Houston native Jamal Cyrus calls his artistic mentor Terry Adkins a “cerebral artist with soul.” The same description could be applied to Cyrus himself, whose cross-disciplinary artworks often excavate under-known Black cultural histories. JAMAL CYRUS: THE END OF MY BEGINNING (Inventory Press/Blaffer Art Museum, $35), Cyrus’s first monograph, accompanies his midcareer solo exhibition of the same name. The understated title is borrowed from a sculptural installation from 2005, in which Cyrus adorned a miniature suburban landscape with mounds of snowlike Afro hair. As the exhibition’s cocurator Steven Matijcio writes, the shorn tresses recall artist David Hammons’s sculptures as well as the sargassum seaweed found in the Sargasso Sea.
This work sheds light on Cyrus’s process, which often takes viewers on an associative journey across time. Operating seamlessly among the roles of an amateur archivist, fan, and educator, Cyrus draws on points of departure that include the mid-twentieth-century Pride record label, old copies of Jet magazine, and FBI surveillance files on Black activists. He rendered the latter into a series of semi-abstract two-dimensional works. Curator Grace Deveney notes, “Cyrus emphasizes the shapes of hidden information, underscoring our inability to fully know the narrative . . . contained in the FBI’s archive.”
An adolescent during the late-’80s and early-’90s golden era of hip-hop, Cyrus calls the period of 1992–95 “my generation’s attempt at a Black Arts Movement.” His most memorable works often nod to Black musical history and community-building. Take Texas Fried Tenor (2012–), a performance in which the artist subjected a saxophone to the regional culinary technique of battering and deep-frying. Meanwhile, the pedagogical legacy of Texas Southern University’s art department informs the work of Otabenga Jones & Associates—a collective Cyrus formed with fellow former TSU students Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Kenya Evans, and Robert Pruitt. They named their fictional leader, presiding over an organization of ten thousand, after the African teenager exhibited at the Bronx Zoo in the early twentieth century. As writer Ana Tuazon argues, the collective subversively reimagined the roles of teacher, student, and pedagogy itself. —WENDY VOGEL
“What I’ve tried to capture,” Ellsworth Kelly once said, “is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.” This might not always have been obvious to viewers of his well-known abstract paintings and sculptures, which could seem transfixed by the urge to condense the flux of reality into a few pure, simple, monochromatic planar forms. But the fact is those elegant shapes always came from the artist’s everyday experience—“lines of a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street”—and his aspiration was for their return there, that is, for the works to become elements in an environment rather than self-contained icons of art.
Kelly’s immersion in this quotidian “rapture of seeing” has never been so evident as it is in a book that unveils a side of his art, an ostensibly minor one, that I have to admit I hadn’t been aware of before. ELLSWORTH KELLY: POSTCARDS (Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery/DelMonico Books/ARTBOOK DAP, $60) is the catalogue of an exhibition, curated by Ian Berry and Jessica Eisenthal; it includes essays by Tricia Y. Paik, Lynda Klich, and Eisenthal. Kelly actually mailed some of his postcard collages (he acknowledged the kinship with Ray Johnson); others were kept for his own pleasure. They reveal a prodigious visual imagination and outstanding wit. Sometimes he adorns the background scenes with geometrical shapes that overtly recall those of his paintings. He also reveals an unexpected Pop affinity by superimposing letters or words—cool, go—on them, or fragments of male and female bodies. Whatever Kelly sees, kitschy consumerist come-ons or pure distilled form, he seems to view with affection. “If you can turn off the mind and look at things only with your eyes,” he thought, “ultimately everything becomes abstract.” To me, it looks like the mind was always working. The postcards reflect, but at a tangent, Kelly’s lifelong aspiration toward abstract seeing—a program, more than a predisposition, to become what Cézanne called Monet: only an eye, but what an eye! The collages help teach how to see the paintings, and the paintings help teach how to see the collages. —BARRY SCHWABSKY
If you’ve never given any thought to the hook-and-eye fastening of a skirt or very trimly side-parted hairlines, one Italian artist will change your mind about the aesthetic rapture possible from such minutiae. DOMENICO GNOLI (Fondazione Prada/ARTBOOK DAP, $105) is an expansive supplement to a recent Milanese exhibition, reveling in his life as a painter (oil, tempera, acrylic—often mixed with glue and sand), illustrator, and set designer (notably for London’s Old Vic). The son of an art historian, Gnoli, as a child, was sempre steeped within an aesthetic universe; his life (1933–1970) is combed through here with an almost ecstatically overstuffed illustrated chronology filled with art references and excerpts of letters addressed to his family and his creative community. Musings on the artist’s modus operandi—like Italo Calvino’s rhapsody of four Gnoli tropes, including pillows and men’s shirts—help complete the pictorial panorama. The essay by curator Germano Celant, who orchestrated the exhibition before he passed away in 2020, frames Gnoli’s work as “the revenge of insignificant and disqualified elements,” which he rendered insouciantly exquisite. Celant praised Gnoli’s “anti-style,” which refuted Pop art’s vacuity even as it celebrated the iconography of quotidian materiality. “The intention is to observe,” Celant wrote, so that conventional and readily recognizable items become “spectacular in a theatrical way.” Gnoli himself contended: “I isolate and represent. . . . I never actively mediate,” noting—at once mystically and pragmatically—“I experience the magic of its presence.” —SARAH MOROZ
“I never said to myself, ‘I will be a painter.’ I always thought, ‘I am a painter,’ in the present tense,” stated Françoise Gilot. The artist (born in 1921) was one of Pablo Picasso’s many lovers, and unsurprisingly overshadowed by his reputation, but her formidable strength and creativity went undeterred. The decade-long link commenced in the mid-1940s: they lived in the South of France and had two children. When they broke up, Picasso’s stature enshrouded Gilot’s autonomous output, and he spitefully instructed galleries and critics to deliberately edge her out. But it’s evident from FRANÇOISE GILOT: THE YEARS IN FRANCE (Silvana Editoriale/ARTBOOK DAP, $35)—with its ninety color images—that sexist public oversight didn’t alter her vision of herself. Between 1946 and 1949, Picasso used Gilot as a muse; she refused to allow him to cite her by name in his portraits. She “retorted” to his studies of her with her own self-portraits, like Le Peintre (autoportrait au travail) (The Painter [Self-portrait at Work]) in 1946, a turmeric-hued vision featuring her hands aflutter. Art historian and professor Sarah Wilson noted that the artists “create a duet”—yet there was no equilibrium. Gilot’s disturbing drawing Adam forçant Ève à manger la pomme (Adam Forcing Eve to Eat the Apple), 1946, is a pitiless depiction of their relationship. (She called him an autocrat and an ogre; her incendiary book Life with Picasso was later published in English in 1964.) “Françoise’s face was both entirely possessed by Picasso . . . and entirely dispossessed. Her image became world property,” Wilson elaborates. Although the couple shared a life, they never shared the same reality. “In some of the ‘kitchens’ I painted, the windows have prisonlike bars,” Gilot remarked, “whereas when Pablo painted his kitchens, it was only a problem of lines and rhythms.” —S. M.
I’m not sure I have ever seen a catalogue raisonné as beautiful, as magnificent, as the new publication on the oeuvre of the great American sculptor David Smith. DAVID SMITH SCULPTURE: A CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ, 1932–1965 (Estate of David Smith/Yale University Press, $500) comprises three volumes: a first volume of essays by several commentators, a detailed chronology, and an overview of seventeen “series” of works; a second volume of richly illustrated and copiously annotated entries on individual sculptures from the years 1932–53; and a third volume on works from 1954–65. Following informative remarks by the sculptor’s daughters, Rebecca and Candida Smith, there are essays by Michael Brenson, author of a forthcoming biography of the artist; Sarah Hamill; Marc-Christian Roussel; and Christopher Lyon, who also served as editor of the catalogue as a whole. All four essays are serious attempts to come to grips with aspects of Smith’s endeavor. Among Brenson’s contributions is a highly intelligent discussion of the place of series, as distinct from sequences, in Smith’s corpus; Hamill, author of a highly interesting book on the place of photography in Smith’s sculptural imaginaire, returns to that theme in a nuanced essay focused on his photographic practice; Roussel’s essay on “methods and materials in David Smith’s sculpture” makes an important contribution to our understanding of Smith’s technical preferences and procedures throughout his career; and Lyon usefully discusses the role of two significant critics, Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss, in the formation of the modern discourse about Smith’s achievement. Included in this essay is a detailed discussion of the controversy that arose when Krauss criticized Greenberg’s now notorious decisions regarding the painted surfaces of various sculptures that Smith’s death in an accident at age fifty-nine had left unfinished. I think it is fair to say that subsequent opinion holds that Greenberg was plainly in the wrong, though the issue of the aesthetic effectiveness of applied color in Smith’s oeuvre remains open, at least in specific instances.
As for the two catalogue raisonné volumes proper, they are superb, with splendid photographs and marvelously informative entries on individual works. In short, one of the handful of truly great sculptors of the twentieth century has been given the scholarly monument that he deserves, a solid foundation for the further interpretive work that is bound to follow. —MICHAEL FRIED
