Jack Whitten: The Messenger
Through Aug. 2 at the Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan; moma.org.
Jack Whitten, who moved from Alabama to New York in 1960, was not just a painter but a sculptural painter. Swaths of acrylic paint are swooped and layered across canvas. Cubes of dried paint conjoin in a textured mosaic, resembling glimmering stars against a night sky. Look closer, and “suddenly the glops and drips look sonic, like musical bursts and pings,” the critic Holland Cotter wrote in his review for The New York Times. The exhibition showcases 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, and scintillates through the Museum of Modern Art’s galleries, Cotter writes, in a refreshing career retrospective of “a radically inventive artist who ranks right at the top of abstraction’s pantheon.” Read the review.
Sargent and Paris
Through Aug. 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan, metmuseum.org.
The portrait painter John Singer Sargent lived and traveled across Europe, North Africa and the United States, but it was his work during a formative decade in 19th-century Paris that catapulted him to recognition.
In a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay, where the exhibition will appear in the fall, the show charts Sargent’s success in his early career. “We see just how he did it,” the critic Karen Rosenberg wrote in her review. “With a lot of savoir-faire and a touch of the enfant terrible.” The exhibition builds to a climax around Sargent’s scandalous “Madame X,” in which the American expatriate Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, heavily powdered and daringly dressed in a cinched black gown, looks seductively over one shoulder. The close look at Sargent’s cosmopolitan ascent as he found his footing adds up to, Rosenberg wrote, “an evocative look at the belle epoque city where a young Sargent hit his stride.” Read the review.