Ariella Budick

Modernists hated bibelots but this New York show makes a strong case for the love of unnecessary decoration

Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg flourished in the city at a moment of pivotal change

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Towards the end of her life, Méret Oppenheim begged interviewers to stop asking about the furry teacup. That single work, produced in a burst of youthful inspiration in the 1930s, came to define her career and, five decades later, she was sick of it. Over the course of her life, a wry, intelligent spirit poked up now and then between stretches of banality, depression and creative blockage, but never decisively enough to distract from the surrealist novelty item “Object: Le Déjeuner en Fourrure”…

Step into the New Museum’s ardent and affecting Pepón Osorio retrospective in New York and you find yourself confronting the artist’s naked heart — or rather, a 6ft scale model of that muscle, bloody and bristling with red crepe-paper capillaries fluttering in the breeze. Speakers embedded in its surface carry the swish and thump of Osorio’s own pulse. It’s a metaphor that’s no less effective for being obvious. The whole thing dangles festively from the ceiling like a giant piñata, practically…

Edvard Munch transfigured mental distress into indelible icons, so we must be grateful for the anguish and loneliness that drove him to create such soul-stirring images. A woman with blood-red hair sinks her teeth into a man’s prone neck in “Vampire”. An erotic “Madonna” beckons with ecstasy and pain. In “The Kiss”, a man and woman’s faces blur into one flesh as they devour each other. And then there’s “The Scream”, the painting that embodies torment so graphically that it birthed an emoji. But…

How do we keep the past alive without swaddling it in nostalgia? Memory has a way of picking up the lint of wistfulness, a fine fuzz that softens the harsh beauty of reality. So when Uruguayan artist Alejandro Cesarco learnt that his father was dying of cancer, he decided to use the lens as a de-sentimentalising machine, a form of protection against the mind’s gentle distortions. The older man, a dapper doctor with a handlebar moustache that would have impressed Wyatt Earp, sat imperturbably i…

“Another hundred people just got off the train,” Stephen Sondheim once reported in a song, though he neglected to point out that most arrive with a detailed, if possibly distorted idea of their destination. New York is nourished by the multitudes who churn through, some to stay, many to flee, all leaving their trace on the metropolitan spirit, the complex whatness of the city. This Is New York, the title of the Museum of the City of New York’s centennial exhibition, contradicts itself, because…

Before I experienced Barkley L Hendricks’ revelatory retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2008, I had never seen more than a couple of his works at a time. He lingered unjustifiably on the fringes of the elite, and he died in 2017, at 72, a respectable almost-unknown. Now that he’s posthumously become the superstar he always deserved to be, one of his favourite museums, the Frick Collection, has gathered 14 of his paintings in a show that stands alongside its permanent collection of w…

If looking at Judy Chicago’s art makes you uncomfortable, well, good. The essential 60-year retrospective at New York’s New Museum contains such an abundant supply of provocations, bloodied menstrual pads, gaping sexes, sarcastic needlework and other feminist flexes that it would make anyone break into a sweat. And yet the show is an exhilarating corrective, airlifting Chicago out of footnote status and dropping her squarely in the American canon where she has always belonged. It’s taken her dec…

In the late-15th-century painting “Death and the Miser”, Hieronymus Bosch captured the lure of lucre. A man lies mortally ill in his bed, unlikely to last the night. Death, a skeleton wrapped in a shroud and holding an arrow, is literally at the door. In this dark night, a ghastly battle unfolds between salvation and damnation. A swarm of knobby little demons descends on the patient, tempting him with sacks and bowls of money. In the original version, Bosch depicted him grasping the devil’s gif…

When 20-year-old Marta Minujín, fresh from Buenos Aires and already plugged into the avant-garde of 1960s Paris, dumped the contents of her studio into a dead-end street in Montparnasse and set them aflame, the blaze caught the art world’s attention. She followed that up with six decades of a practice that is by turns spectacular, incendiary, entertaining, witty and raunchy — qualities largely absent from an earnest survey at the Jewish Museum in New York. Despite its detail and breadth, and the…

Absence is a kind of presence, as any lover of ghost tales knows. Unnamed Figures at the American Folk Art Museum applies that principle to art history, scouring more than 100 years’ worth of works for hints, allusions and anonymous Black figures so minuscule they almost disappear. It’s a massive and important task, since people who were all but invisible in their own time later faded even further into oblivion — even as they continue to haunt us. With the eye of connoisseurs, the tenacity of d…

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New York No matter how aggressively MoMA expands — and by now it’s consumed nearly an entire midtown block — the museum can still only display a meagre slice of its possessions at any given time. Rather than commit to a single ossified version of art history, curators keep the permanent collection in slow, ever-changing rotation. A few crowd-drawing perennials — Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, for instance…

Imagine a woman in her forties, the mother of two children, sitting at a kitchen table in the Bronx, obsessively exorcising her terrors by piecing together scraps of fabric, torn paper and string into elegant collages for nobody to see. Hannelore Baron, an artist so overcome by anxiety and mental anguish that she rarely left the house, shut out 20th-century America where protests raged, cultures clashed and bloodshed dragged on in Vietnam. And yet, even hunkered in her lair, she somehow osmosed…

Those who adore (or despise) Gustav Klimt for his gold-flecked, sinuous women in ornate boudoirs and curtained salons might be surprised to discover that the man ever stepped outdoors. But he did, eagerly — desperately, even — and his lust for nature infused his summertime work. “It is terrible, awful here in Vienna, everything parched, hot, dreadful, all this work on top of it, the ‘bustle’ — I long to be gone like never before,” he complained in 1901. When he did escape all those exacting cli…

In the 1920s, Harlem taught Americans how to be modern in a thousand different ways. The Harlem Renaissance transcended style or school, spanned art forms and flew far beyond the confines of one New York neighbourhood, to Chicago, Philadelphia and Paris. More than a movement, it was a sensibility: urban, novel and proudly Black. “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” proclaimed poet and activist Langston Hughes in 19…

The classic story of modern art goes like this: there once was a city called Paris, where the world’s most brilliant artists converged, jostling and mingling into an international avant-garde. Then Hitler’s armies invaded, and everybody left. André Breton, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and many other luminaries decamped to America so that, by the time the war ended, New York had become the new capital of art. That narrative isn’t wrong, exactly, but it lacks nuance. Pari…

Absence was a vital presence for the sculptor Toshiko Takaezu. She built her forms around soft mounds of emptiness richer than anything the eye could reckon. “The important thing is the dark space that you can’t see,” she once said and, in that spirit, she wrapped voids in ceramic, sometimes breaching the shell with a tiny oculus. Her work is also gloriously extroverted: the Noguchi Museum’s survey of her 60-year career is alive with stunning surfaces, curved, smooth and pocked planes, glazed in…