A new movie is bringing attention to a painting that some consider to be the Austrian "Mona Lisa" — while others argue it’s just a society portrait, and not a great one at that.

The painting is Gustav Klimt's first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. As re-told in the film "Woman in Gold," Viennese émigré Maria Altmann sued the Austrian government in 2000 to recover family artworks seized by the Nazis. Among them was Klimt's famous portrait of her aunt: a dark-haired woman, sitting on a chair, covered in golden ornamentation.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907

(Neue Galerie New York)

The film centers on Altmann's six-year battle, which she won, and stars Helen Mirren as Altmann and Ryan Reynolds as her lawyer Randol Schoenberg.

The movie ends before the painting comes to New York City. But in 2006, the Altmann family sold the "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" for $135 million to cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, who founded Neue Galerie. It was the highest price ever paid for a painting at the time.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) Adele Bloch-Bauer Seated in an Armchair Facing Forward, Resting Her Temple on Her Right Hand, 1903

(Neue Galerie New York)

In conjunction with the movie, Neue is presenting an exhibit looking at the history of the painting. During the press preview last week, Lauder said he is very proud of the piece. “This is the best picture we have and frankly, there is nothing else like this. Even 'The Kiss' in Austria, I think, is not as good as this,” he said.

But in this interview, WNYC’s art critic Deborah Solomon disagreed. “I think it’s pretty overrated as a painting. It is a society portrait and to me it has none of the adventurous spirit of other works of that era,” she said.

Gustav Klimt in front of the entrance to his studio at Josefstädter Strasse 21.

(Photograph by Moritz Nähr, 1912. Private Collection)

Examples from the same year, 1907, include Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” and Henri Matisse’s “Blue Nude,” Solomon said. “Those were paintings that would change the history of art and smash up the single-point perspective that have prevailed in art since the Renaissance.” For her, the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer doesn’t measure up. “For me, it feels like a trophy,” she said.

The exhibit at Neue Galerie features the painting and about 50 other works, including vintage photographs, jewelry and several sketches – it took Klimt four years to complete the piece. “Gustav Klimt was one of the greatest draftsmen of all time, and as you go through the small show, but a very interesting one, you see that he drew hundreds of sketches for the painting,” said Solomon.

What do you think of the painting Adele Bloch-Bauer I?  Do you think it's the Austrian "Mona Lisa," or do you agree with Solomon that it's overrated? Join the conversation with a comment.

Adele Bloch-Bauer, ca. 1910

(Courtesy of Neue Galerie)

A social awakening is happening in the museum world.

Two new exhibits discuss the whiteness of art and the struggle of African-American artists to bring more black faces into paintings. Jacob Lawrence's 1941 series about the black migration from the south to the north is at the Museum of Modern Art. And Jean-Michel Basquiat's eight notebooks that have never been presented to the public are at the Brooklyn Museum.

WNYC's art critic Deborah Solomon said in this interview that museums seem to be responding to the national conversation on racism following the killing of several un-armed black men recently. “I think museums are realizing as we become a country made up more and more of minorities, that we need to include minorities in the museum population and the story of art,” she said.  

Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. 1940-41. Panel 1: “During the World War there was a great migration North by Southern Negroes.”

(© 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.)

The MoMA show reunites all 60 panels of Lawrence’s migration series for the first time in 20 years. It includes other art-works from the period – books, songs, photographs, paintings – and it comes with a series of public events, film screenings, music performances and poetry commissions. “I like the Jacob Lawrence show because it puts Lawrence in a large social context – and captures the hardships of American blacks in the early to mid 20^th century. It acknowledges that life matters more than art,” she said.

When Lawrence's migration series was opened at Downtown Gallery, he was the first African-American artist to be represented by a New York gallery. The panels show both public life and private life, a lynching, a race riot, a family sitting together in a shack, trying to decide whether to go north; a starving boy standing at his mother’s table when there’s nothing to eat; an empty room with a green window shade pulled down, from which people have moved away. “I think it is the leading work of social dissent in all of American art,” said Solomon.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Untitled Notebook Page, 1980–81.

(Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum)

Like Lawrence, Jean-Michel Basquiat also wanted to tell the story of his people. His new show at the Brooklyn Museum features eight notebooks he wrote between 1980 and 1987 dismantled in 160 pages, along with 30 related paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works.

Edo Bertoglio (Swiss, born 1951). Jean-Michel Basquiat on the set of Downtown 81, 1980–81.

(Edo Bertoglio (Swiss, born 1951). Jean-Michel Basquiat on the set of Downtown 81, 1980–81. )

A quotation inscribed on a wall of the Basqiat  exhibition says, “The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them.” Solomon said the exhibit shows Basquiat was also thinking about his role as a social activist. “We are reminded once again that social justice and the absence of blacks in art history was of concern even to Basquiat,” she said.

Solomon said she applauds MoMA for introducing a social show. “Art does not exist in a bubble. It springs from life and I am all for including people’s experience in our museum experience.”

What do you think? Should art shows come with social missions? Why or why not? Join the conversation with a comment.

The MoMA show reunites all 60 panels of Lawrence’s migration series for the first time in 20 years. It includes other art-works from the period – books, songs, photographs, paintings – and it comes wi

(Christopher Burke)

Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. 1940-41. Panel 58: “In the North the Negro had better educational facilities.”

(© 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

Deborah Solomon, WNYC art critic and the author of American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), talks about the new Whitney Museum and its first exhibition "America Is Hard to See" and how it and other museums are addressing Michelle Obama's challenge to be more inclusive.

Lee Krasner (1908 1984). The Seasons, (1957). Oil and house paint on canvas, 92 3/4 × 203 7/8in. (235.6 × 517.8 cm).

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Frances and Sydney Lewis by exchange, the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund and the Painting and Sculpture Committee 87.7 © 2015 The Po/Whitney Museum of American Art)

Fred Wilson (b. 1954). Guarded View, (1991). Wood, paint, steel and fabric, Dimensions variable.

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the Peter Norton Family Foundation 97.84a d © Fred Wilson, Courtesy Pace Gallery/Whitney Museum of American Art)

Agnes Pelton (1881 1961), Untitled, 1931.Oil on canvas, 36 3/16 × 24 3/16in. (91.9 × 61.4 cm)

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Modern Painting and Sculpture Committee 96.175/Whitney Museum of American Art)

Hedda Sterne (1910 2011). New York, N.Y., 1955, (1955). Airbrush and enamel on canvas, 36 1/4 × 60 1/4in. (92.1 × 153 cm).

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of an anonymous donor 56.20 © 2015 Estate of Hedda Sterne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y./Whitney Museum of American Art)

Mary Heilmann: Sunset (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 1, 2015–)

(Photograph by Marco Anelli © 2015/Whitney Museum of American Art)

Arshile Gorky (c. 1902 1948). The Artist and His Mother, (1926 c. 1936). Oil on canvas, 60 × 50 1/4in. (152.4 × 127.6 cm).

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Julien Levy for Maro and Natasha Gorky in memory of their father 50.17 © 2015 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y. /Whitney Museum of American Art)

George Bellows (1882 1925). Floating Ice, 1910. Oil on canvas, 45 × 63in. (114.3 × 160 cm)

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 31.96/Whitney Museum of American Art)

E.E. Cummings(1894 1962). Noise Number 13, (1925). Oil on canvas, 59 5/8 × 42 3/4in. (151.4 × 108.6 cm).

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 93.98. Used by permission by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust /Whitney Museum of American Art)

Richard Artschwager's elevators at the Whitney Museum of American Art

(Jonathan & Elan Bogarin // El Tigre Productions/Whitney Museum of American Art)

Even those of us enamored of this city know that sometimes New York is just too New York-y. The art world, for instance, tends to favor local painting and sculpture over imports from the west — west of the Hudson, that is. The problem is that art championed by MoMA, the Whitney and other New York institutions is more likely to gain international attention and even canonical stature, whether it deserves it or not.

Happily, a new exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery attempts to undo the geographic bias. Summer is the season of the sprawling group show, and the most satisfying one around now is “What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present.”  Occupying three spaces on West 22nd Street, the exhibition brings together some 19, mostly under-known artists who represent a spirited assault on the art of the capital. They have a few things in common. They don’t live in New York; they don’t give a hoot about the less-is-more forms of abstract painting; and frankly, they’re not avatars of good taste.

Karl Wirsum, "Chairy Blossom," 1969. Painted metal lawn chair.

(Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery)

Rather, they’re proud to be bad-taste people — with all that implies about finding inspiration in such once-disreputable vernacular sources as cartooning, illustration and advertising. Their work can be raunchy and chaotic. It abounds with such pop-culture staples as figures with big hair and swelling muscles. Some of the objects would look more at home in a thrift shop, most notably, Suellen Rocca’s  “Purse Curse,” of 1968, a plastic pocketbook inscribed with a smoochy couple. I can’t decide if it’s just damn cute or a brilliant work riffing on pristine geometry of Minimalist sculpture.    

Suellen Rocca, "Purse Curse," 1968. Oil on plastic purse.

(Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery)

The show is comprised of four loosely-related regional schools that flourished from the 1960s to the 1980s in several cities. Some are already nationally known, such as the Chicago collective Hairy Who (which includes Jim Nutt, his wife Gladys Nilsson, Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) and the San Francisco Funk School (including ceramicists Ken Price and Robert Arneson and the painters Peter Saul and Joan Brown). Here they are joined by Destroy All Monsters, a 1970s art collective from Ann Arbor blessed with the presence of Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw.

Taken together, their work allows you to see that sometimes the graphics of pop culture — with its legible outlines and screaming colors — can be the best vehicle for expressing authentic emotion. Put another way, it’s amazing how often art that begins as yesterday’s bad taste ends up as today’s good taste. Does the show discredit the official canon of art? Not at all. but it does acquaint you with some essential additions.

Fun fact: The Chicago art collective Hairy Who got its name after artist Karl Wirsum asked a question regarding the identity of Harry Bouras, an art critic for the Chicago radio station WFMT.

“What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present” was organized by Dan Nadel, an independent curator. It will remain on view through Aug. 14, at three different spaces owned by the Matthew Marks Gallery: 502, 522 and 526 West 22nd Street. Free for all.

Hanna Liden, a Swedish artist living in New York, holds the odd distinction of being the first to turn bagels into public sculpture. Her installation “Everything” — which takes its title from the kind of bagel that combines the seeds and seasoning of its sesame, poppy and salt counterparts — is now on view at Hudson River Park. Fabricated from industrial foam and spray-painted in shades of light brown and black, her bagels measure four feet across and can appear solo or in neat stacks. As objects, the sculptures are so warm, so devoid of angst and alienation, that they probably represent a new level of friendliness in public art.  

A bagel, of course, is a symbol of New York at its gastronomic best, but it is also an organic shape. It’s a ring, a loop, an infinity with no beginning or end. Liden’s sculptures playfully reference abstract sculpture in their repetition of geometric forms. It’s as if she wants to remake Brancusi’s Endless Column, with bread.

Her “Everything” also owes something to Claes Oldenburg, her Swedish-born compatriot and one of the founders of Pop art. He is known for pop-art trophies — like his humongous Clothespin in downtown Philadelphia — that endow everyday objects with the zooming scale of skyscrapers.

Liden, by contrast, keeps her sculptures on a human scale. She’s not trying to pile bagels up to the sky. She’s not competing with the silhouette of the tall buildings that form a backdrop to her work. Rather, her sculptures feel earthbound and approachable. One of the sculptures consists of a single humble bagel. Passers-by are welcome to sit on it and gaze out at the river, carving out a moment of calm amid the rush of city life. This is sculpture as comfort food.

 Hanna Liden’s “Everything” is presented by the Art Production Fund, with support from Kiehl’s. It remains on view at the entrance to Hudson River Park (at Christopher St.) through Oct. 20 and at Ruth Wittenberg Plaza through Sept. 30. Free for all.  

With summer's end comes the upswing of the local art and culture scene. Local critics discuss what upcoming productions, shows, and exhibitions they're keeping their eyes (and ears) on this fall.

⇒Deborah Solomon, WNYC art critic, talks about gallery and museum shows:

• Biggest of the Blockbusters: Picasso Sculpture, at MoMA;
• Best Retrospective: Frank Stella at the Whitney;
• Best Show About A Religious Conversion: "Becoming Jewish: Warhol's Liz and Marilyn," at the Jewish Museum;
• Best New Older Artist: Jared Bark, aka Jed Bark, now 70, “the dean of New York framemakers”, is having a show of his "Photo Booth Works: 1969-1976" at the Southfirst Gallery in Williamsburg;
• Best Gender-Themed News News: Chelsea gallery shows by women artists include Dana Schutz at Petzel , Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan,  Anne Truitt at Matthew Marks, Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery and Isa Genzken at David Zwerner.

Note, Deborah Solomon’s book Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell comes out in a special edition in October.

⇒Sean Rameswaram, host of the Sideshow podcast from Studio 360 and PRI, shares his top comedy picks.

• Pop Up Magazine at BAM (sold out);
• Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival at Brooklyn's Bell House and Union Hall in September;
• Coney Island Pavilion “Warriors” (1979) reunion, esp. the cos-play contest September 13;
• David Sedaris tour comes to Englewood, NJ and Westhampton, NY in October;
• Dave Chappelle at Gramercy Theater in September;
• New York Comedy Festival, including new Daily Show host Trevor Noah, Patton Oswalt and Margaret Cho in November;
• Daily Show and Colbert Late Show tapings
• “How Cats Took Over the Internet” at the Museum of the Moving Image

 ⇒David Cote, theater editor for Time Out New York, recommends theater must-sees:

• Revival: "A View from the Bridge" directed by Ivo van Hove in playwright Arthur Miller’s centenary year;
• New Space: St. Anne’s Warehouse in Dumbo and their all-female production of "Henry IV";
• Off Broadway:  "Hir" by Taylor Mac at Playwrights Horizons
• Opera: Alban Berg's "Lulu" at the Met directed by William Kentridge.

⇒Graham Parker, general manager of our sister-station WQXR, suggests several classical music and opera productions:

• Opening night at The Met – Verdi's "Otello"
• Brooklyn offers new work from Julia Wolfe at BAM's Next Wave Festival; LoftOpera in Bushwick; and new Williamsburg venue National Sawdust?
• Goodbye "Avery Fisher" Hall, hello "David Geffen Hall
• Carnegie Hall's "Somewhere Project" builds off the West Side Story ballad;
• Composer (and WNYC softball team member) John Luther Adams tribute at Columbia's Miller Theater in October;
• And the MET Museum, not Opera, is on the list with a couple of concerts at the Temple of Dendur with works by Arvo Pärt and Tan Dun’s Water Passion.  

→ Read more:20 classical music concerts to watch for this fall, by WQXR's Brian Wise.  

→AndTime Out New York's 20 Broadway and Off Broadway shows to catch this fall

Think you know Picasso? Think again.

A new exhibit opening Monday, September 14, at the Museum of Modern Art presents approximately 140 sculptures by the Pablo Picasso created over the course of his entire career. Bronze, found pieces of wood, plaster and metal. There was practically nothing the artists didn't use to create his sculptures.

For this show, MoMA has used the entire fourth floor gallery to allow visitors to get a complete view of the works of art. Many of the pieces on display have never been shown before in the United States. 

"He was not trained as a sculptor," said Deborah Solomon, WNYC's art critic. “He had to make it up as he went along and as go you through this show you really see a different Picasso and you feel like he is alchemist who can turn anything into an object that has the virtues of sculpture.”

A 'She-Goat' by Pablo Picasso cast in bronze from 1950.

(Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York./MoMA)

'Bull' by Pablo Picasso from 1958 made out of plywood, tree branch, nails and screws.

(Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York./MoMA)

Pablo Picasso's 'Head of a Warrior' from 1933.

(Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York./MoMA)

'Woman in the Garden' by Pablo Picasso, built in 1929-30 as a possible memorial for the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

(Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/MoMA)

Three new photography exhibits at the Jewish Museum explore the stories behind the images, how they were created and how they influence our understanding of immigration, communism and celebrity.

"We tend to think of photography as truth laid bare," said Deborah Solomon, WNYC’s art critic reflecting on Alfred Stieglitz's famous work of art, The Steerage. "I think this is an incredible tale about the unreliability of photography as a witness to history and the truth."

Masterpieces and Curiosities: Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (September 25, 2015 through February 14, 2016).

The image has come to represent immigrants coming to America at the turn of the century. In reality, Stieglitz took the photo while traveling aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907 on his way to Europe. The third-class passengers in his photo were returning to Europe, perhaps because they had been rejected by immigration officials, perhaps to visit family in Europe. And while contemporary viewers may object to the conditions of the people in the photograph, for Stieglitz, he was interested in composition and furthering photography as a fine art. “If all my photographs were lost, and I’d be represented by just one, The Steerage, I’d be satisfied,” said Stieglitz in a quote the exhibition highlights.

The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film (September 25, 2015 through February 7, 2016)

With 181 works including photographs, film posters, and vintage publications, this exhibit documents how photographers and filmmakers promoted the values and ideology of the newly created Soviet Union. More than two-thirds of the population was illiterate in the 1920s and images, more than words, were considered effective propaganda tools. Many artists, a large number of them Jewish, embraced what they saw as the government’s emphasis on building an egalitarian world. Their works pushed photography in new directions, further confirming it as its own art form. But later, by 1932 under the rule of Joseph Stalin, the artists who created modern and avant-garde works fell out of favor, as authorities felt art must reflect a realist, pro-Soviet style.

A metaphor for the Soviet Union pushing ahead into the future from 1939. The clouds in "Express" were added to create more drama.

(Arkady Shaikhet/Nailya Alexander Gallery)

Becoming Jewish: Warhol's Liz and Marilyn (September 25, 2015 through February 7, 2016)

Both Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor converted to Judaism. Both were Hollywood celebrities. And both were idolized by Andy Warhol. Warhol took their publicity stills and turned them into works of art that comment on, as well celebrate, their celebrity status. The exhibit explores their conversion and Warhol’s works.

"Marilyn" by Andy Warhol

(The Andy Warhol Musuem, Pittsburgh/Artists Rights Society (ARS))

Andy Warhol's image of Elizabeth Taylor "Liz."

(The Andy Warhol Musuem, Pittsburgh/Artists Rights Society (ARS))

It's the peak of the fall art season and at times it can feel like new exhibits are opening practically every day. If you're wondering about what to go and see, WNYC's art critic Deborah Solomon recommends two shows.

First, an extensive show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring the work of artist Walid Raad.

"Part of it is performance, he is actually there and he walks us through the atrium of the museum giving us lectures about the various failings of the modern world," said Solomon. "He's a charming performer and for me that was the high point of the show."

Solomon's second pick is an exhibit at the Frick Collection that is the first major U.S. show of the Italian painter Andrea del Sarto.

"It consists mostly of drawings and mostly of red chalk drawings," said Solomon. "He was able to capture skin and cloth and the surface of things very convincingly."

Listen to more of Solomon's reviews of the two shows by clicking on the audio link.

Study for the Head of Julius Caesar by Andrea del Sarto from around 1520.

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY)

Andrea del Sarto's "Portrait of a Young Man" from around 1517.

(The National Gallery, London/The National Gallery, London)

Frank Stella, who is 79, got up on a podium to make some brief comments at his Whitney Museum opening this week. He said he had a great time these past few weeks installing his current retrospective. But wait a second. Since when do artists install museum shows? Don’t curators exist precisely to guard against the perils of self-interest and guarantee that art exhibitions come framed in the requisite scholarly context?

Not exactly. “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” is very much an “artist’s hang,” and it is also a pretty thrilling affair. Instead of sticking to the usual museum approach whereby paintings are arrayed in chronological order and neatly chart an artist’s growth spurts, Stella – working with museum director Adam Weinberg – mixes it up. For instance, you find Stella’s chastely geometric paintings from the 1960s hanging in the same gallery as his swooping Moby Dick sculptures from the 1980s – sculptures whose jutting forms and decorative-bordering-on-kitsch surfaces were once seen as a predatory assault on the Minimalist movement he himself had pioneered.

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s full review, and her look at two other exhibits at the Whitney, a film installation by Rachel Rose and paintings by Archibald Motley.]

Perhaps the new Stella show is designed to avoid repeating MoMA’s two properly linear retrospectives in 1970 and 1987. Or perhaps Stella wants to establish that his oft-derided late works, especially the supersized space invaders, can hold their own quality-wise beside the radical early work. Although the show makes it difficult to understand Stella’s development and can be confusing, what it sacrifices in clarity, it makes up for in handsomeness and optical energy. So too, it succeeds in retiring the well-worn “early work vs. late work” argument.

Frank Stella's "Grajau I" created in 1975 mixes paint and laquer on alumimum.

(Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York./The Glass House, A Site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. )

Instead, look for the themes that remain constant – the force of nature, for instance. My favorite piece in the show is the floor-to-ceiling, uniformly silvery hunk of metal titled “The Raft of the Medusa,” which is set in front a window overlooking the Hudson River. Elegant and battered in equal measure, the sculpture looks like both metallic de Kooning and a piece of detritus fished out of the river.

Frank Stella's "Marrakech" from 1964 on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

(Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York./MoMA)

“Frank Stella: A Retrospective” remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb. 7, 2016.

Also on view: “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Jan. 17, 2016 and “Rachel Rose: Everything and More” remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb. 7, 2016.

Was I ever a habitué of Coney Island? Not exactly. The magic carpets and Ferris Wheels of my youth were located at Rye Playland, in the safe, well-scrubbed suburbs of New York. The rise of the suburbs, in fact, contributed to Coney Island’s decline in popularity after World War II. Yet most of us feel as if we know Coney Island, largely because it has been an enduring and powerful subject for succeeding generations of artists, photographers and filmmakers. Much of that work has now been gathered into a fascinating show, “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland: 1861 to 2008,” which will remain up at the Brooklyn Museum through March 13, 2016.

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson.]

Every artist had his or her own Coney Island, as you can see in the canvases of William Merritt Chase (tranquil landscapes) or Reginald Marsh (he made Coney Island revelers appear uniformly blond, curvy and female) or even, surprisingly, the abstract painter Frank Stella. In his “Coney Island,” of 1958, alternating stripes of yellow and red frame a central rectangle of blue, evoking carnival signs and the ocean without spelling it out.

A Reginald Marsh painting from 1932 promoting Coney Island side show stars 'Pip and Flip.' The 'pinheads' from the 'Yucatan' actually were born in Georgia and suffered from microcephaly.

Frank Stella's "Coney Island" from 1958.

(2013 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /Brooklyn Museum)=

Not all of the work in the show is first-rate, but there are a few gems, including Weegee’s “Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn,” a black-and-white photograph from 1940 in which zillions of people in bathing suits and trunks stretch on as far as the eye can see. They amount to a new kind of rush hour – they’re experiencing the rush of belonging, the American phenomenon of standing beside thousands of strangers from different backgrounds and knowing you’re part of something larger than yourself.

The 'Modern Venus' of 1947 waving to her fans on the parachute ride at Coney Island .

(Brooklyn Museum Collection/Brooklyn Museum)

For a deeper dive into the world and art of Coney Island, the catalogue for the exhibit, written by curator Robin Jaffee Frank, is excellent.

An example of a site-specific signs painted by artist Stephen Powers, on display with the exhibit 'Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland.'

(Deborah Solomon)

I keep two small rocks on my desk. I picked them up decades ago, one in Nova Scotia, the other out West, and they continue to hold a sentimental charge. Rocks, as the geologists like to say, never forget; they have a sort of inbuilt poetry about them, perhaps because they come with a long and unknown past.

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson.]

I have been thinking rock-laden thoughts lately because I just saw a wonderful show, “Museum of Stones,” at the Noguchi Museum, in Long Island City. (It remains on view through January 10). The museum, of course, is a permanent repository for the art of Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese-American sculptor who died in 1988 and is probably best-known for designing a ubiquitous, bean-shaped coffee table. The current exhibition mixes Noguchi’s abstract sculptures with stone-related pieces by about 30 contemporary artists. Many of the artists are well-known — including Janine Antoni, Mel Bochner, Vija Celmins and Ugo Rondinone — but generally work in mediums other than stone.

Dove Bradshaw's 'Waterstone,' where water drips on limestone, slowly eroding it away

(Deborah Solomon/WNYC)

The show, which was organized by Dakin Hart, a curator at the Noguchi museum, is appealingly understated. It doesn’t make heavy claims about Noguchi’s legacy. It’s not trying to say he spawned a generation of sculptors. In fact, much of the work of the current generation seems to go against his legacy. Noguchi was a sculptor in the heroic tradition who believed that rock was a living force, as alive as any tree or plant. He wanted you to see even his most glossy and polished sculptures as inseparable from their earthy origins.

But artists today are more likely to use rocks ironically and not get all rhapsodic about them. Both Jimmie Durham and Tom Sachs are represented in the show by pieces that mimic the look of junior-high science fair projects and pretend to classify lab specimens. Sachs’ “Mars Rocks” (2012) consists of a plywood display case lined with tidy rows of 100-plus samples of supposed material from Mars. It comes with a removable magnifying glass, in case you feel like inspecting the work and satirizing a scientist inclined to over-categorize.

Tom Sachs 'Mars Rocks' from 2012 purport to be rock samples taken from the red planet.

(Collection of the Artist/The Noguchi Museum, NY)

The stronger pieces in the show tend to be elegiac, a lament for a globally-warmed, politically frozen planet. John Perreault, a critic and artist who died in September, contributes an affecting installation called “Mended Stones” — a floor-bound assembly of 81 smallish rocks that have cracks running through them. He made the piece by collecting some rocks, breaking them, and then gluing them back together. The installation seems to be saying that rocks are no longer a symbol of time and permanence. Rather, we broke them, we broke the earth, and this is a good time to think about repairing it.

John Perreault's 'Mended Stones' now on view at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York.

(Deborah Solomon/WNYC)

The art of drawing has always been overshadowed by flashier mediums, but this happens to be a moment when drawings are impossible to ignore. The main event is “Drawing Then,” a group show of uncommon excellence at the Dominique Levy Gallery (at 909 Madison Avenue).

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson.]

The title riffs on “Drawing Now,” a historic survey that was held at the Museum of Modern Art 40 years ago. The new show, like its predecessor, focuses on drawings from the say-you-want-a-revolution 1960s. It contains first-rate works by Jasper Johns, Vija Celmins, Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, among others.

Jasper Johns, "Souvenir 2," is part of the show, "Drawing Then."

(Dominique Lévy Gallery)

It seems newly clear, with the gift of hindsight, that the 1960s were a golden age for American drawing, the period when works on paper acquired the aesthetic oomph once reserved for paintings. Drawing spoke to the era’s obsession with process and ideas. Compared to Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists of the ‘50s, who believed that the act of painting was suffused with drama, Johns and others in the ‘60s proved that drawing and the thinkinglife have a drama of their own.

Vija Clemens 1968 drawing of a "Letter," part of the exhibit "Drawing Then."

(Dominique Lévy Gallery)

Today, sadly, drawing has become less central to the practice of art. The artist Brice Marden once bemoaned to me that the vogue for photography has killed off the market for drawings, which used to be the art form that collectors favored if they couldn’t afford to buy a painting. Now they buy a photograph instead.

This is not to say that drawing is an endangered species. Hardly. At the Drawing Center (33 Wooster Street), in SoHo, Jennifer Bartlett is exhibiting a poignant selection of works on paper that belong to her “Hospital” series.

Bartlett, who is now 74, began her career as a Conceptual artist enamored of grids and mathematical systems. But life, unlike art, is neither gridded nor systematic, and the works in the show – pastels, all – are based on Bartlett’s distressing experiences as a patient at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in 2012.

The strongest pieces capture the world beckoning outside her hospital windows. There are views of the East River in which the water mesmerizes with its harmonies of blues and greens; and views of the Triboro Bridge that endow New York with a bright Tiepolo sky. Bartlett finds so much pleasure in the urban landscape that the sidewalks of New York may look more alive to you after you leave the show.

A view of the east river from her Jennifer Bartlett's hospital room, part of her series "Hospital" from 2012.

(The Drawing Center)

Is Laura Poitras an artist? The question might seem like the height of irrelevance. She is, after all, a hugely acclaimed documentary filmmaker. Her Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” (2014) followed Edward Snowden on his crusade to expose aggressive snooping by the government in the wake of September 11, 2001. Yet Poitras is not indifferent to the artist question, and she is currently having her first show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Can she make the transition from documentary filmmaker to “fine artist,” with all that implies about work that can hold its own beside that of Edward Hopper, Jeff Koons and other staples of the Whitney’s collection?

“Astro Noise,” as the show is titled, brings together five new installations that relate to the theme of surveillance. Most of the pieces are video-based, and one is projected onto the ceiling. Rather than swamping you with classified documents or didactic PowerPoints, the show tries to create a spooky, slightly paranoiac ambience. The main attraction, “Disposition Matrix,” sets you adrift in a dark passageway in which a series of 20 or so peephole windows beckon you to draw close.  As you look through the little slots, which offer views of video clips and items from the Snowden archive, you play the role of a spy, a lone figure enshrouded in shadow, squinting at something hard to see.

The piece can put you in mind of Marcel Duchamp’s legendary “Étant donnés” (1966), which is also an exercise in aggressive peeping. In the Duchamp installation, viewers look through two holes drilled in a wooden door and see a disturbing tableau behind it. It acknowledges the voyeuristic pleasures of looking – and one wonders whether Poitras is trying to make some comment about the impulse to look that underlies both art and surveillance.

ANARCHIST: Israeli Drone Feed (Intercepted February 24, 2009), 2016, by Laura Poitras.

(Laura Poitras/The Whitney Museum)

The catalogue for the exhibition doesn’t furnish us with the answer, because after a short, lucid introduction by curator Jay Sanders, the book is given over to writers and activists whom Poitras hand-picked. There are essays and short stories by Dave Eggers, Cory Doctorow, Ai Weiwei and various others. The pieces are interesting enough, but none of them mention the works in the show or make the case for Poitras as an artist. And isn’t that the reason we’ve gathered here?

The Whitney show doesn’t add much to Poitras’s already lustrous reputation, and viewers seeking illumination might come away wondering why so much basic information about her artistic influences and training has been withheld. Apparently even people who oppose state secrecy have their own secrets. Go see the show anyhow, and add your gaze to the chain of gazes that have come to define life in the 21^st century. You can watch the artist watching the government watching you. 

The history of art does not abound with female masters. Yet in recent years, feminist-minded scholars have tumbled back in time to search for overlooked figures. One of the better-known rediscoveries is Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, a gifted and prolific portraitist who flourished in late-18th century Paris, in the last, luxury-loving moments before the French Revolution. She is now having her first-ever retrospective in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is a worthy affair.

At a time when art schools were still closed to women, Vigée Le Brun was a model of obdurate persistence. Her father, a painter, died when she was 12, and she was largely self-taught. After she won a commission to paint a portrait of Marie Antoinette, she became the go-to portrait painter of the 1780s. Countesses and duchesses who could afford her high fee rushed to sit for her and, to her credit, she created a pantheon of relaxed-looking women who seemed no less complete without the presence of men.

Vigée Le Brun had enormous facility. She was good at depicting the trappings of aristocratic life — like the sheen of satin, or lace ruffles spilling from the end of a black velvet sleeve, or a wide-brimmed hat bedecked with a curling ostrich feather. And she excelled at painting women’s hair. An odd hairdo was popular at the time, a kind of regal mullet, with short curls in the front and long tresses falling down in the back. For a point of reference, see the Met’s own “Madame Grand,” a charismatic portrait in which a young woman holding a musical score rolls her eyes upwards with a hint of impatience, appearing a little too-cool for the matrons who populated her world.

'Madame Grand' by Vigée Le Brun painted in 1783.

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

After the Revolution, Vigée Le Brun fled Paris and managed to sustain her career in exile. Her portraits became formulaic and slick. Not to mention untimely. You would never know from her paintings that the Reign of Terror had ever happened. There is not a wrinkle to be found on any of those smooth and contented faces, not a hint of darkness or encroaching mortality. This makes her art less complex than it could have been, and it would be a century before the painter Berthe Morisot proved that art by women could rival that of men.

Vigée le Brun's "Self-Portrait" from 1790.

(Gallerie degli Uffizi, Corridoio Vasariano, Florence/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Edvard Munch remains best-known for his “Scream,” an image that can rival the Mona Lisa for mass popularity. But Munch was much more than a one-hit wonder. “Munch and Expressionism,” a fascinating show at the Neue Galerie, rounds up a first-rate selection of his paintings and woodblock prints, many of them from museums in his native Norway. It has often been said that Munch was a key influence on the German Expressionists, who are also well-represented in the show.

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson.]

"The Scream" by Edvard Munch. This version is a pastel and is one of four versions of the iconic work of art.

(Private colection/Neue Galerie)

Munch, actually, invented Expressionism before anyone knew what to call it. He was exploring Freudian themes of depression and sexual shame before Freud got around to publishing a word on the subject. Munch openly traced his problems to his childhood, which was clouded by illness and death. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, and a beloved older sister died of the same disease when he was 14. His father was a physician, and I sometimes wonder whether Munch’s self-dramatizing “Scream” was directed at a father who was likely to have dismissed his son’s emotional suffering as small potatoes compared to illnesses that were claiming lives.

"Separation" by Edvard Munch painted in 1896 now on view at the Neue Galerie.

(Lynn G. Straus, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York./Neue Galerie)

This is very much a show with a theme, and it is interesting to see how Munch’s early Symbolist works influenced artists in Germany, especially Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. But the differences between Munch and his followers outweigh the affinities. While an artist such as Erich Heckel favored loudly colored, in-your-face paintings that owe much to the French Fauves, Munch didn’t go for modern flatness. In many of his paintings, long roads unwind behind a central figure, and tiny figures in the distance hint at unresolved dramas.

Munch remains best-known for his early work – the dark, Symbolist meditations infused with a heavy melancholy. But he did lighten up at the end. Despite his intense and oft-stated fear of death, he outlived many of his friends; he died in Oslo in 1944, at the age of 80. Look for an extraordinary painting in the show called “Standing Nude Against Blue Background,” a late canvas circa 1930 that seems almost shockingly upbeat. It reportedly has never been shown before.

Edvard Munch's "Standing Nude against Blue Background" painted between 1925-30 now on view at the Neue Galerie.

(The Munch Museum, Oslo; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Neue Galerie)

A woman occupies the right side of the canvas, appearing to be floating on a raft of beautiful blue-and-green brushstrokes. The loose brushwork and patches of dripped pigment can put you in mind of Jackson Pollock’s free way with pigment. It’s a relief to see that finally Munch learned how to find pleasure – at least in his art, if not in his life.

Detail of the dripping paint in Edvard Munch's "Standing Nude against Blue Background."

(Deborah Solomon)

Munch and Expressionism runs through June 13, 2016, at the Neue Galerie.

This month the Metropolitan Museum of Art expands to its third site, moving into the former Whitney building designed by Marcel Breuer on Madison at 74th Street.

WNYC art critic Deborah Solomon previews its opening exhibition.

And a piece of good news Solomon couldn’t help but emphasize several times: the new Met Breuer is pay-what-you-wish admission!

1. 

Titian, "Flaying of Marsyas" probably 1570s

(Archidiocese Olomouc, Archiepiscopal Palace, Picture Gallery, Kroměříž (KE 2370,0,107)/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

2. 

Jan van Eyck, "Saint Barbara" 1437

(Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (410)/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

3. 

Lucian Freud, "Self-Portrait," 2002

(Private collection, courtesy Ordovas/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

4. 

Alice Neel "James Hunter Black Draftee" 1965

(COMMA Foundation, Belgium/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

5. 

Robert Smithson, "Mirrors and Shelly Sand," 1969-70

(Dallas Museum of Art/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

6. 

Andy Warhol, "Do it Yourself (Violin)," 1962

(Private collection/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

There is nothing like a global catastrophe to push art into seeming irrelevance. A painting has never stopped an earthquake from erupting. But art fares well in the remembrance-of-earthquakes department, and “In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11,” an exhibition at the Japan Society, is a model of intelligent memorializing. Bringing together more than 90 works by 17 leading photographers, the show sets out to observe the five-year anniversary of 3-11, which is numerical shorthand for that Friday afternoon in northeastern Japan when an earthquake triggered a series of unimaginable horrors, including nuclear meltdown.

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Richard Hake.]

“In the Wake,” as its title suggests, does not seek to take us inside a red-hot instant of devastation. There is nothing here like the 9/11 scenes that New Yorkers know regrettably well – no photographs of rushing firemen or frantic crowds, no close-ups of someone’s missing shoe. Rather, the show explores the eerily quiet aftermath of catastrophe while highlighting the wide range of approaches to story-telling. Some of the photographers go for matter-of fact images that capture what they saw. Others take refuge in fantasy images that only nominally resemble the visible world. After a catastrophe, do you want to see what’s there – or rather to invent something all-new?

"Takata Matsubara" by Japanese artist Naoya Hatakeyama.

(Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery/Japan Society)

The show opens with photographs that favor of a literal, almost documentary style, such as those of Naoya Hatakeyama. A well-known Japanese artist, he lost his elderly mother in the floodwaters. Afterwards, he decided to return to his hometown and photograph all that remains – an abandoned landscape with mangled trees and mounds of rubbish and little trace of the life that once flourished here. “No style” is of course a style of its own, and Hatakeyama’s photographs have a clean and spare beauty, especially one that allows a rainbow to intrude.

On the other extreme, some photographers favor conceptual strategies and digital manipulation. This, I think, is the weaker half of the show. But it does include the dazzling work of Nobuyoshi Araki, a well-known Japanese photographer who decided to stay put in Tokyo on that fateful March 11. He later ripped the negatives of the film he shot that day, and the resulting prints – they variously show a cloud, a rainy street scene, and an actress on television – are defaced by dark slash marks. They turn every print into a “reject” and suggest that perfection – artistic or otherwise – is no longer possible.

"Untitled" by Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki.

(Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery/Japan Society)

Of all the French Impressionists, Edgar Degas is generally viewed as the most conservative. Unlike Monet and the rest of the clan, who set up their easels in the verdant out-of-doors and recorded the fleeting effects of light, Degas preferred the grand indoors.

Trained in academic drawing, he was one of the great draftsmen of the 19th century and he never abandoned his love of the figure. Today, his female figures can induce mixed feelings. His bathers, with their gauche poses, look a little bovine as they climb into tubs and at time suggest a disturbing voyeurism on his part.

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Richard Hake.]

Yet “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty,” a breathtaking show at the Museum of Modern Art, argues that the artist was far more modern and experimental than his reputation suggests. The exhibition focuses on his monotypes, a lesser-seen aspect of his production that enabled him to be loose and free.

Edgar Degas' "Café-Concert Singer," from 1877, is part of MoMA's exhibition "Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty."

(Private collection/MoMA)

A monotype, technically, is a relatively simple process that yields up a single print (as opposed to an edition). More often than not, it begins with a pot of greasy printer’s ink and a smooth metal plate on which to draw. Most of the monotypes in the show are small in size, and allow us to watch Degas create streaks of light and shadow out of the muck of viscous black ink. He often applied the ink, or wiped it away, directly with his hands and left fingerprints as evidence. My favorite piece in the show, “In the Omnibus”— in which a woman with a veiled hat is shown in profile, riding a bus — is a marvel of economy, a welter of dark smudges and smears that somehow coheres into a graceful portrait.

"In the Ombnibus" by Edgar Degas, part of the exhibit, "Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty" at MoMA.

(Musee Picasso, Paris/Deborah Solomon)

After printing an image, Degas would often run the plate through the press again, creating a second print, a ghost image of the first. Its very paleness provided him with an invitation and an excuse to colorize the image by adding some pastel. There are visual pleasures here that you will never see anywhere else, as you watch Degas rework his images —repeating them, reversing them, mirroring them, pastel-izing them. The variations hint at his obsession with “process,” one of the key concepts of modern art. By a nice coincidence, Jasper Johns, a more recent master of the monotype, is having a show devoted exclusively to some 40 years of work in that medium at the Matthew Marks Gallery, starting May 6. This is, happily, the spring of the monotype.

"Ballet Scene" by Edgar Degas, from 1879, is part of MoMA's exhibition "Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty."

(William I. Koch Collection/MoMA)

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty at MoMA runs from March 26, 2016 to July 24, 2016.

Sol LeWitt was one of the founders of Conceptual art, and he had a talent for making complex ideas seem accessible. He earned his first fame in the 1960s for sculptures assembled from white-painted cubes piled up into sturdy configurations.

“Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple,” he once said, hinting at his own talent for aesthetic clarification.

But he also possessed a talent for appreciation, and was among the leading collectors of his generation. He routinely bartered his sketches with those of his artist-friends, mostly as a gesture of moral support. He ended up with some 4,000-plus paintings, drawings, photographs and miscellaneous objects stored near his home in Chester, Conn., where he died in 2007, at the age of 78.

Postcard from Sol to Eva LeWitt, 2000. Ink on postcard, 4 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches. LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT.

(The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York./The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

A fascinating new show at the Drawing Center brings together some 120 works culled from his elephantine holdings. Yes, there are a few LeWitts here, including his wonderful “Wall Drawing #1248,” which was executed for the occasion by two officially designated draftsman.

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson.]

The exhibition does not explore influences between artists so much as revel in the shared DNA of the Conceptually-inclined clan of the ‘60s and ‘70s, with their predilection for graph paper and grids and rows of numerals. This hardly sounds like a recipe for pictorial engagement, but there is wit to burn in Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s ”Untitled (Falcon Rulers),” a meticulous watercolor depicting four six-inch wooden rulers framing a patch of hardwood floor. I have reason to suspect it is square.

Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Untitled (Falcon Rulers), 1976. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 8 inches. LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT.

(Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York/Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York)

The show becomes sweetly sentimental one floor down, where you are likely to linger among a group of hand-embellished post cards that LeWittt sent and received. One card arrived from the painter Pat Steir, who, in the small space reserved for a message, wrote “Dear Sol” a few dozen times in different colored pencils, each mark echoing the next and adding up to a very bouncy, slightly bonkers, salutation.

The show does enlarge your view of LeWitt, and not only because it memorializes him as a force for good in the art world. More importantly, I think the show calls attention to the democratic impulse underlying his work — not the sculptures so much, but the more influential “wall drawings,” many of which were actually painted, not drawn. He delegated their execution to teams of assistants whom he graciously credited, and these days, a new generation is warming to LeWitt’s collaborative approach. Clearly, he began his career on a note of subtraction, paring his art down to essentials. But in the end he turned out to be a world-class includer, and that too, was an idea ahead of its time.

“Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection” remains on view at the Drawing Center in SoHo through June 12.