A lone man steps out of a taxi, walks into a dark, narrow space, takes aim with both hands, and shoots to kill. One can hear as well as see the impact and hear without seeing the cries. His Mohawk haircut announces his savage intentions—and the racism of a man who thinks he knows who are the savages. His victims have no time to ask. I’m going to get him, a voice repeats between agony and hope, only to add himself to the toll of the dead. Yet he, too, has had his shot, and the killer comes at last to a rest, with a bloody hand and his face close to a smile. He has come for a teenage girl who ta ..read more

Henri Cartier-Bresson helped to found Magnum, the authority when it comes to photojournalism, but he also defined art photography for generations as the “decisive moment.” Can the International Center of Photography take one last step, from representation to abstraction? Not exactly, but change comes from an unlikely source. Robert Rauschenberg, rarely a photographer and hardly a formalist, turns a stairwell into a study in black and white. The steps themselves approach Modernism’s grid. When I reviewed “ICP at 50” in March, I promised to return to the story of how public and private were hard ..read more

Mary Lovelace O’Neal left her teaching job at Berkeley in 2006, for a studio in Mexico. It would not be my choice, but she can stand the heat. She can always retreat in her imagination to New York at midnight, when the sky is black and everything is cool. Black for her is definitely a color, and it animates some lively figures darting across the night as well. Just to speak of it as her ground belies how light they are on their feet. It embodies her own blackness as well. Her latest, at Marianne Boesky through May 4, includes Round Midnight, after Thelonius Monk in jazz, and Bright Lights Big ..read more

Si Lewen was a survivor, and the price of survival was to relive the Holocaust again and again. It was a price he was more than willing to pay. Lewen relived it sixty-three times in one work alone, the drawings of The Parade—and again in the canvases that he called his Ghosts. A parade can itself mean a procession of events from which there is no escape, like a parade of disasters, his gallery compares Ghosts to shrouds, at James Cohan through April 27. The very fact of repetition can characterize a nightmare, much as Arthur Jafa replays the horrific final shootings in Taxi Driver in his lates ..read more

To pick up from last time on the fate of abstract art, sixty years ago two views of painting faced off. You know them well. Art had to be big, bold, and new, the mark of the artist on a scale that no one gesture could ever comprehend. Or art had to be rigor, geometry, and object, where, people said, what you see is what you get. Of course, the second is the point of view of Minimalism and post-painterly abstraction, the first of color-field painting, but the argument and the tension go back further still, to Abstract Expressionism itself. And then, too, there was a third point of view. Who nee ..read more

Grace Carney cannot get enough of women. Her show’s title insists on it, thrice over, with “girlgirlgirl.” You just may not notice them right away or see them all at once, at P.P.O.W. through February 24, and excuse me for another late post. She deserved your and my fuller attention. Her stained colors command attention all by themselves, at least for a moment, and continue to reward attention after that. They recall an era when color-field painting alone sufficed to go big. Still, they temper their breathless good cheer with female bodies in the present. They invite one to ask when drawing be ..read more

Judy Chicago ends her retrospective with other women. It could hardly be otherwise, when her best-known work, The Dinner Party, relied on the assistance of four hundred. With its place settings for thirty-nine more, it sought to span recorded history as well. No surprise, then, if she devotes a full floor of her retrospective to women across the centuries and across the arts, at the New Museum. It could hardly be otherwise, when she titles it “Herstory,” through March 3. And yes, it is shameful that I am posting this late, but at least the review in full was always online. For her, a women’s ..read more

Cauleen Smith could have even a New Yorker nostalgic for Southern California. That may sound like a tall order, although the sensation may last all of fifteen minutes, but Smith will make you feel right at home, recently at 52 Walker. And I work this together with a recent report on immersive video by Mary Lucier as a longer review and my latest upload. Smith, too, shows how a multichannel video can and cannot encompass a life, but will one fall for the illusion or pierce it? Is this really the video of a lifetime? Smith sets out plush sofas—so comfortable that you may get up only to be sure t ..read more

It was never easy to take in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo himself labored beneath the ceiling on scaffolding of his own design, while struggling to reach the figures still taking shape overhead. “Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel” in 2017 brought thirty-four photographs to the World Trade Center PATH station—on their way to a second showing at the Garden State Plaza in New Jersey. Maybe, just maybe, it brought with it a closer approach to the art. Still not close enough? Andrew Witkin lines a wall with images, so that there is no craning your head, but also no dispelling the mystery ..read more

“Sex and Death” may sound like a Woody Allen film, with all his surfeit of certainty and irony. But no, it is still life by Rachael Catharine Anderson, not in the least weighed down by either one. All she wants, as a work’s title puts it, is Space for Thought. She finds it, too, but in the space of a painting—a space that grows more shallow and suggestive the more you look. She might have taken the gallery’s own narrow space on Houston Street and compressed it further. It has room all the same for things that refuse to die, at Signs and Symbols through April 13. Anderson has done her level be ..read more