Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat light up the cavernous Gagosian Gallery on far West 25th Street like a carnival.  At each turn they offer up big noisy characters and splashes of crayon-box color and snatches of street slang.  Basquiat, like Warhol, is a brilliant graphic designer, and paints to charge each square inch of surface with a bristling kinetic energy.  It’s as if every figure, phrase and mark we see could burst forward at any moment, but has been pinned in place with scientific precision.  These canvases are full but aren’t overwrought.  In Italian is packed with all sorts of things (faces, quotes, splotches, scribbles, two quarters, one gorilla) and yet remains remarkably poised, with swatches of primer and raw canvas showing through, giving the scene, below its lush, funky texture, space and depth.

Seeing these paintings expunges Basquiat’s personal mythology of a boy genius dying young.  These are substantial works that stir up recollections of Jackson Pollock (in their deep swirling motions) and Willem De Kooning (in their scary, funny monsters).  They also, seemingly effortlessly, capture rhythms of cartoon art, graffiti, advertising, and video games.  Two paintings here stand out for their brute, experimental simplicity.  Each of these was shaped by stretching canvas over a wood pallet, overpainting it in a single color, and embellishing it with a single face and name.  One, red, commemorates Jersey Joe Walcott and the other, black, commemorates Sugar Ray Robinson.  These two pieces have an unique sculptural charisma that sets them apart from the other canvases.  They’re more powerful as talismans than as paintings, and start to chart a different course.  It’s hard not to wonder what more Basquiat would have done if he had lived.  There is in these canvases an iconography not yet fully developed.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983.
Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery

© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013.

The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process.  In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles.  By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives.  Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism.  And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table.  In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things.  In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain.   In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint.  Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window.  It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918.  Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What happens to graffiti when it’s hung inside a gallery and sold, besides losing a great deal of its cool?  Is it fine art, and is it good art?  An exhibit at one elegant Lower East Side Gallery gathers saleable pieces from several prominent street artists.  Most of the pieces look like they’re samples — smaller segments cut out from works the artist might have completed on the side of a building somewhere.  They feel unnaturally reigned in, like zoo animals, drained of their natural elan.

Only the pieces by Ben Eine sit comfortably within the gallery.  This English artist stencils letters across buildings, and is best-known for painting the entire alphabet on storefronts along Middlesex Street in London.  Like Shepard Fairey, his work is linked to Barack Obama: Prime Minister David Cameron presented Obama with an Eine canvas on a state visit.  And, like Shepard Fairey, Eine is a skillful graphic designer.  His work relies less on scale, site and bravado for its power — as so much street art does — than on composition and color.  There’s a strong tension between figure an field in his paintings; he doesn’t like empty space, and inflates letters to fill the void.  The lettering styles he uses resemble nineteenth-century type faces, so that, both in process and feeling, his stencils feel more mechanical than free-form.  And his texts are becoming increasingly complicated, especially when he stencils streams of letters.  He’s not writing poetry, not yet, but his format slows the act of reading, so that one stops and thinks rather than taking in the words all at once, seamlessly and mindlessly, as happens with so much advertising, signage and media.  Eine’s letters have a bracing physicality that alerts us to how powerful and subversive text can be.  Sentences are always written for us with a reason.

I know…, 2012.  Ben Eine.  Couretesy of Charles Bank Gallery.

As LCT3’s production of Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced opens, we see an artist completing a portrait of her husband in their Upper East Side apartment.  He poses stiffly for her, and she compares him, admirably, to Juan de Pareja, the subject of the magnificent Velazquez portrait at the Met.  Both men are defiant, she says, and resist the artist’s gaze to emerge as authoritative personalities.

What’s most remarkable to me about the painting she references is the discordance between the subject and the medium: the presence of a black man in a seventeenth-century oil painting.  De Pareja, as depicted here, appears not only defiant but complex, in a way that black men aren’t typically depicted in any media, not even today.  De Pareja is sometimes described as the artist’s servant or apprentice but he was actually a slave Velazques inherited from his aunt.  Velazquez taught De Pareja to paint (the Prado has two de Pareja canvases in its collection), brought him along when he visited Italy, and finally freed him in 1650, around the time this painting was completed.  Velazquez could be a merciless portraitist, describing individuals with a lacerating optical fidelity that was streaked with contempt.  He was particularly critical of royal subjects, whose flesh often seems lifeless and faces often seem witless.  But one senses in de Pareja’s face alertness, directness, wariness and pride, as if he is a man of the world.  The gentle light and soft-as-breath brushstrokes are ennobling.  The compassion Velazquez extends to his slave in this portrait is one he extended similarly to many of the commoners, children and dwarves he painted.  Perhaps it was simpler for him, somehow, to see humanity in those less powerful than himself.

Velazquez, Portrait of Juan de Pareja, 1650.

What revelations there are at the Met’s show Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years aren’t about Warhol.  They’re about the other fifty-nine artists, all Warhol-inspired, who’s work is featured.  There are three Gerhard Richter paintings from the 1960’s that have the same superfine handling of paint and dreamy, blurred finish as the photo-realist work from the 90’s he’s  famous for.  There are also some recent paintings by Luc Tuymans, whose spectral brushwork and coloring blunt their acrid politics.  One 2005 portrait of Condoleeza Rice is rendered in a web of translucent, tissue-like layers that convey tenderness more than satire.  These men paint magnificently.

But the most impressive of the other fifty-nine might be Sigmar Polke.  From the handful of works collected here, dispersed in different galleries, he emerges as a singular voice.  There’s a quilt on which the artist’s drawings and doodlings run against the patterns and piecing of fabric.  It’s a rich, clotted surface that trumps both the pictorial and compositional pleasures of traditional painting.  And there’s Plastic Tubs, which shows the things to us in workmanlike strokes and candy colors on a canvas that’s left largely, strangely blank.  Polke’s quilt paintings prefigure the 80’s assemblages of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, which also combine discordant materials and images, but lack their all-out sensuality.  Polke’s more conventional paintings, like Plastic Tubs, while fine, lack the ravishing surfaces of Richters’ and Tuymans’.  Regardless of the medium Polke, like Warhol, remains supremely cool.  He overturns expectations with wit and without winking.

Plastik-Wannen [Plastic Tubs], 1964, by  Sigmar Polke.

If you head to the Met’s exhibit Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years searching for the ways Warhol provoked and liberated other artists, you’ll find it.  But the show might be most compelling as a summation of Warhol’s own work.  It includes pieces from all phases of his career, and it’s far more compact and energetic than a blockbuster.  There are, in a string of small second-floor galleries beside the museum’s European master paintings, some of the artist’s Greatest Hits: a soup can,  Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, two Marilyns, an Elvis, portraits, and cow wallpaper.  Each one displays Warhol’s graphic virtuosity, and seems to be orchestrated for maximum optical impact.  There’s a small, square Marilyn, the size of an album cover, whose colors and shades are rendered with such pristine concentration that it’s like a piece of jewelry.

There are also, by Warhol, two Jackies, a car crash, and two electric chairs.  These works have the same formal power as the happier ones.  In fact Orange Disaster #5, a 3x5 grid of electric chairs against a burn-colored field, might be the finest piece in the show.  Its scale (it’s the size of a double door), severe composition, and lush gradations stop you as you walk by.  It’s majestic.  These pieces tap a rich, darker strain, one the artist abandoned later to take on more deliberately superficial subjects like flowers and celebrity portraits.  (When I asked a friend what might have caused this shift she deadpanned, “Drugs.”)  The exhibit highlights these darker pieces by juxtaposing them with the work of contemporary artists who engaged political subjects.  But Warhol’s fascination with death and violence seems entirely personal.  These canvases are like emotional maps, looking into the head and the heart.  While they’re brilliantly composed they’re gruesome and could not have been uncomplicated to execute.  Did Warhol numb himself in order to silkscreen this image of a man dying in an ambulance accident, twice?  I doubt he was interested in the irony of the circumstances, but in the man’s spectacular physical vulnerability.  The artist completed most of these darker works in the early 1960’s, before the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK.  What would have happened if he’d kept on with it?  Would we think of him today the way we think of Goya?

The moment I finished reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be I started searching for Margaux Williamson’s paintings online.  The book, which calls itself “A Novel From Life,” tracks Heti’s adventures among the young bohemians of Toronto.  It’s self-conscious literary tone and explicit descriptions of her love life have earned the young writer some notoriety, and also comparisons to Lena Dunham.  I actually think Heti describes artistic ambition and physical love quite powerfully.  But the real subject of the book is female friendship, and how a strong one can sustain one emotionally and intellectually.  At the heart of the book is Heti’s relationship with her best friend Margaux Williamson, which is challenged as their identities swerve too close to one another during a trip to Miami, and then recovered when they’re both back home and able to identify the very particular ways each supports and inspires the other.

Heti’s language is light and she describes things by brushing over them.  The memoir, though it covers one year chronologically, has a porous quality, as if it’s a mass of memories captured at just that moment before they settle into a proper novel (from life).  Williamson’s paintings are, necessarily, concrete.  But there’s a similar hovering quality in her hand.   There’s also a wonderful dissonance in the way she locates figures wthin space.  The people she paints are often at odds, both spatially and dramatically, with their surroundings, as if they’re trapped inside the wrong world.  Do Williamson’s paintings illustrate Heti’s book?  No, but they give voice to the same kind of searching, unsettled spirit.  Expressed so precisely by these two artists, this condition might be a sign of the times.

The Weeds by Margaux Williamson

It was with considerable reluctance that I moved off my couch on Friday evening to see the exhibit of Josef Albers drawings at the Morgan Library.  I had little interest in seeing more of the artist’s canonical, clinical square-on-square (Homage to the Square) compositions that I felt I already knew too well.  So I was taken aback at the work on display, which included studies for those square paintings, and wells as more robustly figural works that I’d never seen before.  These drawings revealed a warmth and workmanship that, for the first time, brought the artist’s work to life for me.

Most remarkable were a series of studies Albers made while living in Mexico from 1947 to 1948 called Variant/Adobe.  Based on the serene, severe geometries of a native house facade, they’re painstaking investigations into the alchemy of color and form.  In each panel the artist constructs the same basic figure — an oblong house front with two windows — from different color schemes.  There’s a gorgeous hesitancy to these pieces.  The shapes are outlined lightly in pencil on rough blotter paper.  Then Albers takes a color, straight from the tube, and, after applying some daub of it, selects another to try right alongside.  It doesn’t look as if he’s always working incrementally, trying to pin down the exact right shade of yellow within a spectrum, but following crazy hunches, doing everything he can to allow the correct color, whatever it is, to reveal himself.  Albers had always seemed like the most tiresome of painters, a pedagogue who painted what was already known to him in order to make it perfectly clear to everyone else.  These drawings, that show him searching and struggling, show otherwise.

What was it was like for George Harrison, a talented musician playing in a band beside two men who might have been the greatest pop artists of all time?  And what was it like for Francoise Gilot, a talented painter living with a man who might have been the greatest painter of all time?  The most recent of the Gagosian Gallery’s thrilling, museum-quality Picasso shows, Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris–Vallauris 1943–1953, makes one wonder.  The show is organized in three parts: two galleries with Picasso’s work from that period, a gallery with photos showing the life of the two artists together, and finally, a gallery with Gilot’s work.  As we entered that room a gentleman behind me declared, “Well, she was no Picasso,” an assessment that seemed terribly unfair.

Gilot’s work is serious but there isn’t enough of it at the exhibit to get a strong sense of what her deep interests are.  Picasso’s work, on the other hand, illuminated what we already know of him.  There are lovely, colorful paintings of Gilot, their children, their pets, and their toys, scenes lighter and more joyous than we thought he was capable of.  But the most moving pieces in the show are Picasso’s two drawings and painting, all titled Femme Designe, that show Francoise at work.  Today Gilot is remarkably good-humored about the time she spent with the master, however much it overshadowed her own work.  She thinks she made it through those years because she had a strong sense of herself, and, as she puts it, “He did not try to destroy me.”  She remembers that Picasso supported her work at first but lost interest as she began to gain recognition.  But there’s a tenderness in his depictions of her as an artist that I’d like to understand as an endorsement, however complicated it was.

After taking in the Kremlin’s immense, impersonal government buildings, arriving at Assumption Cathedral, which is tucked deeper inside, is like falling back in time.  Its exterior is a battered, undressed stone that evokes a pre-Christian desert landscape.  And its interior — every square inch — is covered in jewel-hued frescoes that tell the story of the church.  These aren’t like the frescoes in Renaissance churches, that open windows into fictive space.  These are paintings stacked one upon the other, wrapping the walls and crawling up onto the ceiling vaults.  Populated with flattened figures in airless gold backgrounds, they’re like very sacred cartoons, rich with knowledge from another age.

The way the embellishment overwhelms the architecture made me think, as I had many, many times during my trip, that Russia not part of Europe but part of Asia.  In many ways the country reminds me of India.  It’s huge, deeply diverse in culture, and moving boldly into the new century while also remaining stubbornly the same.  In Moscow there’s a barely-concealed sense of chaos coursing below the streets that once senses could, at any moment, simply erupt.  This latent (and sometimes not) disorder seems like an essential part of the culture.