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I enjoyed seeing the Brooklyn Museum’s Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving, but as regular readers of this blog know, it’s always all about the art for me. And while there were plenty of excellent photographs, costumes and MesoAmerican artifact on view there, the exhibit was about Frida–not about her art. To be sure, that’s what the exhibit was about her, not about her art, and it succeeded at its goal.

But as I wrote in the concluding paragraph of my review, which appears in today’s Wall Street Journal, “This engaging and sometimes engrossing exhibition will delight Kahlo fans, but for me it’s a missed opportunity to dilute the fixation on her biography and engage them with more of her path-blazing, idiosyncratic art. The balance between her life and her art is, as ever, askew.”

So what is in the show? The photographs of Kahlo create the narrative of the exhibition, and they range from family photos to works of art by the likes of Tina Modotti, Edward Weston and Lola Álvarez Bravo. There’s Frida’s jewelry, shawls, bags, costumes. There’s a cabinet full of objects from Brooklyn’s permanent collection.

There are a few fine paintings here by Kahlo, which I mention in my review. I wish there had been more and better.

Oddly to my eyes the very best painting in this exhibition is by an unknown artist. Portrait of Dona Maria de los Angeles de Cervantes Ozta y de Velasco was painted in Mexico around 1935 and purchased by the museum in 1952. It’s so unheralded that the BM website shows only a black-and-white picture of it. (I took the photo posted here, from an angle only because the lighting obscured a frontal photo.)

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It has this label: “Doña Maria in three-quarter length and view facing to the left side of the picture in which she is seated. Her black hair is parted in the center and she has curls at either side under her ears with some flowers in her hair over her left ear. Her black velvet dress is off-the-shoulder and edged with white lace like the sleeves which come to the elbow. The bodice is pointed and the skirt gathered. She wears white gloves and there is a heavy gold chain ornament around her neck.”

It is in the exhibit because that gold ornament is identical to one worn by Kahlo in a nearby photo.

Kahlo had a big exhibition of her work in Philadelphia in 2008. Maybe that was on Brooklyn’s mind when it took this exhibit. Or maybe Kahlo is just to big a draw to turn away any legitimate show.

When it comes to paintings by Monet, there are many to love. But I especially appreciate his series (poplars and Rouen cathedral are probably my favorites).

Still I was eager to see that Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process, an exhibition of his paintings from that series, which had originated at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, was coming to Worcester, Mass., with one more painting than Rochester had–a total of nine. The Wall Street Journal agreed, and sent me to the Worcester Art Museum last week.

They are marvelous works, and they show, as intended, how great Monet was at conveying, as I wrote, “the city’s light, air and atmosphere, especially fog and smog.”

And: “The bridge stretches across each, but its appearance alters in color and context, fades in and out of focus, and in one case—“Waterloo Bridge” (1900-1901) from the Davis Museum at Wellesley College—almost disappears entirely.”

Here’s a link to my review.

I am posting all nine here, in no particular order–see what you think, decide what weather you think Monet is evoking.

That headline may not sound like news, but it is, in one sense. Many occurrences in the world of indigenous art that may not, on their own, make international headlines are adding up to real progress, intensifying a trend that began a few years ago.

My own contribution to this was published late yesterday in The Art Newspaper. I wrote about a gift of about 1,000 works of art, made by native peoples across Canada and the U.S. to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Canada.

The couple who made the donation–Thomas Duryan and Alice Ladner, began collecting this category in 1992 and, as Druyan has said, he fell down “the rabbit hole”–becoming addicted to collecting, which, if you have to be addicted to something, is not bad, as long as you have the money.

The gift will do wonders for the MacKenzie, because it follows two others.

As I wrote:

The couple’s gift, worth seven figures, according to the MacKenzie’s director, Anthony Kiendl, follows an anonymous C$25m donation last summer to start an endowment and a six-figure donation for acquisitions by a local philanthropist, Lyn Goldman. Together, the three gifts will allow Saskatchewan’s oldest art museum, opened in 1953, to play a much larger role in the art world. “Locally, we’re going to keep building the strong community engagement and, nationally and internationally, we’re building partnerships and developing touring exhibitions as well as building our publications programme,” Kiendl says.

And that’s good news for indigenous art because the MacKenzie is already known for its collection in that area. Here’s the link to my article. (Just over a year ago, The Art Newspaper wrote a trend piece about Native American Art.)

In another development, announced today:

The Walker Art Center said it would “launch …an Indigenous Public Art Commission, a project inviting artists’ proposals for a new public artwork for placement in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden or a location on the Walker campus planned for the fall of 2020. This initiative evolved from a series of commitments the Walker Art Center made with Dakota elders in a mediation process in 2017 connected to the removal of artist Sam Durant’s work Scaffold from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

Of course, the installation last fall of the Diker colleciton of Native American Art in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art , instead of the catchall galleries for what used to be called primitive art, is a big improvement.

Plus, day after day. I receive press releases of new Native American or Australian aboriginal art exhibitions–they seem to be the most common.

It’s all a good thing, and I hope you are watching this develop more deeply along with me.

Most Paul Gauguin exhibitions show him off as a self-described “savage,” that sensualist who abandoned his family in France to canoodle with young Tahitian girls. He did behave badly a lot of the time, even as he was turning out gorgeous paintings.

So it was refreshing to see Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey last year at the de Young museum in San Francisco. The exhibit, a joint venture between Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, leaves out his most sensualist works and therefore presses visitors to see other aspects of his work.

Plus, journey was an apt description for a title: the exhibition is a chronological mini-survey of Gauguin’s development as an artist and his search for an understanding of his own and others’ spirituality.

As I wrote in my review, published in today’s Wall Street Journal, you can see Gauguin work on his artistry in these paintings, drawings, ceramics and wood carvings. He pays homage to artists who inspired him (such as Pissarro, Manet, Delacroix and Degas) early on, and then in Brittany and on the South Sea islands, he turns into the Gauguin we know and love.

The less usual aspect for visitors is that, almost from the beginning, according to curator Christina Hellmich of the de Young, Gauguin inserts hints of his spiritual quest. Later, when he gets to the South Seas, he is looking at native rituals. totems and other objects while he thinks about his paintings. Several Oceanic objects are on view: instead of seeing Gauguin as we usually do, in the context of his European peers, visitors to the de Young see him a different context altogether.

It fact, though Met director Max Hollein departed the San Francisco museums last June, he deserves much credit for this exhibition. As his curators (not him) told me, a courier from the Glyptotek–which owns many Gauguin works, a legacy of his wife, who was Danish–had brought something to SF some time back. Hollein asked her if there was anything she’d been thinking about, anything she’d like to do. Her response: she’d like to put Gauguin’s work in the context of Oceanic art.

Bingo, Hollein said (metaphorically speaking): the FAMSF had just the right collection; it also owns several Gauguin drawings. Thus the partnership.

But that was not the end of things. Then he made another smart move: rather than assign the exhibit to the European paintings department, he selected Christina Hellmich, curator of the museum’s Oceanic art department, as the organizer. She brought fresh eyes to Gauguin. I know because I spoke with her for about an hour, and learned a lot. I may or may not agree with all of it, but it was very interesting.

Here’s an example. In one of the last paintings in the exhibition, Gauguin’s Flowers and Cats, she pointed out the cat on the right’s eyes. She sees a similarity with the eyes of a 1902 gable figure that Gauguin may have seen. At the least, he saw items like it.

A stretch? Maybe, maybe not.

Photo Credits: Top two, courtesy of the FAMSF; bottom, JHD