2025 Spring Culture Preview | The New Yorker

Another traditionally feminine medium, porcelain, is the star and possible villain of “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition (March 25) takes a wary view of its own contents, which span half a millennium, arguing that the West acted out its daydreams of a docile Orient one cup-and-saucer at a time. The museum also honors the centennial of the American painter John Singer Sargent’s death, with “Sargent and Paris” (April 27)—another show about racy fantasies of foreignness, in a way. Inevitably, everything is centered on the artist’s early masterpiece, “Portrait of Madame X,” the painting that made French society pant. Yes, it’s in the Met’s permanent collection, but a year without a Sargent exhibition somewhere is like a lovely young heiress without a secure dress strap.

The reopening of the Frick Collection, on April 17, following almost five years of renovations, should make everyone pant. There is a host of new goodies to reward us for our patience, including sculptures by the Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kanevsky and a stunning roomful of drawings by Goya, Degas, and others, too fragile for long-term display but on view through the summer, at least. The building’s second floor, previously off limits, will be full of ceramics and Bouchers from now on, much as it was when actual Fricks lived there.

A day later and a mile north, the Guggenheim Museum opens “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” a major survey of one of the most intriguing American artists of the past twenty-five years. If you know him, you probably know “The Broken Five,” the huge, howling mosaic inspired by the Central Park Five; if not, it’s here, along with almost ninety of its siblings. By the time you exit, their scrawls and dried-shit textures should be almost as recognizable as the Coca-Cola logo.

Another mile north, at El Museo del Barrio, “Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop” (April 24) honors the multidisciplinary artist with her first large-scale museum survey. Like Johnson, Alvarez has hopped between figuration, abstraction, and conceptualism; her finest work, though, may be her “Air Paintings,” the ingenious flypapers of acrylic, ink, enamel, and glitter which are incapable of being dull for even one square millimetre.

Spring ends with the Morgan Library’s “Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron” (May 30), a celebration of the early photographer who lived on the Isle of Wight and, when she was nearing fifty, started taking pictures of her friends. If you were trying to preserve as much of Victorian England as possible and had only one Victorian’s work to help, you could do a lot worse than these images; everybody’s here, from Tennyson to Darwin, looking wistful and profound and utterly unamused. Brood with them all summer long.—Jackson Arn

Dance

Portraits of the Artists

Martha Graham was known for laying bare the inner landscapes of her female protagonists, with psyches as incandescent as hot coals. Several works in Martha Graham Dance Company’s spring season (Joyce Theatre; April 1-13), such as the second act of “Clytemnestra,” “Errand Into the Maze,” and “Frontier,” share this burning intensity. But “Deaths and Entrances” (1943), which the company brings back after a long absence, is a particularly interesting case, a portrait of a woman artist—Emily Brönte, originally danced by Graham herself—who, like Graham, fights to preserve her creative impulse.

The dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, too, probes the vicissitudes of a creative life in “Memory Piece: Mr. Ailey, Alvin . . . the un-Ailey?,” an outgrowth of the Whitney’s recent excitingly multifaceted “Edges of Ailey” exhibit. Jones, still vigorous at seventy-two, moves through space with ferocious intent while conjuring stories from the past: early dance sensations, tense interactions with the legendary Ailey, and clashes with critics who tried to box him in as a Black artist. “Do you require moral fervor from Merce Cunningham?” he asks, still furious at the notion. “Memory Piece” alternates with a new work for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company that explores the limits of personal freedom, “People, Places & Things.” (New York Live Arts; May 15-24.)

A little more than a year ago, New York City Ballet unveiled a work inspired by an image from the Russian invasion of Ukraine—a man holding his dead son’s hand after a missile strike. The ballet, “Solitude,” by Alexei Ratmansky, is by turns surreal, harrowing, and poetic, a surprisingly stark statement for a medium not known for tackling explicitly political topics. The piece returns for City Ballet’s spring season (David H. Koch Theatre; April 22-June 1), in a program that also includes Justin Peck’s newest work for the company, “Mystic Familiar,” an elegant display of dreamy youthfulness with music by Dan Deacon and designs by the artist Eamon Ore-Giron. Also not to be missed is a program of ballets set to the music of Maurice Ravel, including a delicate and stylish pas de deux by George Balanchine, “Sonatine.”

Not one for introspection or psychologizing, Twyla Tharp instead brings technical dazzle and musical understanding to the stage at City Center (March 12-16). As usual, there is a new piece, set to Philip Glass’s meandering “Aguas de Amazonia.” But I would place my bets on the older work, “Diabelli” (1998), set to Beethoven’s eponymous piano variations, themselves a feast of invention, wit, and intricacy. This is ideal material for Tharp, whose brain thrives on complexity and minute variations in form. And then there is her energizing effect on dancers, who on this occasion include Renan Cerdeiro, until recently of Miami City Ballet—a classical dancer through and through—and the unstoppable Daisy Jacobson.