In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

Shiraga’s approach verges on parody. Rather than pushing around paint with a brush in hand, he laid his canvases on his studio’s floor—a deliberate allusion to Jackson Pollock’s technique—and pulled around brown and maroon gobs with his feet. Set against white backgrounds, these shit-like messes of color are chunky and thick—so viscous that one can even sometimes spot the ridges formed by Shiraga’s toes. The dance-like choreography needed to make these abstractions replaces the fine motor skills associated with handiwork with more bumbling footwork—but the results don’t betray any lesser command of his materials. 

The Fergus McCaffrey show is titled “Plus Minus,” a reference to Shiraga’s assertion that his and Kanayama’s paintings were opposites. Kanayama’s paintings were “cold,” Shiraga said, while his were “hot.” And it is clear, based on this show, that Kanayama’s cold canvases went one step further past the Abstract Expressionist paradigm. Enlisting a little motorized vehicle, these paintings did away with the pretense of sublimity altogether. 

If Shiraga’s abstractions ultimately resemble those produced by some New York School artists, Kanayama’s appear totally anathema to the beefy abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. An untitled painting by Kanayama from 1965, included in this show, is composed of a lumpy circular form onto which a flat bed of red squiggles has been overlaid. Despite the blazing brightness of its hues, the painting does not inspire much in the way of transcendence. Instead, its strokes evince a mechanical quality. That is no accident. 

Kanayama’s paintings, as well as a few pen drawings that he also made with a remote-controlled car, look forward to questions being asked right now, during a time when AI is raising questions about our species’ role in the process of creating. Early on, Kanayama’s paintings asked these questions as almost everything was being made with the aid of a mechanized counterpart. But rather than stoking existential anxiety, automation seemed to bring the artist a kind of lightness and freedom. For him, it was a way to needle the centrality of human emotion that was so integral to modern art. Tellingly, many of his paintings bear affectless titles. Most of the ones in this show are simply called Work. 

Toward the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, there’s a long take in which the camera roves around Brigitte Bardot’s nude body. We listen as her character takes stock of her shoulders, her mouth, her eyes, her nose, her ears, as she asks her lover if he admires them all. “Yes,” he responds. “I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.”

The German artist Astrid Klein also appears to love Bardot totally, tenderly, tragically. In her piece Untitled (je ne parle pas…), Klein offers two-rephotographed images of a vampy Bardot strutting her stuff. Blown up to a scale that recalls advertisements plastered across city streets, these perfect pictures start to come apart, their Ben-Day dots made visible.

In disturbing the veneer of these glamor shots, Klein suggests that it’s impossible, actually, to adore every part of Bardot. All we know of the actress are representations, not the real thing. Klein is exposing the limits of the former, making these images of her oblique and mysterious.

Untitled (je ne parle pas…) is one of a handful of “photoworks” from 1979 by Klein that are currently on view at Sprüth Magers in New York. The show marks the German feminist icon’s debut in the city—which is shocking, given that the photoworks dovetail so neatly with contemporaneous photography by Cindy Sherman. Klein, like Sherman, evokes images of women in films and advertisements, only to lend these images an opacity that denies easy readings.

European arthouse cinema of the postwar era, with its impenetrable women and ambiguous plots, is a touchstone for Klein. Monica Vitti, Michelangelo Antonioni’s frequent leading lady, has recurred throughout Klein’s work. Vitti appears at Sprüth Magers in a still Klein re-photographed for her 1979 work Untitled (powerless…). In it, Vitti appears beneath a translucent sheet of archival paper that partially shields her from leering eyes while emphasizing what film theorist Laura Mulvey would call her “to-be-looked-at-ness.”

But is Vitti truly powerless, as the photowork’s title implies, or does she, in her apparent passivity, possess a different form of control? Klein seems to be asking that question, placing two seemingly opposed adjectives onto the archival paper she has photographed: POWERLESS and REBELLIOUS. Typewritten in Courier font, these words repeat amid strings of x’s, as if context has been redacted, suggesting they may have belonged to a fuller sentence whose meaning remains unknowable.

Klein continued to enlist cryptic text in her paintings from the late ’80s and early ’90s, a few of which are in the backroom of Sprüth Magers. The paintings have a nice sheen to them, thanks to the quartz, alabaster, and zinc enlisted in their making. The text is painted onto these abstractions—in one, the phrase “tragicmagic” is repeated over patterning recalling a bunched curtain—but, with little to grab onto, the words prove overly elusive. The inscrutability of the textual fragments in the photoworks, on the other hand, lends them a certain tension the paintings lack—tension arising between the words and the pictures, which form an unstable relationship.

Take Untitled (paint my life…), which features a woman whose mouth hangs open as she stares outward amid the titular typewritten words, PAINT MY LIFE. Her made-up face invites more looking, but this is simply not possible: a white veil-like blur covers most of her face, obscuring one eye. In much the same way that Klein asks you to fill in the gaps between words and texts, this veiled woman gives you little information, then asks you to fill in—or paint in—the rest. Here is another reminder that, too often, we think we know people in pictures, and just as often, we are simply projecting.

Judy Chicago became the most famous feminist artist of her generation when, for her monumental Dinner Party (1974–79), she enlisted hundreds of women volunteers to contribute craftwork to her giant triangular table. On that table, Chicago set plates dedicated to notable women from history, from the goddess Ishtar to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. But in lieu of food, she served each woman a unique ceramic vulva, decorated as a tribute to her work.

This iconic installation toured 16 venues in 6 countries, with a message to women everywhere: you are never alone, even if you find yourself isolated in the domestic sphere. And in 2001, The Dinner Party became the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s feminist art center.

Though clearly popular, The Dinner Party, like much of Chicago’s work, has also received plenty of criticism—for both its TERF-y equation of womanhood with vulvas, and for its whiteness. In 1984 critic Hortense J. Spillers pointed out that Chicago had included only one Black woman, Sojourner Truth, and represented her unlike the others, with faces instead of a vulva. Spiller calls the result “symbolic castration.”

Even though Chicago enjoys the status of feminist icon, and of being a household name, her retrospective at the New Museum in New York, titled “Herstory,” hasn’t exactly been a buzzy blockbuster. That’s probably because Chicago is not quite the artist we need right now: in 2024 she is known for a version of feminism that is popular and palatable, but also pretty narrow.

While many are tempted to write off Chicago completely, I find myself a nervous witness to a trend afflicting a younger generation that seems to feel that history—say, that of second-wave feminism—is bad, since people were more racist, sexist, and imperialist back then. They’re not wrong, but the attitude misses the importance of learning from history and from elders like Chicago: you can grow from others’ mistakes, and you would be wise to honor the trailblazers who made sacrifices to carve imperfect but important paths for change.

The reason I got into art history in the first place was to learn about how ideas like gender both morphed and persisted across time and culture. And yet, I know that it would be too simplistic to give Chicago’s art a pass for being a mere product of its time. She had plenty of feminist contemporaries whose work did age well, including visionary artists like Adrian Piper and Hannah Wilke. Instead of dreaming big, Chicago looked to history—or herstory—for answers, and in the process, got stuck in reverse.

Still, we can learn from Judy Chicago. One lesson is that, yes, her work feels out of touch. But this, in some respects, is a good thing. Its datedness shows that society has progressed beyond some of the basic and exclusionary ideas that belonged to her and to many others. Which, of course, is not to say that her celebration of women did no damage to the feminists who didn’t see themselves represented. The New Museum seems to have tried balancing this out by giving the first floor over to trans artist Jade Kuriki-Olivo, aka Puppies Puppies, an impressive talent placed in an awkward position.

The greatest lessons Chicago has to offer come from her early works in abstraction, since they tell the story of the artist Chicago did not become. Before The Dinner Party,Judy Chicago made minimalist, geometric sculptures and op art paintings in shades of pastels and pink, imbuing then-dominant styles with feminine flair. The language of avant-garde abstraction, she inadvertently proved, was by no means universal. It was, instead, deeply entrenched in masculine norms, often privileging cool rationality over warm feelings, and favoring restrained colors over “pretty” ones.

Rainbow Pickett (1965), which opens “Herstory,” was included in the landmark Minimalist art exhibition “Primary Structures” in 1965 at the Jewish Museum in New York, where its color palette set it apart from the other offerings, most of them by men.But beyond that early recognition, Chicago recalls in her autobiography that she experienced a lot of misogyny and dismissal from critics, curators, and collectors. She also noticed that while there were plenty of other female students when she was in art school, few of those women went on to become professional artists.

Chicago started researching women who enjoyed creative careers throughout history, hoping to learn from them. Soon, she turned this research into the subject of her art. In 1970 she founded a women-only art program at Fresno State College—a radical move at a time before women could open their own bank accounts in the United States. With her students and artist Miriam Schapiro, she filled an entire California house with collaborative experiments in feminist art. The energy of this endeavor is palpable at the New Museum, even through the grainy documentation laid out in vitrines.

Her first major series after The Dinner Party, “Birth Project”(1980–85), still offered glimpses of her compositional command. Rather than paintings, these gorgeous abstractions of birth scenes were done in needlework with myriad collaborators: here again, Chicago movingly celebrated a technique that had been feminized by society, and thus dismissed. But her reductive way of celebrating women once again spoils the project. It’s sad to witness a powerhouse like Chicago resort to praising women on such unimaginative terms: as life-giving forces. We have so much else to offer, and there are so many other ways to be a woman—which childless Chicago surely knows, having herself said, “there was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I’ve had.”

Sadly, the newer works aren’t much more imaginative. On one floor of the show, for an installation titled “The City of Ladies,” Chicago curated a selection of works by more than 80 creative women, among them Hildegard of Bingen, Frida Kahlo, and Zora Neale Hurston. These hang under a banner Chicago first made for a 2020 Dior runway show that asks what if women ruled the world? With that banner, she doubles down on her reductive approach with a literal one-liner. The slogan glosses over the differences among the many women in “The City of Ladies,” plenty of whom surely envision a feminist utopia that dispenses with rulers altogether.

In those early abstractions, Chicago is actually quite capable of making nuanced art, of sidestepping the reductive didacticism for which she became known. The abstractions Chicago painted on car hoods are by far her strongest works. Her colorful, symmetrical, geometric compositions feel like Rorschach tests: are those forms you’re seeing genitalia between spread legs? The gorgeous yet confusing paintings make you think about the body’s presence while also reflecting on your own gaze.

But Chicago experienced too much misogyny in the body shop, so she walked out, and in her frustration, opted for a language that was more urgent, less nuanced. I’m sympathetic to her reasons, yet disappointed in her results. I left the show with the overwhelming sense that it’s really too bad society wasn’t ready to make space for that Judy Chicago, who was quite a promising artist.

It started with a blast of static that faded away to reveal a gentle pulse of animal sounds: a serene reprise from seemingly alien birds and bugs going about their business on a planet other than our own. An enormous 60-foot screen showed aerial views of former forest land, where trees—or what remains of them—blaze in otherworldly colors. Then a jarring jump cut shifts to close-up footage of young Indigenous people in feathers and face-paint excoriating disgraced Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (“You filth!” “Parasite!”) for damage done to the Amazon.

All of that is part of Broken Spectre (2021), a bracing video work by Irish artist Richard Mosse currently on view in a new space for Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. The show’s setting is itself a story, as the 1898 Italian Renaissance Revival building by the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White will soon play home to a new Shainman space when it opens officially after further renovation later this year.

But the setting of the Amazon is of far more immediate and urgent concern here. Broken Spectre draws from travels that Mosse undertook to the Amazon Basin between 2018 and 2020, when he captured still and moving images of environmental destruction on a scale that boggles the mind. Wall text at the entry to the exhibition—which continues through March 16—states that more than one-fifth of the original rainforest has been destroyed in the last 50 years. The 74-minute video documenting the ongoing decimation shows no signs of that slowing any time soon.

As in work that Mosse has made in other neglected locales including the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of Congo and cast-out refugee encampments in hostile parts of Europe, Broken Spectre is a documentary that doubles as a call-to-action. It’s slow and poetic but also visceral and intense, mostly wordless and bolstered by a score that includes music and field-recordings of wild nature. The soundtrack is the work of Ben Frost, a musician and composer—and previous collaborator with Mosse—who mines fertile realms between contemporary classical music, dark ambience, and noise pushed to voluminous extremes. (The current show is a rare gallery happening for which earplugs wouldn’t be unadvisable.)

There would be no way to overstate how moving Broken Spectre is as a cinematic experience and a cri de coeur. The visuals owe to three different kinds of footage: multispectral video for aerial views (similar to those transmitted by remote sensing satellites), 35mm black-and-white film (which evokes the look and feel of old Westerns), and ultraviolet microscopy (suited for miniscule spans of space shown in a big dramatic fashion). Images come and go, sometimes splitting into four channels and other times spanning the whole of a 60-foot screen, with views requiring some neck strain to take in in full. The beauty of the imagery of the rainforest is haunted by its own transience. And the many shots of men with saws and other kinds of ecosystem-erasing machinery are enough to make the blood boil, especially as feelings of helplessness rise to the fore.

At one point in Broken Spectre, during a placid float down a river filmed from some sort of vessel, a small fleet of other boats passes by, filled with tourists toting cameras and craning for shots of a jungle cat slinking through some trees. Their ogling presence struck me at first as surprising, then kind of shocking, and then self-incriminating: mirroring us as viewers peering through lenses at so much beauty but also degradation on the screen. The most biodiverse stretch of our planet is being destroyed, and it’s hard not to feel desperate to get a glimpse before it’s gone.

“I was walking on the street. A car stopped, a few men stepped out, and pushed into my mouth, a liquid. The mouth froze.”

Those haunting words open two New York shows devoted to Shilpa Gupta, a Mumbai-based artist who has taken over Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea as well as Amant, a non-profit space in Brooklyn. The text is etched into a brass plate hung next to a small sculpture—a cast of an open mouth made with gunmetal—suspended from the wall. The intriguing form lends the words more impact, especially the final three: “The mouth froze.” “The mouth froze!” “THE MOUTH FROZE!”

I felt estranged from my own mouth as I read that phrase, puzzled over the enigma of a first-person reference to “the mouth” (rather than “my mouth”). But I found the phrasing perfect for a pair of shows focused on literal and figurative voices and the many ways they can be both erased and amplified. In Listening Air (2019–2023), the central work in the Tanya Bonakdar show, a sound installation features microphones dangling and slowly spinning in a darkened room while broadcasting recordings of work songs and different kinds of folk and protest music from around the world. Voices resound from India, China, North Korea, Lebanon, Italy, and the American South (the last one recognizable from the refrain “we shall overcome”). The artist reverse-wired the microphones, transforming them into speakers for playback rather than receivers of sounds.

Upstairs, an array of wooden shelves is lined with glass bottles that might appear empty but are filled, in a sense, with Gupta’s voice: the artist says she recited poetry into these vessels, selecting works by writers who have been imprisoned for their words. The work is silent, but the voices conjured within it are palpable—and accompanied by a kind of catalytic clamor courtesy of Song of the Ground (2017), a nearby work that features two rocks banging into one another by way of a mechanical contraption. The stones are from a porous borderland area between India and Bangladesh, where conceptions of boundaries break down.

A standout at Amant—a mini-retrospective of sorts, with works dating as far back as 2012—is an untitled installation from this year in which Gupta revisits the reverse-wired-microphone apparatus, with a mic-speaker intoning the names of detained and incarcerated poets. Meanwhile, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2023) fills a room with vitrines displaying sculptural casts (in gunmetal, again) of books by those same poets bearing titles such as We Can’t Hear Ourselves, No One Hears Us and Two Silences Made a Voice.

That notion of a voice made by silence is one that Gupta seems to both appreciate and abhor, and her work is all the better for the tension between the political stakes it engages and the personal resilience it memorializes. Gupta refuses the idea of silence as an absolute state, and shows how voices persist in defiance of forces that might suppress them.

The children playing by the 1920s-era carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park had no idea what was about to fill their ears when guitar tones and drones from a violin started surrounding Nicholas Galanin’s imposing public sculpture nearby. Raven Chacon and Laura Ortman—two friends of Galanin who had been commissioned by the Public Art Fund to perform this past Sunday afternoon—were positioned with the iconic bridge as a backdrop, but the structure most integral to the proceedings was In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra, a 30-foot-tall sculpture made with the same kind of steel used for border walls between the US and Mexico. The work, with the word “LAND” rendered in the style of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, has a commanding sort of beauty about it. But there is a darkness—a disquieting acknowledgement of the violence and forced separation perpetrated in conflicts related to land—in it too.

Chacon and Ortman improvised a set of music that came just two days after Galanin and fellow artist Merritt Johnson asked the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to remove their work from “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” a survey that counts as the first show of contemporary Native art at the institution in 70 years. Offered as a protest against America’s plans to provide funding to Israel for its military actions in Gaza, the move was a way to show how, as Galanin (Lingít/Unangax) and Johnson wrote, “the work we do as artists does not end in the studio or with our artist statements, it extends into the world.”

Chacon (Diné) and Ortman (White Mountain Apache), for their part, played noisy, spikey, discordant music that was impressively uninterested in the kind of uplifting style you might imagine at a daytime performance in a public park. They had just a few speakers at their disposal, but their sound was loud—and very much in line with the mood of a day that was both triumphant (it was the same day as the New York City Marathon, always an incontrovertible celebration of humanity) and distressing (it was yet another day when what seemed to be protest-provoked shouts in the distance signaled increasing unrest).

At one point, between spells of distorted static and shrieking lead lines that wouldn’t have been out of place at a heavy-metal concert, Chacon was hunched over his bank of guitar pedals when he looked up and spied a helicopter in the sky. He kept on looking, craning his head and twiddling the knobs at his feet while waiting for the chopper to follow its flight pattern and circle back. When it rounded a bend and crept closer, he locked his sound into a digital delay—whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, whoomp—that he timed almost perfectly with the slashing of the blades. Through these sounds, it was as if the earth and the sky had become one, with machinery brokering an accord that it also managed to mangle beyond recognition.

“Indigenous care for Land and community is rooted in connection based on mutual sustainability,” Galanin said in a statement around the unveiling of his sculpture, which went up in May and will remain in place into March of next year. “Rather than nationalism or capital, this perspective always embodies a deep respect for life beyond any single generation.”

The notion of a collective “deep respect for life” has felt cruelly elusive of late, as has the idea of any kind of collectivity that could continue for generations. But there both were, in a sculpture that seemed to suggest that the land on which we live is land we should share.

Cady Noland’s work has never sat quite right with me. Sure, there are the familiar critiques—that her portraits of America, made of Budweiser cans and bullets, don’t feel like her America, since she is wealthy and white. Another critique is that the elusive artist, known for walking away from the art world at the height of fame, felt like an even greater class traitor when she chose Gagosian’s Upper East Side location for a rare show, her second in New York in as many decades. And another is that she mounted the show without seeming to troll blue-chip dealers, the way David Hammons famously tends to. But what unsettles me is the way that she incorporates walkers, wheelchairs, and canes into her portraits of American tragedy.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved her 2018 retrospective in Germany so much that I traveled to see it twice—and it was at the MMK in Frankfurt, arguably Europe’s most boring city. But one subway ride to Manhattan for the Gagosian show, which closes October 21, left me feeling unsatisfied.

This show is mostly new work, and as ever, Noland’s red, white, and blue sculptures made of resin and refuse chafe at the contradictions between the American dream and the American reality. There is, though, an untitled walker from 1986, wrapped in a leather strap and bearing a badge that says “special police.” It’s on view alongside sculptures that, pairing bullets and badges, invoke police brutality. Badges abound, but the walker’s is the only one inscribed with the word “special,” that grating euphemism for “disabled.” I can’t tell if the choice was intentional and insensitive, or just blithe and inconsiderate. But for decades, she’s shown assistive devices alongside grenades and can collections, as if she were equating disability with fates as tragic as destitution or death.

Part of me was pleased to see mass disablement included as one of the machinations of American neoliberalism for once. Inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable nutritious foods, gun violence, and an environment rife with disabling toxins are eroding American health (and, as the theorist Lauren Berlant argued, preventing our uprisings).

But another part of me saw Noland’s walker stumbling clumsily into a paradox, one that disability theorist Jasbir K. Puar articulated in her 2017 book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Puar describes mass disablement and injury as deliberate tactics of policing, writing specifically about the Israeli Defense Force. Then she asks: how do we hold space for rage at this reality alongside our longing for disability pride?

But with Noland, instead of pride, all we get is pity.

Is that pity the artist’s or America’s? As ever, she’s just tracing the impact of the unseen forces of American neoliberalism on ordinary objects, without ever offering clear commentary. But still, she gestures at a bigger, bleaker truth: that the neoliberal state benefits from discourses of empowerment, which conveniently place responsibility on the individual rather than the government. (Remember that our hard-won, landmark legislation—the 1990’s Americans with Disabilities Act—was signed into law by George H. W. Bush, who saw granting rights as a tool for getting more disabled people off welfare.)

But I also wonder to what degree Noland included assistive devices simply because they look like her sculptures already. The walker is shown next to Polaroids of older works rife with grab bars and scaffolding that echo the walker’s aluminum tubing.  

These new works, all crammed into a small space, feel formulaic, as if the artist were cleaning out stuff that’d been kicking around in her studio for decades. (After all, she uses Budweiser cans that, as my colleague Alex Greenberger points out, are no longer in circulation). But the weirdest, and maybe the best, update is that some of the resin blocks now sit on lucite tables, as if the art objects were extensions of fancy furniture. Was that choice about meaning or materials? Here, since it’d be a contradiction to offer class commentary in the form of a luxury good for sale at Gagosian anyway, I like the ambiguity.

Throughout the ’90s, Campos-Pons worked on an installation-based trilogy titled “History of a People Who Were Not Heroes,” and the second entry in this series, Spoken Softly with Mama (1998)—a work she made in collaboration with composer and jazz musician Neil Leonard—opens the show. Against a black wall rest four blown-up archival photographs of Campos-Pons’s family, and three video screens that show various dreamlike shots of the artist; these seven upright elements are, in fact, ironing boards. Carefully arranged on the floor before them are dozens of glass irons and mirrors. The work pays homage to Campos-Pons’s women ancestors who have sustained the family by doing domestic work. “Their caretaking seems to have helped guide her on a path toward social justice,” art historian Selene Wendt writes in the exhibition catalogue.

But Spoken Softly with Mama is also undergirded by a more sinister history: the legacy of chattel slavery, which ebbs and flows through much of Campos-Pons’s work. Slavery made Black women’s role as domestic laborers distinct from other women’s—they were often forced to work in the homes of others, not just for their own families. A critical gaze gives the ironing boards the contour of slave ships that would have brought kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas.

A 1994 photograph from the series “When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá,”one of the artist’s first works using large-format Polaroids, similarly considers the impact of slavery on Black motherhood. In this image, we see Campos-Pons’s torso painted blue, adorned with curving white lines that mimic waves. The blue nods to Yemayá, the orisha of the sea and motherhood in Santería. Two baby bottles that drip breast milk hang from her neck, connected by a tube. (At the time, Campos-Pons had recently given birth to her son Arcadio.) Cradled in her hands is a carved wooden ship. The photo cuts off her head and legs; this mother’s body has been fragmented by forced migration, severed from her roots.

Forced migration recurs in TRA (1991), for which Campos-Pons pairs 60 black-and-white portraits of generations of Afro-Cubans from Matanzas, once the heart of Cuba’s sugar plantation economy, with five boards shaped like boats. This time, upright wooden planks are painted to resemble the infamous diagram of a slave ship, numerous Black bodies shown cramped together in the hull. The work is powerful to behold.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition, which will travel to three venues across the country, leans heavily on Campos-Pons’s use of multipart, 20-by-24 Polaroids. Her technical prowess in staging these scenes—mini-performances in themselves—is in full effect in works like Finding Balance (2015). In 28 Polaroids that together comprise one scene, Campos-Pons stands before the camera, her face painted white. A birdcage rests atop her head, and she wears an antique Chinese robe, a nod to her Chinese ancestors who were brought to Cuba as indentured servants to work on the sugar plantations.

Another Polaroid knockout is the nine-part grid Classic Creole (2003). In the center, a yellow flower rises from a tall fabric-wrapped form that close inspection reveals to be a human body. On either side, strings of beads rise up like trees in a clever play with scale. The work evokes cultural, bodily, and natural roots all at once. “I am from many places,” Campos-Pons has said. “I live with that duality and multiplicity in my mind, and in my soul, and in my body. My roots are a bunch of dispersed fragments in the planet, in the universe, in this incredible miasma that is the world.”

Those metaphorical and literal roots run throughout the exhibition. Replenishing (2001) is a work that references retracing her lineage: it depicts the artist and her mother when they were finally able to reunite in Cuba. In the h-shape composition (for hogar, or home), her mother appears at left in a blue floral dress, the artist, at right in a white dress. The dresses represent the colors of orishas Oshun and Yemayá. Both women hold strings of beads that knot together and meet in the central Polaroid.

Umbilical Cord (1991) similarly traces the artist’s matrilineal side. In a linear grid, we see 12 black-and-white photos, 6 of them torsos with white crosses painted on them, alternating with 6 photos of arms with the left hand outstretched; a thread projecting from each work connects them all. These images show the women in the artist’s family. In Cuba, it is through the left hand, called “the hand of the heart,” that bloodlines are extended from woman to woman. In her work, Campos-Pons makes monumental the various histories and cultures that flow through her family’s veins.

The legacy of slavery came to feel even more present to the artist after she moved South in 2018 to Nashville, relocating from Boston, per the wall text. In Tennessee, she became fascinated by the magnolia trees that grow all around the city. As she walks about Nashville, she photographs them; by now, she’s accumulated hundreds of images of these trees. She digitally printed one of those images on a mixed-media triptych, Secrets of the Magnolia Tree (2021), framing a self-portrait. As cocurator Carmen Hermo writes in the catalogue, “What have these trees themselves seen, their lives extending far longer than ours? Irrigated by the actions and inactions of humans as much as the water cycle, these trees hold memories, too.” Campos-Pons is still attending to the trees, hoping to learn more of the histories they hold. In all her work, time collapses as history and the present intertwine. Soon, the trees’ stories will reveal themselves to her.

Correction, October 11, 2023: An earlier version of this review identified Neil Leonard as Campos-Pons’s husband; he is her former husband.

To translate the pairing into 20th-century terms, it’s not like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who were the subject of a great MoMA exhibition back in 1989. Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas were never in any sense collaborators “roped together like mountain climbers,” as Braque recalled of the Cubist era. They were comparable, rather, to Picasso and Henri Matisse: rivals who could hardly take their wary yet admiring eyes off each other.

Manet and Degas are inseparable from the great historical phenomenon we call Impressionism, yet both are somehow tangential to it. Manet was considered the movement’s progenitor, yet he never took part in its exhibitions, preferring to take his stand in the official French Salons—“the real field of battle,” he believed—no matter if his works were, like most Impressionists’, sometimes rejected. Degas, by contrast, ceased submitting his work to the Salons and enthusiastically took part in the renegade Impressionist shows. Moreover, if by “Impressionism” one means the plein-air landscapes of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley, as one often does, then the label is evidently ill-suited to Manet and Degas. Both of them, in the spirit of their elders like Gustave Courbet, the prophet of Realism, and Honoré Daumier, who turned social commentary into high art, were painters of modern urban life.

And we don’t often think of Manet and Degas as a pair. One reason is that, while they were born only two years apart—Manet in 1832, Degas in 1834—Degas lived much longer: Manet was just 51 when he died, Degas lived to the age of 83. And then there’s politics: Manet a man of the left, Degas a conservative who, at the time of the 1894 Dreyfus affair, was revealed to be a repulsive anti-Semite. Moreover, Manet flourished early, artistically: He painted many of his best-known works in his thirties—Olympia and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe both date from 1863, for example—whereas Degas really hit his stride a little later, I’d say around 1870.

Maybe that’s why Manet can seem further away from us. The snapshot-like compositions of some of Degas’s paintings and pastels, not to mention the proto-readymade gesture of clothing the bronze Little Dancer with a real skirt and hair ribbon, connect directly with the modernism of the 20th century, while Manet remains a man of the mid-19th. The painter-critic Jacques-Émile Blanche would write in 1924 that “Degas’ speculative and inductive intellect is much closer than that of Manet to the ideal of those painters to whose futures we look confidently.”

By the same token, however, Manet’s reputation is indisputably that of the innovator who sparked the whole course of modern art: Pierre Bourdieu was not the only one to have called him a revolutionary, whereas Degas was a modernist despite his own resistance to it. He insisted on the fundamental significance of drawing while his Impressionist colleagues reserved that role for color.

Co-curated by Stephan Wolohojian and Ashley Dunn in collaboration with Laurence des Cars, Isolde Pludermacher, and Stéphane Guégan, and previously shown at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the exhibition is a compare/contrast exercise effectively focusing its attention on the two artists’ approaches to related themes and subject matter: portraiture, seascapes, horse racing, the women of Paris, and so on. We witness too their shared apprenticeship to the old masters on view in the Louvre, and learn of their ambiguous fascination with the Salon on the one hand and their Impressionist colleagues on the other, as well as their responses to the American Civil War and other conflicts.

And yet what emerges most vividly from the exhibition is what the curators leave essentially tacit: the fundamental difference in style, or rather, in the feeling for paint itself, between the two artists. Manet, it seems, was entranced by the physicality of paint, its tactility and manipulability, which he never hesitated to showcase. For this reason, he never tried to cultivate the impeccable (and therefore invisible) finish that was so beloved by the artistic establishment with which he never ceased to contend.

By contrast, Degas, a draftsman through and through, appreciated paint for its fluidity—its blurrings and blendings and suffusions (no wonder he was the master of pastel!), tending toward a kind of atmospheric quality—more than as palpable matière. And yet, paradoxically, what Degas depicted with that almost bodiless flow of color retained its volumetric solidity, where the implacable presence of Manet’s tangible brush marks seems to aspire to the flatness of what would later become mainstream modernism.

Although the critics of his day attacked Manet for painting mere morceaux—bits and pieces—one realizes from the comparison with Degas that he was, on the contrary, an aspirant (usually successful) to the masterpiece. Think of such touchstone works as, most notably, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (here, a full-scale sketch from the Courtauld Gallery, London, stands in for the finished painting), Olympia (on display for the first time in the United States), The Execution of Maximilian (we see the version, on loan from the National Gallery, London, that Manet’s family cut into pieces after the artist’s death, that were that were later reassembled by Degas, and are now owned by the National Gallery), and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (not in this exhibition). None of Degas’s works is an isolated cynosure in that way. He was, albeit very differently from Monet, a painter of series rather than of unique statement pieces.

I don’t mean to assert Manet’s superiority. Gun to my head, I’d even admit a preference for Degas, thanks to his emphasis on the transitory over monumentality. But the exhibition’s melancholy last room, devoted to Degas’s collection of art by his departed friend and rival, suggests a kind of haunting, as if there were something in Manet’s art that Degas could neither internalize nor reject. As for Manet, none of his contemporaries ever stirred that kind of fascination in him. Velázquez may have been the only rival he recognized.

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