Jean-Antoine Houdon, Madame His, 1775, marble, 31 1/2″ tall. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Victor Thaw, 2007.

There are few uncooler-sounding words than “eighteenth-century marble portraiture.” Even typing these words makes me feel like I’m prepping for the PSAT. But eighteenth-century marble portraiture—specifically that of Jean-Antoine Houdon, known for his uncool likenesses of Voltaire and George Washington—can be extraordinarily strange. Furthermore, the examples here are nearly nowhere to be found on your phone except in lo-res preview form. In other words, you have to actually go to the Frick to see them.

Two busts, sculpted within two years of each other, are paired in an out-of-the way hall of the museum: a woman, Madame His, and a man, Armand-Thomas Hue. Translucent, actual-sized, people-shaped white rocks carved in Enlightenment dress and balanced atop quadrangular pedestals at eyeball height, both are lopped off somewhere above the waist and function as the sort of thing that museum-going twenty-first-century humans are likely to walk right past and think, “Oh, art.” Which is just what I did, on my way to the Bellini painting I’d planned to write about. But something stopped me. Madame His doesn’t look like the majority of eighteenth-century painted portraits I’d seen, which largely crash-land somewhere in flyover caricature country: big watery eyes, boiled-egg chins, tiny red lips. As I circled the bust, I increasingly admired how it substantiated my mental template of “actual human being,” how Houdon had worked outside his epoch’s stylizations. I was surprised by how the marble skin seemed to suggest hidden muscles and tendons, by how the slightly rougher fabric of the bodice lightly met her soft shoulders. Then I looked up, and something even more surprising happened: Madame His met my gaze. Read More

The following essay appears in But Still, It Turns, edited by Paul Graham and published by MACK earlier this month. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name showing at International Center of Photography (ICP) until May 9.

Gregory Halpern. Image from ZZYZX (MACK, 2016), in But Still, It Turns, edited by Paul Graham (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography

I don’t know whose side you’re on,
But I am here for the people
Who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning
And close down for deep cleaning at night.

—Jericho Brown, “Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry”

I
Now, wherever and whenever that is for you

Dark stars inked on the palm of a raised hand. A tiny blackbird alone in the gaping, giant world of a street curb. Someone crouching in asphalt-baked sun in a position of prayer or pain or ecstasy, or perhaps all of the above. A guy kneeling to cut open a watermelon as two mothers perch on the edge of a gas station parking lot, their children swarming close. The craggy shadow in the desert cast by a rock face; the man in a poncho crossing a thin creek over tall, shadowy grasses. The herculean act of pushing a massive tree down the middle of a rural Alabama street. A young boy fitting his small body in the space between tire rim and hub of a car, draped around the curve of the wheel. The frozen, shouting faces of a lineup of white cheerleaders some sixty years ago and, in an image from perhaps the same year, a white mother teaching her little girl to shoot a gun. A deer running down a highway embankment, between roads.

We know that a photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the various eras of its subsequent rediscovery. Lazy language has us reaching for the trope of “capturing” “a moment.” Similarly it is ingrained in us to look at photographs as stilled time, as past. But even this is a relative condition. The perception of the past is split in the act of remembering: how a moment first appeared, how it is seen differently later and reseen again, taken out of isolation, reshaped by knowledge and context. How the singular is part of a larger sequence.

When the experience of the present is overwhelmingly and radically altered, the grammar of time is disrupted, too. Verbs no longer conjugate cleanly into their compartmentalized dimensions of past, present, and future; actions and thoughts loop back on one another. Linearity disappears. An analog clock, repetitive and circular, winding and ticking, is more relevant than the calendar. Strike twelve once again. Sometimes we inhabit all the tenses and eras at once.

As I lived with the images in But Still, It Turns over many months, as they became markedly more immediate, speaking with startling prescience to unfolding events that they preceded by years, that they had perhaps on some level intuited, I began to understand their shared subject as the nature of time itself: how we perceive it, how we exist in it, how it exists in us, how it connects us. Read More

Kansas, Alabama, Illinois, New York—wherever Gordon Parks (1912–2006) traveled, he captured with striking composition the lives of Black Americans in the twentieth century. From his first portraits for the Farm Security Administration in the early forties to his essential documentation of the civil rights movement for Life magazine, he produced an astonishing range of work. In his photographs we see protests and inequality and pain but also love, joy, boredom, traffic in Harlem, skinny-dips at the watering hole, idle days passed on porches, summer afternoons spent baking in the Southern sun. With “Half and the Whole,” on view through February 20, Jack Shainman Gallery presents a trove of Parks’s photographs, many of which have rarely been exhibited. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956, archival pigment print, 34 x 34″ (print). Edition L5 of 7, with 2APs Inventory. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1957, archival pigment print, 30 x 40″ (print). Edition 1 of 7, with 2APs Inventory. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. 

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tie the Temptress to the Trojan, 2018. Collection of Michael Bertrand, Toronto. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

We stand before each other and look. Who are you? What do we see in each other? Perhaps our eyes meet this first time. Perhaps we tilt to the side, resist directness. We make a first assessment. Then we keep looking, and more is revealed in every glance, tilt, moment, and we come deeper into knowing.

Each Lynette Yiadom-Boakye painting is like looking into a story or an entire life. They call to mind vignette collections such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings (1964), wherein poems like “Mr Bleaney” imagine all that is behind the faces of the sometimes lonely people we see in our day to day, if we pause to look and consider. There are entire lives inside one frame, one poem, entire souls and stories inside the singletons and groups in these paintings. Read More

“The visual is a language that must be learnt too, as one learns French or English or Arabic,” said the artist and poet Etel Adnan in an interview earlier this year with Apartamento. “What I love about colours though is that we cannot own colour; we can only accept its reality.” If anyone could stake a claim on color, though, it would be Adnan, now ninety-five and continuing her relentless pursuit of a vocabulary all her own. Few other artists wield such a range of shades with her confidence; it seems nearly impossible that one could encounter her paintings and tapestries without feeling the slightest spark of joy at the wild, vibrant hues she conjures: pungent neon greens, charred oranges, and sad, bluish grays light enough to display the mark of the brush. “Seasons,” Adnan’s second solo exhibition with Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York, will be on view through December 23, 2020. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Etel Adnan, Au matin, 2017, wool tapestry, 56 1/4 x 78 3/4″. © Etel Adnan. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

Etel Adnan, L’Olivier, 2019, wool tapestry, 55 x 78 3/4″. © Etel Adnan. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

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