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From the Archives: Read What ARTnews Critics Said About Robert Mapplethorpe

LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

“Robert was smart with his board because he knew that appointing family members or life partners who can make emotional decisions is not always great to manage an artist’s legacy,”lawyer and Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Stout told ARTnews. Mapplethorpe instead assembled a board with professional specialties in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his impressive oeuvre.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind approximately 14,000 prints, made from around 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, the management of the artist’s legacy has become an intricate feat: 15 galleries around the world manage the sales from the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five in charge in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries holding representation deals; Brazil’s Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel manages the South American demand; and the Asian market is handled by Seoul’s Kukje Gallery.

At Art Basel next week, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac, and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work on offer. There’s also various institutional shows each year and brand partnerships, like those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts, and Honey Fucking Dijon, who license Mapplethorpe’s images. In its earliest days, the foundation only licensed paper-based products, such as postcards, calendars, and posters. “There was no way we could know if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, as many artists started making licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and act meticulously about publishing because books do survive,” Stout said. “They are not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything being online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did an awful lot of books with different publishers.” He also added that the foundation’s trustees have reached a consensus of being “conservative about licensing” and that they aim “to make decisions that we thought he would have made.”

In addition to its management of Mapplethorpe’s art, the foundation has a lesser-known remit, acting as a grant-giving entity invested in supporting HIV research. “We largely depend on gallery sales, and running a photographer’s estate is more challenging than a painter’s,” he said about the given vast difference in pricing for the two mediums.

Mapplethorpe’s intriguingly enigmatic visual lexicon however has perhaps been more popular than ever in recent years. The first quarter of 2024 has so far seen four solo gallery exhibitions for the photographer: at London’s Alison Jacques, Gladstone in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and Morán Morán in Los Angeles, as well as a three-artist show, with Ann Craven and Mohammed Z. Rahman, at Phillida Reid in London. The Paris and LA shows both had high-profile curators: fashion editor Edward Enninful and artist Jacolby Satterwhite, respectively. Last month, the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire opened the exhibition Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe which places the photographer’s work in conversation with that of the 20th-century Italian painter. Their mutual fascination with flowers anchors the show, which features 38 photographs, all on loan from the foundation. 

The Gladstone show, which closed in April at the gallery’s Upper East Side outpost, sought to shine a light on a lesser-known part of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, his three-dimensional assemblages and photographs in sculptural frames. The exhibition benefitted from the gallery space’s former life as a townhouse, as the installation conveyed a demure blend of theatricality and domesticity. His ca. 1972 Untitled (Coat Rack Sculpture), for example, occupied a corner with a lit lightbulb (in lieu of a coat) adjacent to a black-and-white photograph of artist Jay Johnson in which the same sculpture appears next to Johnson’s nude body. In front of a backyard-facing window was Open Book (1974), a large aluminum floor structure in which a quartet of photographs of penises sit above a sleek triangular base.

The recent Gladstone show followed the Guggenheim Museum’s year-long exhibition “Implicit Tensions” (2019), which presented a considerable group of Mapplethorpe’s mixed-media constructions for the first time. The ambitious undertaking was an extension of the foundation’s gift of 194 artworks to the Guggenheim in 1993, which also established a photography department at the museum and a gallery named in the late photographer’s honor.

“Before Mapplethorpe, photography frames were more incidental, reflecting the uneasy transition of the medium from page to wall,” Guggenheim associate curator Lauren Hinkson recently told ARTnews of the two-part show.The second part of her project invited living artists like Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, and Catherine Opie to exhibit their own images about queer resilience as a response to the first part of the exhibition. “Like the work of any canonical figure, Mapplethorpe’s work and its meanings are neither stable nor static, but are continually open to reinterpretation as other artists offer alternate approaches to image-making,” Hinkson said.

New-generation queer creatives, on the other hand, still find inspiration in Mapplethorpe’s unabashed handling of carnality, whether in his allusive flowers or dramatically lit double fisted rears. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, a fast-rising French designer with cult following, unveiled his Mapplethorpe-inspired men’s collection, in collaboration with the foundation, during New York Fashion Week in February. Pop star Troye Sivan currently wears some of the pieces from the bondage-inspired collection in his ongoing word tour, Sweat. The leather-heavy garments veer away from Uniqlo’s 2015 T-shirt line which were printed with the artist’s more approachable photographs.

Inviting new perspectives has been one lucrative way for the Mapplethorpe Foundation to keep his legacy alive. A suite of gallery exhibitions curated by cultural luminaries, from Isabelle Huppert to Elton John or the recent Enninful and Satterwhite ones, activate his large oeuvre through different personal lenses. (Ropac’s Enninful-organized exhibition drew around 2,000 visitors on its opening day in March.)

For Satterwhite, the opportunity to curate a Mapplethorpe show finds resonance in his own practice, which also traverses themes of power, autonomy, and euphoria. The foundation gave the Brooklyn-based artist access to the photographer’s entire oeuvre, and the resulting show, titled “Animism, Faith, Violence, and Conquest,” included a medley of Mapplethorpe’s less-charted images about utopia, resistance, and devotion. The show’s titular themes are subjects Satterwhite explored about belief systems and survival while working towards his recent Metropolitan Museum of Art commission, A Metta Prayer (2023).

A 1982-dated photograph, for example, shows a television with a chain hanging from its bottom; an image from 1985 includes a young boy in pirate costume looking through a spyglass. “I was thinking about how to subvert video games and ideas of violence, surveillance, and conquest in my project,” Satterwhite told ARTnews. He noted that he has long dreamed of doing a project around Mapplethorpe, “but if I had the chance 10 years ago, the result would have totally been different,” he said. Organizing the show fresh off his Met commission, in which he marinated similar ideas of devotion, power, and toxicity in beauty, the artist said he felt closer to Mapplethorpe’s similar concerns at this point in his practice.  

Mapplethorpe’s gallery representation itself has been important in the shifting perspectives of the artist’s work. “The dominant aesthetic of Robert’s estate, with calla lilies and nudes, was established by the foundation and Robert Miller Gallery, which initially had an exclusive representation,” Stout, the foundation president, said. The foundation changing its representation to New York’s Sean Kelly gallery in the early 2000s, helped bring forth a more multivalent approach to Mapplethorpe. In 2003, with the help of Sean Kelly, Cindy Sherman organized the first of these artist-driven curatorial projects that are now done multiple times a year.

“The public reaction and a Roberta Smith review in the New York Times convinced us that we should let other people make decisions for exhibitions,” Stout said. “Even we still see works this way that we never saw or forgot about.”

The challenge for the Mapplethorpe Foundation these days is to run an endeavor with funding from a finite repertoire. In an effort to monitor sales in various price points and avoid exhibiting the same work concurrently in separate shows, the foundation has established what they internally call “a core system.” The layout helps the board and staff break down and control the types of images sold across the globe and maintain a balanced inventory in terms of value and future demand. The works with exceptionally iconic subjects such as Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe himself, or Andy Warhol, as well as calla lilies are “for more special moments,” Stout said. This system also helps the foundation shuffle works between different gallery inventories for an even distribution.

“When we started the foundation with Robert, we weren’t sure if we would go on for over 20 years,” Stout recalled. “We don’t have trustees making emotional decisions and holding onto sentimental pieces on our board—we just want to place everything well.”

The Headlines

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS. Amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee has added sites in the cities of Kyiv and Lviv to its List of World Heritage in Danger. Those sites include the 11th-century St. Sophia’s Cathedral in the former and the latter’s medieval section, the Washington Post reports, noting that the historical center of Odessa was placed on the list earlier this year. Not added to the list, which aims to garner international support for protecting historical places, was the city of Venice, despite experts recommending its inclusion because of flooding and mass tourism, Reuters reports. The city recently passed a measure to charge day trippers a fee on certain days next year. The Art Newspaper reports that Italy’s minister of culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, responded to the news by declaring that “common sense has prevailed,” terming the call to include Venice “an unnecessary, purely political maneuver without any basis in objective fact. Venice is therefore not in danger.”

LISA LYON, the award-winning bodybuilder, dancer, kendo competitor, and performance artist who posed for striking photos by Robert Mapplethorpe, died on Friday at the age of 70 of cancer, Penelope Green reports in the New York Times. Lyon was also shot by Helmut Newton and Lynn Davis, acted in various films (including the 1986 horror comedy Vamp), and in 2000 entered the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation Hall of Fame. Her collaboration with Mapplethorpe began in 1980 after the two met at a party. As an artist, Harrison Smith writes in the Washington Post, Lyon “turned her body into a living sculpture while performing at art galleries and museums.” Her aim across all her work, she once said, was to present a woman’s body as “neither masculine nor feminine, but feline.”

The Digest

Artist Firelei Báez, the Dominican-born, New York-based artist known for elegant, alluring paintings that address history and mythology, has joined Hauser & Wirth. Báez, who has surveys on tap in Denmark and Boston, was previously with Kavi Gupta in Chicago and the James Cohan Gallery in New York. [ARTnews]

The Denver Art Museum nixed a touring show of ancient Greek art from the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, over the lack of provenance information for some works, sparking a debate over museum policy. An MFA curator who was subsequently dismissed has been supported by some peers and patrons. [The New York Times]

Only 28 percent of U.S. museum workers are satisfied with the opportunities they have for career advancement (compared to 48 percent of workers), according to a survey of around 2,000 of them by the advocacy group Museums Moving Forward. About two-thirds are considering a job change. [The Art Newspaper]

For the first time, billionaire art collector Bernard Arnault, the 74-year-old CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and his five children gave an interview to an international newspaper. Who will succeed him? “It’s not an obligation, nor inevitable, that a kid is my successor,” he said. [The New York Times]

Miami Heat forward and art collector Kevin Love is the latest celebrity tapped by Sotheby’s to organize one of its  “Contemporary Curated” sales. The auction, on deck for September 28, will feature works by Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Ernie Barnes, and many more. [FanNation and Observer]

A CLOSE LOOK AT TWO GREATS. Speaking of Ernie Barnes, in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Adam Bradley has an in-depth report on how the artist became a beloved figure among Black Americans decades before the art world took an interest. “His work is really about joy and positivity,” dealer Ales Ortuzar, who co-represents his estate, told T. “Those are two things that have traditionally been dismissed in the art world.” And in the Financial Times, Jackie Wullschläger has a luminous essay about writing (this is rather astonishing) the first English-language biography of Claude Monet.

The Kicker

THE PAPAL ESTATE. The inimitable John Waters—film director, writer, actor, art collector, artist, and the list goes on—is the subject of a just-opened retrospective at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles titled that is after his infamous nickname: The Pope of Trash. The Pink Flamingos creator gave a characteristically wisdom-filled interview to the L.A. Times that touches, among many other things, on the value of shocking people. Said Waters: “Everybody can be disgusting—it has to be disgusting and funny.” Words to live by. [LAT]

But misunderstanding breeds fear, and Hickey is not an easy figure to understand. His resume rambles through the peaks of boomer bohemia: born in Texas in 1940, he has run galleries in Austin and New York, partied with Warhol and Mapplethorpe, taken LSD and speed, written outlaw country songs in Nashville, briefly edited for Art in America, and reviewed records for Rolling Stone, all before 1980. Air Guitar is characteristically gregarious, swinging from basketball legend Julius Erving’s layups to painter Cézanne’s picture plane. Then there is his reactionary-seeming thesis, first formed in his 1993 book The Invisible Dragon, that the point of art is Beauty, of which the market is the measure—and that this exchange, this free-form, individually determined relationship to compelling works of art, is democracy in action. On the back of this refrain, Hickey made himself the chain-smoking, Burger King–eating bête noire of the academic art world, lecturing from Cambridge to LA all the while.

Far from Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2021; 152 pages, 25 black-and-white
illustrations, $24.95 hardcover.

The Austin-based journalist Daniel Oppenheimer rushed out to buy his copy of Air Guitar after his brother told him it would blow his mind. Twenty years later, he has written a biography of the battle-scarred critic, Far from Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art. Oppenheimer’s book readily admits to its subject’s defects. It is also a valediction. Oppenheimer is chiefly a political journalist—his previous book profiles six leftist figures who swung right—and Far from Respectable is detached from the art-critical aspects of Hickey’s work, compelled instead by its subject’s bravura and style. Framed as a twilight reappraisal of Hickey’s life and work, the book’s main task is to pull Hickey’s criticism from its pigeonhole in the art world of the 1990s and into wilder, thornier, more human thickets of desire. There’s a hole in the middle of Oppenheimer’s account between 1977, when Hickey goes to his mother’s in Fort Worth to kick amphetamines and barbiturates, and 1989, when he reappears with a tenure-track job at the University of Las Vegas, having narrowly avoided becoming the fourth man in four generations of his family to commit suicide.

But while he praises Hickey’s writings as art, Oppenheimer also asks the pertinent question: is Hickey’s criticism still relevant? This is where the book gets relevant too. The author doesn’t name the art world controversies of the 2010s, but it’s hard not to recognize ongoing conflicts over the roles of art and politics and institutions in Oppenheimer’s description of the 1980s culture war spats over Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe (whom Hickey chummily calls Robert), when right-wing congressmen chiseled away at federal funding for the arts. These controversies hardly resemble today’s mainstream arguments over art. The battle lines now, to borrow the book’s often martial diction, are drawn through the liberal institution itself, in conflicts between factions on the left. But this was precisely the bone Hickey picked. While curators defended Mapplethorpe’s explicit, elegant photos of assholes and cocks in terms of formal rigor and timeless artistic values, Hickey railed that Jesse Helms had it right: Robert’s raunchy images were a direct assault on everything that puritanical America believed, and for Hickey, this was a power worth defending. The right-wingers and bigots didn’t bother him—“Each of these parties was performing its assigned role in the passion play of American cultural politics,” Oppenheimer writes—as much as the curators who wanted to package Mapplethorpe’s most vulgar, full-frontal work in neutral, neutralizing appeals to free expression. Hickey’s broadsides against the “therapeutic institution,” which he claimed served up art like broccoli, notified fair-weather friends of outlaws and outcasts that they indeed fight for the man.

Dave Hickey at his Austin gallery, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, November 1969.

Oppenheimer’s only sustained critical postmortem concerns the blowup over beauty that Hickey launched with The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, published by Art Issues Press in Los Angeles—which, remarkably, still smolders. Hickey was so irked by the establishment left’s cold-as-marble defense of Mapplethorpe that he wrote a group of essays to the contrary, essentially arguing that beauty itself, independent of the codes and experts of the therapeutic institution, marked places for subcultures to self-organize, and that this was the true democratic magic of art. Far from Respectable recounts the fallout. In 1996, “allies” of Hickey, including his wife, Libby Lumpkin, and current Los Angeles Times senior critic Christopher Knight, roundly attacked an exhibition of feminist art curated by art historian Amelia Jones. Jones struck back with a paper lacerating not Knight, nor Lumpkin, but Dave Hickey, casting him as a reactionary tastemaker and cocky patriarch who brandished his own idea of beauty as universal truth. Oppenheimer argues that Jones’s reading was almost willfully inaccurate—that, in fact, both Hickey and Jones place beauty firmly “in the eye of the beholder.” Indeed, rather than taste-making, as both the critic’s biography and his writing make clear, Hickey actually advocated something like aesthetic polytheism or poststructuralist bacchanal. But Hickey, ever the pugilist, “chose . . . to poke his finger in the eyes of the people who were mad at him, to play on stage the asshole they assumed and very much wanted him to be (the better to dismiss his critiques).”

“Hickey never had a plan,” writes Oppenheimer, “nor even a good sense of direction. He had a talent for writing, a daimonic intellect, an intuition for where certain kinds of cultural energy were coalescing, and certain tendencies to depression and self-sabotage.” In surfing, drugs, music, and art, Hickey sought out subcultures and cliques in tension with “the cultural economics of the mainstream.” And of course he was often wrong. Hickey’s eager faith in the “democracy of the market” to generate diverse free havens within capitalism whitewashed huge disparities in access. The fact that Hickey “spoke of how much he liked selling, in particular, to a certain kind of risk-taking businessman” betrays a quaint view of art’s relationship to commerce very much shaped by selling pop art in Austin in the late 1960s. (It’s worth adding that, in the twenty-first century, Hickey turned to bashing “rich collectors” for poisoning the collegial weirdness he’d found in art.)

Then there is his big-tent concept of American culture as open, raucous, risky, and a hell of a time. (But open to whom, exactly? A straight white man like him, at least.) He found joy in American paganism: love of commerce, worship of idols (politicians, pop stars, graven images), and “cosmopolitanism,” or diversity. One chapter opens with a vignette from Hickey’s adolescence, when his father brought him along to a local jam session. “Magda set up in front of the piano,” Oppenheimer recounts. “Butch stood up his bass. Julius laid his guitar in his lap while he rolled and lit a joint. Ron took a hit and then sat down at his drum set. Hickey’s father, also Dave, took out his sax and his clarinet. They all tuned and warmed up. Then they played.” Hickey wrote in Air Guitar that this afternoon “was the best, most concrete emblem I had of America as a successful society and remains so.” It’s a tragic and vulnerable statement. His father would kill himself three years later. And the reality of this country would prove hostile to the polyphonic ease that so impressed Hickey as a boy.

By the end of Far from Respectable, Oppenheimer starts referring to Hickey as Dave, the way Hickey called the artists he’d known by their first names. “Dave was lonely and feeling unappreciated,” he writes. “I was offering to write a book about how amazing he was.” The book’s final pages relate a weekend in Santa Fe, where Hickey and Lumpkin now live, when the subject who has seduced the author for so long becomes flesh and blood, broken down, prisoner of a failing body. This primal scene is intercut with Oppenheimer’s meditations on his own conflicted relationship to his austere, leftist parents and the ingrained, politically justified, pathological denial of pleasure that they professed. “This was my inheritance,” writes Oppenheimer, “against which I struggled very inarticulately and mostly unconsciously. Until I read Dave.” These sketches of the author’s own biography feel vague and faux-confessional—until you realize that what he’s really confessing throughout the book, and by writing the book itself, is that he has found a surrogate father figure in Hickey, liberation in Hickey’s work.

Engaging with beauty makes our lives richer—if it does anything at all—and Oppenheimer finds Hickey beautiful. Even as he concedes that Hickey’s infamous Beauty was “flamboyantly prejudicial,” Oppenheimer finds him “so potent, ultimately, not because his theory of beauty was superior but because his performance while articulating it was so beautiful.” Oppenheimer attempts to jam with Hickey, offering his own book’s four chapters as a countermelody to the four essays in Invisible Dragon. He doesn’t have Hickey’s feel for the notes, but there are moments when the whole thing sings. “When Dave was in his glory, I’ve been told, his brilliance poured out of him in a glittering stream of connections, allusions, humor, sophistication, and vulgarity,” writes Oppenheimer. Even diminished, as the three watch MSNBC, Hickey delivers a haunting vision of the Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas, which he and Lumpkin happened to witness. “The field of the concert looked like glowing coals,” he told Oppenheimer. “Glow, glow, glow. It was everybody’s cell phone. Isn’t that sad?”

Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Adebiyi, ca. 1989.

©ROTIMI FANI-KAYODE/COURTESY AUTOGRAPH, ABP/GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK

WEDNESDAY, JULY 24

Exhibition: “Kyoto: Capital of Artistic Imagination” at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bringing together over 80 works, including paintings, lacquers, ceramics, metalwork, and textiles, “Kyoto: Capital of Artistic Imagination” traces the cultural history of the Japanese city from ancient to modern times. Some highlights in the exhibition, which will also spotlight several recent acquisitions, are a 14th-century suit of armor, 18th-century Noh robes, and a selection of traditional tea wares.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Exhibition: “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now” at Guggenheim Museum
Earlier this year, the Guggenheim Museum opened a survey of Robert Mapplethorpe that included his portraits of celebrity figures, his images of S&M culture, and his pictures of black men (which have proven controversial). Mapplethorpe’s queer aesthetic has been influential for younger generations of artists, and this show—the second half of the earlier showing—will explore his influence on his followers. A number of Mapplethorpe’s images will be shown alongside works by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Performance: Maze at the Shed
This dance-theater commission is co-directed by FlexN dance crew leader Reggie ‘Regg Roc’ Gray and theater artist Kaneza Schaal. Each dance, a series of vignettes, is shaped by the dancer’s personal experience with abuses of power; the result is a meditation on human coexistence told through the Jamaican dance tradition of bruk up. The 90-minute performance will be accompanied by live drumming and vocals and performed within a light landscape designed by designer Tobias G. Rylander.
The Shed, 545 West 30th Street, 7:30 p.m. Some performances have sold out; consult the Shed’s website for dates and pricing

Herbie Fletcher, Wrecktangle #12, 2014.

©HERBIE FLETCHER/COURTESY FLETCHER FAMILY AND GAGOSIAN

THURSDAY, JULY 25

Opening: “The Fletcher Family: A Lifetime in Surf” at Gagosian
This exhibition is opening in tandem with the publication of the book Fletcher: A Lifetime in Surf, which chronicles the family’s role in surf and skate culture. The show will feature artworks from four series by Herbie Fletcher, including his “Wrecktangles,” sculptures made from custom surfboards, and “Blood Water” paintings. A selection of ephemera—photographs, posters, sketches, maps, surf magazines, boards, and more—will also be on view.
Gagosian, 976 Madison Avenue, 6–8 p.m.

Performance: Jerron Herman at Whitney Museum
To honor the 29th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Whitney will stage a performance of Many Ways to Raise a Fist by Jerron Herman. Described by the New York Times as “inexhaustible,” Herman is a playwright, principal dancer, choreographer, and development director with Heidi Latsky Dance. His work combats the perception of physical disability as artistic limitation. After a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, doctors warned Herman that bodily autonomy would be difficult, if not impossible; Many Ways to Raise a Fist is billed by the Whitney as a celebration of “both personal and collective defiance.”
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 6:30 p.m.

Symposium: “Convening for Contemporary Art, Education, and Social Justice” at New Museum
The New Museum’s inaugural multi-day “Convening for Contemporary Art, Education, and Social Justice” invites educators, activists, and artists to consider the social and economic inequities within the school system, and develop new strategies for inclusivity in the classroom. Programming will intersect with the museum’s 2019 Summer Social Justice Residency and Exhibition, “Mirror/Echo/Tilt,” which features work by Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith. The artists will be on hand for a conversation, and various leaders will also present on community and self care.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Programming continues on Friday, July 26, and Saturday, July 27

FRIDAY, JULY 26

Screening: Danny Lyon at Anthology Film Archives
Though best known for his stylized documentary photography, Danny Lyon has also worked extensively as a filmmaker, and the Anthology Film Archives is showcasing his moving-image work in a three-day series called “Danny Lyon: Then and Now.” First up in the series is this screening of two films from the 1970s: Llanito (1971) and Little Boy (1977). The former film focuses on various residents of Bernalillo, New Mexico, from Chicano boys to developmentally disabled Catholics. One of its subjects, Willie Jaramillo, went on to become the protagonist of Lyons’s most famous film, Willie (1987).
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, 7:30 p.m. Tickets $7/$9/$12

SATURDAY, JULY 27

Screening: Barbara Hammer at Museum of the Moving Image
As part of a survey of the late filmmaker Barbara Hammer‘s work, the Museum of Moving Image will screen one of her famous piece, Nitrate Kisses (1992), an experimental documentary about several gay couples. Shot in black-and-white, and combining readymade and newly shot footage, the documentary aims to revise notions about what a queer image might look like. Screening with it is Generations (2010), in which Hammer, 70 years old at the time, hands off the filmmaking duties to a younger filmmaker, Joey Carducci, in a meditation on aging. Carducci will be on hand to speak about Generations.
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Avenue, 4 p.m. Tickets $9/$11/$15

Performance: Yonatan Gat and the the Eastern Medicine Singers at Green-Wood Cemetery
Commissioned by Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, this performance will bring experimental music to the nearly-200-year-old Green-Wood Cemetery. The performance is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Native American group the Eastern Medicine Singers, whom the musician Yonatan Gat first met at the festival SXSW. Their new performance, Graveyard Shift, includes a procession through the cemetery’s paths.
Green-Wood Cemetery, 500 25th Street, Brooklyn, 7 p.m. Tickets $25

Peter Hujar’s David Wojnarowicz: Manhattan-Night (III), 1985, sold for $106,250, a record for the artist.

COURTESY SWANN

Ahead of two concurrent Pride marches—the official (and corporatized, some have said) parade and the alternative Queer Liberation March—on Sunday, two New York auction houses held queer art sales to honor the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, offering up books, letters, paintings, photographs, posters, and more.

The first, held on June 20, took place at Swann Auction Galleries, and was billed as being the first of its kind at a major auction house, with a portion of its proceeds benefiting the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in SoHo. And this past Thursday, Sotheby’s held its own Pride sale, titled “Bent,” with portions of its proceeds to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York.

At Swann, the sales total of $950,833 fell squarely within its presale estimate of about $865,000 to $1.29 million, with a 75 percent sell-through rate by lot; at Sotheby’s, the sale total of $1.15 million was below its presale estimate of $1.4 million to $2 million, with a 64 percent sell-through rate by lot.

(All sale prices reported include buyer’s premium. For Swann, that premium is 25 percent of the hammer price up to and including $100,000; 20 percent of any amount in excess of $100,000 up to and including $1 million; and 12 percent of any amount in excess of $1 million. For Sotheby’s, it is 25 percent of the hammer price up to and including $400,000; 20 percent of any amount in excess of $400,000 up to and including $4 million; and 13.9 percent of any amount in excess of $4 million. Estimates are calculated sans premium.)

Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War, remembrance copy, inscribed to Peter Doyle, from “the author with his love,” 1875-76, sold for $70,000.

COURTESY SWANN

Swann’s sale was packed with bidders and onlookers, and was front-loaded with letters and rare books, interspersed with a few works of early photography and works on paper. Among the most anticipated lots early on was a copy of Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War (1875–76), which the American author and poet inscribed to his romantic partner Peter Doyle “with his love.” (The 200th anniversary of the Transcendentalist’s birth is currently the subject of various shows, including ones at the Morgan Library & Museum and the New York Public Library.) The book sold to an online buyer for $70,000, just shy of its high estimate of $75,000. A similarly inscribed copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) sold at Sotheby’s a week later for $87,500 to a phone bidder.

Both sales featured work by some of the biggest (and most market-friendly) queer art stars, including Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and Peter Hujar. The top lot of Swann’s sale was one of Hujar’s brooding photographs of his one-time lover and friend Wojnarowicz. After a battle between two phone bidders, the print from 1985 sold for $106,250, demolishing its high estimate of $25,000 and setting a new record for the artist at auction. Meanwhile, at Sotheby’s, a Hujar photograph of a nude HIV/AIDS activist and writer at the beach went for $27,500.

Peter Hujar, Come Out!, 1969, sold for $10,000.

COURTESY SWANN

Also on offer at Swann were several lots related to Hujar’s iconic 1969 image used to publicize the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day, commemorating the one-year anniversary of Stonewall. A test print of the photograph, which was featured on posters that encourage people to “COME OUT!!,” sold for $10,000, or $4,000 more than its high estimate of $6,000.

Examples of some of Mapplethorpe’s most controversial images were also on offer at both sales, among them images from his “X” portfolio, which shows BDSM acts, and his “Z” portfolio, which shows images of black men and which some critics have alleged are fetishistic. At Swann, a print of Mapplethorpe’s famed photograph Jim and Tom in Sausalito, which shows one subject urinating into the mouth of another, went for $25,000 (another print of it is currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York), while a complete suite of the “Z” portfolio pictures sold for $47,500. Sotheby’s had four prints from the “Z” portfolio, each carrying an estimate of $6,000 to $9,000; three sold for $5,000 each, and the fourth failed to find a buyer.

Also on offer at Sotheby’s was a set of four images that Mapplethorpe had made in 1986 for his patron and partner Sam Wagstaff, whose collection of early photography heavily influenced Mapplethorpe. In the first image from the cycle, titled Arthur Rimbaud. A Season in Hell., Mapplethorpe dons devil horns, while the final image is a nude self-portrait, shot from behind. The piece sold for $15,000, well above its high estimate of $5,000.

The 19th-century gay poet has also figured prominently in Wojnarowicz’s work, and both Sotheby’s and Swann had a photo from his famed “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” which sold for $12,500 and $3,500, respectively. Surpassing both of those was a 6-by-5-inch postcard announcing a Michelle Stuart exhibition that Wojnarowicz painted over with one of his signature silhouetted figures in red; it sold for $17,500.

Both sales had early Warhol drawings that were similar to those seen at the beginning of the artist’s recent Whitney Museum retrospective, which is now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Art. At Sotheby’s, two alternately colored screenprints of a man’s nude lower half each sold for $106,250 to the same telephone bidder, making them the top lots of that sale.

Catherine Opie, Dyke, 1993, sold for $22,500.

COURTESY SOTHEBY’S

As with most auctions, the sales were dominated by the art of men, but work by queer women also hit the block at both auctions, which included Leonor Fini, Annie Leibovitz, Catherine Opie, and more.

A 1920s-era work on paper by Danish illustrator Gerda Wegener was one of the top 10 lots; it sold for $20,000. At Sotheby’s, Fini, a Surrealist who had a career retrospective at the Museum of Sex last year, had an oil painting titled Narcisse Incomparable that sold for $56,250, just below its low estimate of $60,000. (A photograph by Lissa Rivera, who curated the Fini retrospective, sold for $3,750 at Sotheby’s.)

Photography by women was popular at both sales. A Leibovitz picture of Keith Haring, nude with his body painted white and black to match his iconic figure drawings, sold at Swann for $18,750; a portrait of Bette Milder in a bed of roses sold for $15,000 at Sotheby’s. An Opie photograph of a woman’s back with “DYKE” tattooed on her neck, set against a blue patterned background, sold for $22,500, though a self-portrait of the artist with a mustache and butch attire failed to find a buyer. Several works by Joan E. Biren (JEB), who currently has the window installation at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, were offered a Swann. Her 1977 image of the feminist artist collective the Furies sold for $3,000.

The two sales included a great deal of work by artists featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s recently-closed exhibition “Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern,” which focused on the titular patron and gay man who was instrumental to the early development of the museum. Among the artists overlapping MoMA and the sales were George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Jean Cocteau, Jared French, and the collective PaJaMa (an abbreviation of the initials of lovers Paul Cadmus and Jared French, along with his wife Margaret French).

A letter signed by Harvey Milk sold for $11,250.

COURTESY SWANN

Some at Swann applauded when a Cadmus sketch for a lithograph of a locker room scene titled Horseplay sold for $47,500. Meanwhile at Sotheby’s, a suite of PaJaMa photographs sold for $18,750, a new record for the collective, and a Jared French painting of a nude man from three vantage points went for $10,625.

Of the two sales, Swann was the less starry one—and also the more well-attended. It offered a broader range of artists from various eras, including work by Ray Johnson, Jack Smith, Haring, Glenn Ligon, Nan Goldin, Jimmy De Sana, Duane Michals, JEB, Hugh Steers, Jack Shear, Candy Darling, and the Silence = Death Collective.

While the 275-lot affair at Swann dragged at points, there were moments where the energy among bidders was palpable. At one point, a letter signed by the late Harvey Milk—the first openly gay elected official in California—when he served as acting mayor of San Francisco on March 7, 1978, hit the block. Selling for $11,250, the letter marked a new record for Milk’s autograph, just one of many signs that the growing interest in queer works, from museums and the market, might just be more than a fad. In this context, Milk’s note held particular significance. It reads, in part: “thought you should have a memo from the 1st up front gay mayor of any city—it’s for real!!!”

Meredith Monk at Big Ears.

ELI JOHNSON

Lonnie Holley, the Alabama-born sculptor/musician, commanded the stage of a gutted warehouse turned concert venue in the Old Town district of Knoxville, Tennessee, a former industrial zone divided by railroad tracks whose weathered bricks now house apartments, java shacks, and rock ’n’ roll bars. It was barely past lunch on a Friday, but Holley seemed ready for church as he played lilting improvisations on a keyboard and offered stream-of-consciousness testimonies.

“Be still and know,” he told a crowd gathered for the annual Big Ears music festival in a city made indelible in the stories of native son Cormac McCarthy. Holley’s shirt bore the image of an all-seeing eye emitting a light beam of rainbow colors. Around him, the Messthetics—a trio featuring two former members of the punk band Fugazi—built a supple rhythmic backbone for spiritual reveries. Holley’s call for stillness was thoughtful advice, but it was also impossible to follow for anyone hoping to make the most of Big Ears, for which some 20,000 people convened two weekends ago for a supersize lineup of legendary composers, blue-chip contemporary music ensembles, rock heroes, jazz visionaries, electronic disrupters, drone mavens, folksters, punkers, and happy collaborative mashups of all of the above. Sprawling across downtown Knoxville’s cathedrals, theaters, and dive bars, the feted festival encourages constant flux, urging its audience to seep past lines of taste, genre, generation, and media to revel in everything all at once.

The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Roscoe Mitchell at Big Ears.

NATHAN ZUCKER

Big Ears artists aren’t defined merely by music. This year’s lineup included filmmakers (Bill Morrison, Jodi Mack), dancers (the Nashville Ballet, in “Lucy Negro Redux” with Rhiannon Giddens), poetry (Moor Mother), fusions of video and performance (Mosaic Interactive, featuring performers from Africa to Indonesia), and mixed-media spectacles of various sorts (Triptych: Eyes of One on Another, composer Bryce Dessner’s theatrical meditation on Robert Mapplethorpe).

“It’s a very open-hearted atmosphere,” said Meredith Monk, back for her second Big Ears appearances in three years. The composer and vocalist gave two public shows—including a scaled-down version of her Cellular Songs—as part of a 50th-anniversary tribute to ECM Records that brought a dozen or so artists associated with the label to Big Ears, including a radically expanded version of the jazz-minded Art Ensemble of Chicago. Monk lamented that she didn’t get to hang out much with her “old pals” because she had been working too hard: “It was nose to the grindstone,” she said.

Drawing on her past fusing choreography, theater, performance art, and her own unique vocalese since the 1960s, Monk led her ensemble through a buoyant rendition of her latest works, which evoked the origins of life itself with white-garbed performers sitting in a circle and chirping “You” in a round, over and over, each vocalist a stand-in for a biological cell.

Monk took well to the festival’s community vibe. “We were in a restaurant and a young woman came in,” she said of a fan who had seen her show with her mother and 95-year-old grandmother by her side. “We were crying the whole time,” the fan said. “Would you come and meet my family?” The grandmother, it turned out, was full of energy—and full of feedback Monk was happy to hear. “Sometimes I go to places and feel like the Lone Ranger,” the composer said. “We leave and don’t get to feel the effect that work has on people.”

Triptych: Eyes of One on Another, as performed March 15-16 at the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

MARIA BARANOVA

The Mapplethorpe-inspired Triptych: Eyes of One on Another, which had its world premiere with the LA Phil in Los Angeles a month ago and will travel to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in June, enlisted artists and materials in what proved to be both a re-examination and an exaltation of the photographer’s enduring imagery, with its classical beauty and raw eroticism. Using poetry by Essex Hemphill and Patti Smith as well as words by librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle—all performed by the vocal group Roomful of Teeth plus Alicia Hall Moran and Isaiah Robinson—Triptych is a personal work for composer Bryce Dessner (also a member of the rock band the National). The composer grew up in Cincinnati, which in 1990 became the epicenter of the culture wars when the Mapplethorpe exhibition “The Perfect Moment” arrived at the city’s Contemporary Art Center. Dessner was then 14. “The county prosecutor shut it down and put the museum’s director in jail,” he remembered. “It was a giant event in Cincinnati and a big event for me as a teenager figuring out what a lot of issues were about, like the AIDS epidemic, censorship, and Mapplethorpe as an artist. It stuck with me.”

The new work marks the first time the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation has granted theatrical rights to use the artist’s images as the core of a production, which in this case projected pictures above the performers on stage. “As a teenager, I was told I was not allowed to look at those,” Dessner said, “so the idea is to just look at the pictures. Looking at them in 2019 is obviously different from looking at them in 1990 or 1985 or 1978.”

Figuring out how to engage such aesthetically and politically loaded work wasn’t easy. “Making a piece about another artist’s work is difficult,” Dessner said. “Especially photography, which isn’t meant to be shown in a narrative way. We had to think a lot about how music could be a doorway into the poetry in those images. We came to it out of a great love and appreciation for the beauty of his photographs.”

Lonnie Holley at Big Ears.

ELI JOHNSON

It’s not such a leap from Dessner’s thoughts about Mapplethorpe back to Holley, who frames his art-making as a sort of delivery system channeling the past and a critique of current times. He could even be describing the feelings of a teenage Dessner in the title to a recent song, from his 2018 album MITH: “I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America.”

Though Holley himself said he holds out hope. “We are the thread for the stitches to mend up the sores,” he said while in Tennessee, signing albums at a merch table after his show. “We need to know that our activities, one way or the other, turn out to be a spiritual sacrifice to make things greater on Earth itself.”

The reason, Holley added, is clear: “Because this is the mothership.”

Patti Smith performing at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on March 8, 2019.

ENID ALVAREZ/COURTESY SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

“It’s so hard for me to believe that 30 years have passed because he always seems so present,” Patti Smith told a sold-out auditorium at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this past Friday. She was referring to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died almost exactly 30 years prior to Smith’s performance, and that evening, through Smith’s tender readings of poetry and performances of songs, it felt as though Mapplethorpe had made himself present. Four floors above her was the show “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now,” which includes the artist’s black-and-white still lifes of flowers; his portraits of artists such as Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman; and his stark, transgressive images of BDSM culture. His presence loomed over Smith’s event that evening—literally.

At the Guggenheim event, Smith, who is now 72, wore a sleek black blazer and nodded to her ruffian roots by pairing her top—a sophisticated garment befitting a memorial service—with beat-up, laceless combat boots. Throughout the performance, she read from her award-winning memoir Just Kids (2010), which focuses on her time with Mapplethorpe, and from her latest poetry book, Devotion (Why I Write), 2017. She also performed songs with accompaniment from Tony Shanahan, who has played in her band since 1996.

Smith conceded that the anniversary of Mapplethorpe’s death fell the day after the event, but she chose to recognize March 8, 1989, as the day she lost the artist because that was the last day she spoke with him. (Mapplethorpe died at age 42 from AIDS-related causes.) “I promised him that throughout my life I would magnify his work and his name as best I could,” she said. “Then I asked him if there was anything specific he wanted me to do. These were his last hours on earth . . . and he asked me if I would write our story.”

In response, Smith penned Just Kids, which took more than 20 years to complete. “I had never written a book of nonfiction before,” she continued, “but I knew exactly what our story was because when we were quite young and we rarely had any money to go to concerts or to go out, we mostly stayed home after doing our jobs. . . . Sometimes when it was really cold or we were bored, he would ask me to tell him our story if he couldn’t sleep. So I knew exactly what he meant.”

The night began with a slow-burning, soulful rendition of “Wing,” from Smith’s 1996 album Gone Again. “I was free,” Smith’s crisp, guttural voice repeatedly intoned, in reference to a passage from Just Kids about New York’s East Village neighborhood during the 1980s, where Smith describes having no place to sleep, bumming around all day, and taking delight in her bohemian lifestyle. The audience delighted in hearing Smith discuss a favorite recipe of hers—and a least favorite of Mapplethorpe’s—from when the two lived together at the Chelsea Hotel: lettuce soup. “What you do is, you get day-old lettuce and some bouillon cubes,” she said. “You boil some water, take the dirty leaves off the lettuce and cut it in four, put some bouillon cubes in it. When it comes to a boil, you throw all the lettuce in there for a few seconds, simmer for a few seconds, turn off the stove, and serve.”

Images of Patti Smith from “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

ENID ALVAREZ/COURTESY SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

Smith has a reputation for her lyrical, mournful way of speaking, and perhaps the evening’s most tender moment came when she spoke of a coffee table book about Michelangelo’s sculptures that Mapplethorpe owned. Reading her 2018 poem “The Boy Who Loved Michelangelo,” Smith said, “We would look at it for hours. He always said that had he lived in that era, he would have been a sculptor. He was only 20 then, and he wasn’t taking photographs yet, but in a few years he would accomplish his love for sculpture through photography.”

Over the course of the evening, Smith acknowledged that she owed her career in part to Mapplethorpe. “Robert wanted to be successful, but I didn’t care—I just wanted to be a starving artist and a genius,” she said through laughter. “The beautiful irony is that . . . [Just Kids] has eclipsed everything else I’ve ever done. And it’s exactly what Robert wanted for me.” The opening chords of Smith’s 1978 song “Because the Night” began, and a number of audience members stood up and started dancing. Toward the end of the song, Smith went off-script and ad-libbed an emotionally felt exclamation: “Because the night belongs to Robert!”

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1985, gelatin silver print.

©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, USED BY PERMISSION/GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

With a Robert Mapplethorpe show recently opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, we turned to the ARTnews archives and collected excerpts from reviews of shows mounted during the artist’s lifetime. Included are musings on some of Mapplethorpe’s early sculptures and photographs of Patti Smith, Holly Solomon, and others, as well as a review of Mapplethorpe’s photobook Lady: Lisa Lyon, which included images he took of a woman wrestler. (Like writers at many other publications during the 1980s, ARTnews critics tended to avoid dealing with some of the more controversial aspects of the artist’s oeuvre.) Excerpts from the past follow below. —Alex Greenberger

“Reviews and Previews”
By Michael André
March 1974

“Recent Religious and Ritual Art” (Buecker & Harpsichords): Robert Mapplethorpe, Lenny Salem and Royce Dendler are visionaries who stumble at times into the slapstick or insane. Mapplethorpe spread a layer of nails over the bottom of a washtub, placed a crucifix on the nails, filled the tub with water and added apples. A related sculpture consists of a crucifix attached to a stool-sized nail keg placed before the door of a men’s room.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Candy Darling, 1973, four dye-diffusion transfer prints (Polaroid), in painted plastic mounts and acrylic frame.

©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, USED BY PERMISSION/SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

“Outlandish nature”
By Gerrit Henry
April 1977

Robert Mapplethorpe, whose works were shown at the Holly Solomon Gallery, is a celebrity photographer probably best known for the cover photo on Patti Smith’s first album, Horses, in which the rocker appears, grim smile, hooded eyelids, tie loosened, jacket thrown over her shoulder, looking like Arthur Rimbaud by way of Frank Sinatra. Mapplethorpe has photographed other “in” celebrities—painter Brice Marden, David Hockney and Henry Geldzahler, gallery owner Solomon herself—with a similar eye to the more outlandish sides of their natures, which the photographer has apparently encouraged them to display. Mapplethorpe is an excellent technician, particularly adept at creating light effects that are the visual equivalents of certain psychological states induced by cocaine. With persistence, he should shape up as the Richard Avedon of the ’80s, by which time one suspects, the public will have become as idolatrous of freaks as they once were of sex symbols.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982, gelatin silver print.

©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, USED BY PERMISSION/GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

“Portraits of a Lady”
By Emily Simson
November 1983

This year there can be no ignoring Robert Mapplethorpe. At the age of 36, he has just had three concurrent exhibitions in New York City alone and has traveled through Germany and to Paris, Tokyo and Toronto, where his photographs were shown in solo exhibitions. He has been included in four group shows and has recently published a new book, his first full-length photographic study of a single subject—Lady: Lisa Lyon (Viking, $31.25 cloth, $16.95 paper).

In the past Mapplethorpe has shocked his audience with explicit photographic depictions of sexual subjects, such as graphic views of black male bodies. He has photographed actors and artists, children and aristocrats. He has produced stunning images of flowers. But his photography has evaded classification. As Mapplethorpe said in a recent interview, “As a photographer I would like to be able to throw my esthetic in as many different directions as is possible without ever being one thing. I don’t want to be a fashion photographer. I don’t want to be a journalist. I don’t want to be . . . I just want to do it all.”

Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre can, however, be divided into three areas of concentration: erotic subjects, portraits and still lifes. Lady may be considered a conglomeration of all three. The book’s 116 duotones feature Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion, in a myriad of poses and costumes. Mapplethorpe photographs her as a high-fashion model, a lace-clad temptress, a Greek goddess in silk and pearls, a leathered and silver-studded S&M queen, a muscled athlete. These diverse characters are presented in a consistently tight large-format style, a consistently formalist esthetic. Mapplethorpe’s method of working obliterates grain, amplifies detail and extends the black-and-white tonal range. The book’s coherence may be due in part to Mapplethorpe’s technical acuity. However, the latitude of his talent is revealed in Lady’s sequential photographs.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Calla Lily, 1986, gelatin silver print.

©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, USED BY PERMISSION/GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

“New York Reviews: Robert Mapplethorpe at Barbara Gladstone”
By John Sturman
November 1985

In terms of content, the show held no surprises. Mapplethorpe, who achieved commercial prominence about a decade ago with his photos of pop celebrities such as Patti Smith and Marianne Faithfull, remains a compelling portraitist. Included here were striking 1983 studies of Cindy Sherman and Donald Sutherland. And one of the Season in Hell photos—Gun Blast (1985)—reaffirmed Mapplethorpe’s power to depict the violent or the shocking in a clean, controlled way. But sharp, cold, almost clinical photos of flowers and more sensual images of nude or scantily clad males have long been part of Mapplethorpe’s repertoire, and many of the works on display were perhaps too much in keeping with his previous explorations to be really challenging or satisfying.

Judy Chicago, Driving the World to Destruction, from the series “PowerPlay,” 1985.

PHOTO: ©DONALD WOODMAN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; ART: ©JUDY CHICAGO AND ARS, NY/COURTESY THE ARTIST; SALON 94, NEW YORK; AND JESSICA SILVERMAN GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

This season brings long-overdue surveys for artists like Vija Celmins, Graciela Iturbide, Zilia Sánchez, Judy Chicago, Hans Hofmann, and Margaret Kilgallen, as well as the latest editions of major international exhibitions like the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Guangzhou Triennial. It’s also a winter of firsts. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will stage the biggest Marcel Duchamp show to date in Asia, with many of the objects on view having been drawn from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s world-class collection of the artist’s work, while America will get its first-ever Sri Lankan art survey this December in the form of a 250-work exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Below, a look at the winter’s most promising shows.

NATIONAL

December

“Judy Chicago: A Reckoning”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
December 4, 2018–April 21, 2019

Many know Chicago solely for The Dinner Party (1974–79), a landmark installation now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum that creates the setting for an imagined gathering of 39 historical female figures, from Boudica to Frida Kahlo. In the intervening years, Chicago has produced a formidable body of work, however, much of it dealing with the representation of women and rituals throughout art history. This full-career survey, which will bring together works from her early days as a feminist-art pioneer as well as more recent figurative paintings, includes Purple Poem (for Miami), a brand-new site-specific smoke piece. —Alex Greenberger

Scowen & Co., Entrance to the Buddhist Temple, Kandy (Ceylon), ca. 1880–90, albumen silver print.

©MUSEUM ASSOCIATES, LACMA/LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF GLORIA KATZ AND WILLARD HUYCK

“The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
December 9, 2018–June 23, 2019

No American museum has ever put on a survey of Sri Lankan art before, so LACMA is breaking new ground by bringing together 250 artworks spanning nearly 2,000 years of the country’s history. The show will feature precious decorative objects, 19th-century photographs depicting the South Asian country’s scenery and monuments. These, along with ivories and textiles, reflect Sri Lankan exchanges and interactions with European colonizers. The show draws on LACMA’s own rarely displayed collection of Sri Lankan art. —Claire Selvin

“Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
December 15, 2018–March 31, 2019

Celmins is best known for her photorealistic paintings that depict natural environments—the sea, for instance, or the moon’s cratered surface—with a masterful level of detail that can at times border on abstraction. The artist’s first North American retrospective in 25 years will feature around 150 paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Next fall the exhibition travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Breuer building in New York—as it happens, the very same building where Celmins had a major traveling exhibition in 1992, when it was home to the Whitney Museum. Celmins’s celebrated seascapes will appear alongside her Pop-inflected paintings of consumer goods. —John Chiaverina

January

Margaret Kilgallen, Untitled, ca. 2000, acrylic on paper.

COURTESY RATIO 3

“Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.”
Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
January 12, 2019–June 16, 2019

Kilgallen, who died at age 33 in 2001, was of the main artists associated with the Mission School, a loose group based in California’s Bay Area known for its work made using humble materials that drew inspiration from all kinds of countercultural activity in 1990s America. This retrospective is the largest presentation of Kilgallen’s work since 2005, and it will use the artist’s exhibition history as a compass to explore her wide-ranging influences, which include the history of printmaking, American folk art, and feminist theory. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a quote from Kilgallen in which she discussed her disinterest in mechanical work and instead opted for something different and entirely handmade. —J.C.

Graciela Iturbide, ¡México…Quiero Conocerte! (Mexico…I want to get to know you!), Chiapas, México, 1975, gelatin silver print.

©GRACIELA ITURBIDE/MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, GIFT OF THE ARTIST

“Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico”
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
January 19, 2019–May 12, 2019

Iturbide has long trained her lens on the contrasts she has observed in Mexico, with particular attention to seemingly opposing forces that coexist—ancient traditions and contemporary culture, life and death—and the rituals related to them. This exhibition will feature 125 photographs from throughout Iturbide’s five-decade career, among them her intimate documentary-style images of indigenous peoples in Mexico, including the Seri in the Sonora Desert and the women of the Juchitán people (part of the Zapotec culture) in Oaxaca, as well as recent work depicting items in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom and plants at the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Gardens. —Maximilíano Durón

“Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold”
Met Breuer, New York
January 23, 2019–April 14, 2019

There are few more iconic photographs of an artist at work than the one of Fontana holding the knife he’d just used slash one of his paintings. His slashed paintings reflected the traumatic violence in Italy, where he was based, following World War II, yet they also served as dramatic experiments that questioned whether painting really was a two-dimensional medium at all. Those works rightfully garnered him acclaim, but he produced much more than that, making room-size light installations and abstract sculpture alongside his paintings. This retrospective aims to show the full scope of his work, and the exhibition will emphasize the role Fontana’s birth country, Argentina, played in his practice. —A.G.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Candy Darling, 1973, four dye-diffusion transfer prints (Polaroid), in painted plastic mounts and acrylic frame.

©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, USED BY PERMISSION/SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

“Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now”
Guggenheim Museum, New York
January 25, 2019–July 10, 2019; July 24, 2019–January 5, 2020

The two-venue retrospective at the Getty Center and LACMA made 2016 the year of Robert Mapplethorpe in Los Angeles. This year Mapplethorpe mania comes to New York. To mark the 30th anniversary of the artist’s 1989 death from AIDS-related causes at the age of 42, the Guggenheim will present a yearlong, two-part exhibition of his work. Drawn primarily from a 1993 gift of 200 photographs from his estate, the show’s first part will bring together a variety of works—celebrity portraits, nudes, flowers, self-portraits, and images of the S&M community, as well as collages and mixed-media constructions. The second part will explore Mapplethorpe’s lasting influence on contemporary art, pairing his work with that of others in the museum’s collection, such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Catherine Opie. —M.D.

“Liz Magor: BLOWOUT”
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 30, 2019–March 24, 2019

Best known for her sculptures and assemblages of dissimilar materials, Magor has made a new body of work for this show incorporating Mylar, which is often used to create transparent commercial packaging. The Canadian artist introduced what she has called “agents” to her materials, causing them to slowly deteriorate in various ways. In April, the show, Magor’s first in a museum on America’s East Coast, will travel to the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the exhibition’s co-organizer. —C.S.

February

Kevin Jerome Everson, IFO (still), 2017, film.

©KEVIN JEROME EVERSON/COURTESY THE ARTIST, TRILOBITE-ARTS DAC, PICTURE PALACE PICTURES, AND THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

“Colored People Time: Mundane Futures”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
February 1, 2019–March 31, 2019

The three-show series “Colored People Time” will examine ways in which slavery and colonialism affect the present and the years to come. “Mundane Futures,” the series’ first exhibition, will feature work by Martine Syms, Kevin Jerome Everson, Aria Dean, and Dave McKenzie, with a focus on the future of black cultural production. The show will position Syms’s film The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (2015), in which the artist reads a text about a new kind of black aesthetics for the 21st century, with two different historic texts: Sutton Griggs’s 1899 black dystopian novel Imperium in Imperio and the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program from 1972. “Mundane Futures” will be followed by installments called ”Quotidian Pasts” and “Banal Presents.” —C.S.

Frida Kahlo, Appearances Can Be Deceiving, n.d., charcoal and colored pencil on paper.

©2018 BANCO DE MÉXICO DIEGO RIVERA FRIDA KAHLO MUSEUMS TRUST, MEXICO, D.F. / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

“Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving”
Brooklyn Museum, New York
February 8, 2019–May 12, 2019

In 2014, curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm told ARTnews that Kahlo has “been so overshadowed by her celebrity that her work has become lost.” Could this be the exhibition that finally saves the Mexican Surrealist painter from her own celebrity? For what is being billed as the largest Kahlo show in America in a decade, the Brooklyn Museum will home in on how the artist carefully crafted her identity. The show will include her clothes, personal possessions, and examples of contemporaneous films and propaganda, as well as works from the museum’s Mesoamerican holdings. If the show’s title is any proof, it will shed light on never-before-seen aspects of Kahlo, whose work frequently dealt with the complexities of being a female artist in the first half of the 20th century. —A.G.

“Maryam Jafri: I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
February 10, 2018–June 23, 2019

How or why some consumer products fail to sell is the subject of Jafri’s 2014–15 series “Product Recall: An Index of Innovation,” a grouping of appropriated advertisements alongside ad copy and information that came with these goods. (One work in the series includes boxes from a line of frozen vegetables that were advertised using language that urged consumers not to buy them; the reasons why they never found their audience are obvious.) This show, Jafri’s first museum show in the U.S., will include a new version of that series, which the artist has called an “alternative history” of consumer culture. —A.G.

“Nari Ward: We the People”
New Museum, New York
February 13, 2019–May 26, 2019

Bringing together over 30 sculptures, paintings, videos, and installations, this show, Ward’s first New York museum survey, traces the artist’s 25-year career. The show will present some of Ward’s early sculptures—including the large-scale environments Amazing Grace (1993) and Hunger Cradle (1993)—made with materials the artist found in Harlem. The exhibition takes its name from Ward’s 2011 piece of the same title, in which the opening words of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution are rendered in hand-dyed shoelaces—a way of reclaiming the text, the artist has said. —C.S.

Zilia Sánchez, Amazonas (Amazons), from the series “Topologías eróticas” (Erotic Topologies), 1978, Acrylic on stretched canvas.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM, NEW JERSEY

“Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island)”
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
February 16, 2019–May 19, 2019

One highlight of the 2017 Venice Biennale was a suite of shaped canvases by Cuban-born artist Zilia Sánchez. This show, Sánchez’s first-ever retrospective, will feature some 65 paintings, sculptures, sketches, and other pieces made over the course of her seven-decade career. The works often tackle metaphysical themes, employing geometries and imagery related to female mythological figures, including the Amazonians and Antigone. Sánchez has discussed her work in terms that refer to her alienation—both as a Latin American artist and as a woman—hence the show’s title. —Shirley Nwangwa

“Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction”
February 27, 2019–July 21, 2019
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California

It’s impossible to imagine a history of American abstract art in the postwar era without Hofmann, who taught many budding New York painters of the time—including Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner—in the ways of color theory and modernist styles. Hofmann’s work, with its juxtaposed swatches of opposing colors and uneven textures, is lesser known than that of his students, so this show will bring together nearly 70 works to spotlight how he translated European techniques for American audiences. The show will travel in the fall to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. —A.G.

Hans Hofmann, The Vanquished, 1959, oil on canvas.

JONATHAN BLOOM/©THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA/UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE, BEQUEST OF THE ARTIST

INTERNATIONAL

December

Jaume Plensa
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
December 1, 2018–April 22, 2019

Curated by Ferran Barrenblit, this show will provide a comprehensive view of Plensa’s work from the 1980s to the present. The artist’s koanic work plays on the yin and yang of various phenomena—how darkness can accentuate light (and vice versa), and how silence can emphasize noise. Plensa’s fantastical, oversized sculptures, in which human forms appear to materialize from amalgams of text, have forged his reputation as one of Spain’s foremost artists. Because Plensa hails from Barcelona, the MACBA show will act as a homecoming of sorts. —Annie Armstrong

Alex Katz, Paul Taylor Dance Company, 1963–64, oil on canvas.

BAYERISCHE STAATSGEMÄLDESAMMLUNGEN, MUNICH/UDO AND ANETTE BRANDHORST COLLECTION

Alex Katz
Museum Brandhorst, Munich
December 6, 2018–April 22, 2019

“Sincere art is art that relies on subject matter to carry it,” Katz told Calvin Tomkins in a New Yorker profile earlier this year. “An honest painter is one who doesn’t paint very well.” Included in this show will be Katz’s stylized portraits of notables from the New York art world, among them the late dancer Paul Taylor, whom Katz painted as a stark white figure against an all-black background. As part of the show, alongside Katz’s portraits and landscapes, the museum will premiere a new documentary about the artist. —S.N.

“The Street: Where the World Is Made”
MAXXI, Rome
December 7, 2018–April 28, 2019

Street scenes are among the most pervasive subjects in art history, having appeared in everything from ancient Roman frescoes to Romare Bearden paintings. But what value do they have for artists today? That query formed the basis for this exhibition, curated by Hou Hanru. Included will be work by Gimhongsok, Francis Alÿs, and Yael Bartana, among many others. —A.G.

Rosana Paulino, Geometria à brasileira (Brazilian Geometry), 2018, digital printing, collage and monotype on paper.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Rosana Paulino: The Sewing of Memory”
Pinacoteca Estado de São Paulo
December 8, 2018–March 4, 2019

Concerns regarding the status of black women in Brazil run through much of Paulino’s output, which will be surveyed here in this 140-work show, the largest devoted to the artist in her home country. Spanning the last three decades, the show will feature works that recontextualize images created by European colonialists and scientific practitioners. Fabric will appear throughout these works; the artist has said that the material is a symbol of how men and women might be able to heal themselves following intense trauma. —A.A.

“Pedro Figari: African Nostalgias”
Museu de Arte de São Paulo
December 12, 2018–February 10, 2019

Figari’s work has rarely been surveyed despite his having long been considered one of the most notable modernists in Latin America. This show will span the full breadth of the Uruguayan artist’s career, with a focus on how his background as a human rights lawyer influenced his paintings. Many of his subjects were black Uruguayans, whom he depicted performing quotidian activities, such as dancing or honoring the dead. Though he transitioned from law to art late into his career, he produced some 4,000 Impressionism-inspired pictures in just 15 years; the MASP show will offer a sampler of them. —S.N.

Pedro Figari, Candombe, n.d., oil on card.

MUSEO BLANES, MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY

Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Various venues, Kochi and Kerala, India
December 12, 2018–March 29, 2019

For the fourth edition of this biennial, curated by artist Anita Dube, the Pavilion at Cabral Yard, which acts as the show’s central space, will host both physical and digital programming. In addition to talks, screenings, and performances, the venue will hold public displays of online content in a “web-integrated space.” Dube has called her show a “knowledge laboratory”; among the artists she has selected to participate are Barthélémy Toguo, the Guerrilla Girls, Shirin Neshat, and William Kentridge. —C.S.

Oskar Kokoschka, Flute Player and Bats (Wiener Werkstätte postcard no. 73), 1907, color lithograph.

©2018 FONDATION OSKAR KOKOSCHKA AND PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/ALBERTINA, VIENNA

Oskar Kokoschka
Kunsthaus Zurich
December 14, 2018–March 10, 2019

Kokoschka created much of his energetic, sometimes humorous figurative work in direct opposition to the wave of state-sanctioned art that took hold throughout Europe during World War II. This has made him a peculiar figure in art history—the late Austrian artist is famous for his contribution to German Expressionist painting, for example, even though he intentionally kept some distance from the movement during its heyday, in the 1920s. This retrospective aims to better situate Kokoschka in the art world of his time; it includes around 200 works that cover the full spectrum of his output, from paintings to prints. —J.C.

Guangzhou Triennial
Guangdong Museum of Art, China
December 21, 2018–March 10, 2019

The sixth edition of the Guangzhou Triennial, titled “As We May Think: Feedforward,” will investigate ideas related to technology, machines, and humanity. The triennial will include an archival exhibition, curated by Wang Shaoqiang, the director of the Guangdong Museum of Art, as well as a three-part themed exhibition organized by Philipp Ziegler, Angelique Spaninks, and Zhang Ga. Work by 49 artists, including Gilberto Esparza, Tomás Saraceno, and Liu Wa, will be featured. —C.S.

“The Essential Duchamp”
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul,
December 22, 2018–April 7, 2019

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the death of the pioneering conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea is mounting the most comprehensive exhibition of his work in the Asia-Pacific region to date. Comprising some 150 works, many of them sourced from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the show will include the artist’s famous Fountain (1917/50) sculpture—a readymade constructed from a urinal tipped on its side—and other groundbreaking “readymades” alongside archival materials. There will also be a digital replication of Etant donnés (1946–66), the artist’s final major work. —J.C.

January

Pierre Bonnard, The Fourteenth of July, 1918, oil paint on canvas.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory”
Tate Modern, London
January 23, 2019–May 6, 2019

Back in 2006, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman waited in line for 20 minutes just to get to the front door of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris’s Pierre Bonnard retrospective. It was worth it, he wrote: “the show is sublime.” Now Bonnard is set to draw crowds at Tate Modern. Spanning nearly 40 years of the French artist’s career, this show will feature close to 100 works, and will highlight Bonnard’s expert use of brilliant color in his intimate, melancholy paintings. In his landscapes and scenes of domestic life, he evoked the passage of time through experiments in color. Included will be some of his most famous works, among them depictions of his wife, Marthe de Méligny, in various states of undress. —S.N.

Morag Keil
Institute of Contemporary Art, London
January 30, 2019–April 14, 2019

For her first major institutional show, the Scottish artist Morag Keil will present a grouping of new and existing works, all of them restructured specifically for this exhibition. Keil works in a variety of mediums, including film, installation, painting, and drawing, and often investigates how technological change, branding tactics, and media platforms affect our everyday lives. Included in the show will be a remodeled version of her 2016 video Passive Aggressive, which appropriates clips from animations, reality TV, and footage of motorcycling, and explores the blurred boundaries between fantasy, technology, and surveillance. —J.C.

Morag Keil, passive aggressive, 2016, installation view at Eden Eden, Berlin.

HENRY TRUMBLE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIE ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI, BERLIN

February

“Victor Vasarely: The Sharing of Forms”
Centre Pompidou, Paris
February 6, 2019–May 6, 2019

With recent major exhibitions of artists like Julio Le Parc and Bridget Riley, Op art is back in the spotlight. Widely regarded as the movement’s grandfather, Vasarely is finally getting his first retrospective in the city he called home after 1930. The show spans the full arc of the Hungarian-born artist’s career, starting in the 1930s with his proto-Op experiments. Also included will be examples of Vasarely’s eye-popping abstractions, which appear to warp before one’s eyes, and his later works, from the ’60s and ’70s, which responded to the look of advertising and mass media from the era. —A.A.

Victor Vasarely, Re.Na II A, 1968, oil and acrylic on canvas.

PHOTO: CENTRE POMPIDOU, MNAM-CCI/BERTRAND PREVOST/DIST. RMN-GP; ART: ©ADAGP, PARIS/COLLECTION CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS, GIFT OF THE ARTIST

“Roppongi Crossing 2019”
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
February 9, 2019–May 26, 2019

The theme for the 2019 edition of “Roppongi Crossing”—a triennial held by the Mori Art Museum that offers something of a scene report on the Japanese contemporary art world—is “Connexions,” a reference to how artists are attempting to find points of unity in an increasingly fractured cultural and political landscape. More than 20 artists have been selected for this year’s edition. Their contributions will include Aono Fumiaki’s junk assemblages, ANREALAGE’s “form-changing clothes,” and Takekawa Nobuaki’s Cat Olympics, a sculpture that ponders the hype surrounding the 2020 Tokyo games through an absurdist feline lens. —J.C.

Bruno Gironcoli
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
February 14, 2019–May 12, 2019

After years of relative obscurity, Gironcoli’s work has recently seen a revival, thanks to a major show of the late Austrian sculptor’s work earlier this year at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. Now the Schirn Kunsthalle will offer its own survey of Gironcoli’s metal sculptures, which resemble nightmarish versions of sci-fi machines. Their allusions to technology spiraling out of control have proven influential for young artists. The Schirn show will focus specifically on Gironcoli’s late works, from 1990s and 2000s. —S.N.

Mary Maggic, Housewives Making Drugs (still), 2017, video.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

“Producing Futures—An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms”
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
February 16, 2019–May 12, 2019

Ever since 1991, when the collective VNS Matrix disseminated its Cyberfeminist Manifesto both on- and offline, artists have envisioned a number of ways technology might disrupt our relatively conservative understandings of gender binaries and norms. But what is the state of cyberfeminism today? With this show, the Migros Museum will survey artists concerned with digital technology’s impact on the body—and consider the relevance of cyberfeminism in the present. The show’s artist list includes Guan Xiao, Tabita Rezaire, Anicka Yi, Juliana Huxtable, Wu Tsang, and more. —A.G.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 22 under the title “Editors’ Picks.”