The Best in Art, From a Joan Mitchell Retrospective to LA’s New High-Profile Galleries

Blockbuster: Jasper Johns ‘Mind/Mirror’, Whitney Museum of American Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art

If Abraham was the father of three world religions, then Jasper Johns could be considered patriarch of at least that many branches of contemporary art: pop, minimalism and conceptualism, for starters. He’s such a giant in the field that simultaneously filling two major museums with one comprehensive retrospective didn’t feel like the least bit of a stretch.

With more than 500 works on display, the exhibition did a deep dive into Johns’s practice, from his early days in New York City searching for a path beyond the dominant abstract expressionism to his breakthrough Flag painting, which blurred the line between object and image, and on to his middle years’ fascination with crosshatches and then to his late-period exploration of Rubin vases (which double as faces seen in profile), ladders and other idiosyncratic symbols. His famed “Maps,” “Targets” and “Numbers” were there, as was his compact bronze of nearly twin Ballantine Ale cans—a cheeky response to Willem de Kooning’s quip that an artist could give gallerist Leo Castelli two beer cans and he could sell them.

Perhaps most poignant were the works Johns, who turned 92 in May, has made in recent years. Riffing on a pair of old photographs—one of artist Lucian Freud, the other of an American soldier in Vietnam, both men covering their faces in torment—Johns contemplates mortality and, to borrow the name of one of the series, the inevitable “Regrets” that arise as life wanes.

Above: Jasper Johns, Map, 1961, oil on canvas

Auction: Macklowe Collection, Sotheby’s

The Broads, the Rubells, the Raleses: Married couples have assembled many of postwar and contemporary art’s most acclaimed collections as a kind of conjugal ritual. In those three cases, the fruits of their marital hobby spurred the founding of important museums.

Not so the treasures amassed by Harry and Linda Macklowe. When the estranged bickering billionaires could not come to terms on the division of their Richters, Warhols and Rothkos, a fed-up judge ordered the trove go on the block.

The first installment brought a $676 million payday—a record for a single-owner sale—when Sotheby’s sold the 35 lots in November (part two was slated for May 16). The average price achieved was $19.3 million, with four pieces—by Rothko, Giacometti, Pollock and Twombly—topping $50 million. The sums were reflective of the museum-quality works, selected over the Macklowes’ 57-year marriage, dealers have said, primarily by Linda, a trustee of both the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The bitter exes attended the auction to witness the symbolic dissolution of their union—separately, of course.

Above: Andy Warhol, Sixteen Jackies, 1964, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, in 16 parts

Online Series: Peter Fetterman, ‘The Power of Photography’

Back when the world shut down in 2020, Peter Fetterman, a longtime photography collector and dealer with a gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., began sharing one image a day in an e-newsletter he dubbed “The Power of Photography.” Accompanying the daily photograph would be a brief ode to the artist at hand, whether a personal memory or a case for the photographer’s contributions to the medium. Each installment served as a sorely needed moment of beauty in a sorrowful time.

There were portraits of the famous (Lincoln, Churchill, McCartney and Lennon, Muhammad Ali) and of regular folks, including a stunning Edward S. Curtis 1904 image of a Hopi man. From Alfred Eisenstaedt’s vintage shot of an ice-skating waiter (wearing tails, no less) in St. Moritz and Ruth Bernhard’s graceful nude to Miho Kajioka’s ghostlike peacock and Paul Caponigro’s exquisite pears, the memorable works are too plentiful to enumerate. But Fetterman, who, as of press time, continues to bestow on his lucky contact list a daily treasure—his total is just shy of 700—has compiled 120 of them into a new book, The Power of Photography.

Above: Neil Leifer, Muhammad Ali vs Sonny Liston, 1965

Gallery Show: Mickalene Thomas, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Lévy Gorvy

Pandemic safety protocols affected not only how museums and galleries exhibited art but also, in some cases, how artists made it. Mickalene Thomas was accustomed to working with live models in her Brooklyn studio, where she would often build sets with a groovy ’70s-rec-room vibe as a backdrop for her stylish photographs, collages and paintings of women of color. When authorities urged all but essential workers to stay home, she turned to her cache of vintage Jet calendars, featuring Black women in various states of undress and come-hither poses. For the striking, pop-y canvases she showed at Lévy Gorvy’s New York gallery in the fall, she collaged silkscreens of the pinups, oil and acrylic paints and her signature rhinestones and glitter. Thomas’s women are seductive, yes, but they’re also bold and firmly in control, much like their creator.

New York was just the first installment of a series of Thomas exhibitions that unfolded in Lévy Gorvy’s four galleries on three continents. London debuted more Jet paintings, Paris featured canvases and a video installation from her Civil Rights–oriented “Resist” series, while Hong Kong’s presentation hinged on a more abstracted portrait sequence that nonetheless continues to address the historical omission of Black women from the canon by commanding our rapt attention.

Above: Mickalene Thomas, March 1976, 2021, rhinestones, glitter, acrylic and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel with mahogany frame

City: Los Angeles

With first-rate art schools, a thriving gallery scene, an ever-growing corps of collectors and scores of resident Very Important Artists, LA has long been a bona fide art capital. Still, this past year marked a turning point, as seemingly every gallery that wasn’t there already suddenly felt the need for a SoCal outpost.

Pace Gallery, David Zwirner, Sean Kelly and Lisson Gallery all announced they’d be taking spaces there. Even smaller New York operations, including the Hole, Sargent’s Daughters and Shrine, are migrating westward, joining powerhouses Hauser & Wirth and Gagosian, which already have a significant LA presence, as well as a galaxy of homegrown businesses with international reputations, such as Blum & Poe, Night Gallery and David Kordansky.

Pace sped up its expansion by absorbing the well-respected Kayne Griffin Gallery, whose founders, Maggie Kayne and Bill Griffin, will now run the LA branch. CEO Marc Glimcher tells Robb Report that though several Pace artists had relationships with LA galleries, about 75 did not. “In order to be global,” he says, “you need to be local.”

Above: Pace Gallery’s newest outpost, on LA’s South La Brea Avenue 

Retrospective: Joan Mitchell, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The groundbreaking abstract expressionists who dominated the New York scene in the 1940s and ’50s were, by and large, a hard-drinking, testosterone-oozing lot who sucked the oxygen out of any room. Although Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons and other women played key roles as patrons and gallerists, the men didn’t leave much space for the female artists exploring the gestural style. But the supremely talented Joan Mitchell was right in the thick of it, exhibiting with the big boys, earning a top-notch reputation and selling her glorious, wall-size canvases to major museums. Even after moving to France permanently in 1959, she remained a vital part of the ab ex elite until her death in 1992.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art paid tribute this past year with a retrospective that highlighted her personal, refined brand of abstraction, which features graceful, swirling brushstrokes rich in color against a white background, with references that range from nature to verse (her mother was a poet) and from memories to music. Many of the roughly 80 works had not been on public view in decades. Co-organized with the Baltimore Museum of Art, the exhibition is on view there until August 14 and is due to arrive at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in October.

Above: Joan Mitchell, Petit Matin, 1982, oil on canvas.

Poetic Justice: Frida Kahlo, Sotheby’s

For most of her adult life, Frida Kahlo lived in the shadow of her charismatic older husband, muralist Diego Rivera. The Mexican couple’s talent was unquestionable; their marriage, tortured. So when her 1949 self-portrait Diego y yo, depicting Rivera’s face superimposed on her forehead as she cries, sold for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s in November—setting a record for not only the revered painter but for all Latin American artists—there was a collective cheer of appreciation. The price achieved was more than three times that of the previous record holder. As if Kahlo needed any more vindication, the artist she left in the dust was none other than Rivera. Nearly 60 years after Kahlo’s premature death, it’s time for her to dry those tears.

Above: Frida Kahlo, Diego y yo (Diego and I), 1949, oil on Masonite

Museum Renovation: Dia Chelsea

Dia, the institution founded in 1974 and fueled by the fabulous de Menil wealth, has long occupied a crucial niche of the art world, offering long-term support to a meticulously selected roster of artists who often dream of undertaking wildly ambitious, decidedly uncommercial projects. Think Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field in the New Mexico desert or James Turrell’s never-quite-completed Roden Crater in Arizona. Throughout its history, Dia has also demonstrated a prescience—or perhaps influence—when it comes to real estate, having moved its primary New York exhibition program to the Chelsea neighborhood in 1987, when the city’s galleries were still colonizing SoHo.

In 2003, Dia Beacon opened in a renovated Nabisco factory upstate, and its nearly 300,000 square feet overshadowed the two Chelsea spaces, which closed the following year. Eventually, Dia began to rebuild its presence in the area, and a renovation that bowed last year, joining three buildings in a design by Architecture Research Office, managed to create galleries that are both large in scale and intimate in ambience. With exposed brick walls, concrete floors and a flood of natural light, they’re an ideal setting for the kind of minimalist, meditative works Dia favors, such as the engrossing sculptural and sonic installations by Camille Norment on view until January. The new Dia even resuscitated its book shop, a beloved haunt of its previous incarnation.

Installation view of Camille Norment, Untitled, 2022. Museumgoers are invited to sit on the wooden-plank sculptures and commune with the microtonal music.

Lifetime Achievement: Faith Ringgold

She made narrative paintings when it was decidedly unfashionable, incorporated sewing and quilting—once denigrated as women’s crafts—into her work, unblinkingly took on racism as a primary subject and loudly protested the exclusionary white establishment in charge of museums. Faith Ringgold has been a maverick.

Long overlooked, the 91-year-old native New Yorker, whose powerful retrospective at the New Museum in Manhattan electrified art lovers this year (Faith Ringgold: American People travels to San Francisco’s De Young Museum in July), is now front and center in the minds of critics, viewers and generations of Black artists who have succeeded her. For Ringgold, her studio practice has always been intrinsically linked to her activism. “They’re the same,” she tells Robb Report. “It’s the way I think; it’s me.”

In the 1960s, she defied bigotry—as well as sexism on the part of Black male artists—and confronted the nation’s woeful race relations on both her canvases and the picket line. One of her most famous works, American People Series #20: Die, which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, renders an interracial riot in a bloody mural that alludes to Picasso’s Guernica. But Ringgold also depicted Black joy, as seen in Groovin’ High’s dance floor full of happy couples. “I tried to portray my world and how I saw it,” she says.

Ringgold made one of her most compelling series after fruitlessly trying for 12 years to get her memoir published. Undeterred, she created “French Collection,” a sequence of a dozen sewn and painted quilts that tell the story of Ringgold’s alter ego, a young Black American woman who migrates to Paris in the 1920s. (Ringgold did just that, with her two small daughters and mother in tow, in 1961.) In neat handwriting along the borders, “Willia Marie” narrates the tale. From an image of Willia Marie and little Black girls dancing jubilantly in the Louvre beneath the gaze of Mona Lisa to one in which she reclines, nude, in a pose reminiscent of Manet’s celebrated Olympia—not the prostitute’s Black maid—Ringgold stakes claim to the historically white male canon.

Over her more than 60-year career, Ringgold has worked in 16 different media, from prints to sculpture; Tar Beach and her other children’s books remain classics. And that memoir no one would publish? Little, Brown released We Flew Over the Bridge in 1995. As Ringgold puts it in what could be her motto, “You have to be persistent.”

Art Above: Faith Ringgold, American People Series #15: Hide Little Children, 1966, oil on canvas