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Casper David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 8 to May 11, 2025
The Met billed this as the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition devoted to Caspar David Friedrich, bringing together roughly 75 works across oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches, plus selected works by contemporaries to sharpen the context.
The curatorial intelligence (by Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein) was to resist the one-image shorthand that tends to follow Friedrich, especially the meme-ified cliche of “Wanderer,” and to build an argument out of motifs. The press material lays those themes out explicitly: spirituality and religion, the infinite and unknowable, time and mortality, solitude and companionship, the familiar versus the unknown, and the perilous beauty of the sublime.
Early Friedrich appears as draftsman and printmaker, someone who draws outside, tests techniques, and only later, steps into oil with public ambition. The Met’s “Inside the Exhibition” material emphasizes that trajectory, and in the galleries you could feel it: the authority of pencil and wash, the way a plant study or a rocky outcrop can serve as a rehearsal for metaphysical drama. Friedrich’s breakthrough ink-wash drawings, made for public exhibitions in Dresden and Weimar, and these don’t “illustrate” Romanticism so much as manufacture a mood.
[…]A Hidden Oasis in the Bronx
Tucked away on the ground floor of the Walsh Family Library at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art is one of New York City’s best-kept secrets. For anyone in the Bronx, it offers a startlingly intimate encounter with the ancient world, particularly the enigmatic Etruscan civilization that predated and influenced the rise of Rome.
The museum’s location (literally inside a library) creates a quiet atmosphere. Unlike the sprawling halls of the Met, where you might feel like one of many thousands, here you are often the only person in the room with artifacts that are 2,500 years old. Windows look out onto the campus, grounding the ancient objects in a modern academic setting.
Etruscan Highlights
While the collection spans the Mediterranean, its Etruscan holdings are particularly evocative of a culture that blended elegance with a deep focus on the afterlife and ritual.
- Bucchero Ware: The collection’s standout is its array of Bucchero pottery. This is the signature “black-on-black” ceramic of the Etruscans, designed to mimic more expensive hammered metal. The deep, lustrous black finish and sharp, angular shapes provide a striking contrast to the more common red-and-black figure Greek vases nearby.
- Votive Offerings: You’ll find a fascinating collection of terracotta votive heads and feet. These were left at temples as “thank you” notes or prayers for healing. They are surprisingly human and individualistic, offering a direct emotional link to the people from the Italian peninsula long before the Caesars.
- The Burial Amphora: A centerpiece of the renovated gallery is a large Etruscan Amphora (ca. 650 B.C.E.). It serves as a focal point for understanding Etruscan burial ceremonies, surrounded by smaller implements like bronze spearheads and cosmetic applicators.
Irving Penn: Centennial
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 24 to July 30, 2017
Robert Ryman: 1961-1964
David Zwirner, New York, November 9, 2023—February 3, 2024
Robert Ryman (May 30, 1930 – February 8, 2019) was an American conceptual artist closely identified with the high modernist Minimalist mode of painting in the 1960’s. Interestingly he did not attend an art school or program of art studies at a university. Instead, his visual interests began when he worked as a security guard at MoMA, befriending fellow employees Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin.
From the David Zwirner exhibition text:
Ryman gained initial recognition for the work he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result, his paintings created prior to this period remain less well known to this day. Yet it was during the early 1960s that Ryman began to firmly establish the broad parameters of his radical and inventive practice. His paintings from these years reflect how, even at this early point, Ryman was already looking to interrogate and reinterpret the fundamental precepts of painting by experimenting with different supports and materials; deconstructing the relationship between frame and wall; and more broadly, investigating the visual, material, and experiential qualities that define the conditions in which a work of art is encountered. It was also at this time that the artist settled on the square as the primary format for his art and began experimenting with scale, a consequence, in part, of his move around 1961 to a studio space that afforded him the ability to work in larger formats.
David Zwirner Gallery