Coronavirus Pandemic 2020

A Year Without Art

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

Part 1- A Hush All Over The World

Last call. Hudson River, 7:30pm, May 30, 2020. Immediately after I took this I had to hurry home to be off the streets before the 8pm curfew, the first time in my life I’ve lived under a curfew, let alone one during a pandemic. The scene, with the light going out, fits the reality of life at that moment.

It was exactly a year since I was able to see Art when I left The Met Breuer on March 8, 2020, for what turned out to be its last day ever, with the NYC covid shutdown commencing the following day, It was longer than I thought it would be that day, but much shorter than I thought it would be when we were in the heart of the shutdown with the City being the epicenter of one of the worst outbreaks of the virus to that point a few months later. Over 32,000 have died from covid in NYC alone as I write this. I count myself lucky not to be one.

Galleries on West 19th Street, June 4, 2020.

Since I started regularly going to see Art in 1980, this was the longest I hadn’t been able to do so in person.

Someone posted this captioned photo on a window of the shuttered Park Restaurant that summed up one aspect of life in NYC in the pandemic. Here I need to clear something up. In April, 2020, I posted a slideshow of a “deserted” NYC. Yes, the streets were empty- day and night. But that was largely because everyone was staying home- as they should have, and only going out for essential errands.

During that time, a time I spent entirely alone (450+ days, and counting), Art & PhotoBooks were my friends and family. They enabled me to keep seeing & exploring Art & Photography, and actually continue to discover Artists & Photographers. Of course, during the shutdown, the only way I could see books were in my library or by USPS delivery. 

I must digress here. 

The shadows half engulf the embattled  West 18th Street Post Office, May 29, 2020, during the height of the pandemic in NYC and during the height of the discussion about cutting the funding of the USPS. Yet, through it all, Manager Miss Lloyd and staff showed up almost every day and persevered throughout enabling people like me to get potentially life-saving supplies.

My debt to the Post Office goes much deeper. In a pandemic everything quickly disappears from store shelves. All I had was a bandana until the USPS was able to deliver some masks to me in July. Isopropyl Alcohol took a while longer to find, and I finally found some in a store after months of looking.

The new normal. The line for Trader Joe’s extends hundreds of feet down the street to the left and 100 feet in front. April 5, 2021.

Through it all, the staff at Trader Joe’s were positively heroic in keeping this community going, only closing for a couple days here and there when a team member got sick for extra cleaning. Completely uncharted ground for them, they quickly emerged as a role model business in terms of how they adapted and carried on, modifying and inventing procedures to keep their team and the public safe. 

ALL of these heroic essential workers deserve our highest thanks and gratitude. If and when this ends, there should be a parade for them down the Canyon of Heroes.

I don’t know what to say about the countless medical professionals who hung in there during the worst of times, especially those who treated me right in the middle of it for a non-covid related condition, and particularly those who lost their lives trying to help and save others. The tragic story of Dr. Lorna Breen, who worked for the hospital that saved my life in February, 2007, broke my heart when I heard about it. “It’s OK Not To Be OK” were words I took seriously. They are wise- to a point.

Only you can judge if you need real, professional, help, or not, when you are locked down, or overwhelmed, as Dr. Breen apparently was. As a victim of suicide, I can’t stress enough that while it is “OK Not To Be OK” for a while, if you continue to not be OK, reach out and get help- by phone, online, or in person. 

Outdoor dining in the middle of winter in a structure built right IN West 17th Street. February 20,2021. Yes, that structure, and many others, was built right in the street! I admire the creativity restaurants showed in staying open once they were allowed to, though it seemed too unsafe for me. Their creative mindset is an example for other businesses struggling to survive the pandemic.

Many of them did not. In April, the legendary Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, 174 Fiffh Avenue, closed after 92 years. I doubt the space was ever remodeled in that time allowing you to walk into the past anytime you went in. It was one of Anthony Bourdain Top Restaurants (#11) in NYC, and one of mine. Every time a place like this closes a part of NYC goes with it, probably never to be replaced. While, many high end galleries got SMA loans, which continues to mystify me, most small businesses did not.

Spending so much time on my own, what did I do besides read Art & PhotoBooks? I took pictures every single day, during excursions I timed when almost no one would be out. I did no writing, but a lot of thinking. I dipped my toe into the ocean of Instagram, though I am no fan of monopolistic social media as it is. It was a VERY strange feeling walking around without a list of Art shows to go see in my pocket. What to do? I just wandered aimlessly, and sure enough, I saw something new, surprising or shocking, which takes a lot after 30 years of living here.

Other than that, I have been silent. Still, much to my surprise, readership continues to climb, which I try to not think means that people like the site better without me, and I continue to hear from readers all over the world. As always, Thank You for reading my pieces. I hope this finds you & yours well where it finds you. 

Coming Attractions? This window on a shuttered multiplex movie theater usually features posters of what’s playing or coming. Now it serves to make me wonder what the future holds. February, 2021.

I’m a different man than I was when I left The Met Breuer on March 8, 2020. I had NO idea what I, NYC, or the world was in for in the coming weeks and months. Much still remains unknown. I’ve survived the worst of the covid pandemic in NYC (knocking hard on wood). Along the way, I’ve survived a number of unrelated crisis that were made exponentially more difficult because everything was closed here. Yet, I got through all of them with no help from anyone, except those mentioned above.

A covid testing facility in the Flatiron after hours.

As the vaccine took effect, I turned my sights to going to see Art, again. Yet, I say that with a certain amount of guilt. There are too many, many, many people in this country and around the world without access to the vaccine! And, there’s little to no information as to when they might get it. The pandemic has been horribly managed virtually everywhere in the world. If the distribution of the vaccine continues to be as badly managed, any recovery will also be delayed. At the cost of how many more lives?

A woman about to be vaccinated. The Javitz Convention Center has been put to good public use since covid hit. First as a US Army Temporary Hospital last year, and now as a mass vax site. I was vaccinated here twice, the first time I’d set foot in the place since it opened in 1986. If you’re on the fence about getting it? For the record I had absolutely NO SIDE EFFECTS either time. None. Zero. Not even a sore arm. Two weeks after Pfizer shot #2 it was fully effective I was told by the Registered Nurse who gave it to me.

And, I’ve yet to hear anyone mention something else very important- It’s almost MIRACULOUS that a covid vaccine has been developed in a year!

Look at the history of pandemics and scourges. 2021 marks FORTY years since the CDC first officially reported what would be called AIDS, there is STILL no HIV vaccine! William Shakespeare lived his entire life under the threat of the plague, which devastated London no less than 3 times during his lifetime. The plague was a scourge that lasted from 1350 to well into the 1800s! So, WE ARE INCREDIBLY LUCKY a vaccine was found so quickly. I shutter to think what 1, 2, 3 more years without a vaccine would have looked like.

Why I digressed…

Art, unless you make it yourself, is a luxury, “important” only once the main necessities of life and well-being have been covered. As I ventured back to see Art I had everything I’ve said thus far, and everything I’ve been through this past year, on my mind. 

Part 2- Temperature Check

The Met’s famous main entrance, gated, during the 5 months it was closed, unprecedented in my lifetime, May 21, 2020.

Going to The Met or MoMA now (April, 2021) is a very, very strange experience.

MoMA, Main Lobby Entrance, April 29, 2021. Even 5 minutes before closing I NEVER saw it like this. This is usually crowded with people and staff. It’s daytime! Note the sun streaming in from the famous Sculpture Garden directly behind me.

They were both almost entirely empty on weekdays when I’ve been there. In some ways, it’s a dream for me. I can have almost any gallery I want completely to myself.

The Met’s Roofdeck, April 22, 2021. Looking around, I felt that perhaps I wasn’t supposed to be here? But, there is a guard way off on the left.

The only exceptions were The Met’s dual blockbuster shows- Goya’s Graphic Imagination and Alice Neel: People Come First. The times I went I waited 15 minutes to get in to each show.

April 22, 2021. This terrific show opened in early February, when virtually no one had been vaccinated and closed on May 2nd as more were just beginning to be. Very unfortunate timing for a great and timely show of work too rarely seen in this depth & breath due to their fragility.

On subsequent visits I asked people in the front of the line how long they waited and they also responded 15 minutes. The lines are due to The Met’s safety procedures and not letting the galleries get too crowded so visitors can maintain distance. Once inside, I thought they were “comfortably” occupied with ample distance. The lines are interesting because the Goya show was about to end on May 2nd, which generally would cause lines to get in, pre-pandemic, but the Alice Neel show had only opened on March 22nd. That means expect longer lines to see it as the summer progresses. Both shows will live on and continue to be discussed. I am disappointed The Met did not extend the Goya show, or schedule it to open later in the year, so more people could see it as more are vaccinated. Alice Neel: People Come First is a landmark show, perhaps the most important Painting show in NYC since Kerry James Marshall: Mastry because it demonstrates how contemporary Alice Neel remains- as a woman, an Artist/mother and as a thinker and activist. Her position in the canon of great Artists of the 20th century had been established by the regular shows her work has increasingly received over time, including the Whitney Retrospective on the centennial of her birth in 2000, and most recently, Alice Neel, Uptown at Zwirner in 2017, which I covered. 

The boarded up Hauser & Wirth Gallery, an SMA Loan grantee, on West 22nd Street behind Joseph Beuys columnar basalt stone, June 4, 2020. Public Art, like the Beuys seen here, was not boarded up.

Elsewhere around town, most galleries seem to be open for business, those that are left that is, each with their own terms. The carnage that has devastated small business has not spared the smaller galleries. A walk down West 26th Street showed that perhaps 50% of galleries are gone (It could be higher since some entire multi floor buildings were devoted to galleries and I have not gone into them to do a headcount). Among the survivors, some will let you right in. Some with an appointment only. Some are requiring info for contact tracing and/or temperature checks, all are requiring masks and distancing. That’s from reading signs on the doors as I walk past. I’ve only been to a few gallery shows. From the email I get, the number of shows is drastically lower than it was. It should be said that the summer is always slow(er) here so perhaps galleries are getting ready to be more active post-Labor Day. I also haven’t been able to get a sense of Art world employment and the current status of the many who were laid off or furloughed during the shutdown. 

Never say Never is just one lesson of 2020.

As for the Art market, I have noticed some softening in asking prices around town, though of course that depends on who and what we’re talking about1. Is this a buying op, or a harbinger of a long overdue market correction? It’s still very early in the recovery (if it is the recovery), and a bit hard to tell where things are heading,

11th Avenue, April 8, 2021.

It seems to me that most of it will depend on how quickly more people get vaccinated everywhere around the world so the world as a whole can begin to recover. Art is global, made & traded virtually everywhere, but that’s only one instance of how interconnected everyone and everything is. As poorly as the covid crisis has been handled everywhere much now depends on how well the global vaccine distribution is handled. The pandemic will only end as quickly as the vaccines can reach those who need it. Only then can the world truly begin to heal and a real recovery begin.

And we can can get back to exploring Art.

*- Soundtrack for this Post is “Spring Is Here,” composed by Richard Rogers & Lorenz Hart and recorded by Frank Sinatra on his immortal Sings For Only The Lonely, 1958. Rogers & Hart are among the very greatest songwriters of all time in my opinion and Lorenz Hart’s lyrics remain extremely under appreciated. Heard here in a gorgeous 2018 stereo mix where you can fully appreciate the brilliant arrangement by Nelson Riddle-

“Once there was a thing called spring
When the world was writing verses like yours and mine
All the lads and girls would sing
When we sat at little tables and drank May wine
Now April, May and June are sadly out of tune
Life has stuck a pin in the balloon
Spring is here! Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?”

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Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited.
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  1. The auction market seems to still be as strong as ever. Auctions are primarily resales of Art, whereas many galleries are selling new Art. ↩

A Look Back At The Met Breuer

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

First part of a series. 

I was there when it opened (to Members) March 8, 2016, and now I find I was there when it closed on March 12, 2020.

First look. Approaching The Met Breuer for Member’s Preview, March 8, 2016.

With the calendar turning to July, what had been a “temporary” closing due to the pandemic has become permanent with the turning over of The Met’s lease on the building Marcel Breuer designed at 945 Madison Avenue at East 75th Street to The Frick Collection. Originally commissioned by The Whitney Museum, who occupied it for almost 50 years after it opened in September, 1966, The Met (TM, henceforth) rechristened it “The Met Breuer,” (I promptly christened it TMB). The Frick Collection will now move in.

There was no press release or official announcement when The Met’s (TM) turned the Breuer building over to The Frick Collection, effective July. There was a mention on TM’s Instagram page, and now only this on the Visitors page on TM’s website.

In mid-July, the status of Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, which was had been open for just 9 days, and which I saw March 12th, its last day, was clarified when its listing along with those of the two other shows that were open at the time of the “temporary” closing, were moved to the “Past Exhibitions” section of The Met’s website.

After checking every day since March, the show appeared on the “Past Exhibitions” page on July 17th. I’ve enlarged the date section for legibility and added the red text to their listing.

So, with the status of its final chapters finally clarified, the book is now closed on The Met Breuer. It’s time to begin to assess it and its legacy. In Part 1 of my look back, I’ll look at the beginning and the end of TMB. Part 2 will look at some of the highlights of the intervening four years. Part 3 will include some thoughts on the “bigger picture” and what it may “mean.”

Back to the future. March 7, 2015

After trying to get approval for a remodeling of the Breuer Building failed1, the Whitney then decided to build a new building downtown in the Meatpacking District, and so moved out of the Breuer Building in October, 2014. It’s seen here empty in March, 2015, almost exactly a year before The Met Breuer would open here.

The Met announced it would take over the Breuer Building as it’s “outpost” for Modern & Contemporary Art in 2011. Seen here on December 18, 2015. I was told that the silver circles on the windows were meant to echo the ceiling lighting of the lobby inside shown further below.

Looking down at the lower level, December 18, 2015. See the next picture.

The same window. March 8, 2016, Member’s Preview Opening Day. The white wall on the lower level is in front of a bar that had not been completed. The circular ceiling lights are partially seen upstairs.

Member’s Preview, March 8, 2016. Close-up of the sign to the right follows.

On the sign are the two inaugural shows that are both now legendary in my book- Nasreen Mohamedi and Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible both unseen when I took this shot before going in.

The original Marcel Breuer lobby lighting seen in October, 2018.

The building remained largely unchanged by The Met, except for extensive renovations to the lower level, where they installed the Flora Bar and Cafe. Over the years, I’ve warmed up a bit to the design of this building, which is generally described in unattractive terms, including “brutalist.” I’ve always wondered how Marcel Breuer felt about this term being applied to his work. I characterize the building as “overly cold.” To me, now, it feels like it’s keeping a secret close to its vest, one that even an exploration of all its floors does not reveal. There are some details of the design I’m quite fond of- the windows, particularly the large front facing window, and the lobby ceiling lighting. Both of which strike me as “warm” touches in the midst of the unrelenting cold stone inside and out. Even the seating is stone.

“Wake Up over there on the right!” It’s MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, Vijay Iyer, in the shadows, left, on piano, performing with his Trio for Members during their preview in the first floor Gallery, March 8, 2016.

Being in this space, listening to Vijay Iyer’s Trio, reminded me that my very first exposure to the work of the great Joseph Cornell was the Joseph Cornell: Cosmic Travels show, 1995-96 I saw in this space when it was the Whitney2. I’ve been a big fan ever since.

A rare shot of Tatsuo Miyajima’s Arrow of Time, on view in TMB’s first floor gallery seen in 2016. The only show to take place there before it became the gift shop.

The same space seen in October, 2018, soon after it became the Store, as it would remain.

After various attempts at showing Art in this space, it became the gift shop.

Nasreen Mohamedi, lobby installation view.

The first two shows got TMB off to an “auspicious” start, as I called my piece on Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. I had no idea the impact Nasreen Mohamedi would have on me, creating an open and closed case for her place among the great Artists of the 20th century. I returned to see it thirteen times, and I still walk around it in my mind.

Chairs in the final room of Nasreen Mohamedi with one of Marcel Breuer’s unique windows.

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, installation view that first day.

Scenes from The Last Day of The Met Breuer…

Back for what turned out to be the last time, March 12, 2020.

The Met 150th Anniversary banners flying on the corner on what would turn out to be the last day of The Met Breuer strike me as being quite ironic. Unfortunately, they have not had much to celebrate this year. The Met Breuer was closed on the 150th Anniversary of The Met’s founding, April 13th, and then permanently when the calendar turned to July. Losing a branch is a memorable event, but (considerable financial savings aside) not something to celebrate. What it was, is, in my view.

Last call. The sign on the final day lists three very good shows, the other two open for a bit longer than the scant 9 days Gerhard Richter: Painting After All was.

Three very good shows were up that final day, including Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, which will be remembered among all the Artist’s many shows, I believe. I saw all three that day. My look at the Gerhard Richter show that final day is here. At the time, NYC had little idea about the virus that would soon devastate us, how it was spread and what precautions to take. I wasn’t wearing a mask, March 12th. I didn’t have one. A number of the guards were. I didn’t realize then how big a risk I was taking going to The Met Breuer that day, or seeing the other shows I ran around to see just before the March 13 shutdown.

Gerhard Richter, 4,900 Colors, 2007, Enamel paint on aluminum.

A number of pieces I saw that day also spoke to the conditions looming in the City, and the world. Looking at Mr. Richter’s 4,900 Colors it was hard not to feel that the future was fuzzy and out of focus. It still is.

A final look at the lobby counter before leaving for the last time.

I stood outside for a few minutes as the clock approached the 6pm closing, just taking in the scene. When would TMB reopen? There were no thoughts, then, that it wouldn’t, though of course I had TM’s announcement of the summer hand off to The Frick in the distant back of my mind. Summer was a long way off in late winter. As I was leaving, I overheard two staff members say to each other “See you June 1st,” and I wondered if they knew something I didn’t. June 1st? Wow. They’ll be closed for TWO AND A HALF MONTHS! It would turn out to be four and a half months, and never reopen. The Met announced in early July “tentative plans” to reopen at 1000 Fifth Avenue on August 29th. By then, it will be five and a half months.

Last look. It’s 5:50pm, March 12, 2020, as I’m leaving. The Met Breuer is “temporarily closing” in 10 minutes, yet this intrepid staff member is busy cleaning the front doors. It would never reopen to the public, and so this remains my last memory of it.

I’m left with the feeling that when The Met Breuer’s doors closed March 12th, something else may have closed with them. I’ll address that in Part 3. Next, I’ll look at what I saw between March 8, 2016 and March 12, 2020.

*- Soundtrack for this post is “Soundwalk 9:09” by John Luther Adams, commissioned by The Met for The Met Breuer’s opening, that takes its title from the amount of time it takes to walk from 1000 Fifth Avenue to The Met Breuer, in two parts. “Uptown” for listening while walking from TMB uptown to TM, and “Downtown” for the reverse. Both pieces may be heard here.

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Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited.
To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here.
Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them.
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  1. I was active in trying to get it, and the proposed Guggenheim Museum expansion at the time, stopped, with mixed results, as I recounted here. ↩
  2. For some reason the Whitney doesn’t list this show on their site. Though I don’t have pictures of it, I know it was there- I still have the exhibition brochure, and so do these folks. ↩

Gerhard Richter’s Met Blockbuster: Open For Just 9 Days!

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

UPDATE- July 16, 2020- The Met now lists Gerhard Richter: Painting After All on its “Past Exhibitions” page1, meaning it will NOT reopen!

After checking every day, the show appeared on the “Past Exhibitions” page on July 17th. I’ve enlarged the date section for legibility and added the red text…My original look at the show follows-

What if they mounted a blockbuster and nobody got to see it? 

Ahhhh….A major show covering TWO whole museum floors with about 100 Paintings? My idea of heaven…

As I write this in early June, 2020 what is known is that Gerhard Richter: Painting After All will be remembered as the last major show to be mounted at The Met Breuer (TMB) before The Met’s lease on the Marcel Breuer’s Madison Ave at East 75th Street building ends in July and The Frick Collection moves in while the renovations of their 1 East 70th Street home take place. What’s still unknown is how long the show ran for. It opened on March 4th, then “temporarily closed” after I saw it on March 12th, due to the coronavirus shutdown. That’s all of NINE days! The Met’s site says “Closing Date To Be Announced” on its listing, but what are their options for reopening it? With The Met’s lease on the Breuer Building ending in July, reopening it there would seem to have to come in June, which we are half-way through. On May 19th, Met CEO Daniel Weiss said that The Met “hoped” to reopen on August 15th, “or a few weeks later.” His announcement made no mention of TMB, but that timeframe would seem to rule out a TMB reopening. Moving it to 1000 Fifth Avenue might seem to be an option, terms of loans and space requirements for shows previously planned permitting. That might also put any number of employees at risk of the virus, though. Then, there’s this-

The X Factor. The show’s listing in the coming attractions section of MOCA’s site with a start date of August 15th.

This show was scheduled to open at MOCA, LA, on August 15th. So, there remains a chance Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (GR:PAA, henceforth) won’t reopen in NYC. IF that does come to pass, its 9 day run will be the shortest for a major show at a major museum here in my memory. That would be a shame considering the last major Gerhard Richter show in NYC was 20 years ago, a chance missed to assess how his older work looks now and see his more recent work. I started looking closely at Mr. Richter shortly after that NYC show, so in the past 20 years I’ve seen his gallery shows (of mostly new and recent work), but I’ve never seen 100 of his Paintings in one place. Being that Mr. Richter is 88, this may be the last major show of his work during his lifetime. The Artist did not attend the opening, though members of his family did, I was told by Met staffers.

Installation view, showing part of Strip, 2013, in the final gallery, seen on March 12th- hours before the show “temporarily closed.”

SPOILER ALERT! Since The Met’s site still says “Closing Date to be Announced” for this show, my hunch is that they will find a way to reopen it, especially because The Met originated GR:PAA (which is co-curated by Met Modern & Contemporary Art Chairman Sheena Wagstaff), and so has a sizable investment in it. My bet is that they will get an extension on the Breuer lease and use that to give this show a proper run, and The Met Breuer the fitting end I think it deserves. So, if you don’t want a peek at it yet, you may want to wait before proceeding. This piece will still be here when it doesn’t reopen! In which case, you’ll have to go to L.A. to see it, and I will be among the very few to have seen it here.

Installation view of the lobby on the 3rd floor, the concluding floor of the show. Surprisingly for a show called “Painting After All,”  works in glass greet the visitor on both floors. Mirror, 1986, shown here, right.

Installed on the 3rd and 4th floors of the Breuer, and beginning on 4, GR:PAA is not a retrospective and not a “greatest hits.” It lies somewhere between the two. It covers the whole of his career and juxtaposes many very familiar works, alongside some that are barely known to many here. I can’t help but wonder about the Artist’s involvement in GR:PAA, because the selection and arrangement of it has a bold feel to it. For a show that covers such a long period of time, it also has a bit of a sparseness, the work is not crowded together. Each piece has space to breathe. In the documentary Gerhard Richter: Painting, the Artist and his staff are shown using mockups of exhibition spaces and miniatures of each Painting as they work out and assess the placement of each. It’s hard for me to think that something similar didn’t take place with GR:PAA, though Ms. Wagstaff and her staff have repeatedly shown they are more than capable of mounting extraordinary shows without the Artist’s involvement, so in wondering, I mean to take nothing away from their achievement here, which is yet another Met Breuer show that will live on in memory and in discussion. Here, you have a major, living Artist. If you can get his involvement in your show, why wouldn’t you use it2? Whatever the case is, the selection and arrangement of the work take GR:PAA to another level.

“Art requires freedom…in dictatorships there is no art, not even bad art.” Gerhard Richter.

He would know. Gerhard Richter has lived in two countries where there was no freedom. He was born in Dresden in 1932, 11 months BEFORE Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. His father was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1938 and sent to the horror of the Eastern Front. The elder Richter didn’t return to Germany until 1946. Gerhard finished growing up in East Germany before managing a crafty defection to West Germany in 1961. He’s lived in Nazi Germany, Communist East Germany, West Germany and (the Federal Republic of) Germany in his lifetime.

Table, item #1 in the Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonne, though not his first work. In the Catalogue, this is listed under “Household Icons” in the “Photo Paintings” section of his site, yet, with its abstract elements it seems to straddle the fence between the two categories of Paintings his work is broken down into there.

These experiences have continually informed his work3 be it in the people, places and things he’s encountered in them, or in things that went on while he was living there that he didn’t personally encounter (like the Holocaust) in a career that is closing in on 60 years. Officially, the first work listed in his Catalogue Raisonne (CR 1), Table, is dated 1962, 58 years ago. Among works that pre-date Table are a Mural he Painted in 1955, and the work Elbe, included in this show in a Print version, was created in 1957.

September, 2005, Oil on canvas, 20 1/2 x 28 3/8 inches. Painted four years after 9/11, it’s one of the more haunting works done relating to the tragedy I’ve seen, perhaps because it mimics the view I had of 9/11 from my window. Placed in the show’s first gallery, it greeted this viewer like a cold smack in the face. It’s also the only work that references NYC in the show. Mounted on the same wall with Table, it’s another work that abstracts reality, from 40+ years later, reinforcing the fact that Photographs have been one source of Mr. Richter’s Paintings for at least 5o years.

In the intervening years, Gerhard Richter’s work has been marked by a variety in output that has ranged from Prints, Drawings, Artist’s Books, Sculptures, Films and Paintings. On his website, his Paintings are broken down into two main groups- “Photo Paintings” (further broken down to 36 categories!), and “Abstracts” (in 8 groups by date and 6 other groups).

Self-Portrait, 1996, Oil on linen, 20 1/16 x 18 1/8 inches. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Gerhard Richter’s work. Now, his Photo-Paintings, to use his term, like this one, look fresher to me than I had remembered and fresher than a number of his Abstracts.

“To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate.
Painting has nothing to do with that.” Gerhard Richter, 1966, quoted in the Documentary Gerhard Richter Painting.

Eight Student Nurses, 1966, Oil on canvas, refers to the mass murder of 8 young women by Richard Speck in Chicago, 1966. These are from his Grays, which evoke the effect of black & white Photographs.

As I walked through Painting After All, I was struck by how fresh the Photo Paintings looked…

S. with Child, 1995, (both)

which I didn’t get from a number of the Abstracts.

Seven Abstract Paintings, 2016, Oil on wood, each 15 3/4 x 11 13/16 inches. In these later abstractions, it looks like the Artist is using other techniques besides only the “squeegee” to modify the paint he had applied.

Part of the latter feeling may stem from the discovery that the late Jack Whitten had been extensively mining the squeegee technique Mr. Richter’s Abstracts are known for a full decade before he did. I’ve seen reference to Mr. Whitten using a squeegee in 19694, but he may have started before that5. The earliest Gerhard Richter squeegee work I seem to be able to find is from the mid 1980s.

Jack Whitten, Siberian Salt Grinder, 1974, Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, seen at MoMA in 2019.

Still, some of the Abstracts did stand out.

Three of the six Cage Paintings, 2006, each Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 feet square, which get their own room, the other three facing these.

The legendary Cage Paintings were much more stunning in person than in the book of the same name, especially in a group of all six of them, set off in a central gallery of their own on the 4th floor. Seeing them, and being able to be able to walk right up to them and see the details of their layers was one of the highlights of the show.

Four Birkenau Paintings, 2014, Oil on canvas, each 8′ 6 3/8 x 78 3/4 inches faced four Prints made from them in the next to last room of the show.

The other highlight, among the Abstracts, and of the whole exhibition, was the chance to see his recent Birkenau series of Paintings and the Prints he made after them. Installed in the show’s penultimate room along with the only four existing Photographs taken by Sondernkommandos surreptitiously in the titular Nazi Birkenau death camp, Gerhard Richter had wanted for decades to do something regarding the Holocaust. He originally started by using the Photographs as the basis for his work, but soon started over from scratch, abstractly. The results are remarkable and unforgettable. They, literally, drip with pain, bloodshed and horror.

4,900 Colors, 2007, Enamel paint on aluminum.

And there were other “kinds” of abstractions, like 4,900 Colors…

Strip, 2013, Inkget print on fine art paper between acrylic and aluminum.

And Strip, 2013.

Strip began here. Abstract Painting, 1990, seen on the 4th floor, was digitally manipulated in Photoshop hundreds, maybe thousands of times until the thin bands of color we see in Strip are achieved. These would have to be magnified to see an actual image.

This version of Strip, seen in the show’s last gallery on the 3rd floor, began life as Abstract Painting, 1990, seen on the 4th floor. The process Mr. Richter used to create the works in his Strip series is outlined in the Artist’s book, Patterns, in which he took his Abstract Painting (CR: 724-4) and manipulated it in Photoshop, using a mirroring process, he then repeated over and over until the results were reduced to the fine lines of color seen in Strip.

My results after Step 1.

Using his process, I took Abstract Painting, 1990, which I just showed, and began to create my own Strip from it.

My results after Step 2.

I got to the third stage.

My results after Step 3.

Already you can see where this is going, given a few hundred, or more, steps. Even these preliminary results made me feel that this exercise was fascinatingly making some sort of order out of the seeming “chaos” of abstraction.

Installation view of the 4th floor, with the lobby, where the show begins to the right.

Or course, it will be a long time before the final assessment of Gerhard Richter’s work is done, and hopefully, a long time before he stops creating it.

Early, and recent work. Here, early, Four Panes of Glass, 1967 in front of Elbe, 1957/2012, along the back wall, Originally paint roller on paper, 1957, eprinted as inkjet prints in 2012.

“In 2020, art can be made from literally anything. So why still paint?” Met Museum Primer for GR:PAA

Recent. Installation view showing House of Cards (5 Panes), 2020, Glass and steel, the most recent work in the show. That’s the view across Madison Avenue coming in through Marcel Breuer’s window to the left, reflected in the glass.

Though works in other medium are included, as seen above, even with these forays, his Painting have continued, and continued to be the main focus of his work. Highlights from many of the major categories of Painting that Mr. Richter has worked in are included, including his hugely influential landscapes, like Seascape, 1975.

Seascape, 1975, Oil on canvas, 78 3/4 inches by 9 feet 10 1/8 inches. I was stopped by this work when I came across it.  It spoke to me of so much going on at that moment- the looming covid shutdown, which would begin for Art in NYC a few hours later, and along with it, the status of this show. How the world would be different after…Are the clouds clearing, or is a storm coming? Is that light a dawn, or a sunset?

For me, the title Gerhard Richter: Painting After All  has multiple meanings. It can be read as a statement that Gerhard Richter has continued to Paint, or gone back to Painting, after exploring other mediums, his entire career. It can also be read as a statement about all the tumult that has gone on in the Arts over his lifetime, during which time Painting has received unprecedented challenges from Photography and other mediums which have attempted to take it’s prime place among the visual Arts. Regardless of how I, or anyone, feels about a work here or there, the one thing that remains is that Gerhard Richter has consistently shown what Painting can do, what it’s capable of giving us, that other mediums can’t- including Photography, to this point. In doing so, he has set signposts for other Painters to follow to continue to mine what Painting is uniquely capable of.

It can, also, be read as a statement about the survival, and ongoing importance of Painting. After all.

Particularly after my 3+ year immersion in Modern & Contemporary Photography, I’ll go with that one.

*- Soundtrack for this Post is the album Richter 858 by Bill Frisell, that was originally released along with a volume of Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Pictures 858-1 through 858-8. In 2005, then rereleased on Soundlines.

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Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited.
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  1. Here ↩
  2. This is probably discussed and clarified in the show’s catalog. Due to the shutdown, which has closed all bookstores, I have not seen the catalog. I may update/correct this when I do. ↩
  3. In works in the show, like Uncle Rudi and others, and work that are not here, like the intriguing October 18, 1977 series. ↩
  4. Here ↩
  5. In his remarkable book, Notes From The Woodshed, Mr. Whitten, a master woodworker, writes about  the making of the tools he used to make them- “The Developer” he called a large one. ↩

Vida Americana: Revolutionizing American Art

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

The museums and galleries will reopen.

The revolution comes north. The first major work by one of Los Tres Grandes in the USA. José Clemente Orozco, Reproduction of Prometheus, 1930. Jackson Pollock made a trip to see it, then called it “The best painting in the contemporary world.” He  kept a picture of it on the wall in his studio throughout the 1930s1.

Exactly when that will be in NYC is unknown at moment. Near the end of the voluminous list of unfortunate and tragic occurrences resulting from the pandemic in NYC is that the Year in Art shows, 2020, had gotten off to an exceptionally strong start here. A number of very good and important shows were forced to close early in their run, meaning relatively few got to see them. Unfortunate, not tragic. I’ve already looked at the most NoteWorthy, as I’m fond of saying, gallery show I’ve seen thus far this year- Noah Davis at David Zwirner. The most NoteWorthy museum show I’ve seen in 2020 is the landmark Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 at the Whitney Museum, which opened on February 17th and “temporarily closed” on March 12th.

The entrance of Vida Americana (“American Life”), seen on March 11, 2020, the day before it “temporarily closed” for the coronavirus pandemic.

With over 200 works by 60 Artists, Vida Americana makes the heretofore overlooked case for the influence the Mexican Muralists, particularly Los Tres Grandes (“The Big Three”), Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, had on American Artists & American Art between 1925 to 1945. It does so convincingly in side by side installations and bringing to the fore little studied connections a number of major American Artists had with their Mexican counterparts. 10 years in its planning and 4 in creation, Vida Americana succeeds in making its case in resounding fashion with wonders seen now and likely never again according to the show’s curator, the inimitable Barbara Haskell, who’s been at the Whitney since 1975 2.

Times are hard everywhere as I write this as April, 2020 comes to a close. In researching Vida Americana, I was reminded that a little over 100 years ago, in 1918, the “deadliest pandemic in history” (according to John M. Barry’s book The Great Influenza) left 100 million people dead worldwide. A sobering thought at this moment.

Things can always be worse.

300,000 Mexicans died. Luckily, the three Artists at the center of Vida Americana, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, were not among them.

The first work in the show. Diego Rivera, Dance in Tehuantepec, 1928, Oil on canvas. Rightly famous for his incredible Murals, he was also a terrific easel Painter for his entire career, work that has yet to receive the attention on the level of his Murals. Are those some remnants of his passion for Cezanne, particularly in the clothes worn by the lead gentleman?

Though the decade-long Mexican Revolution ended 100 years ago in 1920, the final death toll may never be known. Today, estimates range between one million and three million, (not including that 300,000 who died in the 1918 pandemic). Diego Rivera spent the entirety of the Mexican Revolution studying in Europe on a grant from the governor of Veracruz to further his Art education. He precociously devoured the work of the great European Painters of the time, as can be seen in his easel Paintings that wonderfully echo El Greco and Cezanne, around 1913, and his adoption of Cubism, from 1914-18 or so. He knew Picasso and Georges Braque and was something of a competitor of theirs as he tried to make his own name, before finding his own style. In 1919, towards the end of his European period, Diego Rivera met David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was also in Europe on an Art scholarship. Vida Americana (American Life) takes its name from the sole issue of the journal Vida Americana that contained a manifesto of sorts written by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

José Vasconcelos, date unknown. As minister of education, he commissioned Artists, including Los Tres Grandes, to Paint Murals. And so, he had a major influence on Mexican history, and unintentionally, American Art history,

Meanwhile, back in Mexico, after the Revolution ended in 1920,  a profound change swept across Mexican society. New president Alvaro Obregon’s government enacted progressive social reforms that empowered workers and farmers. This transformative project wasn’t so simple. “There was no shared culture. No sense of a Mexican national identity,” Barbara Haskell said3. “The Mexican Revolution led to the need for Art that depicted the history and everyday life of the people.” President Obregon appointed José Vasconcelos as director of the Universidad Nacional de Mexico (National University of Mexico). He reached out to Diego Rivera in Europe in hopes of recruiting him for the campaign to create a new national culture. Backed by a Mexican government stipend, Diego Rivera, took a trip to Italy to study the great Italian Renaissance frescoes during the winter of 1920 in Verona, Padua, Venice, Ravenna, Florence, and Rome, where he saw Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. After he was sworn in as Mexico’s minister of education in the fall of 1921, José Vasconcelos commissioned Artists, including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, to create grand public Murals depicting the history and everyday life of the nation’s people, and “Los Tres Grandes” were born. They rose to the challenge, and in the process, reintroduced the Mural to Western Art.

Installation View. My mission? Get this shot without people in front of the Art, which includes two rarely seen works by Frida Kahlo.

Vida Americana is so big, with so many pieces drawing one’s attention, so many connections leaving much to study and ponder, in the one visit I was able to make I had to focus on, first, seeing it all, and second, on how the Mexican Muralists directly influenced Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, two Americans who’s paths have long intrigued me.

One example of how extraordinarily this show was hung throughout. Jackson Pollock, Untitled, c1938-41, Oil on linen, 22 1/4 x 50 1/4 inches, David Alfaro Siqueiros, War, 1939, Nitrocellulose on composition board, 48 5/8 x 63 7/8 inches, Jackson Pollock, Composition with Flames, 1936, 26 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Our Present Image, 1947, 87 3/8 x 68 11/16 inches, Pyroxylin on fiberglass, 87 3/8 x 68 11/16 inches, left to right.

Fast forwarding from 1920 to my own teen years, Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper were the two Artists who planted stakes in my mind for modern American Art, after centuries of European domination that culminated at the time with the all-encompassing brilliance of Picasso. Of course, they had come on the backs of almost 200 years of earlier American Artists before my time, yet American Art seemed to be playing second fiddle the Europeans until the post-Second World War years. It was easy to get lost in the Americanism of Messers Pollock and Hopper and easy for me to relate to them particularly since both spent most of their career in NYC. Greenwich Village was home for Edward Hopper for about 50 years, and Jackson Pollock legendarily frequented the Cedar Tavern and other bars in the area, while living with his wife, Lee Krasner, in Springs, Long Island, where I indelibly visited his studio in 1999. In looking through his career, it was well-known that he came here to study at the Art Student’s League with Thomas Hart Benton. “He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting,” Jackson Pollock later said reflecting on studying with Thomas Hart Benton4.

Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1938-41. This “pre-drip” period fo the Artist’s work remains understudied and under-appreciated in my view. Whereas the journey Mark Rothko took from figuration to abstraction is interesting, Jackson Pollock’s is downright fascinating. Here, in this stunning work, the figures break up with such intense rigor and stunning color, it really does make you wonder where it was all going to lead. It also makes me wonder how many other Artists would have been content to continue Painting just like this, a very brief period in Jackson Pollock’s brief career.

After leaving Thomas Hart Benton, what always mystified me was how Jackson Pollock became “POLLOCK” to quote the title of the film made some years back- the Artist who burst on the scene, with a never before seen style that revolutionized what Painting could be in the late 1940s and early 1950s before his tragic death on August 11, 1956 at 44. I even wrote a piece with that title after the most recent MoMA Jackson Pollock show in 2016, Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey 1934-54. Truth be told, looking back on it, though there were some clues in that show, I remained puzzled at how the Artist came up with his style, which has been called everything from “dripping,” to “splash and dash” to fill in your own, here. We know now that all of these terms sell Jackson Pollock’s formidable technique very short, as is demonstrated here.

“I simply paint the life that is going on at the present—what we are and what the world is at this moment. That is what modern art is.” José Clemente Orozco

Jackson Pollock, The Flame, 1934-38, Oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, left, and José Clemente Orozco, The Fire, 1938, Oil on canvas, right. Seeing these works side by side was an eye-opening revelation for me.

José Clemente Orozco was the first of Los Tres Grandes to visit the USA in 1917-19, living in NYC and San Francisco. In 1930, he was commissioned by Pomona College in Claremont, California to paint a mural in the student cafeteria. Prometheus became the first true fresco ever painted in the USA.  Jackson Pollock made a special trip to see it. He called it, “The best painting in the contemporary world5,” and kept a picture of it on the wall in his studio throughout the 1930s. At the Whitney, there is a large, though reduced, reproduction of Prometheus (see the first picture in this piece), along with a few other, smaller, works by José Clemente Orozco that are hung next to early works by Jackson Pollock. HERE was the long-awaited first eureka moment in my quest for insights into Mr. Pollock’s work. The similarities in elements, even styles, between  them when seen side by side were beyond compelling. They were revelatory.

Jacob Lawrence, Selections from The Migration Series, 1940-1, Casein tempera on hardboard. On the wall card, it says, “Lawrence credited Orozco in particular with inspiring his ambition and his use of bold colors and architectonic forms.”

On an adjacent wall was an installation of selections of the work by Jacob Lawrence that seemed to take Mr. Siqueiros’ ideas in different and unique directions. I looked up to see if there was a now lit lightbulb hanging over my head. It wouldn’t be the last time.

David Alfaro Siqueiros, center, and Jackson Pollock, right, in Union Square, NYC, 1936, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution Photo.

David Alfaro Siqueiros was the last to arrive in the USA. While each of Los Tres Grandes were on the cutting edge, if not the edge, socially and politically, he took it further. He believed that revolutionary ideas required revolutionary materials and techniques. In 1936 he established the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop in Union Square, a stone’s throw from where I sit writing this, which he referred to as a “Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art.” Some 30 years later another Artist would explore “new materials and techniques” when Andy Warhol moved his Factory to Union Square. Among the students at the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop was Jackson Pollock, who was about 24, and who had been without a teacher since Thomas Hart Benton moved from New York to Missouri in 1935. “One anecdote recalls Siqueiros constructing something resembling a Lazy Susan, filling it with paint, and spinning it atop a horizontal canvas ”a predecessor to Pollock’s later drip technique6.”

David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Electric Forest, 1939, Nitrocellulose on cardboard, 28 x 35 inches, left, Jackson Pollock, Landscape with Steer, c.1936-7, Lithograph with airbrushed lacquered additions, 15 7/8 x 22 7/8 inches.  It’s interesting that while David Alfaro Siqueiros’s works are often political, Jackson Pollock’s don’t appear to be.

Later in the show, Gallery 11 is devoted to the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop. Here, a David Alfaro Siqueiros was hung next to a Jackson Pollock, and now I could feel the figure breaking down even more. Complete abstraction is not far away. The technique was getting wilder and more experimental. Now, it wasn’t that big a jump at all in my mind from works like Landscape with Steer to a work like his 20 foot long Mural, 1943, in a genre that itself would appear to be a nod to the influence of Los Tres Grandes. For me, this was the biggest takeaway among many, from Vida Americana. But, the joys of the show weren’t solely technical or historical.

Finally! The scene shown earlier, sans viewers. Frida Kahlo, Me and My Parrots, 1941, 32 5/16 x 24 3/4, left, Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Calla Lily Vendor, 1929, 45 13/16 x 36 inches, center, and Frida’s Two Women, 1928, 27 3/8 x 21 inches, right. All three are Oil on canvas.

Walking through the show, all three Artists are well represented, as are a number of other lesser-known Mexican Artists of the period. Frida Kahlo is not one of them. Perhaps as popular, if not more popular, than any other Artist represented in the show, her possible influence on American Artists from 1925-45 is curiously not touched on. Perhaps, it’s taken for granted that her example and influence have never stopped influencing Artists and the general public?

Out of focus shot of the installation showing the 2 Fridas, far right, facing 2 works by Diego Rivera.

Even not as well known is that it was an American who was Frida Kahlo’s first important collector. In 1938, when she was still an unknown in the US, the actor and Art collector Edward G. Robinson visited Diego Rivera in Mexico City. After selecting some works by Mr. Rivera, the Artist led him into Frida’s workspace. He bought 4 Paintings from her for $200.00, each(!), her first major sale7. To that point she had often given her work away. After Edward G’s purchases she said, “This way I am going to be free.” She didn’t have to ask Diego for money. This American had had a real influence on this great Mexican Artist. 

Frida is represented here by two beautiful examples of her work, including the stunning Self Portrait Me and My Parrots, 1941, beautifully installed facing two large works by the husband she married twice, Diego Rivera.

In looking at the work of Diego Rivera, it’s interesting to me that his figures seem to vary between the stereotyped and the specific and you’re likely to encounter either as you move from work to work of his. In both of these works, depicting specific people doesn’t seem to be his point. In many other works, including Man at the Crossroads, 1933, which he Painted for Rockefeller Centers, his inclusion of a portrait of Lenin, and his refusal to remove it, led to the work’s destruction. Elsewhere, he includes a number of his lovers, his wife, Frida Kahlo, and numerous other known persons, including Charlie Chaplin, and self-portraits.

Diego Rivera, Man Controller of the Universe, 1934, reproduction of the Mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City.

None of the three members of Los Tres Grandes were strangers to controversy, with, perhaps, Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads, 1933, Rockefeller Center commission being the most legendary incident. Man at the Crossroads was produced in a revised version as Man Controller of the Universe or Man in the Time Machine, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts), Mexico City, in 1934. A stunning reproduction of it occupies the entire wall, and windows, that face the High Line, and is accompanied by a huge study.

In Gallery 3, titled “Siqueiros in Los Angeles,” another of the highlights for me were two loans of major works by the great Philip Guston.

Philip Guston, Bombardment, 1937-8, Oil on canvas, 42 inches.

Bombardment, 1937-8, one of the Artist’s masterpieces, from the Philadelphia Museum It’s as near to a “perfect Painting” as one can imagine, unique in Art history, and a work that deserves even more attention than it already has, if one can say that about a masterpiece. Securing the loan of it for this show was a major coup. My look at Philip Guston: Painter at Hauser & Wirth a few years back proved a bit controversial, but I make no bones of my admiration for his work before and after his “abstract period,” which I have continued to try find a way in to. It’s gotten easier. But here, in Bombardment, we have a work that is a one of a kind. A rare modern circular Painting (harkening back to the Tondo in the Renaissance, one of Philip Guston’s favorite periods of Art) in which motion, energy, death and destruction find no resting place in a brilliantly orchestrated “explosion” of paint. A work like this would be impossible in a Photograph. It’s also hard for me to look at and not think of Picasso’s Guernica, a mural, also from 1937, and both inspired by the Spanish Civil War, though they couldn’t be more stylistically different. Stylistically, it does make one think about the possible influence of David Alfaro Siqueiros, who Philip Guston had served as an assistant for. Looking at it closely, though it’s “only” 42 inches in diameter it feels a bit like a mural, not unlike another major work by the Artist nearby. 

Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish, Jules Langsner, Reproduction of The Inquisition also known as The Struggle Against Terrorism, 1934-5, Dimenseions and materials not stated.

Here was an amazing model for Philip Guston’s legendary early Mural collaboration with Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner, The Inquisition also known as The Struggle Against Terrorism, 1934-5, something I never even knew existed. Murals on walls are not tranportable. Yet, throughout this show the curators continually find innovative ways of “bringing” them here and making them a part of the show- like this, and like Prometheus, shown up top, and the study for one of Diego Rivera’s “Portable Murals” for MoMA seen further below. Amazing. 

Detail. I would guesstimate this space is about 12-14 inches tall. The real one is over 1,000 square feet.

Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish were both about 23 when David Alfaro Siqueiros called them “the most promising young painters in either the US or Mexico.” He urged them to come to Mexico where he helped them secure a 1,000 square foot wall where they Painted The Inquisition also known as The Struggle Against Terrorism in the courtyard of the University of Michoacan, Morelia. Due to controversy over its depiction of the catholic church, the Mural was hidden from view for 40 years until it was accidentally discovered in 1973, yet it languished for a further 30 years until efforts began to restore it. Though very small, the model gives the viewer a sense of wonder that the Artists could envision the daring and monumental composition they created.

Thomas Hart Benton, Six Panels from American Historical Epic, 1920-28, Oil on canvas mounted on wood, varying sizes. Though panels, these terrific works were begun before Los Tres Grandes created their Murals, yet they share much in common, particularly its depiction of history. On the wall card it states, “Believing that art’s role was to tell the truth, Benton refused to sanitize history. Thus this mural cycle celebrates American history while also drawing attention its environmental and social injustices.” Exactly what we see in the work of the Mexican Muralists.

Diego Rivera, with his wife Frida Kahlo arrived in the US in November, 1930 to open a retrospective of his work in San Francisco, which was followed by one at the newly opened MoMA, NYC the following year. By that point, he was considered “the hero of the Western world, who embodies the spirit of the Mexican revolution8.” “His idea about creating a national epic (in his Murals) was something that would also be very influential on American artists,” Barbara Haskell added9.

Diego Rivera, Pneumatic Drilling, 1931-2, Charcoal on paper, 97 1/4 x 76 7/8 inches. Apparently a full size Drawing for one of the Portable Murals the Artist did for MoMA in 1931. About this work, MoMA said in 2012, “The day after Rivera arrived in New York City, the New York Herald Tribune reported on his plans to “paint the rhythm of American workers.” Rivera later identified this scene as depicting preparations for the construction of Rockefeller Center, which was still in its early stages when he arrived in New York10.” These are the kinds of scenes many American Muralists would do in their WPA FAP Projects, commencing a few years later.

The influence of the Mexican Muralists on the WPA Federal Art Project, 1935-43 is another revelation of Vida Americana. Reintroducing the Mural in Western Art brought it out of the church and into the realm of Public Art. At its peak in 1936, the Federal Art Project employed 5,000 Artists, possibly double that over the 8 years it existed, producing 2,566 Murals and more than 100,000 easel Paintings. It’s obvious, to me, that in looking at the Murals they produced many of them seem to follow in the footsteps of their Mexican counterparts, stylistically, and in their content, many of the Murals belied the influence of the Mexican Artists who’s works were steeped in history and the life of everyday people and workers.

Michael Lenson, Mining (Mural Study for Mount Hope, West Virginia Post Office), c. 1933-34, Tempera on wood, top, Xavier Gonzalez, Tung Oil Industry (Mural Study for Covington, Louisiana Post Office), 1939, Gouache, pen and ink, on pencil on paper mounted on cardboard.

Once you start looking for the influence of the Mexican Artists included in Vida Americana, particularly that of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, you begin to find it turning up all over and in surprising places. Add to this the incalculable influence of Frida Kahlo, as an Artist, as a woman, and as an unconquerable human being, it turns out, as Vida Americana finally demonstrates, the influence of Mexican Art on American Artists from 1925-45 rivals that of any other.

March 11, 2020. A Whitney staff member speaks about “Siqueiros in Los Angeles.” It might be a while before we see this again.

It will be very interesting to see how the Whitney, and all the museums, handle their schedules, and the virus, when they reopen. Will shows that were up when they temporarily closed be extended? What will that do to their future exhibitions and loans? It all remains to be seen.

The curtains have been drawn. For how long? A view of the Hudson River from the fifth floor behind the show. The former Department of Sanitation complex directly across the West Side Highway, which I mentioned in my piece on the Whitney building, has now been dismantled in preparation of…? What will the future bring?

As I write this in early May, it looks like Vida Americana will reopen giving others a chance to see this landmark show, in my view, the first one mounted in the Whitney’s new building (Thus far, I’ve written about their new building, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Stuart Davis, Grant Wood, Laura Poitras, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and other smaller shows). In the meantime, having the chance to see it once has given me much to think about during this pause. While the world on the other side of the pandemic will be different, so too will be the way I henceforth look at 20th century American Art history.

*-Soundtrack for this Post is “Mexico” by Morrissey from You Are The Quarry.

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Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited.
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  1. Whitney Museum introductory video ↩
  2. Comments from Ms. Haskell in this piece are excerpted from her remarks at the Press Preview, unless otherwise noted. ↩
  3. Here. ↩
  4. Here ↩
  5. per Barbara Haskell ↩
  6. Here ↩
  7. Here. ↩
  8. Whitney Museum video ↩
  9. Here ↩
  10. Here. ↩

NYC: APRIL, 2020 – A SLIDESHOW BY KENN SAVA

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

The response to my previous piece, “The Sound of Silence,” has been a bit overwhelming. My thanks to all of you who have read it and especially to those who have taken the time to write. I’ve heard from people all over the world, all of who are also knee-deep in trying to get through the pandemic themself, so I deeply appreciate it. At times like these it’s important to feel we’re in this together.

NYC in April, 2020 has been a month like none I’ve ever experienced. As I write these words, over 18,000 are dead- just in NYC (as of today, May 1st, 2020, per the stats here, which are updated daily). It’s a very rare thing to find the streets of Manhattan empty for a few hours- even well after midnight. To find them that way day after day is something I’ve never seen here before. I began making trips (as safely as possible, usually on foot) to some of the major landmarks of NYC to document what it was like to be there. The experiences left me with a multitude of feelings, as I said in my prior piece, that I’m still processing.

Inspired by a suggestion I received, I’ve decided to expand the concept of that piece, and share more of the Photos I’ve taken in April, 2020, in a slideshow. Yes, after 4 1/2 years of writing about everyone else’s work, I’m sharing some of my own. In it, the title of my previous piece, “The Sound of Silence,” is taken literally since I don’t have permission to use it legally (Dear Paul Simon- May I?)- the soundtrack is silence. It’s designed to be watched fullscreen.

I hope that wherever this finds you, you and yours get through this in good health. Be well.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded and ad-free for over 6 years, during which over 250 full length pieces have been published. If you’ve found it worthwhile, you can donate to keep it going & ad-free below. Thank you!

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited.
To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here.
Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them.
For “short takes” and additional pictures, follow @nighthawk_nyc on Instagram.

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The Sound of Silence

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

In 2017, I did a PhotoEssay commemorating the 10th anniversary of my cancer treatment. This year, I’ve decided to do another one, taking a look at this extraordinary April in New York…

There’s “Autumn in New York” and “April in Paris,” but no songwriter has yet written “April in New York.” This April may or may not inspire such a song, but one thing’s for sure- April, 2020 will long be remembered by everyone who’s lived through it- in NYC, and everywhere else.

Here, in one of the current centers of the pandemic, with New York City, alone, accounting for 129,788 cases and 13,240 confirmed or probable deaths from the coronavirus1 as I write this, people have been mostly hunkered down and staying inside. Last week, however, for a reason I can’t quite explain, I felt compelled to walk over to Times Square. I got there after 11pm, normally a time when activity is high in the days before the pandemic. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find. It’s not a place I have any reason or desire to go to. Most New Yorkers I know say pretty much the same thing. When I turned the corner of 8th Avenue onto 42nd Street, a corner once known as “the crossroads of the world,” I was taken by what I saw. Actually, I probably shouldn’t have been- it was pretty much what I’d been seeing on the mile walk there. The streets were deserted. Nothing was open. There were too few cars or trucks to qualify as“traffic” along ever-busy 8th Avenue that I should have been prepared for a similar sight on 42nd Street, but I wasn’t. What I saw was actually hard to believe.

It was completely deserted. The only sign of life was a police car’s revolving lights on top parked out front of the McDonald’s near 7th, which might have been open for takeout. If so, it was the only even partially open business I saw in Times Square. Or, maybe something had happened warranting a police visit. From the other side of the street, I couldn’t tell, and I wasn’t about to get curious. I turned the corner and walked up 7th Avenue to 44th Street, stopped on the corner and looked around. I was completely and utterly alone.

A song started playing softly in my brain…

“Hello darkness, my old friend.
I’ve come to talk with you, again.”*

Alone in Times Square. 7th Avenue at West 44th Street, 11:24pm, April 8, 2020. Click any picture in this Post for full size.

There was another NYPD car across the street with its lights on. I don’t know if anyone was inside it, or not. That was the only sign of “life” I could see anywhere around me. I can’t remember ever seeing it this deserted before. Ever. In my entire lifetime, I’ve never experienced a feeling quite like it.

“In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence”*

I spent some of my formative days on “the deuce” as West 42nd Street was called back when it was as it appears in the film Taxi Driver. It was raw, seedy, nasty and dangerous, but it never closed. Ever. It was, literally, the same 24 hours a day, everyday. Of course, those days are long gone. I’ve never “gotten” what 42nd Street is supposed to be now, beyond a pseudo theme park for tourists. Ditto Times Square around the corner. No wonder New Yorkers never go there. Of course, they go to the shows on the side streets, and there are some good restaurants on those as well, too, but Times Square is one gigantic wasteland as far as I’m concerned. The “redesign” is a disaster. Personally, I can’t imagine why anyone would come to New York City and go to Times Square. Even just to see it.

On this night. No one (else) did.

Harry Belafonte alone in Times Square in The World, The Flesh and The Devil, 1959. In 1981, I would see The Clash perform six times at Bond Casino, seen here when it was Bond Clothing, on the right.

In The World, The Flesh and The Devil, Harry Belafonte plays a miner trapped in a cave-in who resurfaces only to discover mankind has been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. He sets out to look for other survivors. Bizarrely enough, this film, with the scene above, was on the night after I was in Times Square equally alone. The difference being I KNOW there are millions of other people still here. They are all hunkered down, like I am 23 hours a day, trying to survive the coronavirus pandemic.

I haven’t been able to get the feeling out of my mind since. It’s also stuck with me for other reasons I’m still trying to fully understand.

A few days later, I walked over to Grand Central Terminal, getting there at about the same time I got to Times Square, just before 11:30pm on a weeknight. A time when it’s generally pretty busy. On the way (about a mile), I counted about 10 people- on either side of the street. I entered through the Vanderbilt Avenue corner, not sure it would be open, when I came out of the underpass into the world famous main terminal, the feeling was very much the same as it was in Times Square, with a difference.

Grand Central Terminal, April 14, 2020, 11:34pm.

Standing there, alone again, reminded me that we are all on our own in a crisis. Only those working hard to keep the essentials of life going- doctors, nurses, power station workers, truck drivers, food store employees, essential business employees, pharmacy workers, postal, delivery and transit workers are keeping us from being in a very, very bad situation, particularly for as long as this is likely to wind up being. Standing there at that moment in Grand Central, I was also struck by something else. A train station is a place about travel, about going somewhere or arriving here form somewhere else. That feeling is completely alien to me. I have nowhere else to go. I realized then that the thought of leaving has never entered my mind. But for some reason, standing there, I didn’t feel hopeless, I just felt like I always do, with cancer, Sandy or 9/11- I have to find a way through it by myself.

Cary Grant, left of center, in Grand Central Terminal, in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, 1959, shows the space as it more normally is during the morning/evening rush.

Last week, a reader asked me if I’d ever been through something like this before. I had to give a qualified “Yes.” The 2012 Hurricane Sandy blackout- when we had none of those things I just listed that we have, thankfully, now, for between 5 and 12 days depending on where you were. No power, no mass transit. Not one thing was open because of a lack of electricity, and at night, the temperature went down to about 32. I spent days hunkered down in my bed fully dressed under every blanket I could muster as everything in my refrigerator and freezer went bad and I had to go about a mile to charge my phone. Of course, MANY other people had things much worse from Hurricane Sandy than I did. Many, many people lost everything. An apartment building 4 blocks from me, that I had been in the day before the hurricane, collapsed. It has still not been rebuilt. The risen tide from the Hudson River came to within one block of my apartment building, flooding many of the ground floor galleries in West Chelsea, while devastating lives all around the area. I was lucky. Still, I learned a lot from going through that, a 2 day blackout in the 90’s and of course, going through 9/11. Then, there was the Chelsea bombing in 2016 that was too close for comfort…

Close to the same scene just shown, minus Cary and everyone else. Grand Central Terminal, April 14, 2020, 11:36pm.

Standing there at that moment in Grand Central, I was also struck by something else. A train station is a place about travel, about going somewhere or arriving here from somewhere else. That feeling is completely alien to me. I never leave NYC. As with the other crisis I’ve lived through here, I, like everyone else, just finds a way. 

When I think about rising above it and transcendental places in NYC, the first place that comes to my mind is, in my opinion, what may well be the greatest feat of building by modern man in the world, Brooklyn Bridge. Before you say, “You’re nuts,” watch Ken Burns’ Documentary film on the making of Brooklyn Bridge, then see what you think. On April 16th, I decided to go there and see how The Bridge was faring during the pandemic.

Just after sunset on Brooklyn Bridge, facing Brooklyn, 7:53pm, April 16, 2020. If I could save one modern structure for eternity it would be Brooklyn Bridge. It is one of the supreme achievements of mankind, both Artistically and as a testament to the human spirit. In this case the spirit of those who designed it and built it while overcoming impossible odds.

I walked the entire span, beginning on the Brooklyn side, and arriving on the Manhattan side just after sunset. It was emptier than I could imagine it during daytime hours. As anyone who has had the joy of walking The Bridge knows, when you reach the center you are, magically, all of a sudden on top. The cabling has ended, the sides and even the railings seem to melt away and you feel like you are standing on top of the world. Now, imagine doing this in 1883 when The Bridge opened. At that point, you REALLY WERE on top of the world! This was decades before the advent of the skyscraper. Standing there, you were higher than anything you could see- anywhere around you. It truly must have felt like going to outer space. Of course, I paused and spent a good 30 minutes pondering everything that had been going on as I stood there, alone.

Alone in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge, with Manhattan to the left, Brooklyn to the right, and the East River straight ahead, 7:11pm, April 16, 2020.

“Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sounds of silence.”*

Thinking about things I’ve lived through in NYC, of course, 9/11 was the first major crisis I would point to. That morning, as I walked to work with one Tower on fire, the second about to be hit, a neighbor standing on the corner told me the first plane had flown down 7th Avenue- it had flown down my block! To this day, no one I know died in the horror that ensued. Both people I knew at the time got out. Still, the mysteries of the brain being what they are, somehow my sleeping mind connected that American Airlines Flight 11 that hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center with the heroic United Flight 93. In my dream (actually, a recurring nightmare), it was the passengers and crew of American Flight 11 that fought back and jumped the hijackers, causing Flight 11 to crash early- into my apartment building. 

18 years later, those thoughts were not in my mind when I decided to visit the Oculus in Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Path Station Terminal at the site of the World Trade Center Towers. What is always on my mind when I visit the site of the World Trade Center is my own past. I grew up in the area. My dad had an office 2 blocks from the WTC for 45 years. I remember walking past the Towers while they were being built. Years later, the company I worked for had two Holiday Parties at Windows On The World Restaurant at the top of the South Tower, a few hundred feet from where the Oculus now is, including one for Holiday, 2000, the last Holiday season that would ever be celebrated there. Walking through the area my thoughts were on change. As in HOW MUCH change has gone on Downtown just in my lifetime

Crossing Church Street, I walked up to the front doors, half expecting to find them locked. The door opened, and there was a man standing along the wall, just inside the door. He was one of about 7 or 8 people I saw while I was inside who just stood in a spot. And stood in that spot throughout. Homeless, I guess. Most had some sort of baggage with them. There were 3 police officers walking around, who checked in on them to make sure they weren’t sleeping, among their other duties. But there was almost no one else there. I moved to the edge overlooking the 57,000 square foot floor. All the surrounding stores were closed. Off in the far distance, at the other end, the PATH train station was still in operation. Once in a while, someone walked from my end across the floor to take a PATH train uptown or to New Jersey. Mostly, I was utterly alone, once more. Again, I stood transfixed by the scene.

The 57,000 square foot main floor of Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus on April 15, 2020 at 11:56pm.

Speaking of change, I wrote about being at the Oculus in August, 2016 as it opened. That day, the floor looked like this-

Standing in the same spot I stood in taking the prior picture, on August 17, 2016 at 3pm.

Here, in this gleaming, barely 4 year old facility, was a shocking look at our present in a nutshell. The brick and mortar economy, represented by the stores that surround both levels of the Oculus, with more elsewhere in the 800,000 square foot complex, has completely paused, save for food stores, pharmacies, and home supply stores. The world has almost completely come to a stop. In fact, I think this period of time when we’ve all been home will be eventually seen as a pause between life as it was and life the way it will be. I think most of us know right now that once activity start up again, things will be different. Many of us have been, at least, subtly changed by this experience. Exactly how things will be different remains to be seen, but they will be different. Beyond the horror of all the illnesses and deaths, we will always look back at this moment “between” the old and the new as “the pause” between them.

Right now, the focus is on finding those infected, treating those ill, and keeping the virus from spreading. Eventually, we all hope, this crisis will mitigate. And then what? A lot of people (even those who haven’t gotten sick) are seriously hurting. Many have lost their jobs- temporarily, or permanently. There’s going to be a gigantic, collective, “starting over” for countless people. The ways people interact or get together and many other aspects of life not known right now will also be different. The way many businesses do business will be changed. A few/some/many small businesses, who knows how many, won’t reopen. More business will be done online.

What does this all mean?

“And the sign said:
The words of the prophets are
Written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence.””

7th Avenue at West 20th Street, April 17, 2020, 8:29pm. On this very corner, Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road ends. He wrote it 3 blocks west.

We won’t know specifically how life will be different until this is over. And no one knows when that will be right now. In the midst of all this silence, something else that can’t be heard is happening.

Change.

While we are all alone together inside, hopefully staying safe, the world is changing. The only choice we have is to adapt to it.

*- Soundtrack for this Post is “The Sound of Silence” by Paul Simon and performed by Simon & Garfunkel on the album Wednesday Morning, 3AM, 1964, and with overdubs on Sounds of Silence, released in 1966. They perform it on September 19, 1981 in Central Park below. As I write this, almost 53 million people have watched it-

This Post is dedicated to all those keeping us going, particularly in my case, my thanks to the staffs of Trader Joe’s, and Gristede’s, Chelsea, NYC, Rite-Aid, Home Depot, Con Ed, the USPS, to the truck drivers and delivery people who keep this island supplied, and to Drs. Ro & Hoffman.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded and ad-free for over 6 years, during which over 250 full length pieces have been published. If you’ve found it worthwhile, you can donate to keep it going & ad-free below. Thank you!

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited.
To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here.
Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them.
For “short takes” and additional pictures, follow @nighthawk_nyc on Instagram.

Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. The current stats are here. ↩