JOHN ZEAMAN

Modernism

Turn-of-the-Century Vienna

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Need a cure for cultural overload? Worn out by mega-exhibits and museums the size of shopping malls? Relief can be found at Neue Galerie New York, a recent addition to Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile.

Small, elegant, and aesthetically focused, it is the closest thing around to a perfect museum experience.

The art is early 20th century Austrian and German modernism – which sounds too narrow, but isn’t. It’s housed in a beaux-arts mansion that was once home to a Vanderbilt and looks it. It has a serious bookstore in what was once the house’s wood-paneled library and a restaurant that captures the style and ambience of the legendary Viennese cafes. It’s the kind of place where you can spend an hour or an afternoon and come away feeling alert and satisfied, as if you had visited someone’s private art collection.

“Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt” by Gustav Klimt.

There’s very little wall text, no audio guides, no school groups, and no sense of a lock-step progression funneling you toward the gift shop. In short, none of the museum innovations of the past 20 years.

This charming museum with the old-fashioned outlook grew out of a friendship between the Viennese-born New York art dealer Serge Sabarsky and the philanthropist and art collector Ronald S. Lauder.

For years, they imagined a museum for Austrian and German expressionist art, Sabarsky’s specialty. In 1994, they found the building they were looking for, the six-story Louis XIII-style structure at Fifth and 86th, once the home of society doyenne Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III. When Sabarsky died in 1996, Lauder went ahead with the project as a tribute to his friend.

The name is derived from Neue Galerie in Vienna, founded in 1923 by Otto Kallir as a showcase for the work of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and other luminaries of the avant-garde movement called the Viennese secession.

The inaugural exhibit, “New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890-1940,” reflects what will be the permanent organization of the museum, with the second floor devoted to Viennese painting and decorative arts, and the third featuring such German movements as Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter, and the Bauhaus, as well as unaffiliated expressionists such as Max Beckmann.

 

Egon Schiele “Self-Portrait.”

Turn-of-the-century Vienna was a magical place for art and ideas, part Babylon, part Athens. It had Klimt and Hoffman, Mahler and Schonberg, Freud and Wittgenstein. It was an affluent, prosperous place – the seat of the soon to be extinct Austro-Hungarian empire -a city enjoying guilty pleasures with a sense of impending doom. Countering this, idealistic avant-garde artists tried to forge a new culture. Viennese art has a reputation for decadence, for combining pleasure and pain, eroticism and morbidity, neurotic intensity and graphic sexuality.

The work of Schiele, in particular, crackles with erotic energy. One of the museum’s highlights is a half gallery of Schiele figure drawings, nudes in which the bodys’ skeletons look as if they’re trying to break out of the skin. Schiele was a virtuoso draftsman with a sinuous contour line that exaggerates every dip and declivity, every bulging tendon and tuck of flesh. His neurasthenic women sprawl languorously, embrace, or stare at their own bodies. Schiele—in a self portrait—twists pretzel-like, one arm around his head, eyes shooting lasers.

Klimt is easier on the eyes and nerves, though just as erotically charged. His art is more dream-like, more exotic, more Eastern. In his hands, the symbolist tendency toward decoration, toward mixing realistic passages with mosaic-like patterns, crosses into the realm of the psychedelic (which made his art a popular poster subject in the Sixties). He wraps his seminude figures in swirling patterns of colors, as in the portrait of Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt, who appears to wear a dress of silken luminescence, with a cape of floral and geometric forms that makes her look like a mysterious, gaily decorated Christmas tree.

The other big gun of this period was Oskar Kokoschka. His savage portraits of nervous intellectuals and neurotic society women seem barely there on the surface, like stretched paint rags scraped with the sharp end of a brush. But they have a telling, X-ray immediacy about them.

Kokoschka, by the way, outlived his two contemporaries by about 60 years. Klimt and Schiele both died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. Half the artists in this show, it seems, met early deaths from flu, war, or suicide.

Paralleling these radical experiments in painting was a decorative tradition that was no less daring. Even utilitarian objects took on eccentric forms, such as Kolomon Moser’s checkerboard chair with the lines of a shipping crate, or Otto Wagner’s minimalist stool with the curious slot in its seat. Josef Hoffman imparted geometric elegance to tableware, such as his octagonal serving dish, designed for the famous Cabaret Fledermaus.

“Murnau: Street with Women” of 1908 by Wassily Kandinsky.

Upstairs, on the German floor, schools of art seem to multiply, with groups of three or four artists united in purpose by manifestoes, drawn up, one imagines, in smoke-filled cafes.

Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”) group was named for a painting by Vasily Kandinsky. They rejected realism in favor of saturated and strongly contrasted color, as in Kandinsky’s street scene in which the red roofs of the houses look hot to the touch and the road is a high-keyed pink and yellow.

The hothouse appeal of Viennese decadence becomes something more malignant in Weimar Germany. The paintings of Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – part of a group called Die Brucke (“The Bridge”) – reveal a deeper pain and alienation. Kirchner’s tightrope walkers, painted with savage strokes and discordant colors, evoke the peril beneath the entertainment.

This lurking menace comes closer to the surface, and finally erupts full blown in the works of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann. Grosz strips away the last veneer of romance with his painting of an ugly prostitute and her portly customer, while Dix give us a portrait of a distraught woman desperately trying to cover her sagging flesh.

The world of design, as exemplified in the Bauhaus gallery, moves on a separate track, maintaining the idealistic search for formal purity in the midst of social dissolution. Here can be found Mies van der Rohe’s slab-like Barcelona chair, and Marcel Breuer’s elaborately engineered Wassily chair with its geometric web of supporting straps.

Great care has been taken with the details in Neue Galerie. Despite the 18th century French design of the original mansion, the interior evokes the time and place of the art, with its black-and-white color schemes and bent wood furniture in the cafe. There’s even a design shop where you can buy jewelry, tableware, and bolts of cloth based on original designs by Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Marianne Brandt, and others.

And, although the museum is the creation of a native New Yorker, not an outpost of the countries that produced the art, it has a certain air of Austrian formality and Germanic crispness. When you ask a question, you half expect one of the staff members to click his heels and give a sharp nod. And, despite being the baby of Museum Mile, it somehow projects venerability, as if this were a very old private museum that had just opened its doors to the public.

Neue Galerie

2002

 

 

Surrealism

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“Do you have secret desires that could be thought of as sinful, immoral, base, or that you personally find squalid, vile, filthy? If so, what do you do? Do you struggle against them, or do you satisfy them in your imagination? Or in real life?”

Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Child’s Brain,” was an inspiration for the surrealist movement.

So asks a 1932 survey written and responded to by surrealists and published in one of their own journals. It was typical of the group and reveals the earnestness – bordering on the comical – with which they approached their central preoccupation: desire.

Desire, said surrealism’s founder, poet Andre Breton, was “the sole motivating principle of the world, the only master that humans must recognize.”

“Surrealism: Desire Unbound” at the Metropolitan Museum, a reduced version of an exhibit seen last year at London’s Tate Modern, is a big, yeasty show filled with strange, sometimes outrageous, sometimes disturbing imagery. It’s an unusual undertaking for the usually conservative Met, and an indication of how much things have changed in the museum world. (In fact, with this show, the Irving Penn nudes, and the Costume Institute’s “Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed,” the Met has, for the moment, become the edgiest museum in town.)

Surrealism was art’s response to Freud’s theories about the unconscious mind. The surrealists peered into this subterranean region of repressed desires, fears, and conflicts and saw a new artistic reality, a “super reality” (surrealite) that would blend the visible and the psychological worlds.

Early surrealism was Alice-in-Wonderlandish, an attempt to insert inexplicable events and objects —fur-lined teacups, floating boulders—into everyday life. But by the late Twenties and early Thirties, artists and poets were focusing more and more on erotic themes, with desire — enfolding both love and sex — as the true voice of the inner self.

Max Ernst’s “Robing of the Bride.”

Surrealism had its hard core – poets Breton and Paul Eluard, artists Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and Andre Masson – but the exhibit also devotes space to the non-card-carrying types and fellow travelers such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Joseph Cornell, Joan Miro, and Jean Arp.

The hard-core had a dark side—they revered the Marquis de Sade, and their work sometimes crossed over into pornography —but they also had an endearing bohemian spirit. They were given to attention-getting stunts, sexual scandals, and fervid half-religious crises. At times, they functioned like a political party, preaching social revolution and publishing manifestos in their own magazines and journals.

The movement had its roots in a revelatory moment when Breton, passing a gallery in a bus, saw a painting in the window and jumped off to have a look. The year was 1916, and the painting was Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Child’s Brain,” an enigmatic evocation of the artist’s father, a bare-chested, mustachioed man whose eyes are closed meditatively and who, in true Oedipal fashion, looks both menacing and seductive. Breton later bought the painting, which hung over his bed for most of his life. De Chirico proved a further inspiration with his dream-like paintings of starkly sunlit plazas with their phallic smokestacks and brooding, dark archways. Later, when his work took a different turn, he lost the surrealist seal of approval.

That was how it was with them. The surrealists were forever passing judgment and drumming people out of the group. Giacometti, for example, created some of the most powerful sculptures in the surrealist genre, such as his violently erotic “Woman With Her Throat Cut.” But, when his style veered toward straight observation, he was branded a traitor to the cause.

Salvador Dali presented an opposite problem. He embraced the surrealist program so enthusiastically and indulged his own neurotic sexual hangups so vividly that he made even this broad-minded group uncomfortable. In Dali, you also see surrealism’s weakness for practical jokes: “Venus With Drawers,” the exhibit’s introductory piece, is a copy of a famous Greek statue fitted out with dresser drawers.

Restraint was not a strong point with the surrealists. Painters like Max Ernst and Andre Masson were so intent on getting their unconscious minds onto canvas that they sometimes lost sight of just how garish and over the top these pictures became. Ernst’s “Robing of the Bride” is as bizarre as anything by Hieronymous Bosch, with its owl-headed bride, attended by several monstrosities, including a green, four-breasted, web-footed hermaphrodite who looks to be in her third trimester of pregnancy.

“Birthday,” by Dorothea Tanning.

Ernst, by the way, also had a singular talent for entanglements with young women who were either gifted, rich, or both. At 45, the charismatic artist divorced his first wife and ran off with Leonora Carrington, daughter of a wealthy industrialist and an artist who was even more Boschian than he was. Later he married heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim, but left her for Dorothea Tanning, a 30-year-old New York artist whose beauty, chess-playing abilities, and surrealist style made her an Ernstian dream come true. The exhibit has the painting that was on the easel when Ernst first visited her apartment: an arresting self-portrait that shows Tanning bare-breasted in fairy tale garb, standing in a labyrinthine space with a winged lemur at her feet.

Gender bending was another surrealist game. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp both posed for the camera in drag, Duchamp in the guise of his alter ego, Rrose Selavy (Eros, c’est la vie, or Eros, that’s life), who, despite her name, looked rather dowdy. Ray also played another game, crafting images that combined maleness and femaleness: a photo of a woman with her head tilted back, so that neck and thrust-up chin present a distinctly phallic form. Ernst’s emblematic “Men Shall Know Nothing of This” was inspired by the memoir of a paranoid schizophrenic who imagined himself as both man and woman having intercourse with himself.

One of Hans Bellmer’s dolls.

Kink reached its apex in the work of Hans Bellmer, an artist with a peculiar gift for drawing that elevated even pornographic subjects to the level of art. His fetishistic masterpiece was a life-size doll, a child-woman made with a movable ball-joint design that allowed him to create provocative poses, which he then photographed. Sometimes Bellmer played Dr. Frankenstein, mixing up the body parts. In one, he replaced the upper torso with a second set of legs. Breton and Eluard praised the doll’s “universal, provocative power.”

No surrealist show would be complete without Rene Magritte, the only truly popular surrealist. The Belgian was mild for this company. He was the master of the double-take, jolting viewers with neatly painted snapshots of the impossible – the apple that fills a room, the nighttime street with the bright blue sky above. Even when the subject was sexual – the famous image of the pubic face, or “The Lovers,” two anonymous heads kissing through gray hoods, he was more a puzzlemaker than an erotic artist.

The exhibit ends on something of a down note, with many of the surrealists leaving France for the United States during World War II. New York became the ostensible center of surrealism, but it never really flourished here. Breton was unhappy in New York and refused to learn English. Surrealism was absorbed into what became abstract expressionism, especially in the works of Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, whose works are among the last we see.

More than any individual work, it is the surrealist spirit that shines through in this exhibit. They were often over the top – as with the Canadian surrealist whose tribute to the Marquis de Sade included a dance with a strapped-on phallus and culminated with a self-branding with a hot iron—but they were sincere in the reinterpretation of human nature and their attempts to live on the edge. The free-love atmosphere was not all fun and games. You can see the emotional cost in a convoluted letter from Man Ray to his lover, Lee Miller, in which the photographer struggles to be lighthearted and liberated about her affairs, but fails miserably.

Surrealist art can be like listening to another person’s dream—the weirdness is often more fascinating to the teller than the listener, and “Surrealism: Desire Unbound,” is an uneven show—but it’s hard to imagine a surrealist show that wouldn’t be.

Surrealism was like a labyrinthine castle, a mixture of Gothic spookiness and fairy tale fancy, complete with dizzying towers and dank dungeons in which the strangeness, the oddity of each room was what counted, not the elegance or unity of the layout.

 

Metropolitan Museum

2002

Mexican Modernism

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Compared with the rest of the world, Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s must have looked pretty good. Fascism and Communist totalitarianism were sweeping through Europe and Asia. The United States was making the transition from a devastating depression to a wartime economy.

Mexico, though not immune to these global events, was in a golden age.

1945 portrait of Jacques Gelman by Angel Zarraga.

At the center of this Mexican Renaissance were the Mexican muralists, who celebrated a new national pride and the promise of a socialist workers’ paradise. And, at the center of the Mexican muralists was Diego Rivera, an artist of incredible vitality and creative power. With him was his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, not yet the cult figure she was to become after her death, but a woman of obvious feminine charisma.

It was “La Boheme” with palm trees and government subsidies. Everyone knew everyone else. There were European artists and intellectuals, Mexican movie stars, journalists, revolutionaries. The English-born surrealist painter Leonora Carrington moved there in 1942. When Leon Trotsky fled there from Stalin’s henchmen, he stayed with Diego and Frida.

There were entrepreneurs, too. Despite the revolutionary rhetoric, you could still make a buck in Mexico. And one who did was Jacques Gelman, a Russian-born film distributor. He set up a Mexican company and made a fortune representing the popular Mexican comic actor Mario Moreno, known as Cantinflas. His wife, Natasha, immersed herself in the art scene. Together the couple filled that essential function in artistic flowerings – the patrons. If it wasn’t painted on a wall, there was a good chance the Gelmans would buy it.

Jacques and Natasha Gelman dancing in Mexico City.

Kahlo died in 1955, Rivera in 1957, but the Gelmans lived on in Mexico, continuing to acquire art (both European and Mexican) until Natasha’s death in 1998. An exhibit featuring the best of the couple’s collection has been touring the country and opens Sunday at El Museo Del Barrio in Manhattan.

Not surprisingly, Rivera and Kahlo dominate the show, but there are works here by David Alfaro Siqueros, Jose Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Carrington, the caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, and others.

Portraits are the dominant genre, and the personalities often emerge as more important than the art. In a shamelessly flattering 1945 portrait by Angel Zarraga, Jacques looks every inch a Forties mogul, suave in his double-breasted jacket and ascot, legs crossed in his folding director’s chair, cigar in hand, klieg lights being adjusted in the background.

Natasha is the subject of a half-dozen portraits by various artists. All tended to exaggerate her beauty and allure, though none more than Rivera, who made her look as glamorous as a movie star. She reclines on a couch, her white dress arranged around her legs so as to echo the form of the calla lilies behind her.

“Calla Lily Vendor,” by Diego Rivera from 1943.

Those white flowers with the prominent yellow stamens were a favorite motif of Rivera’s, and he used them to express both sensuousness and spirituality. In his “Calla Lily Vendor” of 1943, he depicts two kneeling, barefoot peasant women embracing a basket of flowers so huge and wondrous, it obscures all but the hat and hand of the vendor.

While Rivera painted the heroic struggle of a people, Kahlo looked inward and depicted her own struggles. Her life story was a series of catastrophes. Partially crippled by polio as a child, she barely survived a terrible bus accident at age 18 which impaled her on a handrail. She suffered with those injuries all her life, unable to complete a pregnancy and losing a leg in her later years. She referred to Rivera, whom she married at 22, as the second of her two “grave accidents.” His infidelities included an affair with her younger sister. They were divorced but remarried, and stayed so until she died at 47.

When surrealism’s founder Andre Breton came to Mexico and saw Kahlo’s paintings, he likened them to “a ribbon around a bomb.” When you know her story, the paintings make more sense, the resolute expression conveying her heroic pride and endurance. She expressed her heartbreak over not being able to have a child in “Self-portrait With Monkeys,” and in another portrait in which a lifeless doll sits next to her on the bed.

Kahlo’s “Diego on My Mind.”

But her paintings became progressively more bizarre, even by surrealist standards. Her indelible attachment to Rivera is graphically evident in “Diego on My Mind,” in which the image of Rivera’s face appears on her forehead, like a third eye. In the most outlandish of these pictures, she depicts herself, Madonna-like, holding a naked Rivera on her lap, flames erupting from his hand and blood from her chest. The two of them are embraced by a Mother Earth figure, in turn embraced by an even larger universe figure.

The other muralists, Siqueros and Orozco, don’t have a large presence, although there’s a strong self-portrait by Siqueros in dark, Rembrandtesque tones.

Kahlo on the cover of Vogue.

Rufino Tamayo, whose style combines pre-Columbian art with European modernism, emerges as an important talent here. His industrial scene of smoking factories has something of American precisionism in it, and his portrait of the comedian Cantinflas captures the actor’s demonic impishness.

Another interesting artist is Gunther Gerzso, who is still alive, a stage and set designer whose paintings have a delicate cubist structure.

There are all sorts of surprises here. The Rivera painting of the lascivious cactuses. The sexy photograph of Kahlo from Vogue magazine, which made a brief fad of her Mexican style of dress. The caricature of a blimpish Rivera by Covarrubias.

The Kahlo portraits will be a big draw of the show, but what the exhibit does best is to evoke the magical feeling of a special time and place, an intoxicating mix of glamour, intellectual idealism, creative intensity, and operatic tragedy.

 

El Museo del Barrio

2002

 

 

 

 

Giacometti

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Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was the archtypical modern artist, which is to say that he was riddled with doubts. That sounds like a liability for a creative person, but in the hands of a great artist — think Kafka, Beckett, Auden —doubts become profound and exquisitely subtle uncertainties.

Giacometti’s uncertainties found their ultimate expression in his sculptures of pencil-thin, elongated figures. These are so attenuated that they almost disappear when viewed from the side. They are formed from an aggregate of inelegant lumps. They are vulnerable, bewildered, and alienated — existential man personified.

Giacometti disavowed any such intention. He claimed to be preoccupied with form, not emotional content. In a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, he emerges as an artist obsessed with process and the essence of representation.

Giacometti was Swiss but spent his creative life in Paris. His father was a post-impressionist painter. His mother was from an aristocratic family. An early self-portrait shows a handsome 19-year-old with fine, almost feminine features and a great mass of curly hair.

He had a natural talent and moved through styles with a Picasso-like alacrity. He sculpted the head of a young man in a beautiful classical style. He painted a self-portrait in a post-impressionist style. Another sculpted head has the blocky simplification of pre-Columbian art.

From there, it was on to cubism, a style that seemed to slow him down, where he found problems that held his interest. He translated the masses and contours of the human body into planes and facets, and in a sculpture of a woman’s torso, reduced the trunk and legs to three elegant planar columns that lock together like crystal rock formations.

Like other modernists, he saw a new language of form in African art. His first significant sculpture, the 1927 “Spoon Woman,” is dominated by an egg-shaped, concave form at its center. It has the primitive power of a female fertility figure.

Reduction, reduction, reduction. His 1932 oil portrait of his father is a struggle marked by negations, erasures, and backtracking. Like Cezanne and Picasso he hammered away at forms relentlessly. Unlike them, he left a record of his struggle. He scratched and erased, leaving thread-like lines intact on some edges, emphatic black slashes on others.

In the early 30s, he was a surrealist. He explored the menacing properties of forms. An abstract slab sprouts horns. Male shapes probe female shapes with long, spike-like projections.

The culmination of his surrealist phase was the famous “Woman with Her Throat Cut.” The subject looks less like a woman than an arachnid, a scuttling scorpion. Its segmented neck is nearly severed by the fatal cut.

The classic elongated figures emerged in the postwar years, seemingly out of nowhere.  Were photographs of skeletal concentration camp survivors an inspiration? No one knows. Despite their attenuated forms, they aren’t frail or weak. They are giants anchored by huge pedestal feet.

In his drawings and paintings, Giacometti continued his research into reduction and representation, working strictly in monochrome so as not to complicate the issue. Many works have an intentionally unfinished quality. Having zeroed in on salient features of a subject, he would stop, not even bothering to put in a second arm, or the other leg of the table. In some, the search for the essence becomes so obsessive that the pencil tears through the paper.

In others, the eraser becomes an important drawing tool, and you can see him pulling elements out of the picture, like a scientist, to see just how much he can take away and still have the mind fill in the rest.

Toward the end of his life, battling stomach cancer, Giacometti seemed to take an opposite tack. The black, baleful heads he now drew were heavy with redundant lines, a mass of black threads winding round and round the form, like a spider wrapping its glassy-eyed victim.

Giacometti had a profound influence on the art of his time. The abstract expressionists carried forward his self-consciousness about process, until process became all and painting became about the act of painting. But he also influenced a generation of figurative artists who were looking for new ways to represent the human form and found inspiration in Giacometti’s messy essence.

Museum of Modern Art

2001

The Nabis

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Let’s hear it for pretty pictures. For at least a hundred years, people have been taught that the thing they instinctively look for in a picture – you know, beauty – wasn’t really what art was about at all.

But then there were those pesky, eye-pleasing Nabis. This group (the name means prophet in Hebrew), consisting of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker-Xavier Roussel, didn’t go down the modernist path of reductionism and abstraction, didn’t fracture reality into cubist shards or reduce it to amoeboid shapes.

“Panel for the decoration of a young girl’s room,” by Maurice Denis.

They painted gardens and groves, interiors and streetscapes, biblical scenes and the cavorting of the Greek and Roman gods. But there was nothing conservative or academic about them. They took plenty of chances, not least in being unafraid to paint beautiful pictures. This can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum’s new show (opening Tuesday and in members previews now), “Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930,” one of the most gorgeous exhibits to be seen in New York in years.

It’s a perfect opportunity to rediscover this long-discredited aesthetic virtue. Beauty – surprise, surprise – makes us happy. We become joyful upon contact with it. It makes us feel that life has a magical dimension, after all. It makes us wish we were painters.

And there’s the additional reward here of getting big portions of artists usually doled out in tiny amounts. Bonnard and Vuillard come by the acre in this show.

The title is a little misleading. “Decorative” sounds minor – as in the “decorative arts,” meaning crafts. In fact, what these artists were advocating was a return to wall-painting, like the great frescoes or murals of the past. The ultimate goal was art that surrounded one, as with Monet and his water lilies and Whistler and his Peacock Room.

The Nabis were all born around the same time – 1867 to 1870 – and all lived into the 1940s, which brings them closer to the present time than we might have thought. They formed their brotherhood in art school in the 1880s, and saw themselves as the spiritual heirs to Paul Gauguin, who had carved a new style out of impressionism using arbitrary colors, flat shapes, and symbolism. This emphasis on flatness and the arrangement of colors and shapes – as opposed to a window on the world – is also sometimes described as “decorative,” lending another meaning to the show’s title.

This is the first exhibit to focus on these artists’ decorative works, mostly large-scale wall paintings, portable since they were painted on cardboard or canvas before being applied to the walls.

There’s an extra thrill to paintings that fill up your entire field of vision. Vuillard, master of cozy domestic interiors, seems to have effortlessly made the jump to monumentality with a painting of the French countryside that is 8 feet high and more than 12 feet long. This is impressionism minus the flickering, flat but not airless, and with every piece of topography – cypress tree, barn, bush, cultivated field – clicking into place like inlaid wood.

Vuillard’s skill in orchestrating large complex spaces is also evident in his several treatments of the Place Vintimille – a pleasant Parisian square, viewed from above, in which our eye is directed along the curving sidewalk surrounding the park, pausing along the way to take in urban vignettes: vendors, strollers, loafers, dogs, card players on a bench. In one sweeping canvas, the foreground is occupied by a massive excavation project, which detracts not at all from the charm of the scene.

There’s nothing duller than artists all trying to conform to some manifesto, and fortunately the four Nabis followed their own temperaments. Denis, for example, is the most art nouveau-ish of the bunch, stylizing his figures and enclosing them in strong outlines. These simplified figures, often of women in long dresses moving about a dreamlike landscape, evoke a spiritual feeling.

His “Decorations for the Bedroom of a Young Girl” is a lovely stream of images: figures of young girls and women in scenes of betrothals, marriages, and mothering that circled the original room like a frieze. Denis’ spirituality could shade over into spookiness, however, and there’s a hint of that in some of the nighttime scenes of gardens and doves in the moonlight. When Denis designed furniture for the little girl’s room, critics complained that the dark gray pieces resembled “tombs.”

A devout Catholic, Denis wound up doing a lot of religious commissions, but also painted mythological subjects for more worldly clients. These more elaborately worked-up scenes included nude bathers and a “Bacchanale,” a scene of pagan lust in which a topless woman is seen dancing with a tiger.

Roussel, who married Vuillard’s older sister, has the least in common with the other painters. He abandoned the flat Nabi style very early, and worked more illusionistically, with short, vigorous brush strokes and bright colors. He suffered a mental breakdown during World War I, and the exhibit has studies for two murals he was asked to do while recuperating in a Swiss asylum. These allegories of spring and autumn show trees budding or shedding fruit, while naked figures drink wine and carry on.

Roussel did a lot of theatrical design, and many of his mural commissions reflect his involvement in the arts, such as his “Afternoon of a Faun,” a scene he did for a famous baritone of the day, and loosely based on a scene from the poem by Mallarme, in which a faun comes upon two nymphs in the woods and ravishes them both.

Everything Bonnard did has the sparkle of genius and the sense of an artistic imagination that was given complete freedom to roam. “Screen With Rabbits,” which juxtaposes images of frolicking rabbits and the amorous couplings of a satyr and nymph, was inspired – as was much by the Nabis – by Japanese art.

The large decorative ensemble he did for the alluring Misia Natanson Edwards (who was both muse and patron to the Nabis) are among his most fanciful. The three monumental canvases – the biggest is more than 16 feet wide – have the orangy color of faded tapestries. They depict Arcadian and pastoral themes: women playing ball and children playing, shepherds and nymphs, exotic animals and aquatic beasts. But, their strangest feature are the meandering borders filled with acrobatic monkeys and magpies entwined with strings of pearls – subjects said to reflect an incident in Edwards’ life in which her husband’s mistress demanded her pearls – among other things – to give up the husband.

Bonnard dominates the climax of the show, with a skylit gallery that shows off his sun-filled “Mediterranean,” displayed with half-columns separating the three Panels, as it was originally installed in the home of a Moscow collector. Also in this room are several of Bonnard’s famous “Terrace” paintings, depicting a table set for lunch, some figures, masses of foliage, and layers of distant landscape, all painted in Bonnard’s characteristically rich palette.

These were painted for himself, not as commissions, and yet it’s possible to see how his mural work, with its large scale and Arcadian themes, prepared Bonnard to paint these masterpieces.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

2001

Hans Bellmer

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Not too long ago, you could rely on the International Center of Photography Midtown to stay focused on the craft of photography. ICP, after all, was founded by Cornell Capa, brother of legendary war photographer Robert Capa, and himself a noted portrait and documentary photographer.

But times change, and today ICP – once so square and earnest – looks more like an outpost of the Whitney Museum. Apparently, someone decided that ICP needed to get more edgy. It needed art that could rile Mayor Rudy Giuliani. It needed catalogs filled with references to “gender,” “identity,” and “sexuality.”

Photography could play an incidental role.

There’s no other way to explain exhibits that so perfectly conform to the contemporary art world cliches. “Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer” deals with erotic, life-size female dolls (sexuality). “Kiki Smith: Telling Tales” is a feminist exploration of fairy tales (identity). And “Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918” is about Victorian-era attitudes about homosexuality (gender).

Taken together, the shows exude a hothouse atmosphere of forbidden desires, Freudian repression, and adolescent fantasies. And, well, what else are museums for?

The Bellmer show is by far the most substantial and interesting. Bellmer (1902-1975) was a talented painter and graphic designer in 1920s Germany. After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, he turned to making provocative photographs of dolls. These big dolls, of his own construction, were disturbing combinations of childlike and mature female characteristics. They wear Mary Jane shoes and little white socks and have no pubic hair, but are shapely and full-breasted.

In one typical photo, the doll is posed provocatively, her chemise lifted up over her rear, her face turned to look over her shoulder with an expression that is part seductress, part victim. In this and some of the other photos, parts of the doll’s body are crumbling or missing, exposing armature and sockets.

Others are grotesque reassemblies in which the body lacks head or arms but instead sprouts a second pair of hips and legs where the upper body should be. In others, the dolls’ ball-joint construction seems to run amok, like mechanical cancer, giving rise to conjoined spheres that suggest multiple breasts or buttocks or some other deformity.

Bellmer’s ability to merge such opposites as the erotic and the grotesque is what made him such a hit with the French surrealists, who eagerly published his doll (“La Poupee”) photographs in their journals.

The show argues for a political interpretation of Bellmer’s work – he was flaunting “degeneracy” in the face of Nazi repression – but it’s just as clear that the images touched some personal chord. It wouldn’t be art otherwise.

Memorabilia documents his period’s fascination with artificial females – from the Olympian doll of Offenbach’s opera “Tales of Hoffman” to the comely robot of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” to the stuffed companion that Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka took out on dates. Other material includes books on sexual deviation in velvet-lined cases, naughty postcards, and Bellmer’s own erotic drawings in which transparent bodies take pornography to a new level.

Bellmer’s a tough act to follow, especially for someone like Kiki Smith, who plays in almost the same league. Like Bellmer, Smith makes fetishistic figures, but her work lacks that fundamental discovery, that core image that Bellmer built on. She investigates fairy tales and mythology, drawing heavily on Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Uses of Enchantment,” with riffs on “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and Eve and the serpent.

She strives for shocking effects – Riding Hood with a hairy, wolfish face, and figures that, like Bellmer’s, span childishness and sexual maturity. But she obsessively scatters her energies across too many media: sculpture, installation, photographic sequences, videos, sound effects, music, drawings. The result is like an elaborate show-and-tell for a feminist tract.

The third, and smallest exhibit, is a quirky bit of social history, 75 daguerreotypes and other early photographic images of men – mostly twosomes – in affectionate poses.

The men certainly give the impression of being lovers, rather than just pals. They entwine their arms around one another, sit on laps, and pose cheek to cheek. That such photography was apparently not uncommon in a period – the Victorian era – known for its narrow-mindedness is the exhibit’s central mystery.

The pictures themselves, which were found in flea markets and among other memorabilia, offer no clues as to how or why they came into existence. Almost all are anonymous (except for one of Walt Whitman and a friend).

Are they evidence of a previously undocumented liberal tolerance of gay unions in Victorian times?

According to curator David Deitcher, 19th century Americans frequented studio photographers the way we take snapshots today. Photographs of same-sex friends were commonplace with the Victorian propensity for sexually segregated schools, clubs, military units, and workplaces. And, gay men – or women – were apparently able to stretch this convention to create the kind of photographs shown in the exhibit.

Perhaps in time, ICP Midtown will become known as a cutting-edge institution, a hip voice in the art world. But some of us were quite happy with its old identity as a straightforward venue for good photography. Right now, it’s wearing its ideology a little awkwardly, like a Midwesterner who has just arrived in Manhattan with an all-black wardrobe.

International Center of Photography, NYC

2001