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Infinite longing. One expects a decidedly romantic idea of Romanticism or nature after a stop for Caspar David Friedrich and lost souls. It also just happens to define Romanticism for Anita Brookner.

Brookner’s Romanticism and Its Discontents puts the emphasis squarely on the discontent. Her introduction to nineteenth-century French art and letters comes off all too pat and Romantic itself. Still, Romanticism truly deserves a survey as heartfelt and concise as this one. Last time I drew on past reviews of Friedrich at the Metto prepare you for its full retrospective, through May 11. Let me now place him in context of French and German Romantics, with an invitation to read more.

A movement so epoch-making may sound like an easy success. For Brookner, though, Romanticism means dealing with failure—and failing badly at the attempt. Her creators represent as many ways to cope with uncertainty. Some escape into idealism, art, and the Classicism of their teachers. Others look to determinate causes in science and humanity. Most found a hero in Napoleon. Each ends up with hardly more than a struggle, fatigue, and fancy ideals to which he himself puts the lie. Or so goes Brookner’s chilly romance.

Modern critics have opposed Classicism to Romanticism, using more contrasts than I care to remember—linear versus painterly, theater versus absorption, wilderness versus culture, primitive versus pastoral, authority versus community, aristocracy versus big industry, villa versus garden, and goodness knows what else. Perhaps only manifestos, historians, and art critics believe in periods anyway. Rebels against Jacques-Louis David, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot kept the revolutionary ideals of the first, the skepticism of the second, and the irony of the last. Nicolas Poussin and Poussin’s landscapes take Classicism into the Baroque with all its temptations intact, Delacroix paints like a Romantic while proclaiming his classicism, and J. D. Ingres echoes David’s line and idealized virtues while adding electric colors and an arm that manages to grow out of a sitter’s chest. One could debate forever whether Modernism ever outgrew Romantic individualism and a culture of capitalism.

Look again at Friedrich’s lunar vistas or the sea, with a dark clarity still visible in landscape art today. He and his countrymen celebrated not the unattainable, but a world newly at hand. One enters past maps of the lunar surface of incredible precision and beauty. Friedrich knew a little astronomy, too, when he included a ring around the moon. Earthshine, reflected light, makes visible just slightly more than half the moon. I imagine that scientists then would have told me just how much more.

Whatever the world, Friedrich invented it at its most luminous. He takes in a river or harbor scene around 1805—at age thirty-one, with a finely wrought view from the artist’s studio. Later a ship’s mast belongs to Woman at a Window, a painting of his wife from 1822. The mass reinforces the stasis and geometry of the window, shutters, and wall. Nothing else comes close to the deep red and green streaks of her dress seen from behind. Somehow she stands out from the same colors and handling, slightly toned down, in her surroundings.

Is that mix of public and private worlds what really drove Friedrich’s men to the woods? Nature lay close by, even to a city boy—too close by. Progress threatened to uproot nature, just as a massive tree trunk stands torn from the ground and erosion has left a protruding rock to survive the elements. It threatened to break forever the intimate link between humanity and nature. Fortunately, one still has artists and the imagination.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Have you missed the lavish retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich at the Met, through May 11? Me, too, until just days ago. If you follow my peregrinations regularly, you know that I have been laid up with ankle surgery since before it opened. I can only hope that I still have time to see a selection of the drawings that made his reputation and the paintings that make him a popular favorite.

I have, however, reviewed him more than once at length in the past. Nearly twenty-five years ago, the Met focused in on just two paintings, including Moonwatchers. I placed them in context of the very meaning of Romanticism, as seen in Romanticism and Its Discontents, by Anita Brookner, the novelist and art historian. And he was a man of his time. A decade later, the museum had an extensive survey of German Romanticism in works on paper, as seen through an open window—or, in the spirit of reflection, the subject of an open window. Allow me then two posts excerpting past reviews, with an invitation to follow the links to more.

Two men gaze through a wood at the moon. They may have turned to the forest for a connection to the night or for the sounds, smell, and light of nature buried in the sweat and toil of day. They could have sought each other’s intimacy, in the quiet of the night—apart from conversation that hardly knew when to stop. They have no weapons, but they could have sought adventure, swaggering in their broad hats and capes, confident in their powers to bring down their prey.

It hardly matters. Earthly quarry come way too easily. These men are in fact students—of the physical universe and the soul, the painter himself and a friend. They have stopped in their tracks, because they seek something farther and less attainable.

Instead of a fox, an idea, or the earth, they have gained clearing, and the moon stops them dead. The painter, Caspar David Friedrich, exaggerates a rise in the wood and distance to the sky with a low vantage point. He heightens the ghostly light with a color and shadow almost out of forest scenes in Bambi, Northern Renaissance and Matthias Grünewald. Like the men but more literally, Friedrich steps quite out of physical space. He puts their motives aside, turning their backs to the picture plane. Now only the painter’s feelings count.

The painting appears in a haunting, well-chosen concentration. To help celebrate a new acquisition, the Met assembles two paintings by the German Romantic, several drawings, and a handful of other work showing his influence. The Frick Collection has shown repeatedly how much more a small show can bring home than many an overblown retrospective, >and the Met’s restraint makes a familiar but elusive image fresh and intelligible. It may still run to hard-edged emotional overkill, but it is impossible to forget. If any painting could represent longing for the unattainable, this must be it.

Perhaps it makes sense that Friedrich often looks quaint or cartoonish these days, for all his broad appeal. The Hudson River School artist he most influenced, George Inness, can similarly look visionary or simply escapist. Friedrich did understand aspiration and failure. He knew personally Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who retold the Faust legend. Like Michi Meko today, he felt at home in the dark woods and a stranger in the urban wilderness. Life after Romanticism has had to battle the same issues of public identity and personal perception—with considerably less confidence in humanity and nature.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

If John Zorn leaves a single image, it is of himself, again and again, wielding a mean tenor sax. It suits a musician who dares to think for himself and on the fly.

He has fronted jazz bands and stretched the limits of rock. He has taken on the rigor and premeditation of a modern composer and arranger, too, from extended suites to bursts of counterpoint. You are as likely to hear him on a sound track as in the concert hall. Just try to pin him down. Just try, in fact, to call him a creative artist, but the Drawing Center shows him thinking in pictures, alongside Ericka Beckman through May 11.

John Zorn does come with a label, experimental music, for a composer past seventy and still in the midst of things. Naturally his scores are often as not for experimental filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard. And his work on paper looks very much like experiments, torn right from the lab, sometimes seen but not often heard. A recent series greets you on the way in with black spatters darkening into shallow pools and stretching into thin, irregular traces as if emerging before your eyes. They look as much like text results as like Jackson Pollock drips, and their technique suggests the laboratory as well. Whether in ink, charcoal, or pencil, it has a collective shimmer, as if lit from within.

If that suggests a certain insularity, he calls the show “Hermetic Cartography,” and do not pretend that you always get it. Hermetic means insular, much as many a hermit is found speaking to himself or to no one at all. At the same time, cartography is mapping, from another tendency in the avant-garde, toward arguing and explaining, and one sketch doctors a map of New England, like a key to the art world. Who can say why? It could be a stretch just to call Zorn a visual artist, and a Wikipedia article about him does not so much as mention it. The show itself relies just as much on ticket stubs and program notes as drawing, like something more insular still.

Still, the shimmer is often real. Not everything works altogether for its own sake, assuming art ever should. A black-curtained room is a dead end, as memorabilia often are. Still, the pools and swirls have the ghostly beauty of a photogram or a medical scan. Do not forget, too, that an actual “rayogram” still belongs first and foremost to Man Ray in Dada and fine art. Then, too, if Zorn’s are not actual direct impressions, experimental art still relies for its success on mind games. Zorn is always explaining.

He is also always in that space between improvisation and formal composition, popular culture and unconcern for a wider public. He is a born collector, unable to put much of anything to use or to throw it away. Often, too, things make explicit reference to popular art. The souvenirs have flatter outlines and color, like cartoons, and at least one refers to sound not by musical notation, but with a word like twang or splat. It also recalls just how much music in a composer’s hand is also an art—and how much notation, too, has its limits. Not everything here is all that beautiful, but then not everything has to be.

Exhibitions continue in the back room with Beckman and “Power of the Spin.” It would be a decent enough title for Zorn’s show, too, doing its best to put a new spin on things. One might well mistake her for more of him. She picks up on his Pop Art, in larger work that looks very much like comic books and collectibles. Downstairs she adds a projection based on a project by Zorn, like a step toward animation. Yet it is also a step toward live action.

It has just two characters, a man in overalls and a woman with green flesh. He is dressed the part for Jack and the beanstalk, while she is undressed for the part as Rapunzel. Choose your myth. More often, though, Beckman embeds her characters in a literal carnival, with art as its rides. An artist of the “Pictures generation” of the 1970s, she has a fondness for narrative and a promise of critique. If her characters are taking risks, the best of Zorn’s appear to explode.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Can art bear witness to a massacre? This winter I wrote about artists who do, and they have me thinking about political art and whether, even for a progressive artist, a message of any kind risks conservatism in art.

Can form and content be at odds like that, and does it matter? Surely these artists hit home because their form and message alike aim for the eye and strike home to the gut. Before I say more about them, then, let me talk through the dilemma and the promise. I did so many years ago with one of this Web site’s first essays, about an artist as in command of silence as Jan Vermeer—and yet even his women seem just about to speak? What would they say about art now? Now I wrap this in with the winter’s reports on Enzo Camacho, Ami Lien, Sohrab Hura, and Marco Brambilla as a longer review and my latest upload.

Just to ask about such matters could serve as a frame for any discussion of political art. Not only political artists will feel strongly about it. So many, in every genre and medium, will speak of finding something more in what they do than a message. I would be wrong to write this off as formalism or, conversely, an overriding need for self-expression. A generation of late modern artists and postmodern critics dismissed all that came before as likely both, even as much of the public dismissed abstraction, conceptual art, and the present. We were not going to be like that, because we were not going to give up on art.

Still, it is only fair to insist that not just political art, but most art, maybe all art, has a subtext not to be dismissed. How often art that had seemed remote to me became vivid once I read more about it. I had not appreciated the depth and shimmer of oil colors in Jan van Eyck and the Northern Renaissance until art historians like Erwin Panofsky taught me their iconography, the stories they set out to tell. It was important not just, as artists themselves might suggest, because it caused me to look longer—long enough to start to see. Without it, the liquid darkness in Francisco de Goya and Disasters of War might have seemed a pale excuse for monochrome abstraction. With it, that darkness became a reason to look and a reason to paint.

Consider an artist whose politics extends well beyond her art. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the film about Nan Goldin, a three-part narrative advances along parallel tracks throughout. The very first sequence speaks of the suicide of her sister, and the story continues to ground her work in her life with all its pain and triumph. The second track takes up her major work, the slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in all its closeness to her but also its silence. These are her friends and loved ones in the age of AIDS, and one can only guess who in a photo is dying or a survivor. One can only guess, too, which of the couples sharing a frame can overcome their physical and emotional distance.

The third track ups the ante on both those narratives, her life and her life’s work. It shows her as an activist backed by a movement. Their assault on the pharmaceutical industry advances, obliging museums to refuse tainted funding. And yet this last track will never fully engage a world outside of art institutions, and it all but gives up on art. Can political art, then, still make a difference? Did it ever?

As an undergraduate, a friend told me, he sought an answer in a hole in the ground. Joel Shapiro, the sculptor, asked his students for two works apiece, one sincere and one false, but forget that. For each, my friend dug much the same two holes in the program’s yard, three by three by three. He started with the false one, but by the time he had turned up all that soil the false had become true. He might have felt a personal obligation or a personal violation in filling them up again.

At art’s most rewarding, the artist’s ideology is part of the work, too, intended or not. Whether politics, religion, or belief in itself, it develops right along with the visual and material. I think of existence and subtext as a bit like music and lyrics, and there is no point in making songs into lesser symphonies. The subtext can be what gets the artist up in the morning, throwing paint at canvas, or to bed in the evening, contemplating every detail, and it can raise other subtexts as well, like as the artist’s disturbing passions. It is a writer’s job to tease all these out and to show that form and content are alike part of the work, the very same work, and just what that entails. What goes wrong with bad political art may be that they never really are.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

You may remember Weegee for one thing, a freak show, but never forget: freaks are people, too. They may even be celebrities.

With wide eyes and contorted faces, they are not a pretty picture, but society’s picture all the same. Riven by shadow, they are used to stage lighting as well. In a retrospective subtitled “Society of the Spectacle,” at the International Center of Photography through May 5, they become more and more glamorous, too. Above all, a freak show really is a show, and Weegee sees one on both sides of the camera, as the paparazzi crowd in. The ambiguity of photojournalism and dark comedy has haunted photography ever since. Just this past fall, Jeff Brouws dares you to find anything wrong in the American scene, while Mary Mattingly watches the dark side of the natural world come out at night—and I wrap this together with recent reports on them both as a longer and fuller review and my latest upload.

Weegee had one name but many lives, much like the New York he portrayed in photography, and yet he kept coming back to the spectacle, much like the city itself. Born Arthur Fellig in Ukraine at the turn of the century, he made a career as the police photographer who kept one step ahead of the police. It gave him a name compounded from Ouija and squeegee, for the man with a police-band radio, a sixth sense, and whatever tools it took to make the streets his darkroom. If the cops had their perp walk, Weegee was there, with his cigar and flashbulb. Chasing fires, crime, and car wrecks, he might even get there first. He took his self-portrait in a police van, staring right back.

This was the New York street photography of Helen Levitt and William Klein, with an emphasis on the urban underground. It anticipates the madness of Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand still to come. He called his first book, in 1945, Naked City—but then, in 1947, he packed up for Hollywood, where crime was legit because you could make it up. He joined the wall of photographers at a press opening, and he turned the camera around to capture them as well. You can all but hear the flash go off. It penetrates the Hollywood darkness as far as he wished to go.

The curator, Clément Chéroux of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, describes a second career. I am not so sure. His technique stayed the same, with a strong depth of field and extreme contrasts in brightness. When he photographs a fire, smoke can be anything from mud gray to the reflection off the firefighters’ lights. In LA, the men wear white shirts and black ties, and stage lights are just part of the show. In his last decade, the 1060s, Weegee left for Europe and yet another life, but where would Paris be without the night?

The show draws freely on ICP’s collection, with the Weegee Archive, which it owns. It takes its publicity image from LA, but the rest leans heavily on his years in New York. It might be missing a lot that way, except that his subject had not changed all that much either. Had he turned from fires, crime, and car wrecks to celebrities—and from the hard boiled to the cheesy? He was always taking the measure of human lives, from the start. Even a crashed car was a portrait.

Had he turned, too, from the crime scene to what lay behind the camera? Like Arbus herself, he was always conscious of action on the fringes. That includes the suspects themselves, but also the entirety of a city in turmoil, black and white. He heads for Coney Island visitors and bar regulars in search of relief. He looks up to families seeking rest on a fire escape in the head of summer. He might have seen himself, his restlessness, and his cigar.

The show’s title quotes Guy Debord, the French theorist, making Weegee a postmodernist before his time. It refers as well, ICP argues, to a society of spectators, like Wee himself. For him, they were never all that different from each other—or the criminals from the stars. When suspects hide their face from police photography’s cameras, they were putting on a mask and a show. Late in life, the photographer’s lens itself creates the mask, with paintings as popular as the Mona Lisa but with wide eyes and distorted faces. Parody, sympathy, and honesty point to comedy, tragedy, and art.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

If one thing comes to mind about the Middle Ages, it could well be stasis. What could disturb centuries of ritual, art, and ideas? What could disturb the darkness?

With The Book of Marvels, the Morgan Library traces not just the end of an era, but something more. In reality, the world itself was changing, and travelers were catching up with the changing picture. As the show’s subtitle has it, they were “Imagining the Medieval World,” and they invite you to imagine it as well, through May 25.

The Book of Marvels contained many discoveries, and so did the medieval journeys that preceded it. The Morgan does not stop with that one book, not even in the small gallery off the atrium. A modern marvel itself on its hundredth birthday, the museum holds the travels of Marco Polo to the East and Christopher Columbus—who published his own account of, he still believed, a shorter passage to India. It has the legend of John Mandeville, an almost surely fictitious Englishman, that may have first appeared in French. They witnessed men with six arms or two heads and bearded women. They found Asian spices, fabrics, teas, and the entirety of Islam.

O brave new world that has such people in ‘t. So goes a memorable line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from a girl whose discoveries, of flawed and altogether normal people, came by sea to her. As her father replies, chastening, ‘Tis new to thee. But then it is only a fiction, and so are the claims with which I began. Far from static, the Middle Ages had its philosophical changes, as Aristotle gave way to original sin, and its political ones, as Rome lost its dominance. It strayed from home for the Crusades to the Holy Land. Trade routes to the Middle East and Asia were opening up as well.

The show’s premise is suspect as well, although interesting. The travels of Alexander the Great and Pliny belong to the ancient world, not the medieval one, and The Book of Marvels, from the 1460s, or The Book of Nature, from 1475, to the Renaissance. Columbus obviously wrote after 1492—and not about India after all, but rather a true brave new world, the Americas. And will it be about the day-to-day world that men and women knew or about imagined marvels? If it has mostly anonymous artists without the true wonders of illuminated manuscripts and medieval bibles, it has the interest of actual lives, hunting and exploring. Someone had to push against the limits of the medieval world.

Just this past fall, the Met staked its tale of the early Renaissance on Duccio in Siena, at the center of new trade routes. Where would a curator stake a career, after all, without a contrarian’s history? The Morgan’s curator, Joshua O’Driscoll, has his fictions as well, but also insights. He grounds the show in both ways of discovering one’s own world, imagining and mapping. In different ways, they create and reflect the hierarchy of late Middle Ages and its giving way to something new. Already the appreciation of marvels suggests the advent of science, trade, and an openness to discovery.

The imaginings are themselves anything but the European church triumphant. The most vivid colors come with black African skin and Persian Islamic art. The many nudes are neither demurely shrouded nor Renaissance heroes. At the same time, a hierarchy appears in depicted wealth and architecture. Those nudes arrange themselves frontally in a several story building. They know where they belong.

Maps may seem more like historical curiosities than art, but they are just as revealing. A guide to the Crusades looks like a treasure map. Later ones show a closed world, but a world that contains multitudes. An encompassing sea forms the picture’s borders. It may consciously invert the ancient view bounded by the shores of the Mediterranean, as in the Odyssey. It may be a brave new world after all.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.