Joan Semmel @ Jewish Museum, NYC - "Joan Semmel: In the Flesh" Exhibition

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh 

Jewish Museum, New York 

December 12, 2025 — May 31, 2026 

The Jewish Museum in New York presents a major exhibition of boundary-breaking work by Joan Semmel alongside a selection of artist-curated works from the Museum’s collection in Joan Semmel: In the Flesh. For over 50 years, Joan Semmel has upended traditional figuration with her boldly declarative nude painting through gestural and hyperreal representation. In the Flesh juxtaposes 16 paintings by the artist, drawn from several periods across her career, many monumental in scale, with nearly 50 modern and contemporary artworks from the Museum’s expansive holdings. The works from the collection—encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper—were selected by the artist for their engagement with themes present in her work, including her exploration of beauty, agency, and self-perception.

The exhibition is organized by Rebecca Shaykin, Barnett & Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, and Liz Munsell, Curatorial Consultant, in partnership with Joan Semmel.

“As we consider new possibilities for showcasing the Museum’s robust collection, In the Flesh has offered a special opportunity for exploring the range of narratives and stories that radiate from our holdings,” said James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “Dedicated to and curated in concert with Joan Semmel, In the Flesh highlights the work and insights of an artist who continues to be ahead of her time. The exhibition simultaneously reflects the Museum’s legacy of championing artists who fearlessly share their lived histories and challenge the status quo through their creative practice.”

Born in 1932 into a secular Jewish family in the Bronx, Joan Semmel trained as an Abstract Expressionist in New York before moving to Spain in 1963, where she enjoyed early success on an international stage. Upon her return to New York in 1970 as a newly divorced mother of two, she found community within the burgeoning feminist and anti-censorship movements, alongside her peers, including Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Joyce Kozloff, Joan Snyder, Anita Steckel, Hannah Wilke, and other trailblazing women artists. During this period, she also curated two of the earliest exhibitions of contemporary feminist art, giving women artists a public platform denied to them by many mainstream institutions. Over the course of the following decades, Joan Semmel forged a distinct painterly language of nude imagery that was a defiant response to the male gaze and spoke to her own bodily experience as a woman, emphasizing female empowerment and sexual agency. At 93, Semmel remains a master of figuration, continuing to challenge views of female aging and respectability.

In the Flesh foregrounds the artist’s diligent, life-long investigation of embodied female experience. Spanning over 50 years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition offers new points of entry to some of Semmel’s most pivotal series. Works on view include her 1978 painting Sunlight, one of Semmel’s iconic self-images and a defining work of the feminist movement, together with examples from her bold, high-key Erotic Series of the early 1970s, as well as complex multi-figure compositions, including the recent large-scale Skin in the Game (2019).

The kaleidoscopic selection of Semmel’s featured works provides context for artworks from the Museum’s collection by artists including Ida Applebroog, Marc Chagall, Nan Goldin, David Levinthal, Alice Neel, Nancy Spero, Man Ray, Larry Rivers, Laurie Simmons, Joan Snyder, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

“When I arrived at the Jewish Museum 15 years ago, Sunlight immediately emerged as one of my favorite works in the collection. It is thrilling to present this painting within a comprehensive view of the artist’s development as a painter of the female form, and especially of her own body over time, and to be doing so in such close dialogue with the artist herself,” noted Rebecca Shaykin. “Joan Semmel’s paintings challenged the male-dominated art world of the 1970s. Her work has inspired generations of artists and shifted the trajectory of contemporary art history. Her selections from the Museum’s collection demonstrate how influential the feminist movement has been in changing the conversation about whose perspectives we value and why.”

Artist Joan Semmel

Joan Semmel (b.1932) has long centered her practice around representations of the body from the female perspective. Trained as an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Joan Semmel began her painting career in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she turned toward figurative painting, constructing compositions in response to concerns around female representation in popular culture and in art. Her practice traces the transformation that women’s sexuality has experienced in the last century and emphasizes the possibility for representing female autonomy through the body.

Semmel’s work was the subject of a career retrospective, Skin in the Game, presented by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA in 2021, traveling thereafter to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 2022. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Tate, London (2023); the Brooklyn Museum (2016 and 2023); the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs (2020); Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany (2018); the Jewish Museum, New York (2010 and 2018); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2013); and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2008), among others. 

The artist’s paintings are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University.

Born in the Bronx, New York, and currently based in SoHo, Joan Semmel studied at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the Art Students League of New York.

Anish Kapoor: Early Works is also on view through February 1, 2026 at The Jewish Museum.

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Anish Kapoor @ Jewish Museum, NYC - 'Early Works' Exhibition

Anish Kapoor: Early Works

Jewish Museum, New York

October 24, 2025 - February 1, 2026

The Jewish Museum presents the first American museum exhibition to focus solely on the formative early work of renowned artist Anish Kapoor. These rarely seen works include Kapoor’s striking pigment sculptures, together with works on paper and sketchbooks. Anish Kapoor: Early Works reveals the experimental proclivities of a trailblazing artist at the beginning of his career. The exhibition opens concurrently with the Jewish Museum’s inauguration of its newly transformed collection galleries and learning center.

Born in Mumbai (1954) and following a time in Israel in the early 1970s, Anish Kapoor moved to England to study art. Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, he has gone on to become one of the most internationally recognizable artists working today. His distinctive sculptural idiom, which first emerges in these early works, brought a radically new voice to British art and then to the international stage. Drawing on an engagement with Conceptual art and Minimalism, his early work was suffused with his unique approach to materiality and presence. Through some 55 works on view, including a selection of recent sculpture, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s early and ongoing investigations of the boundaries of sculpture, color, and form.

“The Jewish Museum has a long tradition of presenting contemporary art as part of its ongoing commitment to exploring the narrative of shared humanity worldwide, together with the rich diversity of the global Jewish experience,” said James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “Anish Kapoor: Early Works reinforces this mission by exploring the boundary-pushing practice of one of the most influential artists of our time, while also highlighting themes of ritual, perception, and the power of materiality that resonate across the diversity of world cultures and histories.”

Early Works presents Kapoor’s pigment sculptures in richly hued and evocative groupings that seduce and confound with their uncanny combinations of cleanly articulated forms with delicate and unstable surfaces of loose pigment that migrates across floors and walls. The exhibition also explores how formal vocabularies and perceptual concerns present in Kapoor’s early sculptures connect to his later work. On view are also select examples of Kapoor’s more recent sculptures created with Vantablack, a nanotechnological substance that absorbs nearly all light. Presented together, these sculptures showcase the artist’s masterful play with perception, drawing on the psychic effects of color—and its absence—as well as the allure of objects that appear to defy their own material nature.

Also on view is a selection of Kapoor’s early drawings and gouaches. Intimately scaled, these works depict surreal, gestural, and subtly irregular forms, offering an aesthetic counterbalance to the formally austere sculptures where virtually all traces of the artist’s hand have been erased.

“These extraordinary early works are virtually unknown to American audiences and represent a side of Kapoor that will be revelatory,” said Darsie Alexander, Senior Deputy Director and Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator. “Our show offers a rare glimpse into Kapoor’s process of pairing of color and form to explore the spiritual, psychic, and physical possibilities of sculpture.  A keen eye towards the placement of objects transforms how they are perceived by viewers and foretells a future making environmental works on a much larger scale. We are thrilled to be organizing this effort in collaboration with the artist.”

Artist Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor is recognized internationally as one of today’s leading contemporary artists, renowned for sculptural works that are adventures in form and in engagement public space.

Kapoor’s work has been exhibited worldwide, with recent solo exhibitions at Cidade Matarazzo, São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Liverpool Cathedral, UK (2024); ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2024); and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2023-24), among others. Large scale public projects by Kapoor include Cloud Gate (2004) in Millennium Park, Chicago, USA; Dismemberment Site I (2003–2009), Kaipara Bay, New Zealand; Turning the World Upside Down (2010), The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Ark Nova (2013), the world’s first inflatable concert hall in Japan.

Anish Kapoor represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 with Void Field (1989), for which he was awarded the Premio Duemila for Best Young Artist and won the Turner Prize in 1991. He was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts.

Born in Mumbai, India in 1954, Anish Kapoor lives and works in London and Venice, Italy. He studied at Hornsey College of Art, London, followed by postgraduate studies at Chelsea School of Art, London.

This exhibition is organized by the Jewish Museum’s Senior Deputy Director and Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator Darsie Alexander and Leon Levy Associate Curator Shira Backer, in close collaboration with the artist and his studio.

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Previous Exhibition on Wanafoto:

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, May 23 — October 12, 2025

Ben Shahn @ Jewish Museum, NYC - 'On Nonconformity' - A Retrospective Exhibition + Catalogue

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Jewish Museum, New York

May 23 — October 12, 2025

The Jewish Museum presents the first U.S. retrospective in nearly half a century dedicated to social realist artist and activist BEN SHAHN (1898-1969). Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity examines the prolific and progressive artist’s commitment to chronicling and confronting crucial issues of his era, spanning from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, as well as his exploration of spirituality and Jewish texts. Featuring 175 artworks and objects from the 1930s to the 1960s, including paintings, mural studies, prints, photographs, commercial designs, and ephemera, the exhibition highlights the enduring relevance of Shahn’s art across media, while revealing new insights into the complexity of his aesthetic and his decisive shift from documentary to allegorical and poetic styles in pursuit of a visual language that would resonate widely.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity extends the Jewish Museum’s history of exploring Shahn’s far-reaching ideas and deep impact of the artist. The exhibition is organized by Dr. Laura Katzman, guest curator, in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Brown, Jewish Museum curator, and is drawn from the recent retrospective curated by Dr. Katzman at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

“Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity showcases the extraordinary work of a pioneering artist whose commitment to social justice across ethnic, class, and racial divides could not have greater relevance today,” said James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “There is no better place for this timely exhibition than the Jewish Museum, which presented Shahn’s last U.S. retrospective in 1976. The affirmation of shared universal humanity in his art parallels the Jewish Museum’s own mandate to explore the cross-cultural connectedness of Jewish experience throughout the global diaspora over 3,500 years.”

The exhibition draws its title from Ben Shahn’s credo of “nonconformity,” which the artist asserted as an indispensable precondition for both significant artistic production and all great societal change. This philosophy is centered in the exhibition as the foundational thread that runs through the artist’s oeuvre, which investigates issues such as unemployment, discrimination, authoritarianism, and threats to freedom of expression, while championing labor, civil, and human rights. Shahn’s later spiritual work, which embraces the Hebrew language and biblical stories, also reflects his exploration of a tradition of social justice activism within Jewish culture.

Born to a Jewish family in Russian-controlled Lithuania, Ben Shahn immigrated to the United States with his family in 1906. He began his career as a lithographer, mastering drawing, engraving, and typography, before expanding and experimenting across a vast array of mediums. The exhibition demonstrates Shahn’s rejection of a strict hierarchy among mediums, based on a belief in the power of images in all forms to stir the conscience of the public.

“Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity offers a reappraisal of the artist through a contemporary lens,” said Dr. Laura Katzman, guest curator. “Shahn’s understanding of art’s critical role in the perpetual struggle for a more just future resonates powerfully today. The exhibition invites visitors to examine the issues that were important to Shahn through our modern understanding of social justice. It also uplifts the richness and complexity of his aesthetic, which drew inspiration from various artistic movements in the postwar era—from abstract expressionism to conceptual art—and capitalized on the reach of mass media, raising commercial production to a high art.”

“Ben Shahn is one of the great American artists of the twentieth century who believed in the value of dissent and the essential function of art in the life of a democratic society,” said Dr. Stephen Brown, Jewish Museum curator. “The first major presentation of his work in the U.S. in decades, the Jewish Museum exhibition is something of a homecoming for Shahn, who has been part of our collection since 1947 and who was educated and politicized in New York City.”

The exhibition includes artwork and ephemera from throughout Shahn’s career, on loan from more than 30 museums, galleries, and private collections. Across seven sections, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity explores the artist’s multifaceted use of photography and mass media, his inventive re-purposing of imagery across media, and his layered interrelations of word and image. The sections are organized thematically around the most pressing issues of Shahn’s time, including:

— Art and Activism encompasses Shahn’s earliest social realist work from the 1930s, highlighting the artist’s response to high-profile injustices perpetrated by the American judicial system;

—- A New Deal for Art presents Shahn’s powerful photographs, posters, and mural studies made for U.S. government art projects that championed programs aimed at alleviating the devastation wrought by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Also on view are Shahn’s “personal realist” paintings, which dignify the ordinariness of everyday life that he encountered on his photographic travels for New Deal agencies;

— The Labor Movement features Shahn’s mass-produced posters and graphics that speak to his commitment to the cause of labor and to promoting the dignity of manual labor, executed in the mid-1940s when he led the Graphic Arts Division of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Political Action Committee;

— War and Its Aftermath explores Shahn’s work created both during and after World War II: propagandistic posters commissioned by the Office of War Information, which confront the horrors of war, and more reflective paintings that grapple with wartime destruction and postwar liberation;

— Age of Anxiety: The Cold War includes the works Shahn made during the era of McCarthyism and the emergent Atomic Age, which both protest America’s anti-communist hysteria and warn of the looming nuclear threat both at home and abroad;

— The Struggle for Civil Rights reflects Shahn’s fervent support of the nonviolent movements for civil rights in the U.S. and for the broader resistance movements against colonialism that were rising up around the world in the 1950s and 1960s;

— Spirituality and Identity—the final section of the exhibition showcases Shahn’s return to the biblical stories and Hebrew texts he grew up with as a child, illuminating how re-engagement with his Jewish roots was yet another lens through which he commented critically on history and society.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity builds on the Jewish Museum’s long history of presenting Shahn’s work to American audiences. In 1976, the Museum hosted a major Ben Shahn retrospective, and in 1998, to mark Shahn’s centenary, organized Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, focusing on the role of allegory in the artist’s later, lesser-known paintings. Twenty-two years later, in 2020, the conceptual artist Jonathan Horowitz curated We Fight to Build a Free World, which situated Shahn’s work at the heart of an exhibition that examined how artists responded to cultural and political challenges with art primarily from the early 20th century to 2020.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Laura Katzman 

Contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, 

Christof Decker and John Fagg

Published by the Jewish Museum, New York and 

the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 

in association with Princeton University Press

288 pages, 8 x 10.5 in., 290 color illus.

ISBN: 9780691273112 - Published: June 3, 2025

Book Cover image courtesy of Princeton University Press

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, published by the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in association with Princeton University Press. Drawing on media studies, cultural studies, and museological approaches, the catalogue brings international perspectives and new insights to the work of artist Ben Shahn. With a foreword by James S. Snyder, the book is authored by Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History at James Madison University, with contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, Professor of Art History at Saint Louis University, Madrid; Christof Decker, Professor of American Studies at Ludwig-Maxmilian University, Munich, Germany; and John Fagg, Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Cultures at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity was organized by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and adapted by the Jewish Museum, New York. The New York exhibition is curated by Dr. Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History at James Madison University, in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Brown, Curator at the Jewish Museum. Dr. Katzman also served as guest curator of the recent Ben Shahn exhibition in Madrid. 

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

thejewishmuseum.org

Updated Post 24-10-2025

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston @ Jewish Museum, New York

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out 

Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston

Jewish Museum, New York

Through March 30, 2025

TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK

"Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service," 2017 

Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 

60 x 60 x 6 in. (152.4 x 152.4 x 15.2 cm) 

Collection of Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull, 

Asheville, North Carolina

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston examines Philip Guston’s seminal influence on Trenton Doyle Hancock and both artists’ shared commitment to investigating the legacy of white supremacism in the United States. The exhibition presents the the work of painter PHILIP GUSTON (American, b. Canada 1913–1980), the child of Jewish immigrants from Odessa (present-day Ukraine), and TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK (American, b. 1974), a leading Black contemporary artist based in Houston, Texas, in dialogue for the first time. The exhibition explores resonant connections between their work and the role that artists play in the pursuit of social justice.

Organized by the Jewish Museum, the exhibition features key works by Philip Guston including his now iconic, late satirical Ku Klux Klan paintings in dialogue with major works Trenton Doyle Hancock created in response to his inspirational mentor, highlighting their parallel thematic explorations of the nature of evil, self-representation, otherness, and art activism. Foregrounding works that depict the Klan, the exhibition demonstrates how both artists engage with and at times even inhabit these hateful figures to explore their own identities and more broadly examine systems of institutionalized power and their feelings of complicity within them. Yet, despite the difficult subject matter and at times violent imagery presented in their work, both Hancock and Guston share an ability to conquer the pain and emotion of their art through humor that is both dark and undeniable, engaging with their shared embrace of the visual language of comics.

Philip Guston, whose early social realist and abstract work ultimately evolved into an idiosyncratic form of social satire, is now one of the most revered painters of the twentieth century. Significant examples of Guston’s buffoonish Klansmen paintings and drawings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, selected by Hancock, will be a centerpiece of the exhibition. Guston’s cartoonish style was used to defy the Klan’s bigotry as racial tensions roiled America—tensions that continue to resonate with renewed urgency today. Guston also used the hooded figure as an alter-ego wrestling with his Jewish identity and his assimilation into American culture. This phenomenon is illustrated especially in Guston’s masterful The Studio (1969), which depicts the artist as a Klansman painting a self-portrait, acknowledging his own complicity with white supremacy. 

For the eclectic artist, cartoonist, and illustrator Trenton Doyle Hancock, Guston’s work has been a consistent source of inspiration for nearly 30 years. His collaged psychedelic canvases similarly draw on the language of comics to challenge and comment upon the American condition. The exhibition includes Hancock’s surreal graphic memoir that interweaves Guston’s biography with his own family tree and reports of Klan activity in the United States, past and present. Titled Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw! (2014), the series has since developed into a substantial body of work in which Hancock’s long-standing avatar, a Black superhero named Torpedoboy, meets and engages with Guston’s Klan-hooded alter-ego. Through this series, Hancock confronts his artistic forefather and examines their respective motivations for grappling with white supremacism in their art.

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out builds upon the Jewish Museum’s ongoing commitment to exploring contemporary art in real time, providing a platform for each new generation of artists. The Museum also shares a foundational history with Guston’s work including the artist’s solo exhibition in 1966, just before the emergence of his late Klan imagery, and his seminal role in Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 on view in 2008. The current exhibition joins a fall program at the Museum that tells complex stories from multiple points of view to spark dialogue around how society engages with and learns from historical narratives. By addressing complex and often painful histories, these stories offer opportunities to create a sense of unity around shared experiences and inspire hopeful paths toward the future.

The exhibition is organized in four thematic sections:

Co-Conspirators

The first section examines Guston’s and Hancock’s first forays into Klan imagery, produced in their young adulthoods. This gallery includes Guston’s Drawing for Conspirators (1930), a troubling image of the aftermath of a lynching that speaks to the toll of white supremacy in the United States. Guston’s mural of another lynching scene (c. 1931), painted for the John Reed Club to commemorate the plight of the Scottsboro Boys, is presented in facsimile form, as the original work was destroyed by the Los Angeles police and the KKK.

Guston’s early, politically motivated works will be presented alongside Hancock’s representations of Loid, a fictitious ghost of a 1950s Black sharecropper who appears as half Klansman, half Klan victim, conceived by the artist around the time of his discovery of Guston’s work in the mid-1990s. This harbinger of vengeance, portrayed with a white sheet and noose and wielding a hammer of justice, first emerged in a photographic self-portrait (Properties of the Hammer, 1994) by Hancock at the age of 19, and has recurred in various iterations in drawings (Judgment #2, 2000), cartoons, and paintings (Coloration Coronation, 2016) to the present day.

K-K Kan I Help You?

This next section features a selection of significant late Klansmen paintings and drawings by Guston, including The Studio (1969) and Riding Around (1969). These works represent Guston’s renewed exploration of the Klan, an exercise in both social satire and self-condemnation, following a resurgence of Klan activity in response to the advancements made by the civil rights movement in the United States.

This section also features Hancock’s Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw! (2014), the graphic series created by Hancock “as a kind of one-liner: what would happen if my alter-ego Torpedoboy met Philip Guston’s alter-ego, the Klansman?” Step and Screw! marks the first time Hancock dealt explicitly with his and his family’s personal ties to America’s haunted past. In 30 black-and-white panels, Hancock contrasts the dark comedy of his comic strip with a fantastical timeline that blends Guston’s and Hancock’s life stories and delves into their generational traumas.

Conception and Execution

The third section of the exhibition focuses on Hancock’s paintings that grew out of Step and Screw! The majority of these mixed media works, which fuse image and text and recombine elements from the original comic book, focus on the “pregnant” moment of exchange between the Klansman and Torpedoboy. In each new iteration, the characters engage in a dubious handoff, with the hooded figure offering the skeptical superhero an object associated with wisdom, be it a lightbulb, an apple, or a head. Works on view include Step and Screw: The Star of Code Switching (2020) from the Jewish Museum’s collection, in which the Klansman offers a talisman so powerful that Torpedoboy’s racial transformation is instantaneous and Lights Out (2023), in which Torpedoboy ends his tenuous affinity with the Klansman, enacting a symbolic patricide.

The Ladder of Coincidence

The final section of the exhibition serves as a coda to the presentation with a single pair of monumental paintings, Guston’s The Ladder (1978) and Hancock’s The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Cinchin' (2012). These works illustrate the “umbilical connection” that Hancock has described feeling toward his predecessor, and how Guston’s influence and imagery have subconsciously found their way into many facets of Hancock’s work.

This exhibition is organized by Rebecca Shaykin, Curator, The Jewish Museum, in partnership with Trenton Doyle Hancock. 

A lavishly illustrated companion volume, co-published with Yale University Press and designed by the award-winning firm Morcos Key, features a lead essay by curator Rebecca Shaykin, with additional contributions by Trenton Doyle Hancock, the veteran curator and noted Black American art scholar Valerie Cassel Oliver, and the celebrated American Jewish comic artist Art Spiegelman. The texts offer multiple perspectives on the current political moment and the ways in which art, popular comics, personal narrative, and humor can deepen our understanding of Black and Jewish experiences in the United States. The book is available worldwide. 

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Related posts: 

Philip Guston. Singularities, Hauser & Wirth Zurich , 7 June – 7 September 2024 

Philip Guston Now, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 2 – August 27, 2023 

Philip Guston - Late Paintings, Peder Lund, Oslo , September 20 - November 8, 2014 

Philip Guston: Works on Paper, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, May 2 - August 31, 2008

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter, McKee Gallery, New York, November 11 - December 23, 2003

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston

Jewish Museum, New York - November 8, 2024 - March 30, 2025

Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration @ Jewish Museum, New York - Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Sasha Gordon, Sara Issakharian, Chella Man, Ilana Savdie, Austin Martin White, Rosha Yaghmai

Overflow, AfterGlow 

New Work in Chromatic Figuration 

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Sasha Gordon, Sara Issakharian, Chella Man, Ilana Savdie, Austin Martin White, Rosha Yaghmai 

Jewish Museum, New York 

May 24 – September 15, 2024 

Ilana Savdie 

Cow, 2023

Oil, acrylic, and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel. 

65 1/8 × 80 1/8 in. (165.4 × 203.5 cm). 

Credit: The Jewish Museum, New York. 

Purchase: Romie and Blanche Shapiro Estates, 

Arts Acquisition Committee Fund, Roberta Pfeufer Kahn Trust, 

and Helfman Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund, 2023-115. 

Photo by Lance Brewer.

The Jewish Museum presents Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration. New works in painting, sculpture, and installation by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Sasha Gordon, Sara Issakharian, Chella Man, Ilana Savdie, Austin Martin White, and Rosha Yaghmai explore how supernatural color and uncanny luminescence challenge the boundaries of traditional figuration. The exhibition highlights the figure’s malleability and continual metamorphosis, expressing the lived experiences of a multiethnic, multiracial, and otherwise multifaceted group of makers.

Overflow, Afterglow brings together seven young artists who use color to distort the figure and expand cultural norms—whether nodding to pop culture and digital immersion, the vibrancies of their heritages, or spaces of youthful and queer liberation. Responding to the social and political turmoil of the past decade and absorbing input from different backgrounds and histories, these artists articulate new visual vocabularies. The exhibition also builds upon the Jewish Museum’s ongoing practice of exploring contemporary art in real time, providing a platform for each new generation of artists.

The exhibition design for Overflow, Afterglow offers a non-hierarchical experience of the works on view. Each artist presents new and recent work within their own installation space, providing a portal into their individual but connected worlds. About half of the works on view has been newly created for this exhibition.

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman

Born in 1993, New York City; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Bermúdez-Silverman infuses her sculptures with shape-shifting luminosity that radiates beyond their outermost edges. She arrives at her sculptures through rigorous research, exploring postcolonial legacies and tracing the ways they continue to mold contemporary realities. Bermúdez-Silverman starts with an intense interest in the cultural narratives of materials. She often chooses commodities such as sugar and minerals that have a deep relationship to the history of European colonialism. The complex matrix of materials and embodied histories held together in her work juxtaposes elements that are both familiar and eerie, producing a jarring effect.

In Repository I: Mother (2021), a ghostly translucent house molded from the artist’s childhood dollhouse is cast from colored sugar. Its glowing pink surface illuminates the sinister ways that gender silently operates in domestic environments and our everyday lives. Recent explorations include the appropriation of Chinese decorative forms in European Chinoiserie furniture (Heliades, 2024) and the eerie fluorescence of uranium glass, which contains materials that are commonly mined from indigenous lands (Leetso I, 2023).

Sasha Gordon

Born in 1998, Somers, NY; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Sasha Gordon’s surreal dreamscapes are bold representations of the artist’s multifaceted self, populated with her doppelgängers. Their skin tones are often imbued with color to emphasize intense emotional states through electric palettes. Gordon’s compositions visualize an inner monologue expressing her fraught experience growing up in a predominantly white suburb as a queer Korean Jewish American. In recent works, Gordon expresses her defiant strength and transfixing power as an artist through the off-center gaze of her confident figures. In these lush, prismatic, and world-building compositions, they unabashedly take up space and seek out pleasure, making magic out of the mundane.

Her new self-portrait, Head Count (2024), refracts in a dynamic composition that is rendered in intricate detail via two perspectives. The artist’s body is further entangled with that of her partner’s in an intimate and meticulously choreographed love scene. Palette is key to the allure of Gordon’s everyday yet extraordinary scenes; in this case the pink and crimson flesh seem to radiate heat.

Sara Issakharian

Born in 1983, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Tehran

In Sara Issakharian’s paintings, violence and mysticism go hand in hand. She depicts atrocious events of our time allegorically, casting anthropomorphic figures in epic scenes of mythological struggle. Among her themes are state-sanctioned violence and the oppression of women in her native Iran, the enduring trauma of war, and the push and pull of emigration. Issakharian works through these painful subjects with a language of forms and figures rendered in both delicate, gentle strokes and bold, propulsive marks of charcoal and pastel. In her monumentally scaled works, clandestine activity, disruption, and apprehensive tranquility all coexist in a dynamic interplay.

Issakharian’s practice is an intensely personal engagement with her own cultural heritage as an immigrant of Iranian Jewish origin. The work And every moment a whole summer (2024) is awash in chromatic and compositional chaos: the figures, drawn from eclectic cultural references, are massed together and detached from their original contexts. She scrambles together characters from Disney films and ancient origin myths, figurines related to classical sculpture, and forest animals drawn from Persian miniatures. In the resulting nebulous pastel cloud, there is a sense of placelessness, unease, and uncertainty, as the figures appear to flee an invisible, timeless force.

Chella Man

Born in 1998, Hershey, PA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

The notion of identity existing on continuums that cut through the confines of binaries is central to Chella Man’s practice. Myriad and fluid conceptions of the self inform their painting, sculpture, writing, performance, film, and advocacy work, all of which draw from Man’s own lived experience as Deaf, transmasculine, genderqueer, Chinese, and Jewish. Man’s practice is a reclamation and celebration of these inherent multiplicities.

Their most ambitious performance and installation to date, Autonomy, provides an intimate encounter with a clone of their nude body bathed in warm golden-hour light. In a performance co-presented by the Jewish Museum and Performance Space on May 2, 2024, Chella Man painstakingly and lovingly recreated the scars and tattoos that grace their body on the silicone clone, memorializing their long journey of gender transition and exercising autonomy over their own body. The result of this performance is presented in installation form in Overflow, Afterglow. Autonomy does not center trauma, struggle, discrimination, or exclusion (though not for lack of such experiences), and instead foregrounds resilience, remembrance, curiosity, and care—for the self, for others, for family, and chosen families. Man emphasizes joy and rest as defenses against the unsettling backdrop of gender politics in the U.S. and beyond, presenting their body cradled by the afterglow of transformation.

Ilana Savdie

Born in 1986, Miami, FL; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Through chromatic saturation and density of imagery, Ilana Savdie embraces abundance as a strategy to subvert figuration. Her signature palette combines luminous fluorescent colors with the shocking contrast of deep, rich hues. Although Ilana Savdie’s works center on the body, and her canvases contend with figures, they put forth only phantom fragments of realism. Glimpses of torsos and limbs are drenched in sweeping flows of leaky paint, broad-brushed gleaming color, and dimpled, skin-like textures created with wax. Inherited familial legacies of the Jewish diaspora are also at play in her work, guiding her exploration of placelessness; Ilana Savdie’s family came from Egypt, Lebanon, Romania, Poland, and Venezuela, arriving in Colombia as the result of numerous conflicts and expulsions. Drawing on such upheaval and cultural fluidity, she is able to balance multiple contexts and traditions. Ilana Savdie leverages an enveloping scale and dynamic, gestural forms, inviting the viewer to examine intricate details from a state of near disorientation.

A particular interest in Ilana Savdie’s new body of work are the dynamics between predator and prey, autonomy and forced dependence—emblems not only of hierarchical power structures but also interconnected relationships. The painting A carrot laced with cyanide (2024) broaches the perverse human desire to tame the animal world, despite its sublime grandeur. The work departs from an image of a circus ringmaster forcing an elephant to bow at the close of a performance. The stacked forms indicate the power of a larger body, which is subjected to the trauma of being controlled and sensationalized, exposing the sinister underbelly of spectacle. Ilana Savdie’s painting Cow (2023), in the Jewish Museum collection, is also a part of the installation.

Austin Martin White

Born 1984, Detroit, MI; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA

In Austin Martin White’s work, paint oozes out from the surface of the picture plane, escaping its limits. Layers of dense and vibrant color push through and spill over the contours of the figures. The artist draws from a range of colonial-era art historical and ethnographic sources to probe the way their power dynamics are perpetuated in the contemporary moment. He first alters his reference images via hand drawing and digital tools before rendering fragments of them using a repurposed vinyl-cutting machine to generate negative images, similar to printmaking techniques. White then pushes his signature mixture of liquid rubber and pigment through the back of his substrate, a process of manual extrusion which creates a vibrant relief. The resulting compositions are textured and topographical, matte and glossy, brightly colored and darkly shadowed, and at points, glowing. Their seepages of color and light emphasize amorphous shapes over any crisp lines to create figures. White’s process renders his source materials nearly unrecognizable, effectively removing any fixed idea or definition that the original images conveyed. 

The painting runawaydaddy (2024) incorporates elements of figures from the influential mid-20th century painter Bob Thompson’s work as well as ethnographic imagery. Like Thompson, Austin Martin White refutes realist representation in favor of planes of vibrant color that only loosely nod to figuration. He draws focus to the way the picture plane is made through his excessive use of paint, imbuing the surface with texture. Pigment seems to crawl out of his figures, exposing the materiality of his artwork. This work reminds the viewer that artistic forms are always a construction of human hands and imagination, and a product of its maker’s political interests.

Rosha Yaghmai

Born in 1978, Santa Monica, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Rosha Yaghmai’s Afterimage series pushes figuration to its most far-flung possibilities, harnessing layers of pure color to evoke the aura of figures she intentionally removes from her compositions. These works address notions of inheritance and collective memory that are absorbed through the body but become abstracted through generations and over great geographical distances. The blurred swaths of color connect to images that emerge when we stare directly into a bright light and overstimulate our retinas. An inverted, residual copy imprints on our field of vision, unmoored from the physical world. Such afterimages are the direct apparition of what is happening inside the body.

To create her Afterimage series, Yaghmai airbrushes blurry contours and pockets of color onto single layers of fabric. The compositions loosely interpret residual images that have stuck in her mind from past-life visualizations; they are also related to reproductions of historical Persian miniature paintings, from which she digitally removes the figures. These traditional works decorated her childhood home in California in homage to Iran, her father’s homeland, where the artist was conceived but has never visited. The artist arranges layers of painted, translucent fabric, one on top of the other, creating shimmering new compositions that bear only traces of their source material.

Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration is organized by Liz Munsell, Barnett & Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum, and Kristina Parsons, Leon Levy Assistant Curator, The Jewish Museum. The exhibition was designed by Chelsea Garunay.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, designed by Common Name, includes an essay by Liz Munsell, texts on each artist by Kristina Parsons, interviews with the artists, and photography by Mary Kang and Abby Ross. Co-published by the Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, the book will be available worldwide and from the Jewish Museum Shop for $35. Available in August 2024.

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Louise Bourgeois @ The Jewish Museum, NYC - Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter

The Jewish Museum, New York

Through September 12, 2021 

The Jewish Museum presents Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, an exhibition that explores Bourgeois’s complex and ambivalent relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, the exhibition showcases a selection of Louise Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings — many of them presented to the public for the first time — along with nearly 50 works from throughout her career, including the Personages of the late 1940s; the organic forms in plaster and latex of the 1960s; the pivotal installation The Destruction of the Father (1974); Passage Dangereux (1997), the largest of the artist’s Cell installations; and the fabric sculptures from the last 15 years of her life. 

“Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings profoundly recalibrate our understanding of her artistic trajectory and motivational impulses. They do not explain or demystify her art, but rather represent a freestanding corpus of writing that display her unusual literary gifts and underline her enduring engagement with analysis. They highlight the centrality of her Oedipal deadlock as the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. And they complicate the narrative of early childhood trauma which the artist herself fostered, encouraging instead a more nuanced appreciation of this relationship which she often spoke about.” -- Philip Larratt-Smith

In the late 1940s, Louise Bourgeois struggled to balance her ambitions as a creative artist and her obligations as a mother and wife, and suffered from a host of physical and psychological ailments, such as insomnia, agoraphobia, compulsive thoughts, and aggressive and suicidal impulses. She was already in a fragile state when her father’s death in 1951 plunged her into a deep depression. In early 1952 she entered analysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a former disciple of Freud and, like Louise Bourgeois, an emigré from Europe. Her analysis would continue for the next 33 years, most intensely from 1952 to 1966, and thereafter in an on-off fashion until Lowenfeld’s death in 1985. Bourgeois also steeped herself in psychoanalytic literature, reading Freud, Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, Hélène Deutsch, Marie Bonaparte, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, and Wilhelm Stekel, among others. During the most intense phase of her immersion in analysis, Louise Bourgeois effectively withdrew from the art world: she had no solo shows from 1953 until 1964, and her art making came to an almost complete halt from 1955 to 1960. 

As part of the analytic process, Louise Bourgeois started writing down dream recordings, process notes, and other texts on loose sheets of paper, some of which she would share with Lowenfeld. This vast written record was discovered in the artist’s Chelsea home in 2004 and 2010. Its existence is somewhat at odds with the fact that Bourgeois distrusted words and did not believe in the talking cure. She always maintained that making art gave her access to her unconscious, and that her art required no verbal exegesis or defense. For as much as the writings shed light on the linkage between her psychic life and her forms, they do not explain her art any more than her art illustrates the writing. Instead they constitute a parallel body of work that at times took the place of her visual output. The function they fulfilled for Bourgeois was multiple: they were a tool for the analytic hour; they had a therapeutic value as a means of calming herself down and releasing anxiety; they gave her insight into the work she had already made, and more broadly into her forms, processes, and motivations; and they enabled her to define her emotions more precisely by fixing them in time. In literary quality and historical importance the psychoanalytic writings bear comparison with the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the journals of Eugène Delacroix, and the letters of Vincent van Gogh; along with her diaries, they establish Bourgeois’s status as an artist-writer of the first rank. They represent an original contribution not only to the field of psychoanalysis—a discipline effectively cofounded by women—but also to that of feminism. They provide a unique perspective on such topics as symbol formation, the family romance, maternal and paternal identifications, mourning and melancholia, and sublimation. The psychoanalytic writings attest to the fact that for Bourgeois art making and psychoanalysis were not distinct activities but points on a single continuum, so that at times it is hard to define where one ends and the other begins. 

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter frames Louise Bourgeois’s engagement with psychoanalysis through the lens of the Oedipus complex, which is both the cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis and the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. Bourgeois’s work is often told from the point of view of a young girl, and she often said that the artist did not go through the rites of passage. The psychoanalytic writings make plain the lingering hold this Oedipal deadlock exerted on Bourgeois, and in particular her eroticized and often anguished fixation on her father. This ambivalence would be replayed in her subsequent relationships with men, including Freud, whom Bourgeois never met but nonetheless internalized as a father figure. Bourgeois critiqued the father of psychoanalysis for his blind spots about female sexuality and for failing to understand the creative artist. Yet her writings reveal the extent to which Freudian concepts and practices—whether directly or indirectly, whether through his own writings, those of his followers, or Bourgeois’s longstanding analysis—informed and enriched her art making. To call Bourgeois “Freud’s daughter” is thus to invoke filiation and resistance, likeness and dissent, and to highlight the central importance of psychoanalysis in the making of her mysterious and idiosyncratic sculptural output. 

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter is curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, Guest Curator, and coordinated by Shira Backer, Leon Levy Assistant Curator, The Jewish Museum. 

Publication: A major publication co-published by the Jewish Museum and Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition, featuring an introduction by Philip Larratt-Smith, an original essay by renowned psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, a full-color plate section of art works germane to the exhibition thesis, and selected facsimiles of Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings. 

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter

By Philip Larratt-Smith; With an essay by Juliet Mitchell

Publication Date: May 25, 2021

Published by Yale University Press in association with

the Jewish Museum, New York

156 pages, 8 3/4 x 11, 80 color + 22 b/w illus.

Hardcover with slipcase, $45

ISBN: 978-0-300-24724-4

THE JEWISH MUSEUM

1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Rachel Feinstein @ The Jewish Museum, NYC - Maiden, Mother, Crone

Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone
The Jewish Museum, New York
November 1, 2019 – March 22, 2020

The Jewish Museum presents Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone, the first survey of the New York-based artist in the United States. Three decades of Rachel Feinstein’s work in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and video, as well as a newly commissioned wall-relief, a panoramic wallpaper, and the artist’s sculptural maquettes will be brought together to emphasize her fascination with the dualistic nature of cultural expression and everyday life, how fundamental yet oppositional concepts coexist and are ceaselessly negotiated in art and the construction of identity. From Rachel Feinstein’s earliest to her most recent works, female figures and protagonists dominate — a distinguishing feature of both the artist’s practice and this exhibition. Rachel Feinstein probes how notions of “the feminine” manifest in the popular imagination, an investigation that pulses through and binds together Maiden, Mother, Crone.

Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone is organized by Kelly Taxter, Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum. Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects is contributing the exhibition design. A companion monograph, designed by Richard Pandiscio and published by Rizzoli Electa, will be available this October, with a lead essay by Taxter and contributions by Marc Jacobs, Florence Welch, Sofia Coppola, Tamara Jenkins, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Sarah Sze, and Lisa Yuskavage, among others.

Sculpture is Rachel Feinstein’s primary medium, but her process comprises and retains the visual traces of diverse methods. She realizes her large-scale forms by transforming preparatory drawings and paper maquettes into three dimensions, or fusing painting with object-making. Rachel Feinstein also draws upon incongruous sources, time periods, and ideas such as religion and fairy tales, high European craft and American kitsch, or her experience of motherhood and feminist ideologies. She weaves together and deconstructs these perceived binaries, underscoring that there is no reality without fantasy, lightness without darkness, perfection without chaos.

Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone will be presented in the Museum’s first floor gallery. The exhibition design plays upon the latent theatricality of that plain space, where the scaffolded ceiling suggests an empty soundstage. Works will be grouped and paired thematically, arranged within four distinct areas meant to evoke a stage, a Rococo interior, a stately park, and a womblike chamber.

The exhibition begins with three sculptures drawn from spiritual sources. All-white, gesturally figurative interpretations of St. Sebastian and St. Michael (both 2012) flank Model (2000), an abstract, voluptuously proportioned white tower dotted with circular mirrored discs. The variously angled, mirrored surfaces are positioned to destabilize, fragment, and unite; they reflect the sculpture, the viewer, the room, or all three. Model is based on the Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net, which posits that all mankind, past and present, are interconnected and inextricable. The sculpture also points to the artist’s own origin story: Feinstein worked as a fashion model throughout her teenage years. From a young age she was both acutely aware of the power of her own image as well as the problematic repercussions of its circulation.

Spring and Winter (1994/96), the earliest piece in the exhibition, will be presented in the centrally located chamber alongside Feinstein’s most overtly sexual sculptures. In this video, the artist costumed herself as a series of one-dimensional, female tropes pulled from fairy tales and children’s literature: a paper doll, a sleeping beauty, a maiden, and a crone. The doll introduces the narrative — a dream within a dream — which follows a slumbering girl who imagines herself as an old woman. The crone falls asleep in a snowstorm and dreams she is a young maiden, cavorting against a backdrop of vivid color. The dualities of young and old, verdant and barren, underscore Feinstein’s early and ongoing commitment to uncovering the complexities of seemingly innocuous stories, particularly those told to women and girls. Spring and Winter was partly drawn from the original source of the popular fairy tale Sleeping Beauty: Giambattista Basile’s Sun, Moon, and Talia (1634), a dark story centered around violence against women. While Feinstein has moved away from performance, she continues to turn to fantastical narratives and characters, suggesting that both fiction and fact constitute perception and reality.

Rachel Feinstein was born in Fort Defiance, Arizona in 1971. She received her BA from Columbia University in 1993, where she studied studio art and religion and worked closely with Kiki Smith and Ursula von Rydingsvard. That same year she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Beginning with the group exhibition Let The Artist Live, at New York’s Exit Art in 1994, Feinstein has continued to exhibit her work internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include: Folly, Madison Square Park, New York; The Snow Queen, Lever House, New York; and Tropical Rodeo, Le Consortium, Dijon. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; The Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, New York; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; and the Barbican, London. Rachel Feinstein is represented by Gagosian Gallery.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York City
www.thejewishmuseum.org

Modigliani @ Jewish Museum, NYC

Modigliani Unmasked
Jewish Museum, New York
Through February 4, 2018

The Jewish Museum presents Modigliani Unmasked, the first exhibition in the United States to focus on Amedeo Modigliani’s early work made in the years after he arrived in Paris in 1906. The exhibition puts a spotlight on Modigliani’s drawings, with a large selection acquired directly from the artist by Dr. Paul Alexandre, his close friend and first patron. The drawings from the Alexandre collection, many being shown for the first time in the United States, as well as other drawings from collections around the world and a selection of Modigliani’s paintings and sculptures, illuminate how the artist’s heritage as an Italian Sephardic Jew is pivotal to understanding his artistic output. 

Modigliani Unmasked considers the celebrated artist, Amedeo Modigliani (Italian, 1884-1920), shortly after he arrived in Paris in 1906, when the city was still roiling with anti-Semitism after the long-running tumult of the Dreyfus Affair and the influx of foreign emigres. An Italian Sephardic Jew with a French mother and a classical education, Modigliani was the embodiment of cultural heterogeneity. When he moved to Paris, he came up against the idea of racial purity in French culture — in Italy, he did not feel ostracized for being Jewish. His Latin looks and fluency in French could have easily helped him to assimilate. Instead, his outsider status often compelled him to introduce himself with the words, “My name is Modigliani. I am Jewish.” As a form of protest, he refused to assimilate, declaring himself as “other.” The exhibition shows that Modigliani’s art cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the ways the artist responded to the social realities that he confronted in the unprecedented artistic melting pot of Paris.

In these years prior to World War I, Amedeo Modigliani largely stopped painting in order to develop his conceptual and pictorial ideas through drawing and sculpture. The works in the exhibition reveal the emerging artist himself, enmeshed in his own particular identity quandary, struggling to discover what portraiture might mean in a modern world of racial complexity.

Modigliani Unmasked is arranged thematically, and includes approximately 130 drawings, 12 paintings, and seven sculptures by the artist. Modigliani’s art is complemented by work representative of the various multicultural influences — African, Asian, Greek, Egyptian, and Khmer — that inspired the young artist during this lesser-known, early period.

When he arrived in Paris, Amadeo Modigliani — still virtually unknown — met Dr. Alexandre, a young physician. Alexandre amassed some 450 drawings directly from the artist and commissioned a number of portraits. The exhibition includes a selection of drawings depicting Dr. Alexandre, as well as a mysterious, unfinished portrait never seen before in the United States. Probably painted around 1913, it is a stylistic anomaly within Modigliani’s oeuvre, more sketchy and gestural than his typical portraits.

Modigliani would visit museums in Paris, including the Louvre and the Musée du Trocadéro, and was mesmerized by the non western art. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the French vanguard, who appropriated such works expressionistically as an abstracted distortion of the human form, Modigliani’s manner of using such stylized effects was far more respectful. The influence of masks in particular is clearly visible in the many drawings and sculptures in the exhibition.

Prominent in the Alexandre collection are the stylized drawings related to sculptures. Produced between 1909 and 1914, this body of work constitutes a distinct category within the artist’s oeuvre and reveals his ongoing preoccupation with identity. Particularly noticeable is his obsessive examination of physiognomy. When seen together, his repeated images of heads and faces reveal minute, calculated variations in the eyes, noses, and mouths. As seen in the exhibition, this group of drawings offer a nuanced commentary on the underlying issue of aesthetics as it relates to race.

In 1911, Amadeo Modigliani began to explore a motif borrowed from ancient art, the caryatid, and a selection of these drawings is included in the exhibition. While in classical art the caryatid is usually a woman, his are male, female, or of ambiguous gender. He also incorporated elements derived from Egyptian art, as well as ancient South and Southeastern Asian sources such as facial features, postures, and tattoos.

The exhibition also includes a selection of life studies and female nudes. Among these are of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, whom the artist met in 1910. Her exotic presence inspired Modigliani to introduce her to Egyptian art. The influences he drew from Egyptian art, such as the attenuation of the figure and the angularity of form, can be seen in the drawings he did of her.

Amadeo Modigliani’s fondness for performance, including theater, street entertainment, and the circus, is reflected in numerous early drawings, often sketched from a blend of life and imagination. The exhibition includes his drawings of the Commedia dell’Arte character, Columbine, as well as circus performers. Many of these works — like others in the exhibition — reveal the acuity of his psychological awareness, which had the effect of transforming simple sketches into portraits.

Modigliani Unmasked is organized by Mason Klein, Senior Curator, The Jewish Museum. The exhibition was designed by Galia Solomonoff and Talene Montgomery of SAS/Solomonoff Architecture Studio.

Modigliani Unmasked Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by the Jewish Museum and Yale University Press. The book includes an essay by Mason Klein that offers close analysis of Modigliani’s portraits and figure studies in pencil, ink, gouache, and crayon, ultimately arguing that the artist demonstrated a modernist embrace of difference, as well as an understanding of identity as heterogeneous, beyond national or cultural boundaries. The 172-page book also includes an afterword by Richard Nathanson. Featuring 165 color illustrations, the hardcover will be available worldwide and at the Jewish Museum's Cooper Shop beginning in September 2017 for $50.00.

JEWISH MUSEUM
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York City
thejewishmuseum.org

Related post on Wanafoto : Modigliani at Tate Modern, London, Through April 2, 2018

Lee Krasner & Norman Lewis exhibition at The Jewish Museum, NYC

From the Margins: Lee Krasner | Norman Lewis, 1945–1952 

The Jewish Museum, New York 

September 12, 2014 - February 1, 2015 

Lee Krasner (1908-1984) and Norman Lewis (1909-1979) were major contributors to Abstract Expressionism but as a woman and as an African American, respectively, they were often overlooked by the leading critics of their time. From September 12, 2014 through February 1, 2015, the Jewish Museum will present From the Margins: Lee Krasner l Norman Lewis, 1945-1952, a survey of key 1940s and 1950s works by these two powerful painters. This was a transformative period in American painting when both artists were experimenting with approaches that joined abstraction and cultural specificity. 

Their works have intriguing formal similarities while reflecting each artist’s personal sources. Krasner’s Little Image pictures relate to her childhood upbringing and study of Hebrew. Lewis’s Little People paintings reference African American cultural heritage, urban life, jazz, and textiles.

Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis were important to the development of the Abstract Expressionist artistic and social scene in New York but remained tangential to mainstream criticism during the formative period of the 1940s and early 1950s. Both artists' work of this formative period embodied the allover approach characteristic of the style. Yet, rather than the bold, gestural strokes of their peers they focused on smaller, repeated images with self-reflective cultural references. Their paintings—brimming with gesture, image, and incident—remained modest in scale compared with the canvases of many of their contemporaries. 

Lee Krasner, better known at the time as the wife of Jackson Pollock, created innovative systems and iconographies within the overall painting style of Abstract Expressionism. In her Little Image paintings, Krasner worked with small repeated pictographs that she systematically painted onto the canvas from right to left, as she was taught to write Hebrew. The shapes are not recognizable images, yet evoke letters, signs, or symbols. Meticulously crafted and intimately scaled, the Little Image works reflect her deft control of unorthodox painting methods such as applying pigments with sticks and palette knives or straight from the tube. Her art celebrates painting as a primal means of communication through an analogy with picture-based writing systems.

Norman Lewis produced unique linear abstractions that shared much conceptually and aesthetically with the work of celebrated Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Ad Reinhardt and Mark Tobey, while expressing his own identity and sources from African American culture. His Little People paintings, with their highly abstracted formal structures, make reference to the urban experience, musical structures, jazz, and African textiles. 

The paintings of Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis selected for this exhibition suggest several parallels. Developed within a key period in American art and culture, their works offer scope for reflection on interrelated themes: art and modernity; issues of artistic expression and identity, whether of class, gender, ethnicity or race; and the relations of the mainstream and the excluded. 

From the Margins: Lee Krasner l Norman Lewis, 1945-1952 is organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator at the Jewish Museum, and Stephen Brown, Assistant Curator. 

LEE KRASNER was one of the most radical of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters. Through six decades, she continually explored innovative approaches to painting and collage. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to an Orthodox Jewish family from Russia, Krasner pursued formal art training at several New York City institutions and also studied with the influential German abstract painter Hans Hofmann. She was a muralist in the Federal Arts Project and a member of the Artists Union and American Abstract Artists. Krasner married painter Jackson Pollock in 1945. Though overshadowed by Pollock, Krasner was an experienced artist well before she met him. Active in the New York art scene of the 1930s and 1940s, she introduced Pollock to the artist Willem de Kooning and critic Clement Greenberg, among others. During her time with Pollock at their home in Springs, Long Island, Krasner developed her Little Image paintings. These works are today considered among her most significant contributions to Abstract Expressionism. 

NORMAN LEWIS was the second of three sons of immigrant parents from Bermuda. His family lived on Lenox Avenue, near 132nd Street, in Harlem. Lewis studied drawing and commercial design in high school before joining the merchant marine and sailing through the Caribbean and off the coast of South America. Back in New York in the early 1930s, Lewis met Augusta Savage, the founder and director of an important art school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. From 1933 to 1935, he participated in Savage’s studio and attended Columbia University. Lewis was active in the Federal Arts Project, and was a member of the artists’ group 306, which met in the studios of Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, and Ad Bates at 306 West 141st Street. The group formed a nucleus for creative life in Harlem and included Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, and Richard Wright. The relationship between the artist and society was a frequent theme of discussion, yet from a style grounded in social realism, Lewis moved, during the early 1940s, toward abstraction. Around 1946 he began exploring an overall gestural approach to abstraction, establishing himself as the only African American among the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists. Inspired by sources in music, nature, Asian and African art, and modern painters from Wassily Kandinsky to Mark Tobey, Lewis experimented with a wide variety of approaches to abstraction. His paintings from this time are devoid of realistic imagery while often referring to African American settings and culture. Beneath the formal elegance of Lewis’s paintings runs a characteristically subtle inflection of his lifelong social conscience and humanitarian concerns.

Exhibition Catalogue

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Jewish Museum is publishing a 96-page catalogue by Norman L. Kleeblatt and Stephen Brown, distributed by Yale University Press; with essays by Lisa Saltzman and Mia L. Bagneris. An introductory essay surveys the trajectories of Krasner and Lewis within an artistic community dominated by white men. This book offers a fresh view of the contributions of two highly significant abstract artists. Featuring 64 color illustrations, the book will be available worldwide and at the Jewish Museum’s Cooper Shop for $30.00.

From the Margins: Lee Krasner | Norman Lewis, 1945-1952 is made possible in part by The Peter Jay Sharp Exhibition Fund and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Endowment support is provided by The Skirball Fund for American Jewish Life Exhibitions. 

The Jewish Museum, New York 

www.thejewishmuseum.org

Chagall at The Jewish Museum, NYC, 2013-2014: Love, War, and Exile Exhibition

Chagall: Love, War, and Exile

The Jewish Museum, New York

September 15, 2013 - February 2, 2014 

The Jewish Museum in New York will present Chagall: Love, War, and Exile which, for the first time in the U.S., explores a significant but neglected period in the artist's career, from the rise of fascism in the 1930s through 1948, years spent in Paris and then in exile in New York.

MARC CHAGALL (1887-1985), one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century, created his unique style by drawing on elements from richly colored folk art motifs, the Russian Christian icon tradition, Cubism, and Surrealism. Beginning with the evocative paintings from his years in France, Chagall: Love, War, and Exile illuminates an artist deeply responsive to the suffering inflicted by war and to his own personal losses and concerns. Although he never abandoned a poetic sensibility, his art of the 1930s and 1940s reflects the political reality of the time. Most unexpected is the recurring appearance of the figure of the crucified Jesus as a metaphor for war and persecution. By the mid-1940s, Chagall returns to joyful, colorful compositions expressing the power of love. The exhibition includes 30 paintings and 24 works on paper, as well as selected letters, poems, photos, and ephemera. 

Escaping the hardships of Soviet life following the Revolution, Marc Chagall moved to Paris with his wife, Bella, and daughter, Ida. During this productive period, he assimilated the French artistic tradition, creating a series of portrait-like flower paintings, vibrant in color and texture.

Chagall's exile from Russia also inspired work based on memories of his childhood and of the Bolshevik Revolution. He depicted a cathedral that dominated the town of Vitebsk, and drew on a remembered storehouse of symbols meaningful to both Jews and Christians, presaging the Christian imagery-in particular the Crucifixion-in work to come. 

Like many Eastern European Jews who had fled to France, Chagall's world was threatened by the rise of Nazism. In 1941, with an invitation from Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, he and Bella escaped to New York City. With the onset of the war and this second exile in New York, themes of violence and disruption characterize Chagall's work. 

The most prevalent image used by Chagall during World War II was of Jesus and the Crucifixion. In Chagall's canvases Jesus was often depicted as a Jew. For the artist, the crucified Jesus was a symbol for victims of persecution, and an appeal to conscience that equated the martyrdom of Jesus with the suffering of the Jewish people. While other Jewish artists depicted the Crucifixion, for Chagall it became a frequent theme. 

Unlike his years in Paris, Chagall was never completely comfortable in New York City. The artist felt disconnected from the places he understood best-Russia and Paris. This feeling of alienation was compounded by a devastating personal tragedy-the sudden death of his wife, Bella, in September 1944. 

Marc Chagall soon established a new relationship with Virginia Haggard McNeil, moving with her to High Falls, New York in the mid-Hudson Valley. His work from this time often expresses a tension-between the memory of Bella and the new presence of Virginia-resulting in fraught but revealing compositions. Gradually, as the artist emerged from his sadness, and the horrors of war receded, the work from this period begins to reflect a more familiar Chagall expressed in joy-filled paintings replete with intense color and levitating figures.

The show brings together significant works from major institutions and collections throughout Europe, Israel, South America, and the United States. Chagall: Love, War, and Exile is organized by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Senior Curator at The Jewish Museum.

Chagall: Love, War, and Exile Exhibition

Exhibition Catalogue

(c) 2013 Yale University Press

Chagall Exhibition Catalogue

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Jewish Museum and Yale University Press are co-publishing a 148-page catalogue by Ms. Goodman, with an essay by Kenneth E. Silver, Professor of Art History at New York University. Goodman and Silver analyze Chagall's complex iconography and phantasmagorical style, tracing the political, literary, and theological sources that inspired his art. Also included are 72 color reproductions, 27 black and white illustrations, and eleven of Chagall's rarely seen poems. 

The Jewish Museum, New York City

www.thejewishmuseum.org