Sam Ben-Meir

Since at least 2014, Mural (1943) has been on perpetual tour. So much has already been said about this large painting – books are devoted solely to the analysis of Jackson Pollock’s first great masterpiece. What else can possibly be said? In fact, there will always be new things to say. As with any work of genius, it exceeds every interpretation. Mural is generally regarded as a transitional work – between the mythological, Jungian abstractions and the later drip paintings which would secure Pollock’s world fame.

Perhaps what is most startling about the etchings of Francisco Goya, presently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the artist’s intensity of focus, his obsession with understanding the nature of human evil. Goya was a child of the Enlightenment, and he knew what it was to see humanity as the pinnacle of creation, the paragon of animals, the embodiment of reason, “in form and understanding how like a god?” as Hamlet would say. Yet this same creature, the light of reason in the world, was capable of the most barbaric cruelty. In one series after another Goya’s etchings attempt to grasp the universality of evil, to see it as an essentially human problem to be understood in terms of our capacity for moral choice. Evil is universally human, for Goya – a propensity in human beings that is at once basic and inextinguishable. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]

Vida Americana is an exhilarating, expansive and immensely satisfying exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum. Like a great and varied feast, this is a show that one must take one’s time to fully appreciate and digest; an exhibition that includes photography, film, sculpture, charcoal sketches, colored pencil and graphite, watercolors, lithographs and oil paintings, from the easel to the epic in scale. Not only are the greatest Mexican artists of the twentieth century represented here – including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros (‘Los Tres Grandes’) – but also many of the notable American artists who they had a profound influence on, such as Jackson Pollock, Jacob Lawrence, Marion Greenwood and Charles White, among others. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]

The Museum of Modern Art is currently presenting Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde – From Signac to Matisse and Beyond, examining the immense influence of this art critic, editor, publisher, collector and anarchist. Fénéon (1861-1944) saw the critic as a channel between the artist and the public – a role which had particular significance because art could further the cause of social justice and harmony. As Paul Signac would proclaim: “Justice in sociology, harmony in art: same thing.” [Sam Ben-Meir]

Another extraordinary piece, Circus Maximus (2019) is one that I so deeply admired from the moment I saw it complete, for its vitality, its de-centered yet exquisitely balanced structure, its thematic unity, and vibrant palette, its countless intertwining stories – I so wanted my kids to grow up with this lively and inexhaustible work that Anderson kindly let me have it and pay it off gradually. He told me he had been collecting the materials that went into it for seven years, which could hardly be doubted. Michael waited until it had become something of the past and then he created this epic tribute to the circus world with all its zaniness, its indefatigable physicality, its costumes and clowns with their joviality yet frightening undercurrents, the animals, elephants, and lions, and so much more. The circus always struck me as a theme for which Anderson’s art was destined, perfectly suited to his unstoppable talent for deconstruction and recreation – here was a subject the content of which he could explore, take apart and endlessly reconfigure in his inimitable style. Anderson could in life play the clown, laughing or crying, for he was not afraid to show his tears – but he was most truly, I believe, the tightrope walker: always living on the edge but with supreme skill, and poise, and his own style of grace. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]