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Because the artist is generally much less well known (at least in this country) than his French peers, the Neue Galerie provides much usable information about their context, including an elaborate timeline, numerous photographs and works on paper. By the time you arrive at the final gallery, you are well primed to look at his four medium-sized landscape paintings.
Dona Nelson stands inches from El Toreador (2023), a massive painting mounted in a steel stand several feet from the nearest wall. They’re looking closely at the surface. “This canvas is from China,” they tell me. “It’s whiter, it’s very soft.”
For as long as sculptures have decorated buildings, sculptors have tailored their creations to their sites. The ancient world is littered with examples, such as the reliefs that rise up the interior walls of the monumental stairway of the Pergamon Altar, from around 170 BCE. Depicting a battle between the gods and giants, the figures spill into our space, with knees and other body parts deliberately carved so that they appear to rest on the same stairs we climb. We are immersed in the action—all part of the ritual of approaching the altar.
Maybe this is a time to look for something else in art, to look at art that resonates with this moment on the precipice of authoritarianism, and to learn from it. What can be gleaned by reconsidering art made in similarly dangerous situations in the past, not with the complacent relief of historical distance, but with an awakened sense of urgency for our own time and place?
Mikel Rouse is one of the most important and accomplished contemporary American opera composers. He’s an avant-gardist with pop and deep humanist appeal. His memoir, The World Got Away, will be published May 21 by the University of Illinois Press. He sat down for coffee with the Rail on a bright, chilly March afternoon in Hell’s Kitchen.