(Those tendencies toward representation and sincerity happen to triumph, retroactively, in the penchant of many younger contemporary artists today.) An intermittently active participation in feminist and identity politics has also caused Ringgold to be embraced in some circles and discounted in others. First came her stubborn fidelity to figuration in times favoring abstraction, and then her eschewal of Pop and postmodernist irony-as opposed to humor, a wellspring of her creativity.
On loan from MOMA, “Die” appears in “Faith Ringgold: American People,” an overwhelming six-decade retrospective at the New Museum, which consists of more than a hundred works by an artist, now ninety-one years old, who is sorely overdue for canonical status after a protracted defiance of art-world fashion. Art work © Faith Ringgold / ARS and DACS / Courtesy ACA Galleries. Does the Ringgold hold up? It holds forth, for sure, and you won’t forget it as long as you live, nor will you settle, if you’re open-minded, on any unambiguous interpretation of what it symbolizes. The pairing substantiates lately prevalent revisionist considerations of what matters, for what reasons and to what ends, in past and present visual culture. Contrasting but similarly terrific energies-clenched in “Demoiselles,” explosive in “Die”-generate meanings that are subtler than their initial shocks imply.
The Ringgold and the Picasso have cohabited surprisingly well, bracketing a complex civilizational if not stylistic history. The two pictures were made exactly sixty years apart: “Demoiselles” in 1907, while Picasso was living in Paris, and “Die” in New York in 1967, a year of eruptive racial and political violence in America. For a museum that had long championed a teleological account of the development of twentieth-century aesthetics, this startled, especially by having the Ringgold displayed near Picasso’s touchstone of modernism “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” with which the Spaniard introduced plangent allusions to tribal African masks to European art. The most provocative curatorial coup in the Museum of Modern Art’s recent series of rehangings of its permanent collection has been the placement of a mural-size painting of an apparent, sanguinary race war, “American People Series #20: Die,” by the veteran American artist and, at times, political activist Faith Ringgold, alongside works by Pablo Picasso.
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