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☆ Ray Francis, Celebrating Blackness
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-22 | by ( Blake Gopnik | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In the late 1970s, in Montreal, photography students were obsessed with getting deep blacks — “max black” — in our prints, squeezing the full range of tones out of our black-and-white photo paper. Few of us realized there might be more to blackness than a lack of light. We didn’t understand that in the right hands, the deep, deep blacks might speak to far more than a darkroom technique — to issues of race and segregation. Four hundred miles south of us, in New York, Ray Francis was printing shots that had the bold shadows we were striving for. Thirty-two of his prints are on view now in “Waiting to Be Seen: Illuminating the Photographs of Ray Francis,” at the Bruce Silverstein gallery in Chelsea, a posthumous show that is Francis’s first solo presentation.

Persons: Ansel Adams moonrise, Ray Francis, ”, Bruce Silverstein Locations: Montreal, New York, Chelsea

☆ 2 Masterpieces Reveal the Big Bang Moment of Our Art Universe
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-22 | by ( Blake Gopnik | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Francis” he’d bought: 50 years on, it still ranked as one of the great portrayals of the holy man. The collector added it to walls hung with other paintings that could hardly have had less to do with the sacred: Neighboring the “St. Francis” was a Giorgione that illustrated the classical tale of Paris, the Trojan prince, being abandoned in the wilderness as a babe. Contarini used this room to compare the latest in people-pictures — even if one of these people was the son of God. As the art historian Charles Hope has pointed out, it’s possible to spot Sebastiano’s stylings on the surface we see today.

Persons: Francis ” he’d, Contarini, Francis ”, Bellini, Bellini’s, God, Giorgione’s, Mary, Abraham, Pythagoras, Giorgione, Giorgione’s couldn’t, Marcantonio Michiel, ”, Giorgione —, Sebastiano del Piombo, Charles Hope Organizations: Frick Locations: “, Paris, Turkish

☆ In Public Art, Sometimes Subtlety Just Doesn’t Cut It
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-01 | by ( Blake Gopnik | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The challenge for Frankel’s video is to do that in the train hall, and it can’t. Frankel’s piece matches our expectations for screen-play rather than transcending them, which means we’re not likely to notice it at all. Like lots of critics, curators and artists, I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to insert video art, or art of almost any kind, into our everyday lives and communal spaces. And up on the screens at Moynihan, Frankel’s piece functions, whether he wants it to or not, as another ad for us to ignore. But would corporate titans stand to see their ads screened alongside art that’s wild enough to outshine them?

Persons: Moynihan, we’ve, Frankel, I’ve, —, I’d, Marcel, “, Mona Lisa, it’s, William Kentridge Organizations: Amtrak, Art

☆ On Our National Mall, New Monuments Tell New Stories
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-17 | by ( Blake Gopnik | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Combine those three terms, and you often end up in a glorious muddle. For just one month, Friday, Aug. 18 through Sept. 18, the National Mall will be hosting “Pulling Together,” an open-air exhibition that tests what works best, or fails least, when artists, publics and monuments are brought together. “Pulling Together” makes room for monuments that talk, for instance, about Black church leaders with AIDS, about the schoolchildren who cut through Washington’s color line, and about Asian migration after America’s war in Vietnam. (One shocking absence: art that addresses the sexism undermining half the world’s humans. The show is planned as the first installment in “Beyond Granite,” a series of temporary public projects led by the Trust for the National Mall with the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service.

Persons: Paul Farber, Salamishah Tillet, Lincoln, Farber Organizations: Art, AIDS, Trust, National Capital Planning Commission, National Park Service, Rutgers University, The New York Times, Mellon Foundation Locations: Vietnam, Philadelphia

In important ways the New York contemporary art world was a much bigger place three decades ago than it is today, not in size but in its thinking. The first institutional solo show of the artist Edgar Calel, titled “B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone),” is a reminder of this. Obliquely, poetically, Calel refers to Mayan views of the earth as a dynamic, responsive, sacred being. (Sections of molded soil spell out the syllable “tik,” the sound he remembers his grandmother making to call wild birds for feeding.) The resulting SculptureCenter piece, beautiful to see, isn’t a “religious” work in any narrow sense.

Persons: Edgar Calel, Calel, HOLLAND COTTER Locations: York, Guatemala

☆ Have We Smothered Warhol With Our Admiration?
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( Blake Gopnik | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In the plush setting of the Brant, it takes an effort to shake off the comfort his pictures now come with and rediscover the discomfort they once served up. Wagstaff, the curator, was maybe registering something important when he worried that Warhol’s painted soup cans might deliver a deathblow to established notions of painting. When Warhol took money to repeat his early icons they did indeed become “dead paintings,” as he once called them, and those gun-toting bohemians only went wrong in seeing this as a cause for rage, not cogitation. The Marilyn retreads they attacked should help us understand that more than almost any other artist, Warhol was willing to recognize how stuff that starts life looking like art can end it acting like currency. (It’s probably Warhol’s first silk-screened painting; one of the treasures at the Brant is that work’s near-identical twin, showing 196 bills.

Persons: Brant, Wagstaff, Warhol, ”, Marilyn retreads Organizations: Le Monde, bohemians Locations: Le

☆ Ruling Against Warhol Shouldn’t Hurt Artists. But It Might.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Blake Gopnik | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It turned out that what the majority actually had problems with — what the decision was mostly about — was the Warhol Foundation’s failure to pay Goldsmith a licensing fee in 2016. It looked like the court had sidestepped the larger issue of whether Warhol should have used her image at all. Or that’s what this new ruling would let some artists and their lawyers argue. At the very least, the ruling won’t send museums rushing to consign the appropriations they own to the dark depths of the vaults, as a more sweeping ruling against Warhol might have done. So long as appropriation artists aren’t selling licenses for their creations to be reproduced — for instance, in a popular magazine — the Supreme Court’s new decision should not affect them.

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