Julie Mehretu: A Good Artist Gets a Ponderous Show at the Whitney

Ignore the identity politics and radical-chic vibe, and take in her extraordinary cityscapes.

I n Julie Mehretu, the mid-career survey of an exceptional, intriguing artist, the Whitney’s committed the highest crime in the realm of retrospectives. It made me like the artist less. The exhibition and book are ponderous and grasping, but that’s not entirely Mehretu’s fault. I still like her work, and like it a lot.

She’s only 51. Her trademark — immense, abstract bird’s-eye views of stadiums and cities — is getting tired, and making them bigger and bigger doesn’t make them better or different. It makes them shouty. I’m not against an artist doing the same thing over and over if the alternative is variety for the sake of pleasing dealers and buyers. It’s the development and expansion of a single theme that makes an artist like Mehretu worth watching.

Mehretu’s biography weighs on her critical reception. It’s unusual and exotic, up to a point, and decisive, again, up to a point. Her father is a geography professor at Michigan State University but was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the son of a Coptic priest turned Lutheran minister. Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa while her mother, an American, and father lived there and her father taught geography.

At seven, she and her parents fled Ethiopia for the United States as revolution and violence wracked the country. The family settled in Lansing, Mich., where Mehretu had a happy, middle-class childhood. Her mother is a Montessori teacher. She studied at Rhode Island School of Design and became famous quickly for her sweeping, abstract, layered, dense paintings enlivened by a jaunty palette and attractive Space Age shapes. She’s mixed-race, a lesbian, and an immigrant, though loosely, since, having an American mother, she has always been an American. She won a MacArthur Foundation genius award.

All of this has given her enormous cachet, mostly among those who chatter about identity because they’d rather not, or can’t, decipher the art. Her work is of epic size and complexity, and startlingly attractive. Her list of artist residencies is impressive. She has spent time everywhere. Now, I’ll put identity aside, because the art’s the thing, not the biography.

Mehretu’s process is complicated, intense, and unusual and, for accessibility’s sake, needs a good explanation in the show. People will engage with her work in different ways, but it seems essential to know how she makes her paintings. She starts with drawing dense, wire-size grids or bird’s-eye urban streetscapes. Her early drawings are central to understanding her process. These look like imaginary cities. Like Tolkien, Mehretu invents spaces that are sometimes planned, American-style grids but sometimes fluid and unplanned. They are flights of fancy and also an acknowledgment that people, being hodgepodge, collectively create hodgepodge spaces.

She then applies a clear acrylic layer and sands it, giving her lines a fuzz. And she’ll repeat, drawing more lines, applying more acrylic, and sanding more. The result isn’t mush but a dense, still, linear look of bustle. The flat city, if we can call it that, seen from far above, now has a pulse. Mehretu then applies lots of calligraphic ink marks and color arcs, bars, and big, linear masses. They’re green, orange, red, yellow, and blue and look like 1960s graphics, arbitrary and fun. Retropistics: A Renegade Excavation, from 2001, is positively airy compared with Black City, from 2007, which is denser and more chaotic. The jazzy arcs and bars are still there but much smaller and tending toward darker colors. Mehretu’s ink marks are often in bunches, like birds flying in a flock overhead.

I see her work as timeless, evocative, and lofty, literally and metaphorically. It’s sublime, as Turner is sublime. I also think it’s hard to take your eyes off it, not because it’s gut-wrenching but because it’s a labyrinth. What she’s not is trendy, but that’s what the Whitney presents her as.

It’s high-velocity, high-density stuff. When I first saw her work, about 15 years ago, my point of access was a love of maps, plus a wanderlust that comes from an intense, natural curiosity. A map of a dense landscape makes some sense from what, experienced on the ground, is a jumble and a cacophony. I love the colors and mix of dots, text, hard lines making borders, and arbitrary, asymmetrical, and serpentine coasts and rivers. That’s an aesthetic judgment. Art, after all, exists in the realm of aesthetics.

Punctuating the catalogue are photo spreads that suggest not so much influences as issues, images, and events “to keep in mind,” I suppose, when looking at Mehretu’s work. Among these are images of a Communist Party meeting in Johannesburg in 1950, student protesters in Paris in 1968, a Gordon Parks photograph of Eldridge Cleaver, Norman Lewis protesting the Harlem on My Mind show in 1969, the Kent State shootings in 1970, a gay contingent at a Vietnam War protest, Castro, of course, and then more Castro, Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja, Emperor Haile Selassie, ACT UP marchers, a Buddhist monk burning himself to death in Saigon, a view of the Piccadilly Circus tube stop in London, mass graves in Iraq, a poster for the 1927 film Metropolis, Obama’s inauguration, the 2011 London riots, works by Caravaggio, El Greco, Gabo, Goya, and Severini, protesters in Cairo, Beijing, and Ferguson, remains of the World Trade Center, the New York Stock Exchange, Robert Mugabe, an abandoned Walmart in Evansville, Ind., the Louisiana Superdome after Katrina, the cover of Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other, a wildfire in Malibu in 2007, and the Berlin Wall.

And that’s a soupçon. There’s a point where eclecticism and wide-ranging interests, as moods or appetites, turn into a marketing gimmick or odd irrelevancies. Mehretu, I think, is a peripatetic, omnivorous person. She’s brilliant. But taken to an extreme, omnivorous becomes indiscriminate, gesture-making, and obsequious. It also leaves the dutiful art lover frustrated. I’m looking, for instance, for scrutable references to the civil-rights movement or the gay-rights movement. Instead, I see grids, dots, slashes, and arcs on surfaces that get bigger and bigger. So, with all this seriousness, her stadium pictures look positively festive.

Also, the long list of “things to think about” coincides substantially but not entirely with the standard cult totems of artsy Manhattan, which are predictable, narrow, and faddish. I thought of Tom Wolfe as I walked through the exhibition a second time, having read the ponderous, over-designed, and pretentious catalogue. He could have made this list of weighty and not-so-weighty worries, which leads me to another observation. Few of these “things to think about” reflect Mehretu’s lived experience, a term I despise since today it suggests everyone has his or her own truth, but I’m using it anyway for what it literally means. One of the reasons Mehretu’s work started to feel didactic and remote to me may be that the subjects — Tahrir Square in Cairo and Damascus during the Syrian civil war — are remote to her, as is, of course, the Vietnam War. Mehretu isn’t a Baby Boomer.

An antique like me feels his blood pressure rise when he sees a photograph of the murderer Castro, but, honestly, I don’t understand why Mehretu would give him the time of day. The civil-rights movement is always relevant, but the 1950s and ’60s were a long time ago. I tend to judge a political artist’s depth of inquiry by whether or not he or she addresses the horrible black-on-black murders in America’s big cities. Nearly 250 people died in shootings in America this past weekend. I know, all the work in Mehretu’s show is from 2019 or earlier, but big-city massacres have been happening for a while. I love her big Hineni paintings, from 2018, which depict abstract infernos. I say “abstract,” but how many of us have walked into an inferno? Mehretu gives us a scene that seems spot-on real, minus the heat. She’s ditched the architectural underpinnings of her earlier work. Her lines are thicker. She delivers outsized flickers of red and orange. Mehretu says she was inspired by the wildfires in California, caused by incompetent forest management, and the Rohingya refugee crisis in Burma.

I’m sure the Rohingya refugees are in harm’s way and unjustly so. I’m afraid, though, that their plight is a remote one. It’s another woe in a woeful world, and the world has always been thus. This reminds me of a symposium occurring on July 28 at the Whitney called “Black/Queer/Abstract.” This explores “Black and Queer radical thought through abstraction.” I suspect it will be a lot of pious, boring yakety-yak. I don’t think Mehretu wants to be considered trendy or radical chic, which is play-radical. Pol Pot, Robespierre, Attila the Hun, and Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologue behind the Holocaust — now, they were radical thinkers. I’m hoping that Mehretu, a very good artist, doesn’t let herself get hijacked by identitarian windbags.

I tend to skip the big political themes and the current-events content of a work of art. The artist and critics might think these are the most important things, but they aren’t. These topics fade and often prove to be canards or trivial. What’s left is the art. And when looking at art, opacity is okay.

An essay in the catalogue cites Glenn Ligon’s observation that, in 2013, Hurricane Sandy, the Syrian civil war, the second Egyptian revolution, and the death of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe stimulated Mehretu to “wipe the slate clean” and focus on “resistance and struggle.” In Being Higher II, she abandons architectural drawing as foundational and opts for ghostlike heads and calligraphic streaks and barehanded swipes, rubs, smudges.

I am, of course, very suspicious of efforts to “wipe the slate clean,” Burkean as I am. And “resistance and struggle” can be hard and good and necessary, but they also can be affectations. It’s another sign that Mehretu’s work is going vogue.

Now, Mehretu is into what the catalogue calls “Disaster and Disembodiment,” a shift that starts in 2016. Conjured Parts, a series from 2015–17, references Aleppo and Homs in Syria, and Ferguson, Mo. “Bodies appear inside the painting and outside, disembodied and disregarded,” Mehretu says. Also moving her are the Dakota-pipeline protests, the Orlando-nightclub shooting, and the drowning death of a toddler on a Greek beach during the Syrian refugee crisis.

Howl, eon I and Howl, eon II are commissions, 27 by 32 feet, that Mehretu did for the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in 2017. They start with blurred images of paintings by Bierstadt, Cole, and Church printed on the canvas like geological strata. The pictures underscore “the competing impulses of annihilation and preservation contained in the ideology of manifest destiny,” and they “trace the Bay Area’s lineage from colonialism and capitalism to counterculture and the tech industry.” Mehretu also embeds abstracted images of street protests and race riots and quotes by artists Philip Guston and Chris Ofili. The enterprise gets very cryptic very fast. Can inscrutability and inaccessibility be far behind? I’m all for contextualizing a work of art and researching artist intent, but if features of a painting are willfully hidden and can’t be seen by the viewer, don’t they become elite codes, leaving the viewer at a disadvantage? In any event, I challenge viewers to find visual evidence of this Bay Area trajectory. The paintings are huge and at least 15 feet above the viewer!

The Hineni paintings start with images of current events that Mehretu captures digitally. These are things such as wildfires falsely blamed on climate change, but also migrant detention centers and violent protests. She uses Photoshop to blur them until they’re unrecognizable, layers them, and paints over and around them. If they’re unrecognizable, in effect buried, they might be part of the artist’s process and inform her intent, but if the viewer can’t see them, do they mean anything?

This brings me to my last problem with Mehretu’s work, which, don’t get me wrong, I love. The two Howl paintings aren’t in the exhibition. They’re too big. Neither is Mural, an 80-foot-long painting dominating the lobby of Goldman Sachs’s Lower Manhattan office building. Mehretu finished this in 2010 but started it before the 2008 financial crisis. I saw it a few years ago. It’s fantastic. A web of colorful vertical and diagonal shapes grabs the viewer, but her then-standard architectural drawings are there, creating a structure of webbing. It’s dense and linear like a plan for the inside of a mammoth computer or an underground sewer system. There’s something of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, on LSD.

I don’t mind that it’s a Goldman Sachs project. They’re the biggest skunks ever, but such is the history of the world. I think it suits because we’re in an era of intense globalization, and this isn’t unique. The Romans, Venetians, and British, in their respective heydays, fashioned the globalization of their day. Markets, free and rigged, stretch and morph. An all-over look in a big painting for a monster financial company like Goldman Sachs seems appropriate. Mehretu’s work, I thought at the time, seemed corporate, like the big lobby paintings, say, that Cleve Gray did in the 1970s.

They had a current vibe but were opaque enough to invite a host of meanings, or no definite meanings, or no definite meanings that would insult people. A lobby is a transitional space, too. No one has lots of time to linger, look, and think. That Mehretu’s mural shouts “hegemony” is what the patron wanted at the end of the day. That a mixed-race lesbian was the messenger might have been seen as a plus, with the selection committee slapping itself on the back for edginess.

The book and the show move briskly from movement to movement, situating Mehretu in a vast number of places. Should I add “global capitalist sublime” as a movement I just invented? There’s a little truth in this, though I see Mehretu as timeless. The city, migration, melting pots, and Tower of Babel are as old as humanity. They’re civilization-making. Mehretu addresses them with an ambition, empathy, and depth of Old Masters such as Bosch and Bruegel. My sense is that the exhibition and book box her in, which is a natural curatorial and academic impulse. For all my quibbles, I find her paintings intensely attractive.

I saw her San Francisco MoMa paintings, too. My take was that their referential foundation — Hudson River landscapes and big Western pictures by Bierstadt — were, functionally, invisible. The paintings are so big and so high off the floor that, regardless of how many cryptic messages Mehretu incorporates, no one can see them. I could read about them, but that, of course, requires a mediator or an explainer. All the viewer at SF MoMA can get is the overall effect. Now, The School of Athens, by Raphael, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings are big and packed, but they are, for the highly educated, at least, decipherable. As a practical matter, Mehretu’s layers are insider baseball.

As I walked through the exhibition at the Whitney, I thought, “These are museum pictures.” That, in this case, is a genre of work too big for a collector, unless he or she has a giant house, and they are too serious for a ballroom, where we want froth. An abstract painting of Tahrir Square in the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolt doesn’t make the toes tap. I don’t mean that Mehretu’s work isn’t decorative enough to go into a private home, as would a Dutch genre scene or a French still life. Their massive size makes them difficult to ponder, study, interrogate, cherish, or love one-on-one. They seem too ceremonial and public.

I read in the catalogue that Mehretu admires the architectural drawings of Otto Wagner, which reminded me that I’d done a show on Otto Wagner drawings 20 years ago. These shows come and go. I understand her use of architectural drawings as a base. Wagner’s are detailed, precise, formal, and grand. Of course, once the buildings are done, they’re part of the fabric of a big, teeming, illogical city. Cities get bombed and invaded, overpopulated, and neighborhoods that were once prestigious get trashed by demographics. I think Mehretu captures this dynamic.

I suppose the analogy I find present in her work is a massive altarpiece in a cathedral versus the small devotional picture. I wonder if Mehretu can pull that small, intricate, precious devotional picture off.

The catalogue’s a tome. It’s hard to read, designed as it is in a heavy, unlovable Bauhaus look, with blocks of dense type, though the details are very nice and helpful. The first part is chronological, consisting of short essays on Mehretu’s development. An essay on her process would have made sense there. An essay by Rujeko Hockley, one of the curators of the show, concerns Mehretu’s early gallery representation. I enjoyed this a lot. Christian Haye is an inspirational and inspired gallerist who promoted Mehretu when both were young. It seems to belong in the beginning of the book, not on pages 233 to 236, because Mehretu developed her original style, technique, and take outside the high pressure, conformist, sales-oriented New York art rat race.

Andrianna Campbell’s essay on Mehretu and abstraction was great, too. Fred Moten’s essay was inscrutable. Adrienne Edwards wrote on Mehretu and prints. I enjoyed her essay, though Mehretu has nothing to do with Goya. Dagmawi Woubshet’s essay on Ethiopian abstraction in the 1960s was educational and engrossing, since I knew nothing about the art scene there. Mehretu’s work seems to express American art’s fascination with grids and topography, while also being rooted in the American Abstract Expressionist movement, now a 75-year-old tradition. She’s a savant, though, and though she’s American, Ethiopia is part of her heritage.

Matthew Hale’s essay is more atmospheric, dancing from Courbet to Suprematism and Constructivism to decolonial abstraction, which I didn’t know, and which doesn’t do Mehretu justice.