Dark Clouds at the Phillips

 

Group shows are challenging and a group show with 48 artists is daunting. In preparation for my visit I scoured the web and social media for more information about their backgrounds. Fortunately, it is a new world where each artist has detailed bios, CVs, and works readily available at the touch of a button. They were selected from 1,500 entries after an open call, and have a tight or loose link to the DMV (Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia) area in keeping with one of The Phillips Collection's missions to support local artists. The juried exhibition Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise is divided into five rather abstract themes: Gazing, Archiving, Challenging, Processing and Experimenting. 

The poetic title is followed by a reference to a song from Chico Buarque, a beloved singer who fought oppression during the Brazilian dictatorship, though in the United States he is best known among Samba and Bossa Nova aficionados. Setting a partisan undertone, the exhibition's introductory panel casts the November 2024 U.S. presidential election as a "significant political shift", showcasing only works created after the event. Seven pieces are displayed in the foyer on the third floor, with only one from a male artist, reflecting the selection heavily geared toward women, who make up three-quarters of the selected candidates. In diverse media and style, the sample of works covers an array of subjects, from personal struggles to international crises. Pregnancy, chronic pain, colonialism, and war inspire them as they take us to the Philippines, Myanmar, and Gaza. A convoluted wall text attempts to connect the pieces only to confuse the message. 

A children's song leads to the next gallery which contains an immersive installation. Visitors can sit on a bench to watch a video of a row of anonymous women wearing hijabs, or view a chalkboard covered with inscriptions in Farsi and their translation in English. Classroom Solidarities: Jin Jiyan Azadi (2022-26), the second prize winner, is an ongoing work by Mojdeh Rezaeipour and also includes  a wall covered by analog collages of classrooms and schoolgirls gesturing in protest to complete the display about women/womxn rights. The visitor's participation is encouraged through pencils, cards, and a fake mailbox to share thoughts about the impact of the international movement "Woman, Life, Freedom". Filled with heavy thoughts, I walked into the twin gallery featuring a formal display of eleven works selected to explore "matter", taken in the literal and figurative sense. The media stay traditional: watercolor, acrylic, oil, charcoal, and yarn, alongside an experiment with cyanotype. The predominant subject involves self-healing through art following traumatic events. It includes a multi-self-portrait of the only transgender artist featured in the show expressing dysphoria through art in their search for identity. Finding "Who am I?" becomes the focus.

 By now, the five themes announced in the press release are lost in the verbose comments of the wall texts and the labels next to each work. About twenty of them occupy the main gallery divided by a partition. The subjects are varied, ranging from sexism to climate change, identity struggles, capitalism, dementia... Untitled Windows Series 21 (2024), Erin Fostel's drawings on drafting film, is an empty urban landscape, mysterious, dreamy and poetic, an architectural composition of superimposed planes melting into one another. A nearby beachscape also captured my attention. Mark Armbruster's photograph overlaid with painted charts, is a sobering reminder of destructive coastal erosion. From a distance, I recognized the centuries-old oak trees from City Park in New Orleans. Alexandra Silverthorne symbolically soaked a photograph of the giant trees in Mississippi River water revealing dry cracked soil at their feet and underlines the precarity of their future. Artists grouped under the label 'diaspora' take us on a journey from Iran to Mexico via Chile, India, Lebanon, with works inspired by the cultures of their homeland through ancestral techniques, and reignite the debate between fine art and craft. In the next gallery, the mixed-media work by Cianne Fragione, Meriggi e Ombre / Waves Chatter / Tangle  (2025) tells a story of hard physical labor: heavy canvas is worked to build a knotted construction next to an abandoned, rusting industrial artefact. Above on the wall, a small painting of a simple yellow shack set against a Mediterranean blue sky completes the assemblage, alluding to Arte Povera. I found its simplicity and rawness compelling. 

Across the room, what appears to be a large snake orange and black climbing the wall from floor to ceiling is a scroll from Kei Ito. Sungazing Scroll (2024), the first prize winner, is a performance of sorts, a recording of 108 of the artist's breaths captured on C-type photographic paper later exposed to the sun. The photogram aligns with Ito's practice which is deeply inspired by his family history and aims at denouncing the use of nuclear weapons. In 2024, the Japanese-American artist participated in the 30th birthday of The Kreeger Museum, a Washington D.C. local staple, with two daunting chemigrams of charred human remains left by the WWII bombings in Japan. Other works include a quilt of a drowning Statue of Liberty losing her crown, a poem in Arabic swirling into a black-and-red abstraction, and notes from an artist's mother, written during her psychiatric internment. The show concludes on a thunderous note with Emily Francisco's installation 2025 July 9: A Thunderstorm // When Systems Collide (2025), a dramatic grand finale of tornado warnings, rumbles and flashing lights.  

The art marathon can take an emotional toll on the audience, surrounded by mostly hopeless, joyless works reckoning with personal trauma, human or natural catastrophes, and overall existential angst through various media, styles and techniques. Overwhelmed by the variety of cultural, geographical, historical, and political references, the viewer may just walk past, their capacity for empathy dulled by the sheer number of works. Early on, the curators make their viewpoint clear, underscored by an introduction that alludes to a "spirit of defiance and hope... despite political oppression,"  borrowing the words of musician Chico Buarque and looming large over the selection of the works. The number and diversity of entrants reflect the rich artistic landscape of the community leaving us to wonder about the remaining 1,400+ participants! For me, the best artists are those who succeed in moving me, even if I can't personally relate to their subject matter. Ultimately each visitor will have a different experience at the show. As a final thought, art can be a vehicle for activism, but cannot be reduced to it. Art is more than activism.

Photographs by the author

Alexandra Chiou "Becoming Light" (2025)

Pamela Crocket "Sub-Cortical 2" (2025)

Kei Ito "Sungazing Scroll" (2024), First Prize Winner

Se Jong Cho "Suspended Semiosis: Tile Mountains" (2024)

Miró in America

 Miró in America is the title of an exhibition curated by the famous art critic and historian Barbara Rose at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1982. Almost fifty years later Miró in the United States, a travelling exhibition which premiered at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona just opened at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The Catalan painter visited the United States seven times during his lifetime starting in 1947 when he was invited to work on a mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati. He was already famous, preceded by his works which crossed the Atlantic as early as the 20's introducing Surrealism to an American audience through a small circle of collectors and art critics. With a first solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse gallery in 1932 and a first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, his influence in America kept growing as he intermingled socially and professionally with American artists in Paris or during his sojourns in the United States. The exhibition underlines the fertile exchanges between American artists and Miró through seventy three works from more than thirty artists and includes paintings, sculptures, a video and archival material.

Set in a niche along the staircase leading to the third floor, Personage with Birds (1970) a late bronze sculpture from Miró, model cast of a 55-foot steel public sculpture erected in Houston, is followed higher up by a group of three decorated wooden sticks, derisory portraits of royalties (His Majesty the King, Her Majesty the Queen and His Highness the Prince, 1974), alluding to the Spanish political climate at the end of Franco's dictatorship. Gently swaying under the stairwell oculus, two "mobiles" from Alexander Calder and his wire portrait of Miró at the entrance of the show highlight the lifelong friendship between the artists who first met in Paris in 1928.

Two totemic white sculptures from Louise Bourgeois take the center stage of the main gallery with, in the background along the wall, a scaled down facsimile of an oil painting titled Mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel, Cincinnati (1947). It leaves little room to view three major early works from Miró on the opposite side of the gallery. Le Renversement (1924) translated as Somersault was Miró's first painting seen in the United States during the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1927. The floating drawings on a monochrome yellow background are rich in symbols and tell of a spiritual journey with a falling horse, reference to Saint Paul's conversion, a mustachioed stick figure ancestor of emojis shouting exclamations of surprise, a flaming sacred heart at the bottom right and above, the Japanese inspired sketch of a steep mountain with an erupting volcano on top. In the middle of the painting, a tuft of green grass evokes a restful place like Montroig, Miró's retreat in Spain. Alongside, Painting (Fratellini) (1927) features scattered clownish profiles on an intense blue background divided by a thin black line, a life line? Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird (1926) was shown at Miró's first museum retrospective at the MoMA in 1941. The cartoonish painting filled with Dada-esque humor and irony left the audience perplexed at first. The three paintings were made during a difficult period for the starving artist subject to hallucinations who talked about his "dark nights of the soul". 

Prominently displayed in the next gallery side by side, Still Life with Old Shoe (1937) from Miró and Garden in Sochi (c.1943) from Arshile Gorky reunite two artists who claimed a mutual appreciation of each other's work. Gorky's reinterpretation of Miró's composition, by substituting his father's Armenian slippers to the old shoe and his mother's butter-churn to Gorky's gin bottle, is a way to pay homage to his distant mentor he finally met in 1947, shortly before his death by suicide. Works from Alice Trumble-Mason, Sonja Sekula and Perle Fine put the spotlight on three less known female artists, loosely inspired by Miró's surrealism, veering toward geometric abstract and abstract expressionism. On a pedestal, Contoured Playground (1941), the bronze model of a project for a playground in Central Park from Isamu Noguchi reminds of Miró's interest in architecture.

The twin gallery is filled with the Constellations (Jan.1940-Sept. 1941), a series of 23 gouache and oil on paper perfectly aligned on the walls, unfortunately obscured by the glare of the protective glass. A closer look at the paintings transforms the display into a metaphysical adventure, a plunge into the realm of dreams and the universe. Each painting deserves a long contemplation to read its content filled with birds, stars, suns, biomorphic shapes, ladders, escapes from a brutal world. Started in Varengeville at the onset of WWII with ten paintings, the series was completed in Spain where Miró fled the German invasion. During his stay in his country of birth then under Franco's ruling, he stayed completely anonymous. Meanwhile the small paintings travelled in a diplomatic pouch all the way to the Pierre Matisse gallery for a landmark exhibition in 1945. They were received with enthusiasm, bought by collectors and museums, and dispersed. In 1959 pochoir prints of the originals were authorized by Miró and the set in the room is one of 150 of a limited-edition portfolio which includes poems inspired by the paintings, Proses Parallèles by André Breton. 

Abstract expressionism, surrealism, color field, the collection of works in the next galleries reunites more than twenty artists, almost half of them women. The selection of tightly hung paintings and their wall texts makes for a challenging viewing. Spanning twenty years starting in 1947, the works represent the Gotha of abstract expressionism lead by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Willem and Helen de Kooning, Franz Kline.... Their intertwined social and professional connections with Miró are sometimes tenuous for artists like Grace Hartigan or Joan Mitchell. In contrast, Lee Krasner, an early admirer, proclaimed after her visit at MoMA in 1941 "I was mad for Miró" and after seeing the Constellations at the Pierre Matisse gallery in 1947 described each painting as "a little miracle". Here, we can find one of her Little Image paintings (1947-48), a series inspired by the Constellations. History is reclaimed with Illusion of Solidity (1945) from Janet Sobel, an underrated artist who impressed Pollock with her "all-over" paintings and inspired his drip technique. Dreamy works from Theodoros Stamos and William Baziotes side by side fit in Miró's world, ... or Paul Klee through Miró? While frequenting Atelier 17 in New York City Louise Nevelson interacted with Miró, so did Louise Bourgeois who already knew him in Paris. Nevelson is represented by a modest sized sculpture featuring a star on top as a lackluster wall sculpture from Herbert Ferber with sun, moon and stars from 1956 is given a prime spot next to a the notable painting from Miró The Red Sun (1948). The Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo with his cosmic imagery collected Miró's work and Adolph Gottlieb found inspiration in Miró's biomorphic shapes for his symbolic pictographs so did Barnett Newman for  Pagan Void (1946), a rare pre-zip painting. A 1945 painting by Mark Rothko shows the heavy influence of Miró, becoming elusive in his work from the early 60's. Works from younger admirers like Helen Frankenthaler and her husband Robert Motherwell show a more subtle Miroesque influence as, exposed to other aesthetic movements, they developed their own style. Miró is present throughout the show, his sculptures and paintings smothered by the busy display of uneven pieces. A vestibule at the end of the gallery holds an assortment of small paintings made in 1972 in which Miró embraces action painting while keeping his favored themes. His self-portrait (1937-1960) nearby faces three shadow portraits (1947) and a video from the experimental photographer and filmmaker Len Lye crammed in the small space with the addition of a glass case filled with archival material.

With a heavy involvement from the Fundació Joan Miró which gathered 130 works for the show in Barcelona, the exhibition at times feels somewhat biased or at least stretches the visual dialogue between the works. It also limits the impact of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, André Breton, Salvador Dalí to name a few who also imported Surrealism to the United States. It is undeniable that inspired by the Surrealist poets, Miró created a unique spiritual, poetic language of symbols, pictograms, calligrams, biomorphic shapes, picture-poems, color fields, heavily borrowed by others. In return, he mingled with American artists and incorporated their style and techniques over the fifties and sixties in a cross-pollination with back and forth East-West exchanges. Of opposite character to his Catalan compatriot Dalí, quiet and humble, he saw his career as a painter similar to a peasant's hard labor and did not seek fame. Fame came to him through his works and flourished with his large-scale public art. Two quotes resume his interaction with the United States. Following his first visit he wrote in a letter to his art dealer: "I am in the midst of work after this stay in America, which I loved so much and which gave me new strength and energy" and toward the end of his life: "It was really American painting that inspired me." 

photographs by the author:

Joan Miró "Self-Portrait" (1937-60)

Arshile Gorky "Garden in Sochi" (c.1943)

Joan Miró "The Migratory Bird from the Constellations Series" (1940-41)

Mark Rothko "Untitled" (1945)

Adolph Gottlieb "Vigil" (1948)

View of the exhibition

Rothko, Known and Unknown

 

Two major exhibitions recently opened, ending the year on a high note: Mark Rothko a retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper  at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Both organized in chronological order gather more than one hundred paintings each, some of them rarely seen, selected from renown institutions like the The Phillips Collection, the National Gallery of Art or the Tate, and from private collections. Since my memorable encounter with the artist's work at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2015, I thought Rothko had no secrets for me. My peregrinations allowed me to visit both shows which left me dazzled by the richness of their content.

It would be overreaching and repetitious for me to discuss Rothko's work, subject of numerous analysis by famous art critics and historians, likewise to write a review of the flawless exhibitions organized by experts and top curators. I prefer to look back at my encounter with the paintings of the famous abstract expressionist artist and to assess what resonates within me. To "see" Rothko, I take advice from Michael Findlay who quotes the poet Wallace Stevens in his book Seeing Slowly: Looking at Modern Art in the chapter "Ignorance Is Knowledge?":

                           You must become an ignorant man again

                           And see the sun with an ignorant eye

                           And see it clearly in the idea of it.    

In preparation for my visit, I adopted some sort of mental vacuity to receive the full impact of the paintings. It is a solitary, personal endeavor. I think that Rothko would agree.  

Starting in Paris, I was struck by a self-portrait made in 1936 near the entrance. The thirty-three-year-old artist, somber and enigmatic, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, appears to scrutinize the viewer. Other than this unsettling painting, Rothko's portraits are forgettable as confirmed a few weeks later looking at his works on paper. The figurative urban scenes of the 30's are followed by the often ignored paintings from the early 40's, foundations of his practice. In search of a universal "new myth" he incorporates motives from Greek mythology, then moves to surrealistic dreamscapes as he slowly veers to abstraction with his "Multiforms" until shapes become simple colored blocks floating on limitless monochrome backgrounds filling vertical canvasses. Rothko's practice reaches its acme in the 50's and the display of such a great number of works from the period is enthralling. Being surrounded by the paintings radiating in the semi-darkness is a unique experience. Each of them stirs deep emotions through a gamut of moody blues, elating yellows, oranges, reds, a symphony of colors mostly joyous until we reach the display of  darker paintings introducing black, wine color, and a room filled with the Seagram Murals travelling from the Tate Modern in London, followed by several "Blackforms". Rothko's attempt to make black glow in the dark to let paintings "generate their own light", a rehearsal for the Rothko Chapel at The Menil Collection, engenders the same feeling of gloom and doom that besets me following my visits at the chapel itself in Houston. Braving a line of visitors, I spent a few minutes in the small gallery in which the Rothko Room from The Phillips Collection is recreated minus one painting. As a frequent visitor of the venue in D.C., I have been able to contemplate the paintings in total serenity time and again. On the highest floor, a unique display assembles iconic sculptures from Giacometti and Rothko's late acrylic paintings (1969-1970) from the Black and Grey series, highlighting the influence of Giacometti's works on the painter. I could not recall seeing these before, but if I had, the uninspired grayish masses under flat black rectangles did not catch my attention. As a final note, three vibrant paintings made in 1967 in the small adjacent gallery remind us that Rothko never renounced the use of colors in his practice. 

Back in Washington, I could not miss the exhibition at the National Gallery even as I thought it might be redundant or worse, disappointing. It was full of surprises. With about a dozen paintings per room, the show unfolds in the same chronological order starting with figurative landscapes, portraits and nudes, providing a glimpse in the nascent artist's career. The wall texts add moving details about Rothko's life and the poor response to his works at the time. The next two rooms are a journey into the artist's surrealist period through a succession of paintings from the mid-40's I had never seen before. Each of them tells a story born from deep connections to mythology, prehistory, a primal world in which the artist searches for a new myth to reach spirituality. I spent some time looking at the biomorphic shapes floating in soft watery colors, savoring their content and the delicate brush strokes. Slowly, the paintings undergo some kind of purification as they become more abstract and the next works mirror those on canvas from the 50's, although smaller in size precluding a total immersion in the landscapes of colors. As we progress, the tones get darker and on the next floor, we reach the Brown and Grays series on paper echoing the Black and Grey series on canvas. Nearby, black paintings slowly appear to glow revealing drips of luminescent paint. The effect is working this time, possibly due to a careful lighting? Close by, in a separate space, a life size photograph of Rothko walking toward a huge easel gives a concrete idea of the painter's physical labor, and a few unfinished paintings on paper reveal Rothko's technique. Moving on, the last room is another delightful surprise, "an ethereal suite of paintings on paper with soft, cloudlike edges surrounded by margins of pale paper". The wall text gives a perfect description of the paintings, evoking the soft colors of the surrealist period. These late works, contemporary to his Brown and Grays series, close the show on a ravishing note.

"Why paint at all?" The answer is found in these two landmark exhibitions giving an in depth look at the path of Rothko's practice, reflection of his inner and most private life. The artist, a master of colors did not want to be called a colorist. Painting for him is not about beautiful hues, but is a catharsis in his search for the spiritual and his interest in "expressing basic human emotions". We can participate to the artist's journey as he arises a primitive angst common to all of us and translates the unspeakable through his art. A quote from Robert Rosenblum about the abstract sublime seems very appropriate: "These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths."

Rothko was concerned about his legacy: "A painting lives by companionship, expending and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token." The unavoidable crowd of selfie takers somewhat spoils the visit, and the images of Rothko's paintings on the phone screens do not allow to "look and see". Everyone recognizes "a Rothko" and moves on. 

Just a reminder that we are responsible for the artist's legacy as the two exhibitions resonate well beyond the visit. 

                                        

photographs by the author:

1-"Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea", 1944 (Fondation Louis Vuitton)

2-"Untitled", 1948 (National Gallery of Art)

3-"Blue, Yellow, Green on Red", 1954 (Fondation Louis Vuitton)

4-"Untitled (Forest Interior)", 1933 (National Gallery of Art)

Rothko's Journey at the MFAH

Mark Rothko's large paintings with their signature rectangular fields of color stand out in museums, galleries, art fairs, attracting eager visitors. Creativity appears to have struck the artist like lightning, leading to swift recognition and fame. The exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Mark Rothko:A Retrospective will dispel such an assumption with more than sixty works displayed in chronological order offering a glimpse into the painter's career.
Most of the works are on loan from the National Gallery of Art and the first room is filled with early pieces from the 1930's. Figurative scenes featuring familiar surroundings like crowds in the New York subway, primitive compositions à la Gauguin or inspired by Greek mythology veer to surrealist and abstract pieces influenced by European movements. Forwarding to the late 40's with the series of "Multiforms", made of biomorphic colored blurry shapes followed by a period of "Transitional Paintings" in the adjacent room, Rothko's vocabulary is maturing with vertical abstract landscapes made with oil paint bleeding into the canvas. Yellows, oranges, reds surround the visitors as the walk through the exhibition leads to the "Classic Paintings" from the 50's. Rothko gave numbers to his paintings or left them untitled. Scholars and art critics defined and named periods according to the painter's technique and biography. Bathing in colors, I felt elated and heard music (The Ode to Joy from Beethoven to be precise). Following Rothko's advice, I stood 18 inches from the canvasses, letting my eyes overflow with luminous colors and limitless horizons. Being surrounded by the paintings radiating energy and life, is a unique experience which offers an occasion to participate in the artist's search for sublime goals. A similar exhilaration overtook me a few weeks later at the Phillips Collection while contemplating the four paintings from the same period in the Rothko Room.  The transition to his next endeavor is brutal. Drama, tension and ultimately doom transpire from the four variations in red commissioned for the Seagram's Four Seasons Restaurant followed by the black and violet compositions realized for the Rothko Chapel located a few miles away at The Ménil Collection. The paintings are somber and the commissioned works lack spontaneity. Lost in the darkness of the black fields, I could not find the thread leading to meditation. The last paintings are reflecting the artist's physical limitations. He changed his technique radically, downsizing the canvasses and using acrylic for his two-toned compositions in black and grey. However his last message is a vision in red, ethereal, a scream for life and hope, radiating pure energy.
The exhibition offers not only a didactic way to look at Rothko's career, but is also a unique venue to experience the physicality of his paintings. Expressing his philosophy through his work, Rothko makes it universal and timeless. Before undertaking his career shortened by his self-inflicted demise, Rothko reflected on art and philosophy in the early 40's and his writings gathered by his son Christopher were published in "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art".

As a whole, the exhibition allows to follow the maturation of the artist's technique and his parallel inner journey and growth.
Rothko was very protective of his works and when looking at them I keep in mind this quote from the artist himself:

"A painting lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out to the world."

photographs by the author

"Underground Fantasy", 1940
"Number 2", 1947
"Number 7", 1949
"Untitled", 1970