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A Public Square
John Haberin New York City
Julie Mehretu in Retrospective
In a retrospective packed with triumphs, Julie Mehretu has at its center an entire room for just one. It is a triumph that admirers will, almost surely, never see again.
Not because it is on loan, but because it consists of four loans, from museums as far apart as Houston, Atlanta, London, and Abu Dhabi. It reunites Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) from 2012, each part fifteen feet high and twelve feet across. The Whitney has a wall for each, because nothing else could contain their dimensions, much less their energy. For Mehretu, it was the energy of a popular uprising just a year before, in Cairo's Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Has the room itself become a public square? Not necessarily, at least during a pandemic, but a painting can be one, and that is her greatest triumph. 
Can I believe that her allusions matter, when I cannot verify a single one? It may not matter, because silences speak, too, on behalf of the silenced. It may not matter, too, because the visible remains vivid, too. It was vivid when she broke out as an abstract artist, and it is vivid again now in painted architecture and, more recently, a painterly touch with electric color. Just as important, the contradictions attest to the dilemma of a deservedly successful artist in a politicized art world. First, though, the four-sided public square.
The idea of a public space
For starters, the painting (or paintings) depict a public square and the promise of a public space. The Mogamma is a government building, built in 1949 for Egypt's first self-government after colonial rule. It also stood, wall text explains, for the country's leap into modernism—and Julie Mehretu is nothing if not a modern artist, even this late in the game of modern and postmodern art. Whatever her subject, her work is all but inscrutable and insistently abstract. Still, one can make out elements of architecture, lots of them, and her wiry ink and acrylic suggest an architect's drawing run wild. It just happens to lack any sign of foundations.
It depicts, too, the very idea of a public space. To believe that wall text, she has thrown in iconic buildings, amphitheaters, and public squares from AddisAbaba to Havana by way of Beijing and Baghdad. (Increasingly with Mehretu, one must take a lot on faith.) All of them have associations with protests and revolution, like Red Square in Moscow and Zucotti Park in Lower Manhattan, where protestors camped out for Occupy Wall Street. There is no doubt where her sympathies lie. The details add to the painting's display of skill, but also its energy and unconcern for foundations.
Mehretu's style, too, defines painting as a public space. The lack of a firm ground leaves plenty of white space, for all the frenetic drawing. One can feel oneself entering the space to move freely amid the abstract marks and actual buildings. Hard-edged patches of acrylic add color, even as they flatten the space of a painting. The whole mess places her in a tradition from Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner onward, with their invitation to the eye as well. So does her mural scale, and her retrospective follows a show on the same floor of Mexican murals. The Whitney is on a roll.
This is layered painting, and often she leaves a translucent coat between layers, bringing her closer to the visual depth of oil paint. In earlier paintings, one can have the illusion of the lines shifting relative to the ground, as if she had painted on raised acetate. You may find yourself retracing your steps to convince yourself that the architecture stays put. Step back, and the network of firm lines and ink stains can lighten or darken. The acrylic can thin out into arcs or right angles as well. Again as with Abstract Expressionism, they efface a distinction between painting and drawing or between formalism and gesture.
All this is exhilarating, like the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street, but you know what happened to either one. Mehretu goes with the moment, but with an awareness that moments can pass. Mogamma also stood for a corrupt, authoritarian government, and it houses one again. She could not have anticipated a military coup, but she must have had misgivings all along about Communism in Russia, Cuba, and China. A mural is also a wall, and walls are built to keep people out. A formalist's plea for art as object and for flatness cuts both ways.
Mehretu made her most celebrated work in 2009, for the lobby of Goldman Sachs, on the opposite side of the building from a brighter and simpler but equally terrific mural by Franz Ackermann. Like so much of her work, it connects to a city's growth, on the landfill of Battery Park City just blocks from Zucotti Park. Its networks spill across the wall as one walks along it. Unfortunately, within months the lobby excluded visitors, obliging one to view it from the street. It could well stand for the financial firm's nasty dealings hidden from the public eye, and then, too, the four parts of that one painting have will soon vanish to the four corners of the earth. Her success could stand for the limits to freedom in art and money as well, and so could her talent for self-examination.
Embracing the independent
Mehretu, then, has a lot going on, and she can fit into whatever story one likes. She appeared with political art as a history of protest and as grief and grievance. She appeared with strictly abstract art as invented worlds and "The Forever Now." Tacita Dean caught her at work along with assistants—at her computer, laying down and peeling away tape for all those hard edges, and just playing trying to think. It ran at the New Museum along with Dean's video of four others, including Cy Twombly spinning out his abstractions. She deserved the company.
She has appeared in other settings, too, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Want a gay global feminism? Born in 1970 in Ethiopia, she grew up in her American mother's Michigan, took her junior year abroad in Senegal, and did her MFA at RISD. She has divided her time since between Berlin and Harlem. Want a proper African American art? She appeared as an emerging artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as an uptown artist, and as an artist inspired by Romare Bearden. She was the inner-city artist in summer shows about Detroit.
This is already her second midcareer retrospective. Once again, she is an independent embraced by the art world, and the 2010 Guggenheim retrospective was all about its embrace. A year after Goldman Sachs, it showed her reaching fruition in the mural's grandeur and intricacy. After a little over ten years, the Whitney offers not so much a corrective, but a catching up and taking stock. Forgive me if I repeat anything from my review back then. I have to take stock, too.
It is not easy for such a public but elusive figure. The Whitney gives her the entirety of its largest floor, apart from an alcove for Madeline Hollander. Still, work this large takes space, and the display grants it, as with the room for Mogamma. It has room for just thirty-five paintings, along with a few large prints and close to forty drawings. It includes Dean's video, but not, say, Mehretu in the Guggenheim's collection. Given her work's scale and detail, the real wonder is that she managed to finish it all.
That video aside, the show presents her through what she did finish. It skips documentation and memorabilia and goes light on biographical details—other than to say text that she has been "shaped by the varied places she has lived." It lacks even a photo much less a replica of the Lower Manhattan mural. The prints are works in themselves, including one more than eight feet tall and five panels across. The sketches are there to fill in holes, especially in the first room, where she is working out a subject and vocabulary. After that, the paintings and prints will just have to speak for themselves.
Most of all, the show presents her as a political artist. The curators, Christine Y. Kim from LACMA with the Whitney's Rujeko Hockley, are responding, no doubt, to diversity and the culture wars now. They also respond to Mehretu's work since 2016 and her understanding of herself now. It comes as a surprise nonetheless. The surprise is that they find a context for work all along. One-sided or not, it takes her back to the excitement of the Arab Spring and the temptations of defeat.
The ghosts of events
The Guggenheim retrospective was all about a breakthrough. It came at a time of the revival of painting, including shape-shifting abstract painting. This one is about successive breakthroughs and continued evolution. It opens with Mehretu in the late 1990s, as still a student, trying to make sense of abstraction and what it might exclude. She divides a canvas into four fields, with the plane geometry and subdued color of early Brice Marden. When she called it Apropos, she might have worried that it was apropos of nothing.
Still, she already adds ink to acrylic, in brief marks like a cryptic alphabet. Ink studies show her teasing out a Character Migration Analysis Index and Conflict Location Index, like the key to symbols on a map. She may have in mind her own migrations or the perils of globalization. Had she gone no further, one might still be talking of her conceptual take on abstraction, but little more. And then, with the new millennium, she moves to New York City. She had already squeezed a torrent of marks into ellipses for an Inkcity, but now she goes big and cuts loose.
The more she accepts her ambition, the more she finds herself caught up in something larger than herself. Pollock could never have worked on the floor on this scale and still have left his mark anywhere near a painting's center. Colors brighten, and ink spins every which way. Are the works exploding or, as the Whitney prefers, imploding? Either way, one can feel their detonation. Titles speak of delirium and dispersion, but they also lead directly to the city—and to Goldman Sachs.
By decades end, she is adding urban architecture, from Venice to the Berliner Plätz. It hey can be wide open, like a stadium, or set in stone, but politics is still in the abstract—the unstated forces of urban development. With the Arab spring, she finds herself more caught up in events. The political is the personal and the painterly, but more explicit as well. Already, too, it is torn between hope and danger. She copies old architecture to respond to change with an act of preservation, even as she tries to align herself with the future.
She insists on both a greater abstraction and a greater relevance. She allows darkness to encroach, with prints and paintings in clouds of black and gray. That same year, with the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, she introduces screen prints and spray paint as ground, but the prints remain illegible. Mehretu's ghostly outlines have become the ghosts of events as well. Colors intensify to commemorate California wildfires and burnt villages, part of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Canvas itself seems on fire.
The Whitney concludes with a painting finished just in time for the show. It has a place to itself overlooking the Hudson River, where David Hammons is at work on a pier, basking in sunlight. Can I believe her that it alludes to a far older political art, Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa? Can I trust to today's merging of abstraction and representation—and what of my admiration for art apart from the public square, in book art? It may not matter, not when I can feel Mehretu's urgency, along with her wish to preserve her independence. For all the contradictions or even because of them, there is no finer abstract artist now.
Julie Mehretu ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through August 8, 2021. A related review looks at Mehretu at the Guggenheim and at Goldman Sachs.