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Because the artist is generally much less well known (at least in this country) than his French peers, the Neue Galerie provides much usable information about their context, including an elaborate timeline, numerous photographs and works on paper. By the time you arrive at the final gallery, you are well primed to look at his four medium-sized landscape paintings.
Maybe this is a time to look for something else in art, to look at art that resonates with this moment on the precipice of authoritarianism, and to learn from it. What can be gleaned by reconsidering art made in similarly dangerous situations in the past, not with the complacent relief of historical distance, but with an awakened sense of urgency for our own time and place?
I was riding up the elevator in the Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building in the spring of 1977, “minding my own business” as it were, and unaware of a forthcoming shock, when the large elevator doors opened. I was stunned and thrown backwards by a John Cage-type experience of nothing. At first, I timidly stood still, but then with the danger of a closing elevator door, I stepped out onto the fourth floor of the museum where I encountered Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977) by Robert Irwin.