Finalist: Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker

As a tyro critic in the nineteen-sixties, I fell for the works in the Frick one by one, learning from my response to the art before knowing much about it.

“Welcome to my house,” I’ve said more than once while introducing people to the Frick Collection, my favorite museum. I’ve had to acknowledge an awkward domestic layout, extending to nine stops on the No. 6 train from the East Village. But I’ve meant it in a way that I share with a lot of art lovers, or even just art likers. The Frick stirs proprietary feelings as, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn’t. Big museums array works by a historical logic that is cold to the eye until thawed by your attention. Everything at the Frick is toasty at first glance. That’s an effect of the place’s having been a home, the mansion of the coke mogul Henry Clay Frick, and of the somewhat fictive sense of the collection’s memorializing one person’s passions: pre-loved, call it. Some works and even whole rooms have been added since Frick died, in 1919. The house opened as a museum in 1935. Now we nervously await the collection’s temporary move to the Breuer building, on Madison Avenue—formerly the Whitney Museum and currently leased by the Met—during an expansion and renovation of the main digs: the museum has promised to return the mansion and its contents to their long-cherished states. We’ll see.

At the Frick, you feel more than welcomed—you feel invited, like a family friend. You needn’t be comfortable with the relationship. Frick was a ruthless capitalist, with mines in Pennsylvania and leading roles in the steel industry and railroads. During the Homestead strike, in 1892, he dispatched armed Pinkerton mercenaries. Several workers and a few Pinkertons were killed (accounts of the number of casualties differ). That year, a would-be assassin, the anarchist Emma Goldman’s boyfriend, Alexander Berkman, attacked Frick in his Pittsburgh office, shooting him twice and stabbing him repeatedly. Frick, forty-two years old at the time, soon recovered. (Berkman was imprisoned for fourteen years.) An insatiable collector, Frick was one of several Gilded Age magnates who vacuumed great art from Europe when it was financially pinched. A depression in British agricultural income in the last decades of the nineteenth century made country estates target-rich environments for swashbuckling dealers like the Briton Joseph Duveen, who, at one point or another, had his hands on much that ended up in Frick’s house. Almost all the amassments were bequeathed by Frick to the public.

Admission was still free when, as a tyro critic ignorant of the Old Masters, I discovered and was transformed by the collection in the late nineteen-sixties. Over the years, I fell in love with specific works one by one—each identified on the walls by little more than the artist’s name, so that I learned from my response to the art before knowing much about it. Likewise self-educated are many of the sixty-two culturati—from fields including literature, music, dance, and film—who contribute short personal essays on favorite works in the collection to a slim illustrated anthology, “The Sleeve Should Be Illegal: & Other Reflections on Art at the Frick.” (The title quotes the novelist Jonathan Lethem’s stunned wonderment at an expanse of black-shadowed red velvet in a 1527 portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein.) It is published by the museum and DelMonico Books with a foreword by Adam Gopnik, one of several authors in the anthology who regularly appear in this magazine. Some of the most appealing contributions are from thunderstruck amateurs. This is a charm of the book. Though now a grizzled professional, I still identify with them in spirit.

My Frick isn’t yours, though yours interests me. The place is a Rorschach for personal meanings, unguided by curatorial programs. (I’ve pitied ambitious curators there, contending with a collection that is both heterogeneous and, as installed, perfect. What needs doing, beyond keeping the lights on?) There’s no overriding historical or institutional narrative to come away with. Most museums have works in storage that can reasonably alternate with those on view, at opportune moments. The Frick boasts no such depth. It is top-heavy with a medley of the simply superb—fantastic icing on not much cake. Its context is itself, occasioning a rat-a-tat of sensations that accumulate but don’t add up. They are episodic, guaranteeing a Babel of individual moods and tastes among viewers on any given day. A visit there is a biographical event: who are you this time? Your alertness to some things and indifference to others will tell you. I’m reminded by nearly every page in the book of my own past and ongoing engagement with the collection, not always agreeing with the contributors but stirred by them to recall bits of the discontinuous stories of how the Frick has affected me.

Keeping in mind that an unprejudiced eye should apply as much to one’s hundredth encounter with a compelling art work as it does to one’s first, I’ll try not to be possessive. I can’t endorse, but I enjoy, the writer Jerome Charyn’s association of Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider” (circa 1655)—a mounted, heavily armed young man, probably at the dawn of a day of battle—with memories of his own boyhood wildness in the South Bronx. He deems the rider “defiant in his orange pants” and “beyond any sense of authority or ownership.” I see the picture differently, perceiving the pathos of a youth who is about to change from somebody’s son or brother or sweetheart into an annealed killer. His eyes are already hard. His mouth, still boyishly soft, will have a harsher set by the day’s end.

Another matter is the best painting in the museum, if not the world: Rembrandt’s fathomlessly self-aware “Self-Portrait” of 1658, made when he was fifty-two and sorely beset by personal and professional woes. He knows that he’s the leading painter in Amsterdam, but he seems to wonder if that’s worth anything. It does nothing for his tiredness. A shadow falls across his eyes. I’m loath to argue with the five contributors who single the work out. It becomes part of each viewer’s life: a talisman. I have my ideas on how the artist achieved it. One feature is the odd placement of the thronelike chair in which he sits. The chair’s arms end snugged up against the picture plane, leaving no forward space for his knees to occupy; only shapeless paint smears mark that zone. We as much as view the artist from his lap—an intimation of physical intimacy that intensifies the work’s psychological amplitude. The late Diana Rigg recalls thinking, when she first saw the picture, “That is how I want to act!” Roz Chast recounts an existential encounter. She writes, “I felt as if he were saying to me: Once I was alive, like you. Sometimes I suffered. Sometimes things seemed funny, or maybe absurd, especially myself. I was a man. I was an artist. I was a great artist. My name was Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn. I painted this painting. I lived. I died. Yet here I am. There you are. We are looking at each other.”

My other chief touchstone in the collection is Diego Velázquez’s “King Philip IV of Spain” (1644), which initiated me into the higher sorceries of the Baroque. The painter George Condo puts the marvellousness well: “There’s a majestic presence here; yet it’s all just paint”—true of any painting, perhaps, but minus the majesty. Space becomes porous behind, around, and in front of the subject: a revolving-door effect, spinning pictorial depth out into the real world. Passages of visible brushwork snap into verisimilitude at a calculated distance: about thirteen feet, as measured by me with baby steps. What seem, up close, to be slight variants of the same grayed white become, from the proper remove, satin, silver, linen, and lace. Is Philip an inbred Habsburg geek? Never mind. A contrast between his tight grip, with one hand, on a silver mace of military command and his dandling of a hat with the other hand poses your choice of treatment from him. The portrait is a treatise on royalty.

Unlike Velázquez, Rembrandt plumbed the mysteries of individual humanity, observant but dismissive of social status. I’ve had moments of feeling that painting has been all downhill since that contemporaneity of a Spanish Catholic courtier and a Dutch Protestant entrepreneur. But elsewhere in the galleries wonders ensue—or predate, as with Duccio di Buoninsegna’s pre-Renaissance, gold-backed “Temptation of Christ on the Mountain” (1308-11), in which Jesus fends off the blandishments of a monstrous, winged Satan on a rocky prominence above miniaturized kingdoms. Humbly barefoot and calm, the Saviour rejects with a gesture the Evil One’s offer of world-ruling power. The choreographer Mark Morris both astutely analyzes the picture and has fun with it: “After those forty terrifying days alone, who wouldn’t be tempted to do something desperate and stupid by such a randy and charcoal-black Satan? It happens all the time.”

My first Frick crush, some fifty-plus years ago, was Ingres’s “Comtesse d’Haussonville” (1845), the lady in blue satin who raises a finger to a pulse point on her throat as if her beauty were a self-charging battery. Since then, I’ve recognized the work’s shameless solecisms, mainly an arm that, when you focus on it, appears to emerge from two or three ribs down the subject’s right side, and the longueur of outsized blue eyes that, far from being windows of the soul, suggest top-of-the-line Tiffany accoutrements. There’s a chair at the lower left that only a stick figure could fit into. With Ingres, style conquered all, starting with common sense. The Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez nails the signature qualities: “glossy, soft, and cold.” The theatre artist Robert Wilson contributes a handwritten Gertrude Steinian rhapsody: “what it is is always is classical.” Concerning prosperous women, the great cartoonist Chris Ware, having noted that there “are few uncooler-sounding words than ‘eighteenth-century marble portraiture,’ ” pleases me by selecting Jean-Antoine Houdon’s complexly personable “Madame His” (1775). From her features and expression, you can tell the very tenor of her thoughts. Houdon is one of those artists whose work you may walk past for years until a day that feels fated when you stop.

Masterpieces command a drawing room that is very much as Frick left it. There are two portraits by Titian, two by Holbein, and a religious vision, Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert.” (There’s also a potent El Greco.) Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More” is a miracle of elegance and empathy, coming to a point in the sitter’s prodigiously intelligent gaze. Holbein must have loved him. With apologies to Hilary Mantel, the novelistic defender of the subject of the room’s second Holbein portrait, Thomas Cromwell (1532-33), he looks like a thug to me, sullen in profile. But the singer-songwriter and author Rosanne Cash casts a vote for the picture’s richness of color and cuts Cromwell some compassionate slack for his future consignment by Henry VIII to a headsman’s axe—“on the mountaintop of power until Henry destroys him,” she writes. In a theatrical coup of installation, Cromwell and More, enemies who were doomed to the same end, face each other from either side of a grand fireplace, bracketing a colorful, deadly history.

About Titian, what can be said after you say that he is the finest pure painter ever? Susanna Kaysen, the author of “Girl, Interrupted,” surmises that the subject of “Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap” (circa 1510) “looks to the left, into the past.” Reading that, I see it. The other Titian portrait is of the artist’s best friend and tireless promoter, Pietro Aretino—poet, connoisseur, power broker, feared satirist, author of popular devotional literature and pornography, intimate of rulers including the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and altogether one of the most interesting men of the sixteenth century. (I’m acquainted with Aretino from a bounteous 2012 biography, “Titian: His Life,” by Sheila Hale.) Turning to the Bellini (circa 1476-1478), we behold St. Francis standing outside his cave in a rustic landscape with meadowed sheep nearby and mountains and noble buildings in the distance. He looks skyward and holds out his open hands in a conventional posture of receiving the stigmata. But there’s no other hint of anything supernatural. The married artists John Currin and Rachel Feinstein report years of concentrating, by turns, on the radiant scene’s intricate topographical and botanical details. My favorite element, which mirrors my mystification at the matter-of-factness of the image, is an adorably witless donkey.

I don’t regard the Frick’s three Vermeers as first-rate—for the premium grade, visit the Met—maybe because I’m not beguiled by their possible narrative content. Parts of the pictures aren’t fully integrated and resolved, bespeaking a haste that compromises the artist’s usual—and, for him, indispensable—perfectionism. I am persuaded by the critic and author Vivian Gornick’s speculative interpretation of “Mistress and Maid” (1666-67), in which a seated lady evinces alarm at the approach of her servant holding a letter. Gornick decides that both women suspect that it announces the discovery of an affair the lady is having. I only wish the whole picture were up to the éclat of the lady’s spellbinding yellow dressing gown. Maddeningly, the Frick once passed up a chance to own Vermeer’s supreme “The Art of Painting,” which is now owned by Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. What a baffling artist! He was at his most transcendent with his most quotidian subjects. Vermeer could split the difference between fact and fiction with a tronie—the imagined portrait of a type of person—like the “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” at the Mauritshuis, in the Hague. But when he fell to storytelling, the results tend to weirdness. In the Frick’s “Officer and Laughing Girl” (circa 1657), a young woman grins with some ratio of ingratiation and fear at a cavalier-ish man, who is seen from the back. The ambiguous drama makes the pictured room, with its open window and map on the wall, feel like an arbitrary stage set.

In another space, we confront Agnolo Bronzino’s peak-Mannerist portrait “Lodovico Capponi” (circa 1550-55), of a handsome, arrogant, somehow discontented youth, clad in a gorgeous outfit that features a startlingly projecting codpiece. (That fashion wasn’t Bronzino’s invention, though he surely didn’t mind it. He was notorious for erotic wordplay in his poetry.) The German-born architect Annabelle Selldorf shares her years-long fascination with the painting’s “simultaneous quality of utter impenetrability paired with a provocative invitation to enter, to speculate, and to lose oneself in the ambiguity of the portrait.” I’ve been ambivalent about the work, at times deeming it intolerably arch, but Selldorf persuades me to give it another chance, as does the American man of letters Daniel Mendelsohn, who eruditely speculates about the sitter’s downcast air. Madly romantic, Capponi famously pined for a reciprocally smitten girl whose stepfather forbade her to see him. I’m not used to detecting emotion in works by the icily stylizing Bronzino. But now I look again, and there it is. Score points for the book, opening my eyes and mind.

Less surprising to me, but gratifying, are accounts by the British artist and writer Edmund de Waal and the American choreographer and dance impresario Bill T. Jones, both of whom zero in on the seemingly humble, but sneakily powerful, small painting “Still Life with Plums” (circa 1730), by Jean-Siméon Chardin. I have urged friends to contemplate it for several minutes. It’s less about how a jug, a glass of water, and some fruit appear—the description is perfunctory and the palette drab—than how they are what they are: instances of matter as densely actual as matter can be. The longer you gaze, the more sensitized you’ll be to quiddities of painting in relation to the real—and in relation to yourself as a viewer. Jones calls the painting “a peculiar mirror through which to ‘watch oneself watching.’ ” Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin. That doesn’t sound rare, but, oh, it is. No other still-life painter until the twentieth century’s Giorgio Morandi is so profound.

James McNeill Whistler’s full-length “Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux” (1881-82) and “Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac” (1891-92) usually hang, with two others, in the Frick’s beautiful wood-panelled Oval Room, constituting a decorative scheme that is platonically perfect. I’m always annoyed when some temporary show displaces them. Adam Gopnik writes of the “X-ray of emotion” in Whistler’s portraiture. “Anxiety, doubt, self-reflection, sexual ambiguity: we feel it all,” Gopnik says of the rendering of the Count. The artist Ida Applebroog admires Lady Meux, a banjo-playing barmaid who married a brewing heir and repeatedly scandalized London high society. Both paintings are about glamour as an ethic and almost a morality, defiantly accepting the attendant psychological strains. Whistler communes with his subjects’ audacities of dress as well as attitude—the Count in svelte black and Lady Meux in a dress that looks corseted from the outside. Taste, as taste, had never risen to equivalent eloquence.

My own taste skates past the Frick’s abundance of genteel English portraiture—an Anglophilic craze on the part of Gilded Age American collectors who, lacking distinguished ancestry, as much as bought some. Regarding portraits by Gainsborough that line the Frick’s dining room, I’m not insensible to the “delicacy, poise, restraint, and a certain kind of cool” that puts the English musician Bryan Ferry in mind of “a Miles Davis trumpet solo.” It’s just that I find the manner smugly self-congratulatory. But Alexandra Horowitz, a scientist who heads the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab, arouses my interest in a Gainsborough park scene by identifying three pooches that frisk amid perambulating ladies: a setter mix, a terrier, and a Pomeranian—“the eighteenth-century version, with longer legs and nose, less of a stuffed toy than a vulpine variant of ‘dog.’ ”

We look at paintings, which are specific objects in specific places, as individuals, alone. We may then turn, with excitement or anxiety, to others in the hope of having our responses confirmed. Those conversations are the test of any art’s cultural vitality—commonplace regarding books and movies but rarer, and a mite self-consciously special, in cases of visual art, where undertones of rarity and brute expensiveness intrude. “The Sleeve Should Be Illegal” models for us the starts of such invigorating talk. What’s nice about the book is the variety of personality, extending to eccentricity, of the voices heard and awaiting rejoinders. A contributor occasionally veers into sentimentality, which is easily understandable. The museum’s sacredness to many, including me, can cloy a little. The book could do with more jokes like Mark Morris’s. What is at issue, after all, is only art, a holiday of the spirit on the crowded calendar of life lived. Nor is all the art worthy of reverence. Mixed and even negative opinions can serve as control rods for the fission of overly pious engrossment.

I am not a fan of Joseph Mallord William Turner, though I savor Simon Schama’s nostalgic affection for the British showoff’s relatively muted “Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning” (1826), which, as the critic points out, deploys a watercolor-like use of oils to convey sights along a bank of the Thames. He writes, “The limpid light washing the scene is the light of my memories, the happy ones anyway.” I’m distracted by the calculatedness of the work’s technique, which counts on an emotional appeal that doesn’t strike me as earned. For his big sea and harbor scenes—there are two harbors at the Frick—Turner applied splooshes of paint that we are expected to interpret as an accurate capturing of light and atmosphere. (Contrary to some opinion, these paintings don’t anticipate Impressionism, which coheres in the eye; Turner’s visual fictions require complicities of the imagination.) Then he drew in paint on top of them, with an occasional effect like that of bathroom-tile decals. I much prefer John Constable. If I were to choose only one painting at the Frick to write about, it might well be “The White Horse” (1819), which gets everything right about a rural setting—meadow, stream, sky, clouds, woods, path, farm buildings—at a time of day that is signalled by the homeward transfer, by raft, of a workhorse. Constable conducts me into a specific part of his world and tactfully leaves me alone there. I like that.

I suppose that I know the paintings at the Frick better than any others (including some that are superior) by the respective artists. The collection anchors my art love as pocket editions of the Constitution can seem to serve certain politicians—except I’m honest. By the way, would I be a collector if I could afford it? You bet. The very few purchases that my wife and I have made instruct me that writing a check is intrinsically more sincere than writing a review, because the expense hurts. I would pass on a big Goya, “The Forge” (1815-20), in which a blacksmith is about to strike an anvil. It excites the American painter, sculptor, author, and photographer Tom Bianchi as “an intensely modern painting, based as it is on a specific, near-photographic moment.” The picture seems to me more akin to the artist’s anecdotal etchings—unnecessarily large for its content of a discrete muscular action—than to Goya’s more complexly inspired oils.

But Goya! The Israeli-born American artist, author, and designer Maira Kalman attributes the haunting—or is it haunted?—mood of his “Portrait of a Lady (María Martínez de Puga?)” (1824) to its slightly elfin subject’s “neutral gaze,” scalloped hair, and black dress against a taupe background. “Pensive? Uncomfortable? Indifferent?” Kalman can’t decide. Nor can I. This example of Goya’s unsettling gifts is a minor painting. But sometimes you may be in the mood for inconspicuous works. Thus the photographic artist Duane Michals comes to rest on an uncharacteristic painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau, “The Portal of Valenciennes” (circa 1710-11), of soldiers lounging outside a city or fortress wall. The master of ceremonious Eros is, for once, hanging out with random guys. This testifies to the eighteenth-century France that Watteau actually lived in while he conjured visions of aristocratic dalliance. A bonus of such oddities is that you can usually have them to yourself on days when the museum is crowded with fellow-viewers.

Crowds can’t vitiate the almost violent charm of the Frick’s Fragonard Room, which incorporates a suite of paintings, “The Progress of Love,” that was commissioned in 1771 by Madame du Barry for a new pavilion outside Paris (she later decided against the paintings, deeming them out of fashion). After the Revolution, the suite, with additions, ended up in the home of a cousin of the artist, in Grasse. The British dealers Agnew’s acquired it for J. P. Morgan. Following Morgan’s death, in 1913, Joseph Duveen sold it to Frick on behalf of the banker’s estate. Duveen arranged for the room’s installation, enhanced with gems of furniture, ceramics, and small sculpture. (However you may judge the sly dealer, he merits lasting honor for this tour de force.) In Frick’s day, women would gather in the room after dinner while the men consumed cigars in a basement space that is still equipped with a billiard table and bowling alleys.

As a mot juste for “The Progress of Love,” I nominate “silly.” Great art essentializes qualities of human experience, of which silliness is a capital instance. The big paintings theatricalize stages of adolescent amour—resisted seduction, furtive intimacy, triumphant union, and subsequent nostalgia—among young people at court who were given nothing to do in life except to dress up and to play at love. At a heroic scale under sumptuously soaring trees, the tableaux both amuse and overwhelm. “It’s like being blown away by a French love bomb,” the musician Donald Fagen, a co-founder of the band Steely Dan, writes, adding a confessional rue for the common course of romance in real life: “the feverish rush of desire, the euphoric first months when lovers are compelled to idealize each other, followed by the inevitable crash when the levels of serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine in the brain start to plunge.”

Fragonard didn’t neglect love’s downside. A final addition to the suite—looking unfinished but really made in a late, simplified style—finds a young woman droopingly alone, with one limp hand resting suggestively in her lap. A stone Cupid above her on a pillar regards her indignantly and points a finger horizontally, as if saying, “Girl, stop moping and get out there.” Fragonard’s rococo gaga-ness is deceptive. He had a subtle, at times almost subliminal narrative imagination. His tones vary from shouts to whispers. No other major period style ended as abruptly as this one, extinguished by the Revolution.

“The Progress of Love” brings to an extravagant climax the luxuriousness that is implicit, at the Frick, in the ownership of so much extraordinary art. Its showiness departs from the collection’s generally sober temperament. Frick had conservative compunctions. He acquired no nudes, for example. He seems to have dreamed less of glory than of dignity, laundering the machinations of his avarice. There was nothing racy beyond the dandyism of Whistler. Frick collected more works of Whistler’s than of any other artist, likely because the painter squared his originality with soothingly patrician airs. Frick was reluctant to endorse his era’s cascade of Parisian avant-gardes. (An occasionally displayed Monet or Renoir feels positively reckless in context.) He epitomized sensibilities of the time that said “Not so fast!” to modernity in a way that can only be modern in itself, called forth by the pressure of worldly change: reactionary, certainly, with a touch of hysteria in championing prestigious, almost exclusively dead white men. The collection’s bias makes it, as a whole, an illustrative historical artifact that happens to be breathtaking in many of its parts. The works may be old, but our experience of them is strictly up to date. More than one contributor to “The Sleeve Should Be Illegal” invokes a sensation of walking on air after a visit to the Frick, a payoff of renewed faith in the powers of art and a forgivable pride in our own perhaps untrained and underused capacities to comprehend the aesthetic and spiritual stakes of a timeless game.

Using cartoons such as “The Simpsons” or characters of his own devising, the artist KAWS makes work that sails beyond kitsch into a wild blue yonder of self-cannibalizing motifs.

In 1992, a Jersey City graffiti artist named Brian Donnelly adopted KAWS as his nom de spray can, only because, he has said, he liked how the four letters looked together. Nigh on thirty years later, as a phenomenally successful painter and sculptor with lines of toys and other merchandise, he remains pragmatic. “KAWS: WHAT PARTY,” at the Brooklyn Museum, is the latest in a globe-trotting series of institutional exhibitions of neon-bright acrylics, antic statuary, and gift-shop-ready tchotchkes that are either based on familiar cartoons and puppets—the Michelin Man, “Peanuts,” “The Smurfs,” “Sesame Street,” and, especially, “The Simpsons”—or run changes on such characters of his own devising as Companion, a lonesome sad sack sporting Mickey Mouse-style shorts and gloves.

Donnelly isn’t a Pop artist, exactly, except by way of distant ancestry. Most of his career moves were initiated about six decades ago by Andy Warhol, who had the not inconsiderable advantage of being great. Warhol’s conflations of fine art with demotic culture were, and remain, pitch-perfect in all respects, including a candid avarice that kidded, even as it embraced, triumphant American commercialism. Do Donnelly’s frisky morbidities emulate Warhol’s preoccupation with death? Fatal car crashes, suicides, the electric chair, and Jackie Kennedy in mourning invested Warhol’s gorgeous stylings with haunting gravitas. Donnelly’s semi-defunct figures generate nothing similarly affecting. Nor is he in a league with Jeff Koons, despite the probability that but for Koons there would be no KAWS. Koons’s weddings of banality and beauty, in his sculptures of determinedly kitsch subjects, are formally consummate and—once you recover from their insults to your intelligence—fantastically seductive. Koons anticipated a global hegemony of big money in contemporary art, symbolizing it in advance of its arrival. His works look as expensive as they are, and then some. But he delivered the goods.

Donnelly’s statues and figurines swing at a similar mojo of high art crossed with nonchalant vulgarity. They miss. The shortfalls are so routine that futility may be a criterion of his art’s anti-glamorous glamour. Like his paintings of the tops of “Simpsons” heads, the objects don’t feel motivated as art. Their themes ring hollow. The supposed melancholy of the abundant Companions—often slumping in evident despair—seems as coolly calculated as the burlesques of death with the “X”-eyed figures in the cartoon paintings. Branding has long since siphoned away the passion of the train-yard prodigy. The only palpable carryover from his bygone street work is a ravenous hunger to make himself known. Mission accomplished! As a recent profile in the Times Magazine noted, he has more than three million Instagram followers.

The established New York art world was having none of KAWS for several years. Professionals quailed at his formulaic production of luxury goods with a populist veneer. But nothing succeeds like success—KAWS found a rapt audience via entertainment-intensive public works, including the “Holiday” series of enormous Companions. One floated on its back in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor, others rode weather balloons into the stratosphere, or reclined near the base of Mt. Fuji. Call the mode Koons lite—harmless, really, if you leave out the sensitivities of viewers who pay searching attention. Every KAWS indexes every other KAWS. All partake in one predilection—not kitsch, which debases artistic conventions, but a promiscuity that sails beyond kitsch into a wild blue yonder of self-cannibalizing motifs that excite and, I believe, comfort a loyal constituency.

I fail to detect charm in most anybody’s cartoons of cartoons. Anything you do at second hand with that lively art—unless you’re Roy Lichtenstein, exercising Mondrian-grade formal rigor—merely churns and inevitably dissipates what it’s about. How do you satirize satire, in the capital case of “The Simpsons”? And when is a Simpson not a Simpson? When it’s a pastiche. But instant recognizability combined with rousing entrepreneurship, at prices for every above-average wallet, seems key to KAWSism—which is certainly democratic, in the sense of making no demands on anyone. It isn’t a taste. It’s an illustrated success story—naked ambition as its own reward, with just enough tacit irony to disarm some doubters. To Donnelly’s credit, he has shaken up the art world, humbling gatekeepers who would love to keep him out but can’t any longer.

Be it noted that there is nothing felonious about Donnelly’s manipulations, which vivify a possibility—the erasure of hierarchical distinctions between art and, well, stuff—that someone was bound to grab hold of eventually. I find it depressing, but you would expect that from an élitist art critic, wouldn’t you? A chance to snoot highbrows is a bonus for KAWSniks, whose glee might as well be taken in good grace by its targets. See the show, for its lessons in a present psychosociology. I predict that you’ll be through it in a jiffy, and that little of it, if any, will stick in your mind a day or even an hour later. There’s a certain purity in art that’s so aggressively ineloquent. Like a diet of only celery, which is said to consume more calories in the chewing than it provides to digestion, KAWS activates hallucinatory syndromes of spiritual starvation.

The avant-garde artist was one of the late twentieth century’s great creative personalities, with traits that once shadowed and now halo her importance.

“Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life,” at MOMA PS1, is a ravishing and scandalously overdue New York museum show of the French-American avant-gardist, who died at the age of seventy-one, in 2002, of emphysema probably caused by her use of toxic materials. The self-taught Saint Phalle is one of the late twentieth century’s great creative personalities, ahead of her time in several respects, with traits that once clouded and now halo her importance. Her career had two chief phases: feminist rage, expressed by way of .22 rifles fired at plaster sculptures inside which she had secreted bags of liquid paint, and feminist celebration of womanhood, through sculptures of female bodies, often immense, in fibreglass and polyester resin. The shooting period lasted from 1961 until about 1963. The bodies consumed the rest of her life. Her masterpiece, the Tarot Garden (1979-2002), is a vast sculpture park in Tuscany filled with twenty-two free-form, monumental women, animals, and figures of fantasy, some the size of houses and made habitable with kitchens and plumbing. She was popular in Europe but, until late in life, cut little ice in transatlantic art circles. The problem tracks to a schism, around 1960, with triumphant American formalist abstraction, Pop art, and Minimalism on one side, and, on the other, European Nouveau Réalisme, a cohort (all male but for Saint Phalle) of provocateurs given to neo-Dadaist stunts: Yves Klein painting with pigment-slathered naked women, Arman amassing collections of identical common objects, Daniel Spoerri gluing down remnants of meals and hanging them vertically, Jacques Villeglé presenting ragged, found street posters.

Saint Phalle’s gunplay, realized in Paris in 1961, was a stunt for sure: creation by destruction, theatrically perforating first plaster-covered boards and then figurative plaster sculptures of male subjects—avatars of her hated father, who sexually assaulted her when she was eleven. Some pieces concealed spray cans, for explosive effect when hit. That year, Marcel Duchamp, seventy-four years old, introduced the thirty-year-old Saint Phalle and her friend Jean Tinguely, the Swiss kinetic sculptor, to Salvador Dalí, fifty-seven. In honor of Dalí, they fashioned a full-size bull, which, wheeled out after a bullfight in Catalonia, satisfyingly blew up. Saint Phalle usually performed in fashionable white pants suits. The cultural frisson of a beautiful woman wielding deadly weapons and setting off explosives earned her notoriety in France, but there was scant critical curiosity, anywhere, about the motives of the work: a traumatic personal backstory and a politically edged aspiration to better the world.

Born near Paris in 1930, to a tyrannical French banker father and a suffocatingly pious Roman Catholic American mother, Saint Phalle had a childhood of privilege and of horror, first in France and then, after her father’s finance company failed in the Depression, in America. Both parents were violent. Saint Phalle described the homelife as hellish. Two of her siblings committed suicide as adults. She was expelled from two Catholic schools and from the Brearley School, in New York, which booted her for defacing its classical statues by painting their fig leaves red. (Even so, she always praised Brearley for having instilled self-confidence in her as a young woman.) Starting in her late teens, she modelled for Life, French Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar. At one point, Gloria Steinem spotted Saint Phalle walking down Fifty-seventh Street, purseless and in a cowboy getup. In an interview quoted by the show’s curator, Ruba Katrib, in the catalogue, Steinem recalled thinking, “That is the first free woman I have ever seen in real life. I want to be just like her.”

At the age of eighteen, Saint Phalle married Harry Mathews, a nineteen-year-old American aspiring musician, who became an experimental novelist after the poet John Ashbery introduced him to the charismatically daft early-twentieth-century work of the Frenchman Raymond Roussel. Crosscurrents of creative influence flowed among many of the international bohemians of the period. The couple quickly had a daughter. Then Saint Phalle broke down. She and Mathews were now living in France and both were having affairs. In 1953, after a bout of sexual jealousy compounded by ill health (she suffered from hyperthyroidism), she attempted suicide. For six weeks, she underwent electroshock treatments and psychoanalysis at a clinic in Nice. It seemed to help. Saint Phalle and Mathews had a second child, and the family spent most of the remaining decade moving around Europe. In 1955, in Barcelona, she was flabbergasted by the buildings and the mosaics of Antoni Gaudí. (Gaudí became “my master and my destiny,” she said.) Plunging into art, at first with naïve styles of painting and assemblage, she separated from Mathews in 1960. He took the kids, but she stayed close to him, as she tended to do, all her life, with miscellaneous friends and (a great many) ex-lovers.

Indeed, sociability was Saint Phalle’s element, to the point of blurring her creative identity. At her first shooting performance, she let the invited guests take turns with the gun that she had rented from a fairgrounds for the occasion, delighting in their cathartic pleasure. As free with giving credit as with claiming it, in the Tarot Garden—which she created on an extensive plot of land donated to her by some wealthy friends—Saint Phalle incorporated homages to the Italian workers who had fashioned the steel armatures for her sculptures, covered them with resin, and helped line the exteriors and interiors with ceramic tiles and shards of mirror. (Videos in the show document the years of exacting labor.) She maintained a productive partnership with Tinguely for years, including throughout an intimate relationship that began in the early sixties and resulted, a decade later, in marriage, with the pair collaborating on works that combine her sensuous sculptures and his wittily racketing machinery.

Until 1963, Saint Phalle continued to create patriarchal icons in plaster and, with bullets, make them bleed paint. Some were relief portraits of leading politicians, whom she loathed as a class—one was of John F. Kennedy, before his assassination. Then, in 1965, after some fetching sculptural works, mostly in soft materials, on themes of melancholy brides and elaborate, not terribly menacing monsters, came the first of what she called Nanas, using the French slang that was the rough equivalent of “broads” or “chicks.” The Nanas were inspired by a pregnant friend whose body was very curvy—almost hyperbolically female. (It was Clarice Rivers, wife of the painter Larry Rivers.) Saint Phalle fashioned the shape as a container, hollow but apparently formed of seismic internal forces. Nanas proliferated at sizes small and gigantic, turning dancerly and acrobatic. Saint Phalle mastered gloss techniques for preserving their painted surfaces—in black-and-white and, often, sizzling secondary and tertiary hues—outdoors, in all weather. Nothing about the work jibed with anything then current in art. Most critics, especially American ones, dismissed it. Today, as categorical distinctions among art mediums and styles deliquesce, it comes off as heroic.

There’s a playhouse feeling and, in some cases, a function to Saint Phalle’s big women and to such occasional monsters as “The Golem” (1972), which occupies a playground in Jerusalem. Three snaking red tongues protrude as slides for kids. (When citizens opposed the commission by the city’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, Saint Phalle argued successfully that scary things help children master their fears. It was a big hit.) She brought an unchanging spirit to her public works, occasional architecture (a three-part home in the South of France which nestles children’s rooms inside a Nana’s breasts), and abundant drawings and handmade books. She never winks to educated taste. There’s a frequent tendency to deem Saint Phalle’s childlike imagery sentimental, but I don’t think it is. No matter how playful, the benign quality of her later work drew on the same fund of contrariness—the proto-feminist animus—that fuelled her early weaponized exhibitionism. (She said that she enjoyed the thought of men looking “very small” next to looming Nanas.) At a time that was biased against figuration and only just becoming alert to feminism, she risked—or perhaps guaranteed—condescension. It didn’t faze her at all.

If anything disconcerts about Saint Phalle, it’s a steely consistency of tone. As a prolific pamphleteer during the aids crisis, in which she lost many friends, she saw no need to darken her bouncily cartoonish graphic style, though she embellished it with language that conscientiously addressed the disaster. Art was a place in her. Any work by her is like a destination that, once reached, lets you go elsewhere only by retracing the way you came. Other artists are like this, notably those who are termed outsider or self-taught: birds with their single songs. Saint Phalle’s enthusiasm for Gaudí’s sophisticated designs extended to the work of such visionary eccentrics as Ferdinand Cheval, a nineteenth-century French postman and the creator of a surreal imaginary palace; and Simon Rodia, of the Watts Towers, in Los Angeles. This predilection points to a compulsive hold on the life force that had propelled her from the start.

In her later years, Saint Phalle slipped into celebrity. She designed and marketed a perfume, jewelry, and scarves, to finance the protracted construction of the Tarot Garden. (“Why don’t I become my own patron?” she asked.) Those commodities look great, by the way—they are continuous with her inventive drive, in an art world that was on its way to welcoming heterodox pursuits including retail commerce and overt politics. She pioneered, as well, an epochal rise of installational and environmental art, though with forms too idiosyncratic to be directly imitable. The PS1 show is a cascade of bedazzlements. Is it lovable? Not quite. Saint Phalle was too guarded—wound too tightly around herself—to vamp for adoration. Attention was enough. Understanding proved more elusive, but was foreordained, eventually, by a fearlessness that sweeps a viewer along from start to finish.

Three things made the late-pandemic Frieze New York a tonic: the joy of seeing works in person, the smaller number of galleries, and face masks.

I quite enjoyed Frieze New York, the recent edition of the annual (except last year) international art fair, housed at the Shed—the arts complex in Hudson Yards, on Manhattan’s far West Side—rather than, as in past years, inside a colossal tent on Randall’s Island. This was unusual for me, because I hate art fairs: they strike me as upscale bazaars, almost immediately exhausting, that reek of quiet desperation. They are a global phenomenon of the last quarter century, born partly out of the competition that dealers face from auction houses, which have recognized—and juiced—the skyrocketing prices of works that may be more or less fresh from studios. Brick-and-mortar galleries can no longer count on preëminence as the farm system of the art industry. To retain top artists and to preserve their own rank in the art world’s marching order, dealers can’t not laboriously and expensively schlep their wares and staff around the globe, from fair to fair. The events are schmoozefests for the über-rich and assorted influencers, granted V.I.P. privileges. (Such an ugly term, unctuously elevating an élite to an elect.) But they are popular with some upper-middle hoi polloi as well. Tickets to the Shed sold out well in advance, with general-admission and preview tickets ranging from fifty-five to two hundred and sixty-five dollars a pop. How much is exposure to a hodgepodge of recent art worth to you?

For me, three things made this late-pandemic Frieze a tonic. First was the joy of seeing art in person after fourteen months of nearly total deprivation. It was like being given back a body to go with digital-wearied eyeballs. Even so-so works gladdened me just by being real. Second, only about sixty galleries were represented, as opposed to Frieze’s usual coma-inducing tally of a couple of hundred. Finally, there was the relative anonymity bestowed by face masks, which had the effect of reducing instances of unsought conversation. Fairs intensify the social rites that attend the showing and selling of art in New York. My mask could hide my chagrin at failing to recognize people who did address me. (“Good to see you” goes only so far.) Not that these are important disgraces, given my temperamental distance from a wholly commercial ecosystem. I cherish the art world for its steady provision of things to look at—and I respect dealers, who wouldn’t be involved in art if they didn’t love it, and who have the wisest heads in the game, because they can’t afford to be uninformed—but I quail at considering the enterprise a club of mutual interests, least of all in the rise and fall of pecuniary fortunes. The cage matches of Eros and Mammon that are fairs leave me dyspeptic, even as I avail myself of a generously supplied V.I.P. pass because wouldn’t you?

The chief distinction of Frieze New York is that it happened at all, unlike the other fairs that usually invade the city this time of year. In terms of the art on display, it was mild to nearly sedate. Dealers seemed reluctant to lead with their best or most challenging stuff, perhaps keeping their powder dry for occasions attracting, as this one largely didn’t, the European and Asian collectors who would usually walk the floor. (They were still able to fatten the contemporary trade through the fair’s online viewing rooms.) Alert to the present era in racial politics, Frieze paid tribute to the Vision & Justice Project, a program initiated by the Harvard professor Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, in 2016. Billboard-size polemical wall pieces by artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Mel Chin, and Hank Willis Thomas lined the fair’s halls, to uneven effect. The gesture felt defensive, as a virtuous fig leaf on the fair’s naked avarice.

At the booths, numerous Black artists scored higher, given that so many of them—such as the painters Rashid Johnson, at Hauser & Wirth, with bristling, peculiarly nerve-racked abstraction, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, with a solo show at James Cohan, of cartoonish characters, rendered mostly in white on black, that included a wry reference to the ever-controversial K.K.K. imagery in paintings by Philip Guston—are superb. (Speaking of Guston, a K.K.K.-free gouache sketch by him of an open book, at Hauser & Wirth, sparked consciousness of his immense, undying influence on younger artists.) The quality of the artists’ work was in synch with their dealers’ eagerness to peddle it. There is just no getting around the art world’s alchemy of value becoming price—which I would simply prefer to happen offstage, like murder in Greek theatre.

Painting ruled this Frieze. The appetites that govern today’s market explain the flourishing of the old medium, which avant-gardists have declared dead, off and on, for a hundred years. I had an uncanny sense of styles and reputations picking up where they left off in March, 2020. (A visitor this year might have had giddy moments of imagining that the horrendous intervening epoch never happened—fake news.) The dominant mode splits differences between antic figuration and formal order. Surrealism is back, with housebroken manners. The present master is Dana Schutz, whose blazingly colored fantasies of enigmatic violence were on show at David Zwirner’s booth. She makes sculpture, too, of rousingly bestial grotesqueries. (Schutz naïvely got into public trouble at the 2017 Whitney Biennial with a presumptuous painting based on the mutilated Emmett Till in his casket. She has since eschewed obvious topicality.) Related younger painters (Schutz is forty-four) included Ivy Haldeman, with Downs & Ross, who composes images of bizarrely animate fashionable clothes and occasional body parts, writhing in space. Narrative? Abstract? Either or both, in key with the present premium on supercharged ambiguity.

A bonus of the fair was a gorgeous mini-retrospective of the fey romanticist Karen Kilimnik—assembled by Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Sprüth Magers—of small, loosely daubed pastiches of vaguely seventeenth- or eighteenth-century pastoral scenes, rosy-cheeked women, and lovable animals, mostly horses. A world of her own, which some disdain but I adore. Since the nineteen-eighties, when Kilimnik made many of the paintings, she has conveyed a quality ever rarer in contemporary art: the expatiation of a personal drive. You feel that she would be making the work if she were the only artist in existence, which, in her heart, she may well be. Similarly take-me-home covetable, at Karma, was a small still-life by Dike Blair, an artist who is little renowned but is passionately esteemed by his fans, including me. Blair has taken various tacks since the seventies, most successfully photo-realist paintings in gouache or oil (from snapshots he takes) of unremarkable domestic and worldly objects and bits of architecture. Flowers feature often. So do fancy cocktails, as at Frieze. Blair’s compositions are deadpan and his colors emphatic. A subtle air of ironic detachment pervades his work, as if he were startled by his own temerity in offering pleasures so unprepossessing. But once you start looking at a picture by him it’s hard to stop. You almost watch, rather than look, as though some ultimate secret of life and art were in the offing, momentarily out of sight and not to be missed when it reveals itself.

But taking the cake in terms of personal aesthetic audacity was “Untitled” (1990), a pale canvas, at Michael Werner, by the late and, by many of us, still lamented German artist Sigmar Polke, who died in 2010, at the age of sixty-nine. He was a wizard of heterodox materials and an unpredictable humorist with mystical nuances. He created this work in the dark with slathered silver nitrate, silver oxide, silver iodide, and silver bromide. Exposed to light, the strokes resolved into a filmy gestural cadenza: quietly ferocious, if such is imaginable, like superimposed eddies in a whipping windstorm. As often during Polke’s career, chance was his sidekick. To view this work is to share in his surprise when it became visible. The painting couldn’t have been more remote from the fair’s pageant of product lines—not that Polke didn’t work in series, but he could be counted on for exhilarating instances of turning the tables on himself.

Either several familiar artists have improved lately or my former resistance to them has expired. So it is with the French multimedia specialist Annette Messager, with two installations at Marian Goodman: a large wall hung with scrolls bearing fluent drawings that are interspersed with small individual figures of uncertain species, and a darkened room containing a heap of taxidermied or toy creatures (rabbit, duck, pigeon, kitten, raccoon, lizard, and more) and sculpted hands with raised fingers, all embedded in a sort of primal crud. Tiny spotlights rotated within the pile, casting on the surrounding walls huge shadows of things near the lights and diminutive ones of those more distant. The flow of the scale shifts mesmerized. A poetry of some organic natural process was suggested—perhaps evolution or, I don’t know, devolution, on fast forward. The works’ theatrical richness provided an immersive time-out from Frieze’s teeming thises and thats.

Contemplation, art’s primary exercise of the human mind, is the last thing enabled by art-fair hurly-burly. But it could and did occur at points in Frieze New York, an event marked less by celebration than by gasping relief, like a swimmer saved from drowning. 

Some of us don’t like the inarguably great artist as much as we know we should.

Some of us don’t like the inarguably great artist Paul Cézanne as much as we know we are supposed to. I, for one, have struggled with him all my art-loving life. Others, as I’ve confirmed in recent conversations with Cézanne devotees, are astonished and appalled to hear anything with even a trace of negativity said about him. “Cézanne Drawing,” at the Museum of Modern Art, with some two hundred and eighty works on paper (too many? Not really, because quantity intensifies the works’ qualities), has a cumulative impact that is practically theological for both believers and skeptics, akin to a creation story, a Genesis, of modernism.

It’s a return to roots for moma, which initiated its narrative of modern painting in 1929 with a show that included van Gogh, Seurat, and Gauguin as well as Cézanne, whose broken forms made the others look comparatively conservative as composers of pictures. He stood out then, as he does now, for an asperity of expression that is analytical in form and indifferent to style. The appearance of his works is an effect, not a fulfillment. He revolutionized visual art, changing a practice of rendering illusions to one of aggregating marks that cohere in the mind rather than in the eye of a viewer.

You don’t look at a Cézanne, some ravishing late works excepted. You study it, registering how it’s done—in the drawings, with tangles of line and, often, patches of watercolor. Each detail conveys the artist’s direct gaze at a subject but is rarely at pains to serve an integrated composition. Cézanne was savagely sincere in his ways of looking, true to what he called his “little sensation” in how things, bit by bit, met his regard. He made pictorial vision the exercise of an artist’s concerted will and a challenge to a viewer’s understanding. The show looks at first glance like an overwhelming ordeal, with its profusion of so many works, mostly small, for you to shuffle around peering at. They seem much the same—as in a real way they are, but with a consistent intensity that refreshes itself from piece to piece. As big as the show is, it can be taken as a mere sampler of prodigious creativity. I usually disdain wall texts, but those here, written by the curators Jodi Hauptman and Samantha Friedman, are soundly spot on and informative. Sanctifying or not, the occasion is richly educational.

Cézanne was personally shy, to the point of being asocial. He was viewed by some in Paris, including Édouard Manet, as something of an uncouth hayseed from the South of France, though he was the scion of a well-to-do family. His often clumsy and weird early works, mostly from the eighteen-sixties and seventies, when he was in his twenties and thirties, seethe with violent imaginings of rape and murder. A man stabs another person on a rural road. An elegant dude evinces surprise upon entering a room heaped with corpses. Naked women figure as objects of hyperbolic sensuality, at times enthroned among lusting male worshippers. He was plainly bent on forcing notice, without much success outside a circle that included his best friend since childhood, Émile Zola.

What ensued next was a remarkable sublimation of unruly emotion into an austere ambition to, as Cézanne formulated it later, “make of Impressionism something as solid and durable as the art of the museums.” The catalyst of the change was Camille Pissarro, nine years his senior, who mentored him in Impressionist techniques and remained a close friend until they were estranged by the Dreyfus affair, in which Cézanne passively sided with the outrightly anti-Semitic Renoir and Degas. Pissarro was the subtlest of the leading Impressionists, devising ways of giving distinctive presence to each part of a painting, by, for example, defining the edges of objects with the paint that surrounded them. For him, an edge was a place where paint didn’t stop but only changed color. Cézanne, compulsively copying motifs from classical painting and sculpture, gradually forsook Pissarro’s fictive unities within the pictorial rectangle in favor of notating rather than reproducing observed reality. His drawings are as likely to leave backgrounds blank as to fill them in. It was a radical shift, scorning both verisimilitude and imagination.

Cézanne was fearless of error. You see that in his figure drawings from sculpture. If a contour isn’t quite right, he doesn’t correct it (the one drafting tool that he seems never to have employed is the eraser): he multiplies it, with lines on top of lines. (There’s accuracy in there somewhere.) His audacious independence was enabled by willful isolation, at his family’s Aix-en-Provence estate, far from the competitive milieu of Paris, where even the most adventurous of his contemporaries had to subsist on sales. He attained a degree of fame among fellow-artists and bold collectors, while being repeatedly subject to public ridicule. The full import of his mature art burst upon the world in a retrospective exhibition in 1907, a year after his death, from pneumonia, at the age of sixty-seven. It may be too much to say that he changed everything in the course of art history. But he was bound to make artists whom he didn’t directly influence more than a little nervous.

Cézanne drew nearly every day, rehearsing the timeless purpose—and the impossibility—of pictorial art: to reduce three dimensions to two. His greatest works, from late in his life, partly reconstitute visual drama, notably in scenes of bathers in Arcadian settings and (my favorites) still-lifes of fruit and domestic objects which yield a sense of seeing, or, somehow, of feeling, around the summarily represented masses. Apples stay delicious while acquiring the density of cannonballs. The effect holds for portraits of his wife, Hortense, and of his gardener—themselves effectively domestic objects, for all that Cézanne cared about them as living souls. To my eye, the show’s only portrait heads that suggest personhood are a couple of his son, Paul, pictured sleeping.

Thingness magnetized him, in tirelessly repetitive renderings of, for example, the nearby Mont Sainte-Victoire, eight barely varying versions of which are in the show. Thereness, too, reigned. You rarely feel any passionate attraction on Cézanne’s part to his subjects, but, rather, a stubborn, even obsessive responsiveness to their existence. He couldn’t help depicting them, because they couldn’t help but be. He seems to have been impervious to boredom. His interest in the visible world was unquenchable. The payoff reminds me of an adage from William Blake: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” Cézanne’s scattershot approach triumphed in his conflations of surface with depth, which abolished perspective by locating the near and the relatively distant with shading and color, perceived all at once in increasingly perfect equipoise. All that remained for Cubism to introduce was the geometric fragmentation of subjects in abstracted, shallow space: a decorative function departing from Cézanne’s unshakable loyalty to facts.

So what’s my problem? Partly it’s an impatience with Cézanne’s demands for strenuous looking. I tire of being made to feel smart rather than pleased. (Here I quite favor the optical nourishments of van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat.) But my discontent is inseparable from Cézanne’s significance as a revolutionary. How good an idea was modernism, all in all? It disintegrated, circa 1960, amid a plurality of new modes while remaining, yes, an art of the museum. It came to emblematize up-to-date sophisticated taste, spawning varieties of abstraction that circle back to Cézanne’s innovative interrelations of figure and ground. It also fuelled a yen in some to change the world for the more intelligent, if not always for the better. The world took only specialized notice. Modernism’s initially enfevered optimism could not survive the slaughterhouse of the First World War and the political apocalypse of the Russian Revolution, which ate away at myths of progress that had seemed to valorize aesthetic change. Dedicated newness in art devolved from a propelling cause into a rote effect. Lost, to my mind, is the strangeness—which I strive to reimagine—that had to have affected Cézanne’s first viewers, as he began to upend traditions that had been more or less continuous since the Renaissance. I have felt this retrospective discomfort in other contexts. It peaks for me in “Cézanne Drawing,” even as I join fellow-congregants in genuflecting before the artist’s genius.

The Norwegian artist, a younger contemporary of Munch, is largely unknown outside Norway’s borders. That should change.

Have you ever heard of a Norwegian artist named Nikolai Astrup, a younger contemporary of Edvard Munch? If so, you’re either a rare bird or Norwegian. Astrup is new to me—and I’m of Norwegian descent, with ancestral roots in much the same rugged, sparsely populated, preposterously scenic western region of the country where Astrup, who was born in 1880, spent nearly his entire life. (There’s a farming community called Skjeldal.) An enchanting Astrup exhibition at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, startled me with densely composed, brilliantly colored paintings and wizardly woodcuts, mostly landscapes of mountains, forests, bodies of water, humble farm buildings, and gardens (among other things, the artist was a passionate amateur horticulturalist), with occasional inklings of mysticism relating to native folklore. A receding row of grain poles could be a sinister parade of trolls, and the shape of a pollarded tree in winter evokes a writhing, unhappy supernatural being. I learned that Astrup is, arguably, the most popular artist in Norway—ahead of Munch, who, I’ve been told, makes schoolchildren sad—while largely unknown beyond its borders. How could that happen?

Astrup was a naturalist, influenced by modernist movements including Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, thanks to his early training—with help from a patron’s grant—in Paris and Germany. Afterward, he promptly returned to the mountainous municipality of Jølster, and stayed there. But he hardly vegetated. Restlessly inventive, often varying his manner from picture to picture, he is like no one else. He could effectively start from scratch even when repeating such motifs as that of a mountain viewed across a lake: his Nordic Mont Sainte-Victoire. It seems that many houses in Norway display reproductions of his art somewhere on their walls. In a “prelude” to the show’s catalogue, the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard recalls one in his childhood home. For Norwegians, Astrup’s appeal was and remains something like patriotic. His fame can seem captive to a sentimental nationalism, which the Clark show, subtitled “Visions of Norway,” exacerbates with photographic murals of Jølster that suggest a walk-through travel brochure. O.K., the place is gorgeous. Now, what about the art? Can it be pried from an understandably fond communal embrace?

Astrup painted thickly, with details atop generalized forms. There’s an intensity about his process that’s hard to explain. Knausgaard asserts that the pictures are “devoid of psychology,” and, in comparison with Munch’s illustrative poetics, that’s certainly the case. But I sense a mental pressure in Astrup’s work as a whole: there’s something personal that he had to deal with or kept trying to get at, bearing on obsessive memories of his childhood. He was the first of fourteen children of a pietistic Lutheran pastor who opposed his vocation in art. Astrup repeatedly painted taciturn views of the parsonage in which he grew up, as if it possessed some unresolved import. It’s a banal building, in the attic of which Astrup and his siblings endured bitter cold on winter nights, the result of splits in the decaying external walls. (The fissures were papered over, but the kids couldn’t resist poking holes in the paper.) Still more telling is the point of view in a number of spectacular paintings and woodcuts of midsummer-night frolics around huge bonfires: the spectator stands outside the goings on. Astrup was strictly forbidden by his father to participate in the pagan ritual. Such works echo a predilection that was stated by Munch: “I paint not what I see but what I saw.” Knausgaard writes that Astrup recorded features of the landscape that he could see from the parsonage in his notebook, but he omitted the ones that postdated his childhood. For all we know, his apparently more objective pictures secrete early impressions, too.

Astrup could have escaped his exigent native society. By 1902, while still in his early twenties, he was already cosmopolitan in style and collegially esteemed by artistic circles in Kristiania (which was renamed Oslo in 1925). At some point, Munch bought three of his works. But Jølster drew Astrup back and held him fast. One reason may have been his outsider temperament, or the limitation that respiratory ailments put on any travel—he had chronic asthma and survived tuberculosis only to die of pneumonia in 1928, at the age of forty-seven.

He seems to have cherished the company of his wife, Engel Sunde Astrup, a skilled textile printer who had a successful career of her own until her death, in 1966. They had eight children, including two small daughters who, wearing red dresses, are glimpsed picking berries in a forest in a phenomenal woodcut, “Foxgloves” (woodblock, circa 1915-20; print, 1925). Astrup’s laborious technique for that medium involved carving congeries of scattered shapes into multiple blocks, each block imprinting a different color. In “Foxgloves,” a trickling watercourse leads the eye from a verdant foreground to the background of a periwinkle mountain and filmy blue skies. The girls provide points of focus, but there’s nothing cutesy about them. They inhabit what Knausgaard terms “a parallel universe,” as if seen by Astrup “through a windowpane that he was pressing his face against.” A use of oil-based inks fortifies colors and textures. The woodcuts are sui generis, in a mode that can seem, befuddlingly, equidistant from prints and paintings. (I want one, and not on account of its country of origin. I have been to Norway and like it fine, as any gadabout New Yorker might. My chief stirring of emotional identity is with North Dakota, where my immigrant people went and I was born. But I recommend the sublime Lofoten Islands, in the Arctic Circle. There, one June night, I watched the sun start to set and then think better of it.)

Getting things right mattered mightily to Astrup, even as he could never be sure he had succeeded. The drama of the work inheres in self-doubt, which tormented him ceaselessly, in the face of a drive that sustained him nonetheless. Each touch of his brush can seem to be a momentary victory against troubling odds. This epitomizes him as modern, making things up as he went along. He lamented in a letter to a friend in 1922, “I ruin practically every serious work that I have made recently. I am so uncertain.” In an earlier letter to another friend, he had written, “I no longer know what art is—when it comes to my own pictures.” I found myself rooting for this good man in his agon with himself.

Astrup depicted the surrounding mountainscape in different seasons. I was riveted by one moment in time, “Gray Spring Evening” (before 1908), in which a massive, still snowy peak looms beyond a thawing lake. Someone out there is rowing a boat amid ice floes. A line of small, mostly leafless trees laces the foreground, delicately evincing Astrup’s love of Japanese prints. The application of that linear influence works well in this case; sometimes the formality jars with his freehand painterliness. But Astrup’s intermittent, relative failures to achieve coherence fascinate in their own way, as evidence of a talent incessantly pushing its limits. Scenic beauty is incidental. Unforced, his renderings of natural splendor responded to topographies that were there to be beheld by anyone. The individuality of his decisions sneaks up on you. That its charm took more than a century to be recognized internationally bemuses.

The Clark show, curated by the independent scholar MaryAnne Stevens, insures that, from now on, Astrup must figure in any comprehensive survey of early-twentieth-century European art. One keynote is a mastery of detail, particularly in the characters of plants. Each leaf or flower amounts to a faithful though never photograph-like portrait of its species, rewarding attention that extends beyond an initial error of thinking that you know the kind of thing you are looking at. Swiftly brushed, the accuracy of the botanical elements suggests a shot-from-the-hip deadeye aim. Astrup’s artistry keeps getting stranger—and stronger—as you gaze, often triggered by such marvels of color as the blazing red and yellow bonfire flames amid the crepuscular sullen greens and charcoal grays that accompany fleeting solstice sunsets. What might appear, at first glance, eccentric in the art of its era redeems itself with a specificity to a time, a place, and a personality, impelling a period style to extremes of authenticity.

The popular myth of important artists being neglected in their lifetimes is for the most part balderdash. Van Gogh would likely have become a raging success soon enough had he not been so isolated in the South of France and, in 1890, hurrying to be dead. The trope tends to elegize artists who are perceived to be ahead of their time or otherwise inimical to regnant conventions. Astrup’s case has me wondering about alternative instances of reputations, ones that are caught in obscure eddies of the art-historical mainstream, relating sideways rather than centrally to hegemonic movements. We are too habituated to the canonical march of modernist progress and a reflex of deeming anything marginal to it “minor.” An exploration of hinterlands elsewhere might well foster a category of similarly prepossessing misfits. For a name, consider Astrupism. With apologies to proprietary Norwegians, Nikolai Astrup belongs to all of us now.