The Year in Art: The Great and the Grim

The best art always soars; 'white supremacy' themes always deaden.

E very year I write about a hundred stories for NR’s readers, reviewing exhibitions but also covering the art market, the tastiest news, and the lay-of-the-land at offbeat places. This year, Picasso, Vermeer, Manet, and Degas got marquee space, but so did the riveting Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, focused on the Kennedy assassination, and the Pequot Museum in southeastern Connecticut. This unusually good tribal museum bookends war, conquest, dispossession, and a new dawn with a hunt for woolly mammoths in the Ice Age and the ca-ching of slot machines at the nearby Pequot casino.

Also figuring in my 2023 journeys were miniskirts, Mayan gods, Meissen cupids, and a bevy of Bonnards to warm body and soul.

My field is heritage, my preference is its preservation, but, alas, I can’t totally ignore its desecration. Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney had less to do with Puerto Rican art than with the miasma that’s the politics of statehood. What emerged in the galleries was a puddle of incoherence.

In a new look, my beloved Portland Museum of Art in Maine slathered its fine American art collection with settler-colonialist ideology, mostly surrounding Maine’s Wabanaki natives and, of course, the bugaboo slavery. There and at the Toledo Museum of Art, curators stretched for every tangent to pummel us with woke cant. Art bores them, unless it’s the art of the grudge. It’s unattractive and tedious.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the death of Picasso. I saw half a dozen of the 40 or so exhibitions organized with the blessing of the Picasso Museum in Paris. It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby at the Brooklyn Museum was the biggest. I’d never heard of Gadsby, a lesbian Australian stand-up comic. It wasn’t a bad exhibition — the art’s too good — and I’ll put aside Gadsby’s shock-jock musings. Picasso dispatches all comers and critics. Yes, he can be a caricature of himself, but he’s one of the gods and deserves his spot on Olympus. Gadsby’s one more annoying fly he swatted away along with her Me Too prattle.

Mary Quant, Joan Brown, and Lois Dodd are three vastly different artists, and I’ll say from the start, I couldn’t care less about their sex, though Dodd (b. 1927), a wonderful landscape painter, got the soft shaft among the big New York museums because she’s a woman. Quant’s miniskirt was the teeny-weeny logo of an era of liberation. Quant (1930–2023) herself was a style entrepreneur. Brown (1938–1990) was a painter and sculptor who danced, San Francisco–style, to the beat of her own drummer so she’s very niche.

Each got a retrospective that was overdue, incisive, and revelatory. I saw Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary at Kelvingrove, Glasgow’s main museum of art and heritage. Kelvingrove is a Victorian pile focused on art, technology, and natural history, so Quant’s designs and clothes were delightful disruptions. Quant’s been famous since the ’60s, but now she’s a giant in art history as well as in style.

Brown’s paintings and sculptures seem cured with the positive energy of crystals and the smoke of hashish. For a big-city civic museum, the Carnegie in Pittsburgh is an idiosyncratic place. So much of its collection comes from acquisitions from the Carnegie International, its periodic fair of cutting-edge contemporary art. Seeing Brown’s show there made sense.

The Dodd exhibition at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., was very satisfying. The Bruce, a museum of art and science in, arguably, New York City’s toniest suburb, has been greatly expanded. Galleries of art, oceanography, rocks, and dinosaur bones seem counterintuitive and eccentric, but that’s good. We like surprises, and we like to think outside the box.

Dodd’s Maine landscapes and New York street scenes don’t logically spring from the Bruce’s collection or its history. Instead, for the premiere of its beautiful, functional new building, the Bruce rebuked museums in Manhattan that are now its peers. Those museums ignored Dodd for decades. She never got a big show. They didn’t acquire her work.

With the good catalogues and the beautifully arranged, comprehensive shows accompanying them, Dodd and Brown each got the national attention they deserve.

Was Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum the bee’s knees, the spider’s ankle, or the milkmaid in the cat’s pajamas? No, of course not, blockbuster that it was. It was a small exhibition, only 28 paintings, one of which the lender retrieved early. Mostly, they’re small things in a suite of galleries big enough to spread around 600,000 people — the population of Vermont — over twelve or so weeks. I read the catalogue, which was magisterial. It revisited 150 years of Vermeer scholarship — a heroic and worthwhile job — and tweaked it. Tweaks and tidbits are all we can do in the realm of Vermeer.

Four of the 28 Vermeers are early and Vermeer before he was Vermeer, before the soft light, before the cryptic moments, and before the just-read letters, ermine, and gentlemen callers. There are two views of Delft, both nice. We’re not dealing with Manhattan from the Top of the Rock. There are some tiny imaginary portraits or hat studies.

What’s left isn’t beyond the scope of human imagination. Woman Holding a Balance, The Milkmaid, and Woman Reading a Letter are lovely and beguiling. The Geographer and The Astronomer are good. The Art of Painting, Vermeer’s zenith, wasn’t in the show. Most of the art came from the Rijksmuseum itself, the Mauritshuis down the road in The Hague, the Frick and the Met in New York, and the National Gallery in Washington. Their trustees got stacks of no-crowds VIP tickets for what was the art happening of the year.

I don’t fault the Rijksmuseum, which needs the money, and only the Rijksmuseum or the Met could pull it off. Vermeer’s no genius. I felt that seeing the six Titian poesie paintings at Boston’s Gardner Museum was essential, enriching, and eye-altering. Painted for Philip II, they hadn’t been seen together in 450 years. And so were two other exhibitions, the Pieter Bruegel the Elder retrospective in Vienna in 2018 and the Raphael retrospective in Rome in 2020. These are once-in-a-lifetime gatherings of the visions of giants.

Vermeer? Great or merely bewitching, the paintings were impossible to absorb given the crowds. I went off-hours — the benefit of a press pass — but few got that look, and anyway, I’d seen almost all of them before. Overall, I think Vermeer’s the most overblown of underwhelming artists.

I’m glad I went to Amsterdam to see it and felt, as your art critic, I needed to go, but I was in the ’hood anyway, having been in Dresden to see and hear Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I’m hardly an opera buff but, aesthetically, Wagner’s four operas are fixed in the canon of Western high culture. Dresden was bombed to smithereens in 1945 and restored to its Baroque splendor. There’s more art in the postage stamp of a city center than anyplace on earth.

I knew little about Saxony’s Grand Dukes, but they matched the collecting taste and acumen of all those Philips, Charleses, and Louis on European thrones and all those popes in Rome. The dukes as well as kings, popes, cardinals, and princes of a certain era obsessed over porcelain. I’m not a Meissen fanatic but took the deep dive at the Meissen corporate museum near Dresden. It’s sculpture, and at its best it’s delicious.

Best to let a Scottish museum develop the definitive exhibition on tartan. With 300 objects, Tartan at the V&A Dundee is indeed that. Though part of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Dundee branch focuses on Scottish design. From Bonnie Prince Charlie to Alexander McQueen, tartan made a political as well as an aesthetic statement. What a delightful show.

I think Manet/Degas at the Met is a great exhibition not because of its intellectual content — very little of the scholarship is new — but because of the sheer splendor of the art the Met was able to lasso. Manet’s Olympia alone was worth a visit.

Of the two, Manet’s the dazzler for his juicy paint, high-keyed palette, and straightforward narrative. Degas, more an artist of the intellect than of the heart, takes more work. Curators tell stories, and the Met could use more with a potboiler sensibility. Degas had a painful, cryptic crush on Manet the curators ought to have developed. The Met got the sexiest work by Manet but seemed seized by diffidence when it came to those simmering Degas, which are to be had. The Clark’s ballet dancer pastel is one of them, but it wasn’t in the exhibition. All of this said, Manet/Degas is a magnificent show.

I could write half my stories for the year on exhibitions at the Met. It’s our greatest for scope, depth, and quality, but America’s a big country with great art and heritage as well as inventive curators in lots of places between the coasts. And the Met displays our museum culture at its peak, its workaday mainstream and the layer I’d call “midwit muddle.”

On the one hand, I loved Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Mayan Art, which was a primer. The art was the best, and it’s a rush to be taught via the best even as a beginner student, as I was. On the other, Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter was an entirely opportunistic, weasel project and the Met’s pathetic stab at art-history affirmative action. Pareja, a subject of the Met’s wonderful portrait by Velázquez, worked for the artist, probably for a time as a slave.

Poor Pareja but happy Met, since the curators, marketers, and director got to polish their social-justice-warrior credentials. Velázquez’s portrait anchored the exhibition, sharing above-the-title status with Pareja’s own work, which is mediocre indeed. In trying to raise his visibility, the Met packed the show with half a dozen more paintings by Velázquez. This brought in crowds but left Pareja looking very bad indeed. He didn’t even consider himself black, and slavery in the court of Philip IV and slavery in the company of Simon Legree are two very different enterprises. I thought the Met besoiled itself. The exhibition seemed like a Tom Wolfe short story.

Into the Light: American Watercolors, 1880–1990, at the Fogg in Cambridge, might have had a dud of a title but what a gorgeous exhibition. It was a survey show with some skating on the surface, but Harvard’s curators delivered new technical insights — each watercolor was conserved — and a master class in the medium.

I hadn’t been to the Fogg since it closed for the Covid mass hypnosis. It’s among the country’s great museums. I know its Homer and Sargent watercolors well, but a fainting couch was in order when I saw splendid, big work by Hedda Sterne, Sam Francis, and Sol LeWitt.

A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur and The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art, and the Sea could not have covered more dissimilar topics, but each packed a punch and each delivered. A Splendid Land at the Cleveland Museum of Art displayed scenes of court life in the Kingdom of Udaipur from around the 1650s until the Victorian era. Tiger hunts, processions, battles, landscapes, and day-in, day-out doings, mostly in panoramic paintings, have the feel and look of documentaries. Most of the art belongs to Udaipur museums and has never been seen by the public before.

The father-and-son Van de Velde artists were Britain’s earliest painters of naval ships at rest and in action.

Both exhibitions celebrated power, no apologies offered. Both presented the best art. Both delivered that you-are-there look and feel. I saw the Van de Velde exhibition at the Queen’s House in Greenwich near London. Did I smell sea air? I know that around Greenwich, the Thames begins to turn into a marine environment. In any event, both exhibitions were rollicking successes, intellectually and sensually.

I love art that enlists all the senses, with tactile surfaces, a vivid palette, and subjects with verve. I view visiting a museum as an occasion, with the history of the place and its ambiance integral to the experience. The Sixth Floor Museum is a history museum so there’s no art, but it’s history with the pathos and sting of a CSI episode.

I’m surprised at how few people know the place exists. Set in Dallas’s old School Book Depository, where visitors can stand where Lee Oswald stood and see what he saw, the museum offers real-life chills. It’s a scholarly place with nearly 100,000 objects related to the Kennedy murder, before and after, and the investigations and conspiracies surrounding it. This year is the 60th anniversary of the shooting. Aside from Mrs. Kennedy, there are no heroes but plenty of creeps, villains, kooks, and questions. What happened on November 22, 1963, doesn’t define the era. Too much happened in the ’60s. Rather, it gives the era its unique, sinister spin. A visit is an unforgettable experience.

On a happier note, my visit to Dallas and Fort Worth in November took me to the Kimbell as it concluded its 50th anniversary with its perfect retrospective of the work of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947). Bonnard’s gotten dozens of splashy museum exhibitions over the years. I’ve seen many, and none is ever forced since he’s a gift that keeps on giving and never suffers from sameness.

In Bonnard’s Worlds, the Kimbell combines art and biography. We start with Bonnard’s panoramic Riviera landscapes, which warm, envelop, and pamper us. Subjects narrow to his wild garden and terrace, the interiors of his modest homes, his and his wife’s bedroom and bath, and to his self-portraits.

Each step on the journey is a stage set for his color and composition, his cats and dogs, and his nudes, which comprise the denouement of a tradition started by Giorgione. The Kimbell’s a tasting menu of masterpieces but does depth well, too. For lush sensuality and curatorial smarts, Bonnard’s Worlds is my Best of 2023.

Last week I was in Phoenix and Salt Lake City. Before the end of the year I’ll write about Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter complex in Scottsdale. With Fallingwater and the Guggenheim, it’s his final opus and utterly unheralded. Until then, Merry Christmas!