This year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, a survey of more than 14,000 studies, confirms that we are now in the management phase of the climate crisis: it can’t be prevented, only mitigated. What role can art play now that the “awareness” and “warning” stages have passed? Artist Alexis Rockman suggests that we take the long view: “It’s interesting to contextualize what’s happening in our lives, within the historical lens of the many times this has happened before.” That does not mean forgoing immediate action. As David Rimanelli writes in the opening essay of ALEXIS ROCKMAN: WORKS ON PAPER (Damiani/ARTBOOK DAP, $55), Rockman has been imploring everyone to take the climate crisis seriously since at least the mid-1980s, when he first started showing. He’s expressed a precocious awareness of the catastrophe in large-scale, glossily perfect, surreally apocalyptic oil paintings, which combine a Museum of Natural History vibe with sci-fi/fantasy retro-futurism. The tone is scary, didactic, and droll. This new volume surveys the artist’s smaller-scale watercolors, field studies, gouaches, and oil drawings from the ’80s to the present. Doom still predominates, as does what Rimanelli calls an “underlying clamminess.” This could be the slime and sickly hue of Frog, 1992, a watercolor and oil of a seemingly disappointed amphibian; in Rockman’s trademark perspective, we see the head above the waterline as well as the body and legs below. But I think Rimanelli means our own clamminess too—the prickly sense that we’re not at home in this exotic ecosystem. That uncertainty can express itself as awe, brokenheartedness, dreaminess, or profound disorientation. All these moods and more are present in series like “Weather Drawings” (dark skies, forest fires, tornadoes), “Bioluminescence” (glowing jellyfish, larvae, squids, fish), “Lost at Sea” (indescribably surreal nautical scenes), and “Field Drawings” (carefully observed single species). Along with Rimanelli’s piece, there is a helpful contextualizing essay by Helen Molesworth and an “Appendix of Graphic Influences,” a kind of cheat code to understanding Rockman’s brilliant synthesis of many strains of naturalist art: Charles R. Knight, Winslow Homer, James Gordon Irving, and Thomas Moran, along with seventeen others. One image here stands out. In film-concept artist Tyrus Wong’s illustration for Bambi, ca. 1942, a family of deer look at a hellish inferno; they seem helpless against a bright and hot horizon and darkened sky. Rockman is not a sentimental artist; still, in his work, it’s hard not to see a similar sense of innocence betrayed. —DAVID O’ NEILL
In one of the last interviews he did, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) chafed at the presumption that identity politics was central to his work: “Anything a black person does in terms of the ‘figure’ is put into a ‘political’ category. Let’s not fall into that stupid racial quicksand.” Skira’s five-volume survey of Hendricks’s work, copublished with Jack Shainman Gallery, seems designed to correct that limited view. Each installment is focused on a different part of his multivalent practice: works on paper, landscape paintings, basketball. The penultimate volume, BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: PHOTOGRAPHY (SKIRA/Jack Shainman Gallery, $25), highlights subjects and media long eclipsed by the Black Power–era portraits Hendricks is famous for. His full-length realist paintings of mostly Black figures set against monochromatic backgrounds are celebrated for their sartorial swagger. But between 1984 and 2002, the artist stopped making these works. Instead, as these books bring to the fore, his output was dominated by other equally compelling interests, which the photography installment beautifully conveys.
Arranged roughly in chronological order (with a few exceptions), the book features sixty-six images taken between 1965 and 2004, a mere sampling of the thousands of unseen photos Hendricks left behind, which are still being catalogued. Shot in black-and-white and color with a variety of cameras, the photos include street scenes, female nudes, self-portraits, and documents of his travels to North Africa. Pictures of women’s feet, television sets ablaze with headline news, and early hip-hop fans are just some of the recurring subjects in this slim compilation, which only scratches the surface of a practice Hendricks began in high school with his mother’s Brownie.
Underscoring the performative and relational nature of Hendricks’s process, Anna Arabindan-Kesson begins her essay with a personal account of the charm Hendricks exuded when cajoling friends, neighbors, and strangers to pose for him. Assistant professor of Black diasporic art at Princeton University, and an old friend, she writes of the fleeting gestures, fashionable clothing, and coalescing details of light and place that often caught his fancy, and of the formative influence of Walker Evans, one of his Yale professors. Above all, she makes clear that photography was a lifelong pursuit as vital and urgent to the artist as his painting, so much so that he slept with a camera by his bed. —JANE URSULA HARRIS
Just after Donald Trump’s election, British-born artist Richard Kraft decided to use the visual language of soccer penalties to track the president’s daily offenses, from lying about the weather during his inauguration (yellow card) to calling the media dishonest (red card, meaning automatic ejection). Now, Siglio is publishing an artist’s book representing the nearly ten thousand cards he created over four years. The five-volume hardcover set, “IT IS WHAT IT IS”: ALL THE CARDS ISSUED TO DONALD TRUMP, JANUARY 2017–JANUARY 2021 (Siglio Press, $135), is named after Trump’s dismissal of covid-19’s death toll. On the page, the mosaics of jewel-toned rectangles in richly designed spreads look like soothing abstractions, but the transgressions underlying each hue transform the effect, jolting the mind out of the visual pleasure they provide.
Trump’s crimes rapidly exceed Kraft’s attempt to measure them. He had to immediately invent a magenta card for more serious offenses, like family separation and climate-change denial. When, in 2020, he adds purple to track Trump’s disastrous pandemic response, the purples quickly come to stand for other crimes, like using tear gas on protesters; Kraft admits that even adding a color as bold as crimson for Trump’s attempts to undermine democracy feels “insufficient.” Volumes 1, 2, and 3 are devoted to 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively, with penalty cards at the front of the book and annotations at the back describing what Trump did to warrant each caution. In 2020, though, Trump’s crimes become so frequent that Volume 4 can hardly contain them, and Kraft’s explanations overflow into Volume 5. The cards become more crimson and mauve as America’s political situation darkens.
The stubborn systematism of Kraft’s project, and its touchingly futile attempt to collate ephemeral news and prevent forgetting, remind me of On Kawara’s “Today” series, created regularly from 1966 until the year before Kawara’s death in 2014. These paintings simply state the date, conveying both a sense of repetition and progression. The personal slips in with the subtitles and newspaper clippings, often about current events like the Vietnam War, that Kawara chose to accompany each canvas. Kraft’s project is also personal, reflecting his childhood love of soccer. But there’s a redemptive element absent from Kawara’s work: Kraft’s idea of art as a survival tactic that makes beauty out of ugliness. For the viewer, though, the effect of both projects may be overwhelming, as they document the relentless assault of devastating world-historical news and the continuing lack of accountability of those in power. —FRAN BIGMAN
Magnum photographer Gilles Peress’s prodigious new three-volume production WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY NOTHING (Steidl/ARTBOOK DAP, $480) has been in the works for more than three decades. Peress, along with a series of patient collaborators, spent that time trying to imagine a container that could hold his heterogeneous ideas on violence, community, oppression, resistance, history, and photography as exemplified by his decade-long engagement with the conflicts in the North of Ireland. Peress seems unsatisfied by any existing format for presenting what he experienced beginning in January 1972, when he photographed Bloody Sunday, the day British troops shot dozens of unarmed protesters. Overlaying nearly two-thousand pages and 1,300 images is some helpful editorial scaffolding: two volumes of pictures are conceptualized as twenty-two imaginary days, while the third volume is a “text-and-image almanac” to the first two, with documents, essays, and references. Still, it can’t corral the breadth and depth of the project. (Volume 3, meant to help explain Volumes 1 and 2, has its own explanations appended at the back.) The book revels in its formal indeterminacy: the title page calls it a “documentary fiction,” while the Steidl catalogue says “paper movie” would be more accurate than “book.” The stark black-and-white photos include bleak and bombed-out urban landscapes; mourners, pallbearers, and tombstones; demonstrations, nightlife, and revelers; and graffiti, signs, and tattoos, with slogans like “Fuck the queen,” “Get Right with God,” and “No surrender” acting as the Greek chorus. Peress is presenting a famously complex history as well as a complex argument about presenting that history, but the photographs themselves are too direct, warm, and iconographic to allow the enterprise to become joylessly meta. —D. O.
Joan Semmel, along with other women artists who shifted from abstraction to more representational painting in the 1960s and 1970s, faced a challenge: Could they overthrow the centuries-old tradition of male artists objectifying female nudes? JOAN SEMMEL: SKIN IN THE GAME (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, $40), an illustrated collection of three essays that accompanies the eighty-eight-year-old Semmel’s first-ever retrospective, demonstrates that Semmel faced this challenge by painting, literally, from her own perspective.
For her “fuck paintings” series of 1972–73, she took photographs of heterosexual couples having sex and created paintings that showed women as “participating equals.” She also painted nudes of herself, obliterating the artist-model distinction. Standing Up Looking Down, 1979, drawing on the distortions that photography makes possible, puts us in the position of her own gaze; the canvas is filled by her drastically foreshortened naked body, so close that it becomes abstract and, as contributor Rachel Middleman argues, cannot “be fully objectified through sight.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, Semmel continued to blend abstraction and figuration in her depiction of female nudes in intimate spaces like locker rooms. Her “Overlays” series combines naturalistic figures with outlines of bodies in non-naturalistic colors. She also continued to play with perspective in nudes depicting her own aging body. In Centered, 2002, and Recline, 2005, Semmel renders herself solidly and fleshily, but obscures her face with a camera pointed directly back at us; other nude self-portraits are fragmented by mirrors or show multiple Semmels in motion— like the large-format 2019 painting that gives the book its title—and give the lie to the 2006 painting Disappearing, in which Semmel paints herself fading into the background. —F. B.
Even if you couldn’t cite Ruth Orkin by name, you could probably identify her most famous photograph. American Girl in Italy, Florence, Italy, 1951 is gendered street theater in a single frame, published alongside a Cosmopolitan article about women traveling alone. Although staged—Orkin collaborated with an American art student in various locations—this image, of about a dozen men leering at a pretty pedestrian, became a totemic representation of the power dynamic between men and women: thirsty, predatory gazes elicited by nothing more provocative than a woman turning the corner.
Unhampered by the male-dominated milieu, Orkin forged a creative vision that was playful and bold—her daughter describes her, in the foreword to RUTH ORKIN: A PHOTO SPIRIT (Hatje Cantz/ARTBOOK DAP, $44), as having “chutzpah,”and curator Kristen Gresh writes, in an introductory text, that it’s “now time to recontextualize the forward-looking agenda she advanced.” She began her career working at MGM as a messenger and came to admire women who made their way in photography, citing “the courage of Susan Meiselas in Nicaragua, Maureen Lambray in Afghanistan, Mary Ellen Mark in rough institutions, Jill Freedman with the New York City police and firemen.”
As a photojournalist, Orkin worked for more than a decade on assignments for Life, Look, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and one of her photo sequences was included in the influential Edward Steichen–curated moma show “The Family of Man.” She excelled at spotting funny juxtapositions, like in Woman by MoMA Statue, New York City, 1948, in which the subject, wearing a floral dress, uses the thigh of a sculpture for balance as she cleans off her shoe. Reflecting on her career, Orkin once wrote that running around the MGM lot was good preparation for her photographic practice because it provided “all kinds of excuses to be where you’re not supposed to be.” —SARAH MOROZ
RENÉ GRUAU: MASTER OF FASHION ILLUSTRATION (Prestel, $68) surveys the work of the artist and Italian aristocrat whose ageless editorial and advertising work, spanning the 1940s through the ’80s, evoked the frisson of high fashion with the boldness and self-assurance of a stop sign. In illustrations and covers for publications like Vogue, posters for the Moulin Rouge, and ads for jewelry, white gloves, and perfume with names like Eau Sauvage and Miss Dior, Gruau distills the glamour he’s selling into its most elemental forms: a dress’s elegant silhouette against a monochromatic background, or, in an ad for stockings, the curve of two legs encircled by a black cat. As such, this volume is a dreamlike procession of candy-colored outfits, bright-red lips, notable hats, and unimpeachable style. In a Gruau, the clothes always take center stage, but the artworks also call attention to all they exclude: there’s never a hint of the humdrum world (and it’s clear that only one kind of person—perfect, skinny, white—was allowed into high-fashion’s upper crust). In her introduction, journalist Holly Brubach finds reference points in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Japanese woodcuts, and Pop art, all of which fit the bill. Yet none of these comparisons capture Gruau’s gift: he made being rich and stylish and not having a care in the world into a form of iconic nobility. That vision of fashion has proved to be the most enduring. More than sixty years after his most famous creations, a word like “chic” immediately conjures a Gruau illustration. —D. O.
