Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I am Me
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) is a major figure in the history of German Expressionism, yet despite her importance to art history, Modersohn-Becker’s work has never before been the subject of a museum retrospective in the United States. While her paintings and drawings have appeared in group shows at museums and galleries, and there is even a Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in her hometown of Bremen, “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I Am Me” organized by Neue Galerie New York and the Art Institute of Chicago marks the first full-scale presentation devoted to the artist in this country.
In the course of her brief career – which was cut short at the young age of 31 because of a postpartum embolism – Modersohn-Becker produced more than 700 paintings and over 1,000 drawings. She is acclaimed for the many self-portraits she created, including the first nude self-portraits known to have been made by a woman. Many of these works focused on her pregnancy, another first among Western women artists. The artist first became known in part through her letters and diaries, including correspondence with her close friend, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
2. Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut
This exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum is situated at the intersection of art and psychiatry. For the first time in the United States the the legacy of Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles (1912–1994).
After fleeing the Nationalist government of Franco amidst the Spanish Civil War, Tosquelles arrived in 1940 at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in Southern France, where he devised a series of revolutionary psychiatric practices that came to be called “institutional psychotherapy,” predicated on non-hierarchical relations between patients, doctors, manual laborers on site, neighboring communities, and outsiders.
During the German occupation of France, this “asylum-village” also became a refuge for political dissidents and intellectuals associated with the artistic avant-garde, whom were exposed to the prodigious artistic output of its patients—among them Auguste Forestier, Marguerite Sirvins, and Aimable Jayet. These very artworks prompted French artist Jean Dubuffet to expand upon the notion of “art brut” in 1945 and contribute to the development of his collection.
The exhibition includes artworks by European artists associated with Tosquelles and Dubuffet’s concurrent aspirations to “cure” mental health and art institutions alike, as well as films and archival documents excavating Saint-Alban’s outsized but subterranean influence on French intellectual life in the 20th century, featuring Antonin Artaud, Paul Éluard, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Oury.
3. MEXICAN AND GUATEMALAN MASKS
There has not been a major Mexican and Guatemalan Dance mask exhibition in New York City let alone in this country since the 1980s. This has left an unfortunate gap in the understanding of this American art form. There are still Yaqui ceremonial dances, for instance, in Arizona during Easter week. It is a vital changing, living form. It has taken almost forty years for Cavin-Morris Gallery to gather this collection of carvings together and reintroduce these masked traditions to the public in an authentic and qualitatively high presentation.
The oldest wooden Mexican mask on record is in the American Museum of Natural History and was carved by an Olmec artisan (1200 – 400 BCE). There were undoubtably many wooden masks, but wood perishes easily in the humid lowlands of Central America. Surviving masks dating from the early 20th century are of venerable age. We include several Pre-Colombian sculptures of heads and faces for reference including a skull mask from Colima culture (300 – 900 CE) and a stone Chontal mask (350 – 100 BCE).
Mexican and Guatemalan masks have canons of form and content, but they are open to idiosyncratic styles of carvers, and like some Himalayan masks, are open to their personal styles and expressions.
The masks in this exhibition date from the beginning of the 20th century to the third quarter of the 20th century. Stylistically, they range from variations on classic human faces, to bull-devils, to anthropomorphic jaguars. They come from several private American collections.
These masks contain the syncretic history of the Americas, often combining Native American, European and African iconographies. Some have shamanistic references and some record colonial histories. Many of these dances, each with a rich variety of characters, are still being danced today in Mexico and Guatemala.
We view this exhibition as an important introduction to a deep abiding culture, ancient in roots and still vital in the present--a truly American art form.
NEW
4. Meet me by the lake
Childhood summers spent communing with friends and family; Parents stuffing bags, loading up the car, and driving to
some lakeside destination away from town. Once there, weekenders join a cohort of familiar faces and new ones, who’d
either camp in tents and trailers or post up in some nondescript rental.
On view at CLEARING, This exhibition brings together artists across mediums from painting to sculpture to drawing. There are those who
explore paint for paint’s sake, either gesturally or energetically. Others who challenge the picture plane or else double
down on the system of images. Floating signifiers remain open to the individual’s own interpretation. Alliances are
naturally formulated this way. Objects emerge out of fantasy or material fetishism, the exploration of thingness or an
enchanted assembly of aspects.
The invisible tissue that connects these artists is slippery. Instead, the gallery space offers a place for friends and
strangers to reinforce or form new alliances, frictions, and dialogues.
LAST CHANCE
5. Harun Farocki: Inextinguishable Fire
Closes August 16!
Harun Farocki occupies a singular place in the history of post-war cinema, using filmic means to dissect how images uphold or unsettle political power. His five-decade career resulted in over 100 works—from agitprop shorts to multichannel installations— that mount a trenchant critique of the ethics of seeing. Farocki was among the most prolific filmmakers to emerge from West Germany in the 1960s, coming of age alongside stars of the New German Cinema like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders. Yet he forged his own style that deconstructed the genres of documentary and narrative alike, mobilizing found imagery to extract meaning that the archive would otherwise occlude. Farocki’s fourth solo exhibition at Greene Naftali treats depictions of war and their distancing effects, through a cluster of works that trace the seepage of the military industrial complex into every sphere of life.
