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“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” which recently opened at the New Museum, is a terrific art show. I might have expected that, given a starry roster that includes Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Theaster Gates among its total of thirty-seven contemporary Black artists. But theme exhibitions normally repel me, shoehorning independent talents into curatorial agendas. What a difference in this case! “Grief and Grievance” is a brainchild of the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who, notably with his curation of the German mega-show Documenta, in 2002, and the Venice Biennale, in 2015, pried the international art world open for new art from Africa and Asia. He died of cancer in March, 2019, at the age of fifty-five, while planning the present show. The New Museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, aided by Ligon and the curators Naomi Beckwith and Mark Nash, completed the task, faithful to
Cartoon by Karen Sneider
About Titian, what can be said after you say that he is the finest pure painter ever? Susanna Kaysen, the author of “Girl, Interrupted,” surmises that the subject of “Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap” (circa 1510) “looks to the left, into the past.” Reading that, I see it. The other Titian portrait is of the artist’s best friend and tireless promoter, Pietro Aretino poet, connoisseur, power broker, feared satirist, author of popular devotional literature and pornography, intimate of rulers including the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and altogether one of the most interesting men of the sixteenth century. (I’m acquainted with Aretino from a bounteous 2012 biography, “Titian: His Life,” by Sheila Hale.) Turning to the Bellini (circa 1476-1478), we behold St. Francis standing outside his cave in a rustic landscape with meadowed sheep nearby and mountains and noble buildings in the distance. He looks skyward and holds out his open hands in a co
In a show at Zwirner, the soft cosmos of Giorgio Morandi’s domestic tableaux is relieved and refreshed by the architectonics of Josef Albers’s squares.