GLR January-February Supplement 2024

Portraits in Dialog

P EOPLE from marginalized groups have always left their mark on art history. Yet it’s only in more re cent times that the world has rec ognized these contributions. Now, under intense social pressure in the 21st century, many museums have been nervously tak ing stock of their holdings, bemoaning the gaps in the range of artists and artworks that their collections contain, and looking for creative ways to fill them—without alienating their more mainstream (i.e., straight, white) audience. One such experiment recently took place at New York City’s Frick Madison, temporarily housing parts of the Frick Collec tion—which includes Old Master paintings and other European art—while the museum’s permanent home undergoes renova tion. The museum commissioned four New York-based artists to create new works during this transition. From September 2021 through September 2022, the portraits hung (one by one) in place of works out on loan. That project, “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Mas

The project’s curators, Aimee Ng and Xavier F. Salomon, paired each contempo rary artist with an Old Master: Salman Toor with Vermeer; Doron Langberg and Jenna Gribbon with Holbein the Younger; and Toyin Ojih Odutola with Rembrandt. The coupled artworks hung in isolation on nearby walls, “in conversation.” In Toor’s moody green painting, Mu seumBoys , two partially dressed men ap

M ICHAEL Q UINN

LIVING HISTORIES Queer Views and Old Masters Edited by Aimee Ng, Xavier F. Salomon, and Stephen Truax GILES. 112 pages, $34.95

proach a glass vitrine that showcases two naked men tangled in what Toor calls a “fag puddle ... heaps of exhaustion and lust.” Perhaps to compensate for insecurity about showing it along side Vermeer’s famous Officer and Laughing Girl , Toor piled on the imagery: a condom, a urinal, a dainty shoe, and so on. “If I were to redo this painting, I’d take out some of the stuff,” he acknowledges. Doron Langberg’s Lover depicts a bare-chested man in dark underwear sitting cross-legged on a colorful couch. Wisely, Lang berg has chosen to use a canvas the same size as Holbein’s Sir Thomas Moore , which immediately establishes a relationship be

tween the two works. The pairing also benefits from its psychological tension: Moore, draped in fur and velvet, holding a folded paper in his hand, almost seems to gaze longingly at Lang berg’s near-nude lover, who looks with down cast eyes at a sheaf of papers in his lap. What am I Doing Here? I Should Ask You the Same , by Jenna Gribbon, depicts her scowling partner Mackenzie sitting on a green chair in a purple suit with a red coat draped over her shoulders, one breast flashing a fluo rescent pink nipple. Holbein’s Thomas Crom well looks bundled up and disapproving on the adjacent wall, clutching a piece of paper as if having just dashed off a complaint about her indecency. He seems to glare at Mackenzie while she gazes out at us. Odutola’s The Listener is the only drawing in the exhibit (part of a larger series), a char coal, pastel, and chalk sketch of an imagined queer, African, female warrior. Her muscles’ light and dark shadows mirror the folds in Rembrandt’s gown, stretched tightly against a

Paired paintings at the Frick: Hans Holbein , Sir Thomas Moore , 1527. Doron Langber, Lover , 2021.

sagging body in his late-in-life Self-Portrait . The contemporary works’ shocks of color and flamboyance contrast with their Old Master counterparts as well as their aus tere surroundings at the Frick. They have youth’s fresh advan tage, like showing up to a black-tie event in jeans and, rather than looking out of place, making everyone else seem overdressed. But they also feel a little random, like a classical music playlist with one TikTok-trending song thrown into the mix. Pairing paintings might create a “dialogue,” but who decides what these strange bedfellows are saying to each other?

ters,” is now recapped in a book by the same name, which in cludes essays about the works on display and interviews with the living artists. Much of it wrestles with questions of inclu sion: Whose pictures deserve to hang on a museum’s walls? Is there an institutional responsibility to represent different kinds of art and artists outside its established purview? What types of people are encouraged to walk through a museum’s front door? Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brook lyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue . 8

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