Art & Design|Museums Embrace the Unfamiliar
Museums Embrace the Unfamiliar
"Glazed," a work from 2006 by the artist Marilyn Minter.CreditCreditMarilyn Minter/Collection of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn
By Roberta Smith
The curator's job sounds relatively simple: just surprise us. Show us something we haven't seen before, or lately, or in such depth, or with such clarity. Try to avoid the predictable and familiar, the market-approved or academically sanctioned, or what other curators have already done. Try to step outside your museum's comfort zone or carefully manicured institutional persona with something eccentric, an intuitive leap. After all, there is plenty of art out there.
"La Nuit Espagnole" ("The Spanish Night") by Francis Picabia.CreditArtists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
The approaching season of museum shows promises more unfamiliar material than usual, with exceptionally high ratio of exhibitions devoted to artists who are not white or male.
Possibly the largest mass of unfamiliar material headed this way is "Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Oct. 25 to Jan. 8). It will cover one of the most fertile periods in Mexican culture, with 300 works in painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, books, broadsheets and portable murals. Many of the scores of artists in the show are all but unknown in the United States, while the ample representation of established artists like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo will amount to mini-surveys.
A scene from the video "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" by Mark Leckey.CreditMark Leckey and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York/Rome
The two-floor, 35-year retrospective of a great American painter, "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Met Breuer outpost (Oct. 6 to Jan. 29), should prove equally eye-opening and also very much of the moment. That is not only because Mr. Marshall's beautiful and biting figurative paintings have been picturing black life in America with such aplomb for so long. But it's also because Mr. Marshall has never set anything off limits — not narrative, not fierce decorative punch, not politics, not tradition or skill, not gravity or wit. The exhibition is a very smart move for the Met and will hopefully prove that the museum has not overreached in opening the Met Breuer. But it also suggests — more emphatically than the recent exhibitions devoted to Nasreen Mohamedi and Diane Arbus — that the museum might dial back its frantic involvement with the new and the now, and concentrate, as it once did, on giving retrospectives to living or recently living artists. It is one of the world's great encyclopedic museums; its primary focus is the past. Let other museums tend to the messiness of the immediate present.
Some of that messiness has definitely been perpetrated by Mark Leckey, the British artist, multimedia maverick and 2008 Turner Prize winner, who will have the largest exhibition of his career at MoMA PS1 in Queens (Oct. 23 to March 5). Mr. Leckey is an oddball connoisseur of culture both high and low. Among his better-known videos are "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" (1999), which uses found footage to explore British club culture, and "Made in 'Eaven" (2004) which centers on the spatial conundrums of Jeff Koons's highly reflective "Bunny" sculpture set in what looks like a small room in an 18th-century house in London. More recently, in the film "Dream English Kid 1964-1999" (2015), he returns to found footage to recount his autobiography. The new show, "Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers," which will occupy two floors, will also include sound installations and videos of Mr. Leckey's alternately hilarious and arcane lecture-performances.
"Danger de la Force" ("Danger of Strength"), a work from 1947-50 by Francis Picabia.CreditArtists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Studio Tomp, Rotterdam
It is hard to believe that there is a first-rank, Paris-based modernist to whom the Museum of Modern Art has never given a solo exhibition, much less a full-dress retrospective. But there is — and it's the Spanish bad-boy chameleon Francis Picabia, noticeably underrepresented in the Modern's collection until the 1970s. No matter, Picabia's wit, use of language and found imagery, and his style changes, make him a precursor not just of Pop Art but of postmodernist painting (his most apparent heir is probably Sigmar Polke). Organized with the Kunsthaus Zürich, "Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction," is in the Modern's wheelhouse, with this artist who found a "third way" between Duchamp and Picasso, that is between anti-art and painting.
As revelatory and satisfying as this effort will undoubtedly be, I wish the museum would do something completely strange, like mounting a thorough, Modern-style retrospective of the artist-healer Hilma af Klint, someone completely outside its carefully elaborated narrative who was nonetheless one of Europe's earliest abstract painters. Her 15 paintings in "The Keeper" exhibition at the New Museum (through Sept. 25) form one of the greatest sights in any New York museum right now.
"Double Drawing" from 1966 by Lynn Hershman Leeson, from "Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016."CreditLynn Hershman Leeson, via Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York; Photograph by Marc Brems Tatti
The Whitney's "Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016" (Oct. 28 to Feb. 5) should venture into new territory, spanning over a century and encompassing both commercial and avant-garde endeavors in film. With it the museum will further explore the potential of its grand fifth floor — already used to such great effect without, one hopes, turning it to a series of black boxes. Still, what about doing something completely unexpected and unhip, like giving the painter Lois Dodd a show? She has dwelt too long in Alex Katz's shadow.
Other exhibitions I'm eager to see include the Jewish Museum's "Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design" (Nov. 4 to Mar. 26), the work of the designer of the Maison Verre in Paris (1928-1932), the groundbreaking house known for its imaginative use of steel, glass and other industrial materials. Chareau, who fled Europe at the start of World War II, spent his last years in New York, which will be the show's focus. It will include furniture, designs for film and artworks by Chagall, Mondrian and Modigliani that he once owned.
I also look forward to seeing "Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty" at the Brooklyn Museum (Nov. 4 to April 2). Ms. Minter's weird, sexy brand of Photo Realism includes close-ups of models in extreme makeup and manages to flirt with both advertising and abstraction. It also exemplifies Brooklyn's admirable tendency to do shows that Manhattan's big museums apparently find too juicy, broadly appealing or who knows what. A precursor is the museum's invigorating Mickalene Thomas survey in 2012.
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