The New York Times : Gerhard Richter part of New York Times Best of 2020

The Most Important Moments in Art in 2020

This was a year of protests and pivots. Monuments fell, museums looked inward. On the bright side, galleries persisted despite the pandemic’s grip and curators rolled out magisterial retrospectives.

Clockwise, from center, the “We Are Many. They Are Few,” billboard in Brooklyn by Sue Coe; the “Black Lives Matter” mural painted on 16th Street near the White House; Noah Davis’s “The Casting Call” (2008); Gerhard Richter’s “House of Cards (5 Panes),” at the Met Breuer; and “The Studio” (1969). by Philip Guston, whose retrospective was postponed because of disagreement over the interpretation of his hooded figures.Credit...Clockwise from center: Sue Coe, via SaveArtSpace and Art at a Time Like This; Carlos Vilas Delgado/EPA, via Shutterstock; The Estate of Noah Davis; Charlie Rubin for The New York Times; The Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

JASON FARAGO

Pictures From a Crisis

The only virtue of this washed-out year: When the circus stopped, the art world could no longer lie to itself. For years, boosters told us that shows were “essential,” fairs “unmissable”; we discovered we could do without them quite well. And institutions reputed as “progressive” had to admit their intransigence. If 2021 is to be a year of reassessment and reconstruction, let’s at least promise to do it seriously.

2. Gerhard Richter + Ceija Stojka

Two profound shows with nothing in common except one question: Can you paint Auschwitz? I cannot, pleaded “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” the German artist’s icy summation, up for just nine days at the Met Breuer — whose culminating “Birkenau” series began with an effort to paint photographs of the extermination camp, and ended up as streaky, speechless abstractions. I must, cried “Ceija Stojka: This Has Happened,” the Roma survivor’s burning retrospective at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía — whose runny, unrestrained paintings of Auschwitz bore witness to a genocide still in danger of being forgotten.

Paintings from Gerhard Richter’s “October 18, 1977” series at the Museum of Modern Art. The full series, comprising 15 works, received its own gallery as a part of the museum’s recent rehang.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

ROBERTA SMITH

Persistence in the Face of a Pandemic

The main story everywhere this year was the coronavirus: how it disrupted or reshaped specific spheres of activity, or left parts of them largely unscathed. The art world witnessed dizzying combinations of these outcomes, which are still unfolding. One surprise was the almost instantaneous financial fragility of museums and the stalwartness of art galleries of all shapes and sizes. When the virus arrived, an especially strong art season had been underway.

9. MoMA Restarts

Until it happened once, it was hard to understand what it meant — the Museum of Modern Art’s big plan to rotate a third of its permanent collection every six months. The first rotation was supposed to open in May as the Spring Reveal.Ultimately, it became the Fall Reveal and opened in November. It was exhilarating to finally grasp how profound it will be to have MoMA’s collection trade its chiseled-in-stone fixedness for permanent, in-progress fluidity. Everyone — curators, visitors, scholars and artists — will have a new relationship with the museum, its vast holdings and the histories they can tell. The mind boggles.

Article published on www.nytimes.com