Jewish Museum (Manhattan, NY)

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    Ben Shahn’s Social Realist Art Feels Relevant Again in Landmark Survey

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    An old master of the Great Depression painted a portrait of America as it still may be.With some artists, there’s one work that seems to capture their essential achievement.In the long-overdue retrospective now at the Jewish Museum in New York, the entire artistic project of the American painter Ben Shahn comes clear in a single fascinating painting from 1940 called “Contemporary American Sculpture.” It depicts a gallery at the Whitney Museum hosting sculptures from that year’s survey of the nation’s artists — except that Shahn, left out of the Annual, reimagines the walls surrounding those stylized modern works as covered in his own realist paintings.Those show scenes of everyday life during the Great Depression — decrepit workers’ housing; a farmer by his shack; poor Black women at a welfare hospital — depicted as though the Whitney’s walls have been pierced to reveal the all-too-real world out beyond. It recalls how Renaissance murals pierced church walls to let in the more-real world of the Bible.“Contemporary American Sculpture” captures what’s at stake in the most potent works in “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity,” as this revelatory survey is called. Those works use the time-honored art of painting to make the modern world, and its signature troubles, as present as Shahn can manage. The effect is gripping, and feels utterly relevant for the troubled moment we are living in now.For a decade or so on either side of World War II, Shahn’s achievements made him an art star, earning him a major show at the Museum of Modern Art and honors including a place in the American Pavilion of the 1954 Venice Biennale, shared with the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning.Ben Shahn, “Scotts Run, West Virginia,” 1937. During the Great Depression, Shahn felt sympathy for Americans suffering the deprivations he grew up with. (This painting was based on a photograph he took.)Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via The Jewish MuseumBut it was de Kooning and his ilk who went on to dominate the art world; as Cold War reaction took hold, Shahn, a dedicated leftist, saw a slow but unbroken decline in his critical fortunes. There has barely been an uptick since. The Jewish Museum show is Shahn’s first notable survey in the United States since one at the same museum in 1976. Featuring 175 artworks and objects, photos by Shahn and his peers as well as illuminating ephemera, it was organized abroad, at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, where it was a big hit in 2023; the curator Laura Katzman had to work hard to find an American museum to take it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jewish Museum Acquires Never-Shown Entry to Venice Biennale

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      Ruth Patir refused to display her video installation at the Israel pavilion until a cease-fire and hostage agreement was reached. “(M)otherland” will debut in Tel Aviv.The Jewish Museum in New York has acquired a video installation by the artist Ruth Patir that was commissioned for the Venice Biennale. It was never displayed, since Patir and the curators insisted that Israel’s pavilion not open until an agreement was reached for the return of hostages taken in the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023 and for a cease-fire in the Gaza war.Patir’s “(M)otherland” will debut in March at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum announced Monday, and then will travel to New York after the Jewish Museum’s collection galleries are reinstalled later next year.The museum declined to disclose the price it paid for “(M)otherland,” which comprises five videos, one made in reaction to the Gaza war and offering a personal view of global tragedy. Four video pieces use ancient female figurines retrieved by archaeologists from the eastern Mediterranean to dramatize Patir’s decision to freeze her eggs after learning that she carries the BRCA gene mutation — an odyssey through an Israeli social system that encourages childbearing and aggressively funds fertility procedures. The small figurines, blown up to life-size dimensions and digitally animated, walk the halls of Israeli clinics, check their iPhones in the waiting rooms, and inject themselves with hormones.The exhibit also includes a fifth video piece, “Keening,” in which the figurines — some now shattered — are reimagined as participants in a display of public mourning following last year’s attack.Still from Ruth Patir’s video “Intake,” 2024.Ruth Patir; via Braverman Gallery, Tel AvivRuth Patir, “Petach Tikva (Waiting),” 2024, video still.Ruth Patir; via Braverman Gallery, Tel AvivStill from Ruth Patir’s video, ”(M)otherland,” 2024.Ruth Patir; via Braverman Gallery, Tel AvivWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Trenton Doyle Hancock Learned From Philip Guston

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      The Jewish Museum pairs the Texas artist with a 20th-century master. Together they confront racism with horror — and humor.When Trenton Doyle Hancock discovered the artist Philip Guston, it was a revelation. Hancock had just transferred from junior college in his hometown, Paris, Texas, to nearby East Texas State University. He was taking a printmaking class and working with a haunting photograph he’d made of himself partially cloaked in a white sheet with a noose around his neck. The rope wound around his body, including his semi-bare right arm, which holds up a hammer. Titled “The Properties of the Hammer” (1993), it probed the dark contradictions of being a Black man in America.Hancock’s printmaking teacher, Thomas Seawell, asked if he knew about Philip Guston, the New York School artist. Guston had (very controversially) left behind Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s to make figurative, cartoonish paintings of objects like books and shoes, which hearkened back to the Holocaust, as well as hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. Seawell saw a kinship between Guston’s work and Hancock’s, but Hancock had never heard of Guston. So Seawell lent him a book, and the student fell in love.“The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible,” Hancock, 50, recalled recently. “When you put a colorful toy in front of a child, they want to eat it. That’s how I felt about those paintings: I just wanted to eat them. I didn’t even know you could make work that looked like this. It was totally new to me.”In “The Studio” (1969), Philip Guston’s hooded protagonist is an artist painting his own effigy. The artist was exploring “what would it be like to be evil?” Trenton Doyle Hancock recalled: “The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible.” The Estate of Philip Guston; via Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkIf you’ve never had the urge to eat a painting, you’re not alone, but meeting Hancock or seeing his art helps make that impulse understandable. He is a voracious consumer of culture, and his work has an intense physicality — in the bodies that are forever bending, stretching and breaking in his images, and in the cutout and collaged surfaces of his paintings. Hancock’s world is a profusion of colors, of media, of characters in his ever-expanding multiverse.His studio in a Houston suburb bears this out. Rooms of the two-story house are devoted to various collections, including sketchbooks dating back to childhood, scraps and detritus (literally dirt swept off the floor of past studios), and plastic bottle caps sorted by color.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Collars, Captured by Camera

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      An exhibit at the Jewish Museum features photos of collars worn by the late Supreme Court justice.Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at an exhibition of photographs of the collars that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore. We’ll also look at a Manhattan Democrat whose City Hall hopes were dashed in 2021 but who is now looking into challenging Mayor Eric Adams in 2025.Kris GravesIn the soft stillness of a museum gallery, you could forget that the photographs on the walls around you were shot under time pressure.Six minutes each, the photographer Elinor Carucci told me.The photographs, on view at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, are haunting, almost three-dimensional images of collars and necklaces that belonged to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More