color combinations that were challenging to aesthetic convention, sometimes even garish or ugly. This late work is particularly ambitious in that sense. It's a near riot of color, more so than almost anything of his I've seen. That, combined with the severe distortion of the figures and objects in the painting show that the artist never grew complacent in his old age. This is a great show of an amazing painter. Anyway, that's what I think.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th ave at 82nd Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna. through April 26

The Bonna collection is a pretty impressive one, and one that covers 400 years of drawing from the late Renaissance to the post impressionists. While it's called "Raphael to Renoir" it actually starts before the former and ends after the later. It also contains only one work from Raphael, and one from Renoir. Maybe the curator had a bias for alliteration. I don't know. It could just as easily be called "Nature and Religion in Drawing" because the subject matter is almost always one or the other, or both. Frequently it's one in the service or the other. It covers pretty much all facets of drawing during the period, from tight detailed studies to loose nearly abstract exercises.

The show is broken into three rooms. The first covers the late Renaissance where you'll see some prominent names like Del Sarto, Carracci, Raphael (of course), and a wonderfully elegant pen and ink drawing by Parmigianino. There is a lot of light handed virtuoso handling of the medium in this room, whether it's chalk, ink, or in a few cases watercolor . Most of this work was meant as studies for paintings, but several were created as independent artworks.

The second room moves to France and the Netherlands in the late 16th century to cover the more secular Baroque era. This starts with a couple of Claude Lorrain ink landscapes that are pure effortless poetry. That light graceful character fills the room, but is only equaled by the chalk drawings of Watteau, Boucher, and Greuze. I was also very conscious of the influence of the Commedia Dell' Art on the artists of the time. Not just on the French artists mentioned, but in a drawing by a 70 year old Tiepolo. Who was, coincidentally the only Italian in the room. At least I think it was a coincidence.

The last room covers the late 18th and 19th century, or late neo-classicism through post impressionism. If you're wondering how something can be both late and neo, just trust me. Almost all of the artists in this section are French, and apart from a few delicate drawings by Ingres, the handling of the materials gets more expressive, painterly and physical. There are a few furiously rendered ballet dancers by Degas, and a wonderfully spontaneous Cezanne watercolor that looks like it could have been drawn by the rain.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th ave at 82nd streetArt and Love in Renaissance Italy. through Feb 16

Metropolitan Museum of Art 5th Ave. at 82nd Street

Usually when you think about Renaissance Italian art you think about religious and mythological art, and more often than not art commissioned by the Catholic church. One of the things that's unusual about this show is that it consists solely of privately commissioned, primarily secular paintings and objects. There are a number of beautifully crafted wedding gifts and dowry objects from wealthy families, like jewelry and ceramics. There are also quite a few childbirth trays, which sound like something an obstetrician might use, but are actually wooden trays that have images painted on one or both sides and are used to commemorate a birth.

the paintings in the show are mostly portraits of couples on the eve or just after a wedding, or in some cases children, or parents and their children. The quality of these vary a bit, but there are some masterful works by big names like Lorenzo Lotto, Dominico Ghirlandaio, Bronzino, Georgione, Titian, and one amazing double portrait by Fillippo Lippi that may be the best thing in the show. There's also a strange and haunting painting of a woman from Loranzo Di Credi.

One gallery is dedicated to paintings commissioned to decorate the "camera" or bed chamber , which I guess was a common practice among rich horny people at the time. A lot of these works are not up to the same level as those in the rest of the show, but there is one Botticelli which is actually part of a larger series that's absolutely stunning.

A lot has been made of the erotic art in this show, but it's a relatively small part of the exhibition and fills only two rooms with prints and ceramics. It seemed to me a lot more comic than sensual, partly because most of the other works in the show uses images of flowers or fruit and vegetables as discreet symbols of fertility and sex, and it's pretty amusing to see in this section how those symbols are replaced with actual genitals. The other reason I thought it was funny is that "the renaissance" by definition is the rebirth of classical thought and culture, so you don't really think of crotch shots and giant dismembered penises. By today's standard these works are pretty tame though, so if you're looking for something Mapplethorpian you may be disappointed. Actually there are two wonderful Titian's in the last gallery that I thought were far more sensual than anything in the "erotic" section. These paintings seem somehow to magically turn paint into flesh through some wild libidinal alchemy. I'm not sure how he did it, but I guess that's why he's an old master.