The New Museum has put together a time capsule: a collection of dozens of works produced in New York in the year 1993. If you were a teenager in 1993, the exhibit “1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” will probably act on you like a heady, pop blast of nostalgia. After all, some of the show’s curators were themselves teenagers in 1993. The show is full of pop music and the kind of lurid imagery that goes straight to your memory banks. The result is a very warm, if perhaps incomplete, dive into the past.

The exhibit opens with a row of TV’s playing snippets of news and entertainment from the time: Rudy Giuliani in an early campaign ad; Whitney Houston belting out a ballad. This sets the tone. In the same room, to make it clear that the show’s focus is on the young, the curators have installed a video by Alex Brag (untitled). The piece is blurry, charming, and predictable: Barbie dolls and young women in little black dresses flail their arms to a background of Nirvana, Ace of Base, and other period music. We know where we are here.

Teenage dreamland is realized most beautifully in one large room on the museum’s fourth floor. The floor is covered in a deliciously soft orange rug (Carpet, by Rudolph Stingel). Dusk-blue billboards, each with the silhouette of one bird, take up two walls, and a string of lightbulbs hangs from a rafter in the middle of the room, (both those pieces, untitled, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres). A clip of Kristin Oppenheim singing the Beach Boys’ “Sail on Sailor” plays in an endless loop and completes the wistful mood.

But it’s not all solitary idylls. “1993″ goes heavy on death and the grotesque. The AIDS epidemic was at its peak, and the emphasis on loss is inevitable. “1993″ includes a well-known, heartbreaking series of Nan Goldin photographs showing a man slowly succumbing to AIDS as his partner stands by, helpless (Gilles and Gotscho). Gregg Bordowitz’s short video (Fast Trip, Long Drop) provides a vivid look at the state of the AIDS activism movement. The grotesque is harder to understand here: Why were so many artists in 1993 turning out coyly sexual life-sized dolls? Charles Ray’s “Family Romance” and Paul McCarthy’s “Cultural Gothic” both point to incest without, really, saying anything about it. Do we need both pieces in this show, especially after Zoe Leonard’s series of anatomical models?

Maybe it’s inevitable that a show of this scope will feel both incomplete and too big. After a while I, at least, found myself wandering through the rooms looking for what I already knew. The show began to repeat. Surely 1993 was about more than dysfunction in Manhattan? A few pieces in the show stand outside of time: Kiki Smith’s nude, powerful Virgin Mary; Lorna Simpson’s simple and somehow shattering Seven Mouths.

A few other pieces at least leave Manhattan. Pepon Osorio’s The Scene of the Crime is a life-size diorama of a South Bronx apartment complete with family pictures and a woman’s body under a bloody cloth. Spanish radio plays ads for detergent and the chairs are draped in Puerto Rican flags. (This Bronx murder is notably the sole mention of a borough of 1.4 million people.) And then there are, of course, Annie Liebowitz’s tragic shots of Sarajevo, including one of Susan Sontag posing amidst the ruins. But why isn’t there more? Did I miss something? Probably. Was the art scene too insular in 1993? Of course. Is there great work out there that still can’t make it on the New Museum’s Bowery? Almost definitely.

“1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” through May 26 at New Museum, 321 Bowery

Henri Matisse, “Young Sailor II,” 1906
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At age 20, recuperating in a hospital bed, Henri Matisse was given a paintbox by his mother as a diversion. It was Matisse’s first stab at painting, and it changed the course of art. As the 20th century’s greatest colorist, he possessed an uncanny instinct for the energy of colors—for the way shifting hues illuminate a painting from within—but other qualities as well: drive, an anxious but methodical disposition, a willingness to fail and a reverence for great painting.

His early stylistic experiments have inspired the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinary exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting. This chronological installation of nearly 50 paintings focuses on series of works—especially pairs of canvases—that show the artist consciously thinking through issues of composition, and ways to give his color full voice. The thrill of the show is that, as Matisse instructs himself, he instructs us too, in the language he knew best.

Matisse’s formidable powers are evident from the start. Hanging alongside a vivid still life from 1899—painted in heightened impressionist hues—a second version somehow preserves much of its weightiness of forms even though reduced to flat, planar colors. Nearby, a Cézannesque still life hangs next to a pointillist version of the same setup. A brushy image of a seated sailor, rendered in a subdued palette, hangs next to one with almost crystalline shapes in blazing Fauve hues. What all these paintings share is an eloquence of colors—or, more exactly, a poignant measuring of the intervals between them.

In 1907-8, Matisse painted two remarkable versions of “Le Luxe,” depicting a standing figure with two attendants. The first has deliberately modeled volumes, but the second’s unmodulated color planes are enough to capture the verticality of the standing figure—the sensation of looking up at her head, and down to her feet, her height measured out by color-charged bands in the background. The artist makes the pose momentous with minimal modeling—much as did Giotto and Duccio, two early Renaissance artists whose works Matisse had admired that summer in Italy.

Henri Matisse, “Le Luxe I,” 1907
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There was no turning back. In one of two stunning paintings from 1914, a window’s cool light gently suffuses a studio view, but the artist’s drawing expands the space almost violently, anchoring a chair and bowl at the bottom, while planting, at our eye level, a distant tower rhyming with the window’s vertical partition. In the second canvas, by contrast, sunlight splashes forcefully across the floor, tracing deep shadows. Elements are rendered more harshly, even irrationally, yet the means are the same: the re-creation of a scene by observing a particular light, and cajoling the forms within into life.

The last galleries include the hieratic, flattened figures, still lifes and interiors from the late ’30s and ’40s, along with four series of photographs of paintings in progress, which afford a gratifying, over-the-shoulder view of the artist at work.

In Search of True Painting is the rare show that reveals and connects art on its own, intimate terms—in its purely visual manifestation. Looking on, we absorb the evidence of one of the greatest minds of modern art, a painter who, to a unique degree, combined intelligence, self-awareness, and knowledge of precedents. Oh yes, he also knew a thing or two about color.

“Matisse: In Search of True Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St., through March 17.

Photo Courtesy of Fotopedia

By Alissa Fleck

The New York Times recently published an article asking “What Is Going on With Contemporary Art?” The newspaper reported last week Christie’s auction house “sold 67 works… for $412.2 million, the highest total ever achieved in the [contemporary art] field.”

The priciest piece was Andy Warhol’s 1962 “Statue of Liberty” for $43.76 million, noted the Times. Christie’s was not the only auction house to make history that day — four auction houses in total made record-breaking sales. The paper reports a particular rise in interest in the work of Franz Kline, of the New York School, who died also in 1962. Lichtensteins and Rothkos were among other top-selling pieces.

Why the sudden surge of interest in spending record amounts of money on contemporary art — wasn’t the hurting economy the crux of the presidential election for so many Americans? Arguably, those shelling out the big bucks for Koons and Basquiats are not spending too much time lamenting their stake in the economy. Perhaps, counter-intuitively, times of economic strife are when reminders of aesthetic beauty become most crucial, the very abstractness of these works reassuringly reflecting back the turmoil of the times.

The Times hypothesizes a combination of improved art marketing and skill on the part of Christie’s are at play.

Jon Garrey, a client services representative for Artnet in New York City, a group he claims has “practically a monopoly on online auctions, art pricing, and gallery sales, reaching 9.5 million page views per month,” exemplifying this improved marketing hypothesis, says several factors contribute to the significant sums being doled out for these big names.

For one, it’s the fact that they are big names. “There’s the artists themselves,” he explains. “We are not dealing with the masterworks of an emerging artist here; these contemporary maestros have been building their brand for years, some even posthumously…It just so happens that these new prices are breaking records.”

Garrey adds: “For artists who have died, collectors will pay handsomely to scoop up what remains of their works.”

Garrey also points to the unstable economy, and the fact that, while art values fluctuate, they tend to remain generally the same. “Owning expensive art earns you a tax break for a reason,” he says.

He even believes the recent super-storm could have played a role, as it caused severe damage to several important art galleries in the Chelsea area.

There are also simpler explanations — it is the end of the fall art auction house season and there’s currently a huge influx of foreign interest in buying art.

What are these buyers looking for exactly? Beyond the big names, Garrey, who works with hundreds of clients, many in New York, says some buyers see it merely as an investment, hoping for larger returns later. Others are interested in the progressiveness of contemporary art — they are lured in by the controversial, the grotesque, the mind-bending.

“With the name ‘contemporary art,’ it makes sense,” says Garrey, presumably indicating the strange times in which we live.

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Irony is one the most overused conceits in contemporary art. So much so that the term “ironic hipster” has become part of our current lexicon. I’m tired of ironic hipster art, minimal drawings coupled with what are meant to be pearls of wisdom encapsulated in a tagline.  The current show of vintage William Wegman drawings and videos at Salon 94 Freemans, Drawings for a Better Tomorrow and a Worse Yesterday, reminds us that there was a time when irony in visual art was a fresh and delightful concept. Wegman’s quirky view of the world holds up to the test of time and shows just how meaningful a few well-drawn lines and well-chosen words can be when crafted by the right hands.

Most of these drawings and videos are from the 1970s, when William Wegman was a shaggy-haired guy who always schlepped a dog around with him. I met him when I was a freshman in college. He showed up to my class (dog in tow) and spoke on a relatively new art form for the time: video. He was lovely, self-deprecating and, above all, generous to students. That spirit of generosity has always come through in Wegman’s art. An attitude of inclusiveness is ever-present throughout his body of work. Wegman respects and invites the viewer, rather than carrying on with a sense that “there’s a joke here, and you’re not cool enough to get it,” an attitude that is pervasive among some of his hipster successors.

Several of the standout drawings in the show are so slight that it takes a good second look to see how deceptively complicated they really are. To describe them and give away the punchline would be to do the work a  disservice. It’s that momentary collaboration with the viewer by which a simple drawing and a few words combine in a flash of delight and recognition. A smattering of drawings from the 1980s are included, and it is evident that Wegman continues to view the world with a bemused intelligence that shows no sign of wearing thin.

In the videos we get to re-meet the soulful Weimaraner Man Ray, a dog with a face so expressive he could have been a silent movie star. Wegman sets up the most absurd situations: The artist chiding Man Ray about the dog’s spelling errors, Man Ray in bed with an alarm clock. Somehow, through the gentle art of irony, he makes those encounters both hilarious and poignant.

This exhibition is a refuge from the jaded contemporary art scene. See it and remember another era in the art world, one that could genuinely make you smile.
William Wegman, Drawings for a Better Tomorrow and a Worse Yesterday
Through Oct. 20 at Salon 94 Freemans, 1 Freeman Alley. Call 212.529.7400 or visit
www.salon94.com for more information.

The Rubin Museum is now showing the first American retrospective of Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first female photojournalist, in “Candid: The Lens and Life of Homai.” Vyarawalla started out as an outsider, taking furtive shots of Bombay street life. She ended her career photographing heads of state and dignitaries. Along the way, she may have traded art for access. But the resulting photographs are a gorgeous record of India’s first years of independence (separating from British rule on Aug. 15, 1947).

The pre-independence photos show us an India caught between two worlds. Victoria Terminus is one of the best. The railroad station, a British creation, is all carved stone and gothic archways. Men in white suits stride toward it. But in the foreground, there’s a turbaned man in sandals, working a pushcart. The whole shot is framed by the shadows of another cart. The Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in Bombay, similarly, show a thick crowd of men holding statues of Ganesh as they march by colonial buildings. A soldier stands on a wood-and-gilt desk to direct traffic. All the faces are a blur.

The faces start coming into focus with national independence. Vyarawalla photographed Gandhi, at prayer meetings and then at his funeral; Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy; and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan. The pictures are just a little bit awkward; Vyarawalla often had to sneak around to get her shot, and it shows. She’s also torn between the crowd and the leadership so that some of these pictures, especially of Gandhi’s funeral, lack a center. But this may be a good thing, since we end up with a broad swath of life in each shot; our eye moves from Gandhi’s son lighting the funeral pyre to a confused child in the crowd, and then back to a European news crew fussing with their own camera.

Once Nehru comes into office (he was prime minister of India from 1947 to 1964), he dominates Vyarawalla’s lens. Some of her photos are pure iconography: Nehru releasing a dove into the sky, for example, looks like a propaganda poster. Luckily, Nehru made a good subject, almost mugging for the camera next to grave visiting heads of state (it’s a special pleasure to see him beside Yugoslavian dictator Tito). Vyarawalla also got shots of the Dalai Lama, Queen Elizabeth and Eleanor Roosevelt, to name a few.

In her later years, the crowds are completely gone from Vyarawalla’s photographs; only the leadership exists. But then, she manages to find the human being inside each dignitary. And she left them for us to see.

Candid: The Lens and Life of Homai Vyarawalla runs through Jan. 14 at the Rubin Museum, 150 West 17th St.

July 26 marked the 60th anniversary of her death, and starting next week, the Consulate General of Argentina is exhibiting 50 artifacts from her life that are on loan from the Museo Evita in Buenos Aires. The rare pieces include paintings, photographs and haute couture such as ball gowns, suits, dresses and shoes worn by Eva Perón.

“There are 18 paintings and 18 photographs of Eva showing her in her official duties,” said Ines Segarra, director of the Argentina Tourism Board.

This is the first time these items have been on loan in New York and it also commemorates the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Museo Evita. Eva’s great-niece, Maria Cristina Alvarez Rodriguez, honorary president of the Evita Perón Historical Research Foundation, founded the museum.

The museum is part of the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Historicas Eva Perón, which researches her role in history by archiving documents, recording oral history and publishing investigative studies.

Museo Evita once housed the shelter for women and children that were helped by Eva, and was used as a transitional home for women looking for employment and housing.

“She was an icon for Argentineans, and a lightning rod. For people around the world, her good works brought attention to Argentina. Evita is very much a part of our heritage. She was respected for all the good that she did,” Segarra said.

Eva’s supporters point to her efforts to help create a welfare safety net for seniors, single mothers and underprivileged children. She fought for women’s suffrage and social security for the workers.

“Evita: Passion and Action” is organized by famous Argentinean curator Gabriel Miremont and is sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism and other Argentinean agencies.

The consulate and tourism ministry promote all aspects of Argentina. During this exhibit, the arts, culture and tourism are being promoted as people view the items once belonging to Perón.

“Evita is one of the most iconic personifications of Argentina’s culture, and by conveying her messages and her good works, we aim to bring our two countries together,” Segarra hoped.

She explained that the consulate regularly mounts exhibitions of Argentine artists such as painters, photographers and sculptors. Admission to these exhibits is always free.

“Evita is a seminal figure for all Argentineans, whatever your political view. She was a visionary and quite ahead of her time. This is an occasion to share with the American people,” Segarra said.

“Evita: Passion and Action” runs Sept. 7 through 23 at the Consulate General of Argentina, 12 W. 56th St. Admission is free. The exhibit is open Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; closed on weekends except for Sept. 22 and 23, when it will be on display from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 212-603-0400.

At a time when performance art, contraptions and conceptual art continue to dominate the contemporary museum scene, it’s a pleasure to find an artist who actually paints, draws and makes prints. Nicole Eisenman is not the only one, of course-—the vast majority of galleries still show works on paper and canvas. But the aura of hipness has hovered for a long time.

At the Whitney Biennial this spring, Eisenman commanded two large walls and then some with a couple of oil paintings and 36 colorful monotypes depict- ing the human form and face. Finding Eisenman’s engaging monotypes among the installations and manifestos felt like coming upon a patch of African violets sprouting in field of cacti.

In Eisenman’s atmospheric and darkly funny works, figures dance, make love, scowl, drink, drive cars, send text messages, cry, masturbate and contemplate death. Her exaggerated lines, intense colors and high emotions can be satirical, bitter and angry, and there are echoes of Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Philip Guston—-so much so that the artist sometimes risks seeming retro. She admits how closely she’s studied the expressionists, Picasso and—-surprisingly-—the impressionists, including Renoir.

At 47, Eisenman has had a robust career for more than a decade and keeps on winning critical acclaim. Before the Biennial closed in May, she’d opened her fifth solo show at Chelsea’s Leo Koenig gallery. In The New Yorker, she was hailed as the most prominent of a new generation of expressionists, most of whom are women.

Eisenman, who is gay, often portrays herself and her friends at bars and parties. Some recent etchings feature women draped over wine bottles and beer mugs, bringing Picasso’s Blue Period to mind. But Eisenman’s identification with Picasso and the expressionists is fraught with contradictions, given that these otherwise great artists abused women both on and off their canvases. Those sorry chapters in art history leave feminist artists-—and what artist worth her salt today isn’t one?-—in a tortured conundrum with no easy way out.

As a queer critic of American culture, Eisenman is quick to parody machismo. In “Captain Awesome,” a painting from 2004, a shirtless dude with his baseball cap on backwards stands in front of a phallic silo, holding an ear of corn and giving the thumbs up sign. It’s creepy, true and far too easy. But a recent lithograph of a disheveled old man holding his own shadow is more nuanced. In fact, some of Eisenman’s finest works, like her 2012 etching “Portrait of Evan,” have been of men.

To grasp how far Eisenman departs from some of her contemporaries, one need only consider the 2012 Biennial, where the Whitney asked their artists to participate in programs to educate the public about their work. Mostly, this involved a lot of talk. Some artists joined panel discussions; others wrote essays, staged happenings or made videos to explain themselves. Eisenman did something radical. She handed sketchpads and charcoal to the crowd and brought in some naked models. Then she told everyone to start drawing.

Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper

Josef Albers (1888-1976) embodied the principles of the Bauhaus, the influential German art school founded in 1919. Though he attended other institutions, Albers’ studies at the Bauhaus and, in particular, with color theorist Johannes Itten, proved decisive. Albers began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1923 and became a full professor at the school’s Dessau outpost two years later. The Bauhaus closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime—the school’s teachings were not sufficiently Aryan.

Albers and his wife, Anni, subsequently left for the United States, both of them accepting teaching posts at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. (“Germans to Teach Art Near Here” read a December 1933 article from the Asheville Citizen.) But it was Albers’ appointment as dean of Yale’s design department in 1950 and the publication of his seminal text Interaction of Color that codified his historical standing. Albers’s signature suite of paintings, collectively titled “Homage to the Square,” put into practice the goal of “maximum effect with a minimum of means.”

Truth to tell, a little of “Homage to the Square” goes a long way—-sometimes minimum means result in minimum ends. Seen en masse, Albers’ chromatic and compositional structures-—always effective, invariably inflexible—-lend themselves more to finger tapping and clock-watching than aesthetic contemplation. Still, among the surprises at the Morgan is the first of the series, a rarely exhibited panel rendered in, of all things, black and white. For aficionados of modernism’s more austere outposts, this inclusion has to count as something of an event.

The majority of Josef Albers in America is dedicated to informal studies on paper. Covered with scrawled notations, flurried applications of color and grease stains, they reveal Albers’ rigorous methodology at its most approachable. No Platonic exegeses here, thank you; instead we have the remnants of workaday life in the studio. The Morgan show allows us to experience Albers as a man given to curiosity and play—-and it prompts double-takes.

Did you know that this most stringent of pedagogues relied largely on colors used straight from the tube or that his insistence on “hands-off” surfaces didn’t preclude experiments with varnishes? Contemporary sensibilities will relish the diaristic nature of Albers’ works on paper and, in the case of the lush tangencies of “Variant/Adobe, Study for Four Central Warm Colors Surrounded by Two Blues” (ca. 1948), swoon to them. Elsewhere, Albers daubs to charming effect, toys with perspective and posits Mexico as “the promised land of abstract art”—-all the while exemplifying one man’s “craziness about color.”

Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper
Through Oct. 14, The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., 212-685-0008, themorgan.org.

The borrowed display features photographs that record fleeting moments in London street life from the 1860s to the present—ordinary scenes of people in the midst of daily city life that follow the development of technology, culture and finance in a growing modern metropolis. It is accompanied by a new exhibit similarly designed to showcase the evolution of street life in New York City. Both shows will run through Dec. 2.

“The exhibit has perfect timing, opening as the world’s eyes fall on London this month,” said Alex Werner, the Museum of London’s head of history collections, who traveled to New York for the opening of the exhibition.

London Street Photography, which has been on display at the Museum of London since 2010, is the museum’s most visited temporary exhibit ever, drawing more than 125,000 viewers in the last two years. The exhibition contains more than 138 images taken by more than 50 photographers, with photographs arranged chronologically from 1860 to 2010.

“The exhibit follows a changing society, following culture and economic conditions as they evolve over time,” said Sean Corcoran, curator of prints and photography for MCNY.

The London exhibition also features a short film screening called Behind the Lens, in which four photographers with images on display reflect on their work. In the documentary-style video reel, artists Wolfgang Suschitzky, Paul Trevor, Matt Stuart and Polly Braden talk about their experiences photographing scenes of everyday London life.

City Scenes: New York Street Photography, the exhibit designed by MCNY to complement its London counterpart, is a smaller display of about 40 photographs taken between 1888 and 2002. The showcase includes several iconic New York images and boasts snapshots by renowned photographers such as Paul Strand, Diane Arbus, Jacob Riis and others.

The New York display serves as both a comparison and a juxtaposition to the London exhibit, drawing parallels between the two major metropolises, which, Corcoran said, are very similar in many ways despite their differences.

“[MCNY] is interested in urban life in New York, and what better way to explore that than to show life in a city, especially a city that is very culturally similar to New York but also different,” said Corcoran, who curated the companion exhibition.

He noted that similarities can be found in the progression of the technology and use of film in London and in New York. In London, famous photographers such as John Galt used imagery to provide social commentary, documenting the life of London’s lower class. American Riis chronicled the living conditions of New York’s poor, seeking to catalyze change by raising awareness through his work.

One difference between the two cities, Werner noted, is that New York essentially replaced London as the world’s vanguard urban center in the mid-20th century. In images captured in post-World War II London, photographers documented a city rebuilding its culture with a new and pervasive influx of American influence.

“London was the largest urban center in the world in the beginning of the 1940s. Then, after the war, New York sort of took over as the largest city,” Werner said.