Review of reviews: Art

Exhibition of the week

Richard Prince: Spiritual America

Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Through Jan. 9, 2008

Richard Prince has based his career on appropriating the work of others, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Yet he’s a true American original, who “has never met a piece of contemporary Americana he couldn’t use.” Images from advertisements, pinups of Hollywood stars, New Yorker and Playboy cartoons, “customized checks with images of SpongeBob SquarePants or Jimi Hendrix”—all are duplicated, distorted, and dismantled in ways that suggest a culture out of joint. The impressive thing about Prince’s art of

the past 30 years is how accurately even his earliest works dissect our current celebrity-obsessed, reality-TV-crazed age. A new retrospective of photographs, paintings, and sculpture at the Guggenheim reflects a life of “nonstop production, of collecting, editing, and honing, of sifting and shifting styles and techniques, and getting better all the time.” The restlessness of Prince’s imagination is summed up in his “joke” paintings, which overflow with stenciled, sub–Borscht Belt one-liners, one after another. “I went to see a psychiatrist,” one reads. “He said, ‘Tell me everything.’ I did, and now he’s doing my act.”

“Hey, did you hear the one about Frank Lloyd Wright modeling the Guggenheim after a toilet?” said Charlie Finch in Artnet.com. “It’s about to overflow with crap.” Sorry, but Prince’s works are bad jokes about bad jokes. He trades in the same debased cultural imagery that his art allegedly parodies, and thus his “biker chicks and Marlboro Men are flat, soulless, and dyspeptic.” But ultimately the joke’s on us. I honestly don’t understand why curators display these works or why collectors pay so much for art so clearly “destined for the discard pile.”

Prince isn’t as bad as all that, said Daniel Kunitz in The New York Sun. The worst of his works can be “soulless,” but the best tap into something deep in the American vein. Consider his famous “Cowboy” series, which uses images from Marlboro advertisements. “Like almost all of his work, it is at once a celebration—of the romance of the West, of individualism, etc.—and a subtle, vinegary jab.” Prince understands high culture as well as low, and steals tricks from Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Willem de Kooning. His most recent works even forgo the jokes. Photographs of rural roads and highways in upstate New York, “they are some of the most visually satisfying works in a show that feeds the mind much more than it does the eye.” Looking at them, you can’t help wishing this inveterate joker would more often take his art this seriously.

Where to buy…

A select exhibition in a private gallery

Manuel Alvarez Bravo:

Ojos en los ojos

Rose Gallery, Santa Monica, Calif.

What an artist rejects can tell you a lot. Manuel Alvarez Bravo displayed about 1,000 of his photographs in his long life, which ended at the age of 100, in 2002. On the evidence of prints developed for The Eyes in His Eyes, part of a project to catalogue the work Bravo kept to himself, his rejects would constitute a decent career for a lesser artist. Many portray street life in his native Mexico, but all display an austere, modernist fascination with form. The finest—black-and-whites of simple objects, such as peanuts, hats, or industrial machinery, and a few uncanny color still-lifes—should send viewers to the previously published oeuvre with sharpened eyes. 2525 Michigan Ave., through Oct. 31. Prices range from $5,000 to $29,000

Harry Callahan: Eleanor

High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Through Dec. 9

Now 91, Eleanor Callahan looks like just another grandma, said Catherine Fox in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But art lovers know her as the ever-changeable muse of her husband, Harry Callahan, “one of the masters of modern photography,” who died in 1999. “In his many memorable photographs, she is an unselfconscious beauty who radiates a serene and womanly presence.” They met in Detroit in 1933, and Callahan captured her image in countless photographs taken over the next 50 years. Pregnant. Under water. With their daughter, Barbara. “Depending on his directions and his particular interests, she could be nothing more than a tiny silhouette in an alley, a foil to create a sense of scale, or a sensuous odalisque.” Some 125 of these images, many never exhibited before, are now on display at Atlanta’s High Museum.

Often the exacting Callahan was experimenting formally in these photographs, said Carol Kino in The New York Times. He needed an impossibly patient model. Thus, many of the photographs offer little insight into their relationship but plenty into Callahan’s art. Often her body dissolves into abstraction, a shape with which to compose compelling shadows. “Callahan was a master of the multiple exposure; in many shots his wife’s body is layered with branches or water, so that she seems to meld with nature itself.” But the impersonal nature of many of these works makes one “surprisingly sensual nude,” taken in Chicago in 1948 or ’49, a special treat. “Her body, from breast to feet, is shown in a foreshortened close-up, as she sprawls languidly on a rumpled bed; in the corner you see the very edge of her hand, with one red-varnished pinky, and her wedding ring.”