By Kiara Downey

When you live in New York City, happening upon entertainers who put every ounce of energy into a bevy of big dreams can seem like an almost daily event.  But once in a while you meet someone whose drive merges with success.  De’Adre Aziza is a local lady who seems to be making just such a union.

With infinite ambitions, she’s a singer, a dramaturg, and an actress who may be a new name to many, but she’s no stranger to the stage or to a television studio.  Currently inhabiting the role of “Bunny” in Dominque Morisseau’s new play Detroit ‘67, she is simultaneously completing work on her first solo album. She is a local girl who fell in love with performing as a teenager and many of her formative experiences explain her wide-reaching interests.

“Just call me an artist. I like art. Period,” says Aziza.  “In addition to working in front of audiences, I’ve been a script advisor, I’ve worked backstage on technical crews, and I have been an acting coach.”  In fact, that stint as a coach says much about her creative and entrepreneurial spirit.  Seeing a need and an opportunity, she approached Spike Lee when he began directing Mike Tyson’s one-man show Undisputed Truth and offered to work as the infamous boxer-turned-actor’s teacher.  This gig required her to draw upon skills she herself acquired as a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  “I actually applied to an NYU program for high school students when I was still attending the Harlem School of the Arts.  I was one of only thirty-two kids accepted into that year’s group.”

While practicing her craft at NYU, Aziza remembers seeing plays that opened her mind to the diverse, and often perplexing possibilities of live theatre.  “Without knowing who he was, I saw two plays directed by George C. Wolfe that blew me away.  I watched his productions of Jelly’s Last Jam and Angels in America, and I thought ‘who is this man?!”

Conversely, she observed some less inspirational creations; “I remember seeing a really bugged out production of Faust one time.  It was vile!  A man actually pooped on stage.”  But she fondly recalls a formative production that left a lasting impression that wasn’t so traumatizing.  The first play that really moved her was August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson with Charles Dutton and S. Epatha Merkerson.  “I was only nine, but I still have a picture in my mind of them on that stage.”

With that as a grounding image, Aziza blossomed into a daring performer (“I’m really shy – until I let the goofy beast loose”) who knows how to walk between two worlds.  As a singer, she feels undaunted: “Singers can walk around with blue hair,” she says, but as a working actress she feels she needs to look “kind of conservative.”  Drifting in and out of each reality, she has successfully combined the two.  In 2008 Aziza received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her work in the comedy-rock-drama musical Passing Strange.

Aziza intends to release her first solo soul album by 2014.  Seed funds for this endeavor began as a Kickstarter campaign and all recording sessions have to take place in between auditions and theatrical rehearsals.   It’s hard to know what this lady likes best – it could be the characters she creates or the songs she sings – she speaks of all with equal joy.  “I love the woman I get to play in Detroit ’67,” she exclaims.  “I can go deep with her, she’s a free spirit.”  The actress also appreciates the play’s weightier topics, “In this play Dominque shows how your life can change in a day.”

De’Adre begins her performances in Detroit ’67 at the Public Theatre this week and she will travel with the ensemble when they transfer to the Classical Theatre of Harlem on March 23^rd. According to Aziza, who is from New Jersey, but has “very strong Harlem roots,” the fact that the play has two different openings in Manhattan will “bring the downtown crowds uptown or it will make it possible for people to stay uptown and see it there.”  Whichever way you go, it’s likely you won’t be able to miss Miss Aziza.  She’s ready for just about anything.

See you at the theatre.

Detroit ’67 runs at the Public Theatre through March 17^th and it will be performed at The Classical Theatre of Harlem from March 23rd-April 28th.

Mark Baumer’s resolution was 50 shades of absurd…or was it?

Mark Baumer, of Providence, RI, is a literary inspiration of sorts. Baumer wrote 50 books this past year, which is an impressive feat if only for his steadfast dedication to the task. It didn’t start out so straightforward though. Indeed, it started out with a humiliating dose of failure.

In January of last year, Baumer, who has in the past walked across America and blogged about the experience, launched a Kickstarter campaign asking for $50,000 to fund his 50-books-in-a-year endeavor. He had never previously written or published a book. His funding campaign ultimately crashed and burned; he raised less than four percent of his total goal.

After his ultimately unsuccessful attempt at a foray into the world of book publishing, Baumer had all but given up on the project. Baumer’s friends weren’t going to let him off so easy though; they kept asking what had happened to his books.

“I got tired of people asking me if I was ever going to write fifty books in a year,” Baumer wrote on his website, fiftynovels.com. Saddled with an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and a sizable ego, he couldn’t handle the feeling that he had failed.

“My goal/mindset was basically to write every book in the world,” he explained. Baumer said he didn’t want to die being the guy who always talked about writing 50 books but never actually did it.

Beginning in June, Baumer started writing. By the year’s end he was finished.

Baumer decided to release all the books, with titles like Someone Who Did Something  and  A Milk That Drank an Infant, incrementally online and free of charge to his readers.

When it comes to setting — and accomplishing — goals, Baumer occupies an extreme end of the spectrum.

In the day and age of increasingly egalitarian Internet art, which favors the shocking and absurd, and in which every nook and cranny of cyberspace houses a minor celebrity on the verge of fading back into insignificance, Baumer is not exactly unusual.

In most cases though, it’s probably not wise to treat your endeavors as though you’re going to die at any moment. (The Protagonist by no means endorses writing as though you’re swiftly going to die, especially for the casual writer.)

However, there’s nothing earth-shattering about the advice to set practical goals for the new year either. I could regurgitate a couple: Set aside some time for writing everyday. Balance “trashy books” with highbrow ones. Read a book before you see its cinematographic rendering. Read something from a Top 10 list. Join a book club. Join a writers’ workshop. Finish everything you start. Read from a genre you’re not accustomed to. Pick something you’re not sure you’ll like or an author with whom you’re unfamiliar. Pick something you know you’ll hate; it’s good for you.

This is all solid advice, I suppose, but it’s nothing new and it doesn’t set the bar very high. Frankly, doing something you think is “good for you” literarily-speaking, while not necessarily enjoying it, is a waste of time in my book. Perhaps Baumer’s anecdote is not new either, but buried somewhere within the tale of his remarkable 180 degree shift, there is an important reminder.

Yes, we can learn a lesson from the Baumers of the world, even those of us with no interest in fame — something can come of even the greatest, most public personal failure. If this is the case, surely something can come from all the small failures along the way as well. Let yourself think big; if your dream isn’t turning out the way you wanted, you can reroute and try again. The result may surprise you. If we can learn anything from Baumer, it’s to not be daunted by the task that seems too large, that by all accounts is too large. Let your friends hold you accountable for your craziest of ambitions. And, perhaps most importantly of all, almost anything is possible these days if you just keep digging into the furthest, darkest reaches of the Internet (Baumer garners a great deal of support from online literary communities.)

Be mindful of the dangers though. In a fast-paced world speckled with Baumers, we see the flip side of this democratic kind of fame. We see renowned public figures like the young and snappy Jonah Lehrer, who was publicly disgraced this year after his plagiarism and literary fabrications came to light, founder amid the demand for the next better, more ingenious thought. We want it faster than ever before. Those who cannot keep up are quickly eclipsed.

Goals should be feasible to some degree, but not at the risk of resolutions being more about limits than what is possible, about not setting ourselves up for failure; failure is inevitable. Resolutions should be about learning to recover and run with it. And when you inevitably just can’t get past some failures, when you want to scrap it all and start over, be equally comforted in knowing the world will soon forget.

People entering their retirement can expect a shift from constant work to spending more time developing their creative talents. Many seniors spend their golden years learning how to paint, draw and make pottery at local art classes.

Dr. Gail Lowenstein, a geriatrician and concierge doctor serving the North Shore of Nassau County and the surrounding area, explained that once people retire, they tend to lose their sense of purpose and begin searching for something to fill the gap.

She shared the story of a man who lost his wife and started to paint. Even though he had never painted before, this gentleman had the urge to create artwork and donated it to local charities.
“He found his purpose, and it saved him and got him through a difficult time,” she said.

Throughout Manhattan, there are many places that give seniors the opportunity to embrace the art world by creating their own masterpieces.

For the past 10 years the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, located on Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street, has offered numerous art programs, including a class specifically designed for seniors. Elders learn how to paint and draw, with the use of still life and photographs.

Accomplished artist Gene Wiseniewski teaches the class and explained that the program is open to anyone over the age of 50, regardless of prior experience in painting. He also noted that some skilled painters use oil paint while others prefer acrylics.

The program has been a success for the past the few years, and is offered three times a year on Fridays from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.

“Seniors are the best to work with, because they are very serious, but they also know how to have fun. They are very inspirational too,” Wiseniewski said.

Another location on the Upper West Side is the Art Students League of New York, which offers a range of classes for those looking to kick-start their creative impulse. For more than 100 years, the league has taught the language of art. Some of America’s most prominent artists have studied at this school, including Georgia O’Keefe, Norman Rockwell and George Bellows.

“Most of our 100 studio classes in drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture include students ranging in ability from beginners to established artists and ranging in age from their twenties to folks in their seventies and eighties,” said Ken Park, the school’s director of communications.
For seniors who are interested in the arts but not necessarily in making art, they offer a seminar series that discusses classic art and artists through literature.

“Folks love the camaraderie and community of the League. Students learn not just from the professional artist-instructors but also from other students,” Park said.

Putting a spin on art classes is Mugi Pottery, located on Amsterdam Avenue between 108th and 109th streets, which teaches individuals how to mold clay while on a spinning wheel. Mugi’s adult classes allow anyone from the age of 16 and up, but many seniors enroll in the classes.

Offering classes for people ranging from 2 to 102 years old, the Art Studio NY, located on West 96th Street, provides unique painting and drawing classes in an intimate classroom. For beginners, the school offers basic classes such as Oil Painting 101 and Portrait and Figure Painting 101.

Whether it is drawing, painting or sculpting, seniors are exploring and enjoying different aspects of art. By doing so, they are not only learning something new, they are remaining active and continuing to live a healthy, vibrant lifestyle.

UPPER EAST SIDE DEALER MAY HAVE PLACED STOLEN GOODS IN MUSEUMS AROUND THE WORLD

By Laurence Dylan

There’s no indication that Subhash Kapoor, the 64-year-old owner of Art of the Past gallery, made a fuss when he was arrested at the Frankfurt airport in October 2011. News reports of the event make no reference to a struggle. After all, mistakes like this happen all the time in the antiquities business.

“Anything can go wrong with anybody,” said Kapoor’s brother Ramesh, who, like him, is accused of smuggling a significant number of artifacts from India to sell in New York. Though Ramesh never denied the charges brought against his brother (and wouldn’t address those brought against him personally), he pointed out that provenance is often difficult to determine when selling artifacts from other countries. “If someone ends up with something, it doesn’t mean that he did anything wrong. If a jeweler ends up with a stolen jewel, it doesn’t mean that that person is evil, or a thief himself.”

The Art of the Past gallery on Madison Avenue at 89th Street has an unremarkable exterior. Up and down Madison, there are all manner of antiquities shops that, far from the hot blue-chip market of Chelsea, offer more-sensible interior decoration options that upgrade a room with a taste of the exotic. You could have a Warhol—the way his pricing works, anyone can—but a one-of-a-kind Buddha lends your library an entirely different tone, and it’s easy to see the attraction there. “Come in,” you want to say to your guests, rising as you snap a leather-bound book shut. “I was just reading Kipling.”

Over the summer a paper sign on the door of Art in the Past said that the gallery was “Closed for Inventory,” an excuse that, like the best lies, had an element of truth to it. It’s quite likely that the gallery was doing a major survey of its inventory, given that its owner, as of the date of publication, is being held in Tamil Nadu, India, awaiting trial for smuggling charges. Among other accusations, Subhash Kapoor faces charges that he helped illegally export 18 idols from that state, worth a combined $11 million. One of the major pieces was a bronze sculpture, depicting Uma Parvati, valued at nearly $2.5 million, and recently seized by the U.S. government for the trial.

And this may only be the tip of the iceberg. Prosecutors expect to question Kapoor about a variety of other objects. Just this past July federal customs agents raided his four Manhattan storage facilities containing some $20 million in Indian artifacts, some of them, according to photos in the New York Post, as large as a standing man. With characteristic air, the paper declared that the treasure trove of objects “would make Indiana Jones jealous.” Kapoor is accused of using his daughter and his brother Ramesh—who owns his own gallery in the city, Kapoor Gallery—to help him smuggle artifacts, and given that Mr. Kapoor opened Art of the Past in 1974, it’s quite possible that the charges may go very wide indeed.

Kapoor was, until he was arrested, a seemingly upstanding citizen who worked with countless museums and enjoyed a reputation for high-quality works. “I certainly never heard anything derogatory about his reputation,” said Eleanor Abraham, who owns an eponymous gallery that deals in antiquities from the same region. It’s difficult to know the extent of Kapoor’s business, but it’s quite possible that his wares bedeck the desks and bookshelves of your closest friend. Depending on his record-keeping, Interpol may never even know. Welcome to the curious world of antiquities dealing, where the only thing more secretive than the origins of your material are the names of your clients.

The nature of art dealing relies upon finding both supply and demand where they are limited on both sides, which is why the successful dealers are able to add a high premium to their prices. This is true of contemporary art collecting as well, but the field of antiquities is unique in that there are added difficulties in the question of provenance. It’s not early enough for you to simply have an object; one must also be able to prove that it was taken from a country legally.

The problem with dealing in antiquities is that most clients will judge you by the standard set by the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the British Museum, whose collections were mainly acquired in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not periods of overwhelming cultural sensitivity when it comes to far-flung lands. During the 1920s, when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut, it was common to simply divvy the loot from a dig after it finished, two big piles: one for the workers, and one for the foreign archaeologists.

“Everybody knew all of these lovely Indian sculptures don’t come from Malibu Beach or Indiana,” Thomas Hoving, the Met’s director from 1967 to 1977, once told the New Yorker. “But people were willing to look the other way.” Modern antiquities laws vary from country to country. It’s illegal to own any artifact from Egypt discovered after 1983, following a law passed that year. Turkey passed a similar law in 1906. It’s safe to say, however, that no country would condone what Kapoor is accused of.

The Times of India alleges that Kapoor worked with Sanjeevi Asokan, described as “a notorious idol thief ” and with him hired two men referenced only by single names, Rathinam and Kaliyaperumal, to steal the goods for him, straight out of the temples of Tamil Nadu. Kapoor is also accused of smuggling Buddhist artifacts out of Afghanistan, and other antiques out of Pakistan. (The Department of Homeland Security and Mr. Kapoor’s lawyer did not return requests for comment for this story.)

“The gallery has sold to some of the most celebrated public and private collections in the world,” read a boastful section of the now offline Art of the Past website. “These include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; The Art Institute, Chicago; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Honolulu Academy of Arts; Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris; Museum fur Indische Kunst, Berlin; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; and the Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore.”

“It is my way of giving back to the field,” Kapoor told Apollo magazine, in explaining why he was so prolific in his work with museums. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt business to have the endorsement of all those museums listed above on your website. The Homeland Security press release on the seizure of Kapoor’s storage facilities makes no bones about it: “Pieces that match those listed as stolen are still openly on display in some museums.” Through acquisitions and gifts, some 240 items now rest in the museums listed above. Following their donation the year prior, the Met put on a show of these drawings titled “Living Line: Selected Indian Drawings From the Subhash Kapoor Gift” in 2009. ( The other major crime in antiquities dealing is, of course, forgery and, amusingly, five of Kapoor’s donations to the museum were in fact forgeries. But they were donated as forgeries, for the museum’s study center, so that they can better judge exactly how forgeries are produced.)

Most museums have taken an “innocent until proven guilty” approach to the items in their collection that originated from Kapoor. And, extending the same courtesy to Kapoor, it’s possible that if he was dealing in items that had been incorrectly removed from their countries of origin, he may not have been properly informed. This is a hazard of the business in dealing in antiquities, one that has led some in the business to theorize that the new market will become two-tiered: one for objects with stellar provenance, which would cost more, and another for items where the provenance is a bit sketchier.

“Sotheby’s has a piece with Homeland Security,” Ramish Kapoor added, pointing out that the item in question, a statue whose ownership is disputed by the Cambodian government, has been custody of the department for over a year. “Are they making a museum over there or what?” A number of countries have recently become more aggressive in their attempts to defend artifacts they’ve identified as misappropriated. To return to the two countries mentioned before, Egypt has, in the wake of its revolution, completely re-organized its Supreme Council of Antiquities in a way that may promise to be less friendly to the West. Turkey, for its part, has banned loans to many major museums, the Met and the British Museum among them, until certain disputed items are repatriated.

Healing the wounds of imperialism is never pretty. And neither are Kapoor’s alleged crimes. The case has already taken many twists and turns and it has only just begun. If you walk into a friend’s house sometime in the near future and a beautiful Hindi statue that used to tie the room together no longer rests on his bookshelf, do yourself a favor and try not to ask any questions about it.

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.

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.

Botched "Ecce Homo" Courtesy of Wiki Commons

“Despite Good Intentions,” states the headline of a New York Times piece about the elderly woman in Spain who performed an amateur “restoration” of a century-old church fresco, “a Fresco in Spain Is Ruined.” Good intentions or not, the woman destroyed a priceless, irreplaceable work of art.

80-year-old Cecilia Gimenez took to the more than 100-year-old representation of Jesus in a church in the town of Borja to “repair” the image, which had partially succumbed to moisture on the church walls, reports the Times. 

Would the subject of her intentions be so thoroughly broached if she were, say, a middle-aged amateur painter who brazenly took to the fresco, armed only with paints and her own ego? Would we be discussing her “Surprisingly Avant-Garde Results,” as Art Info describes, for which she is all but entirely unapologetic?

To suggest Gimenez’s actions are whimsically ignorant is to infantilize someone who knew full well what she was doing, what the piece represented and her own abilities (or lack thereof). She was not a child who unknowingly went at the piece with crayons, though that’s what the final product suggested.

Art Info details the result: “The direction of his eyes has shifted to a preposterous angle, down and to the left towards the beholder, rather than looking to the upper right. The nose is flattened like that of an African mask. Next to the chimp-like headgear, the new painting’s mouth is potentially the strangest alteration: The jaw appears slack with Jesus’s tongue seemingly sticking out in either lifelessness or mockery. All in all, what was a minor work of traditional iconography has become a masterpiece of contemporary surrealism.”

A masterpiece? Contemporary surrealism? She did not merely touch the painting up, she completely altered its appearance. While there is undeniably humor to the situation, to paint Gimenez’s act as excusable or sweetly naive because of her age is to engage in ageism, and ageism is damaging to society. She had the presence of mind to pre-meditate and carry out the act, and we must not react as though she were an infant.

Instances of art vandalism are harshly punished, whatever the person’s intentions. Earlier this year, a man walked up to a 1929 Picasso in Houston, and flagrantly spray-painted it. He was an artist, making an artistic statement, reports the art blog Hyperallergic.com.

The man then released a manifesto, detailing the purpose behind his actions: “I dedicate this to all the people out there who have suffered for any injustice of every kind. To those abused by their loved ones. For those abused by their government. For those who were abused by organized religion. And to Picasso from artist to artist. The beast is meant to be conquered. Picasso loved bullfighting because he knew at the end of the dance, someone had to die and on the day it was his turn.”

The 22-year-old was later charged with criminal mischief and felony graffiti, reported the Houston Press. 

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.

Kusama moves beyond pop

What kind of pop artist “does battle at the border of life and death”? Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), who so described her art-making in 1961, suggests a Japanese Andy Warhol in terms of sheer energy, protean endeavors and fixation with publicity. But Warhol would never have professed such high purpose.

Indeed, the Kusama revealed by the current Whitney retrospective defies any single label. Despite her friendships forged in the ’60s with Warhol, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Cornell, her work leapfrogs categories like pop, minimalism and conceptual, revealing an honest vulnerability seldom seen in her male colleagues.

The museum’s front windows, crammed with the giant, bobbing spheres of her “Dots Obsession” (2009/2012), offer an instant dose of her signature polka-dotted installations. It’s only a foretaste, though, of the six decades of painting, sculpture, collage, film, performances, installations, fashion design and writing displayed or documented on the fourth floor.

Kusama’s “Infinity Net” paintings, her early nod to abstract expressionism, fill one gallery with countless swirls of white, subtly tightening and expanding across wide surfaces. She shifted gears with the “Accumulation” sculptures that appeared in some of the first exhibitions of pop art. These monochromatic works encrust various items—chairs, shoes, rowboat, ladder, hat, suitcase—with multitudes of stuffed fabric phalluses. The fidgety, potato-like protuberances have an awkward intimacy very foreign to pop and minimalism. A variation of these “Sex Obsession” sculptures, dubbed by Kusama the “Food Obsession” works, covers objects with macaroni.

Also on view is Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, her 1967 film showing her fiercely applying polka dots to animals and naked, carousing humans. But it took her “Anatomic Explosions” to put the self-styled “Priestess of Nudity” on the front pages. For these public performances, the artist hastily painted spots on nude dancers until the police showed up. The press releases and flyers combine ’60s breeziness with equal dollops of hucksterism and galactic purpose: “Become one with eternity. Obliterate your personality…take along one of our live bikini models.”

On a more poetic level, colorful mixed-media works on paper from the 1970s combine images of faces, insects and flowers with surprising delicacy. By this point, though, museum visitors may be wondering: How long can a soul publicly obsess about its own obsessions? Only so long, it seems; having returned to Japan, Kusama voluntarily entered a mental hospital in 1977, where she resides to this day.

Thankfully, it has been a nourishing environment. The vaguely biological forms of her large canvases and soft sculptures from the ’80s and ’90s glow with asexual sensuousness. Though frankly decorative, the seething, micro-dotted tentacles of “Yellow Trees” (1994) mesmerize. On the first floor, standing in for the enclosed installations produced since the ’90s is “Fireflies on the Water” (2002), from the Whitney’s own collection. Its coolness factor—with lights seeming to shimmer infinitely in all directions—-is not to be missed.

Pacing the exhibition are numerous photographs of the artist posed next to her work in matching attire. Apparently, notions of art and celebrity were as inseparable for Kusama as they were for Warhol. But Kusama’s motifs seem purer, and her emotional life—with joys and mortifications strangely fused—more accessible. One senses that when she appropriated, it was not for ironic effect but simply to cope. Hence her exploitation of the gestalt of the ’60s, and later, perhaps, of stylistic aspects of Cornell, Nevelson and Eva Hesse.

Today, Kusama is as much life force as artist—if we still distinguish the two—and uncannily predictive of the ascendancy of younger artists like Takashi Murakami. But her triumph illuminates a certain diminution, too, of our expectations of art.

Yayoi Kusama
Through Sept. 30, Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., 212-570- 3600, whitney.org.