The institution, which houses 14 of Mark Rothko’s Seagram Mural paintings in Houston, Texas, found itself in the Category 1 (down from Category 5) storm’s warpath. Three of the murals were damaged, along with parts of the chapel’s ceiling and several of its walls.

Beryl killed 64 people in late June and early July. The Houston area accounted for almost half of the death toll.

“The chapel’s continued stewardship of this beloved cultural and sacred site, renowned for its Mark Rothko panels, remains our highest priority, and the closure will ensure the necessary repairs and restoration can be made as effectively and completely as required,” the chapel’s chief executive director, David Leslie, said in a statement. “Our focus now is on the restoration of the building and panels, and on continuing our mission of both contemplation and action at the intersection of art, spirituality, and human rights.”

It’s not yet known how much the repairs will cost the Rothko Chapel, nor when it will reopen.

The Art Newspaper reported that Beryl is estimated to have caused “between $28 billion and $32 billion in damage in the United States alone, with insurers in the Houston area expected to pay out between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion in claims because of the storm.”

Houston collectors Dominique and John de Menil built the chapel as a space for contemplation. It opened in 1971 and operates as a non-profit entity.

The collection of 1,400 African artifacts of unclear provenance is owned by real estate agent Sam Njunuri. The auctions were planned to settle debts that Njunuri owed Darlene Jarrett and Sylvia Jones, former tenants who allege that Njunuri changed the locks and removed their belongings while they were vacationing in 2015. The couple sued Njunuri in 2021, with a jury ruling in their favor. Njunuri was ordered to pay Jarrett and Jones $990,000 in damages. Njunuri intended to pay them back with the profits made from an auction of his art collection, but a bankruptcy filing in April put an indefinite stop to those plans. 

Meanwhile, investigators have attempted to uncover the origins of Njunuri’s prodigious collection, the existence of which was only publicly broadcast in 2020. That year, KPRC 2, a Houston media outlet, discovered via a tip a discreet shed decorated with high-end security cameras and surrounded by an electronic gate. Inside were hundreds of African artifacts, of varying origin. A subsequent investigation found the shed had been converted with taxpayer money into an art storage facility to the price tag of $326,000. The facility was later revealed to be owned by Harris County and is located in Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis’ precinct.

“A lot of money got spent on a building, clearly to make it so that it could be used to store this art collection,” Former Harris County Judge and KPRC 2 Analyst Ed Emmett said in a statement. “The art collection doesn’t belong to the county. The art collection wasn’t even on loan to the county.”

In 2021, local reporters linked the shed to Njunuri, the owner of African Art Global. A connection was also established between the company and the sister-in-law of Ellis. Two criminal investigations were launched by Harris County District Attorney’s public integrity investigators, during which a Harris County grand jury declined to indict Ellis for his involvement. Njunuri has admitted to owning some of the artworks and has testified under oath that a portion of the collection may have been stolen.

The FBI has determined that a federal crime was not committed, however as of April, investigators are pursuing paperwork to authenticate the collection’s ownership.

“This stunning coffin was trafficked by a well-organized network that has looted countless antiquities from the region,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said three months ago, after his office determined the sarcophagus had been looted from Abu Sir Necropolis, north of Cairo. “We are pleased that this object will be returned to Egypt, where it rightfully belongs.”

An official at Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, told the Associated Press the sarcophagus dates back to the Late Dynastic Period of ancient Egypt, which lasted from 664 B.C.E. until Alexander the Great’s campaign in 332 B.C.E.

According to Waziri, the sarcophagus, which measures about 9.5 feet long, may have belong to an ancient priest named Ankhenmaat.  

The repatriation is part of the Egyptian government’s continued efforts to stop the trafficking and secure the return of stolen antiquities. Bragg said that the sarcophagus was smuggled into the U.S. via Germany and before being returned was featured in the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences.

In 2021, Egyptian authorities saw the return of 5,300 looted artifacts from across the globe, the Associated Press reported.

Jasper Johns, Study for Skin I, 1962, charcoal and oil on drafting paper, 22 x 34 inches.

©2018 JASPER JOHNS, LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

‘The Condition of Being Here: Drawings by Jasper Johns,” now on view at the Menil Collection in Houston through January 27, 2019, would look spectacular anywhere it was displayed. But this survey show is seen to optimum effect in the new Menil Drawing Institute, where it was tailor made for the adaptable rectangular exhibition space it inaugurates. For the venue’s debut, freestanding partitions have been added, the lights are dimmed, and the windows hidden behind other walls.

The Menil has long collected several artists in depth, displaying their treasures in intimate spaces throughout its quiet, leafy 30-acre campus. There you’ll find the sublime Rothko Chapel as well as the glorious Cy Twombly Gallery. And now there is the Menil Drawing Institute, a 30,000-square-foot full-service drawings center, designed by Los Angeles firm Johnston Marklee, that is an important repository for studying Johns.

Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1958/1967, graphite and gouache on tracing paper mounted on board, 16⅜ x 12½ inches.

©2018 JASPER JOHNS, LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/THE MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON, BEQUEST OF DAVID WHITNEY

Instead, the drawings on view represent a sampling of the media as well as the styles that Johns has explored, a fitting approach to the work of a man who decades ago famously wrote in his notebooks, “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” You get to see what the artist did to flags, maps, numbers, targets, body parts, vases, stripes, and all sorts of fragments using colored pencil, charcoal, gouache, oil stick, crayon, pastel, watercolor, graphite pencil, graphite wash, graphite powder, metallic powder, acrylic, printing ink, body oil, water soluble encaustic, photocopy collage, and objects. If the art world had the equivalent of a Guide Michelin, Johns would be cited as a three-star master chef based on his prowess with ingredients and gift for presentation.

Neither this show—nor the multi-volume catalogue raisonné being published by the Menil Collection by the end of the year—can be confused with a how-to-make a drawing manual. Viewed in-depth, Johns’s works on paper affirm his stature as a virtuoso draftsman. Whether a study for a painting or an independent work in its own right, his drawings dazzle.

Jasper Johns, Two Flags, 1969, graphite pencil and collage on paper, 22¼ x 30¾ inches.

©2018 JASPER JOHNS, LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/THE MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON

Because “The Condition of Being Here” is not arranged chronologically, you can enter through either of two doors and circulate to the left or right as you see fit. There’s only one directive to heed: you need to get close to the drawings to appreciate their intricacies. This is an art measured in inches, not feet.

Within these parameters, Johns has retained the intimacy and grace of Old Master works on paper, and in postwar modernist circles his skill as a draftsmanship is sui generis. Consider this: while his one-time partner, contemporary, and fellow disruptor Robert Rauschenberg also executed great drawings—who doesn’t admire Rauschenberg’s suite on Dante’s Divine Comedy?—his most important work in the medium is Erased de Kooning (1953), a clever conceptual ploy.

Jasper Johns, Corpse, 1974–75, colored ink, oil stick, pastel, and graphite pencil on paper, 42⅝ x 28½ inches.

©2018 JASPER JOHNS, LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/THE MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON, BEQUEST OF DAVID WHITNEY

Many of the most enthralling works are drawings with recognizable images Johns treated abstractly. The flags, stenciled numbers, and maps of the United States are as rudimentary as they seemed to be when we were introduced to them in elementary school. However, Johns could not be more sophisticated in the way he renders the grounds surrounding the objects we identify with our childhoods. He captivates us with things we’ve known all our lives.

Unlike an Old Master, Johns is not depicting objects with descriptive outlines and shadows. He’s intent on our merely identifying something so that we can see what he’s done to it. Besides the astonishing networks of strokes he utilizes, there’s the exciting way he pools fluid media. Intrigued by the ghost-like figure in a study for Skin I (1962), you may be oblivious to the mineral oil he applied to someone’s face and hands before he pressed their visage and palms down on drafting paper to make it. The engaging subject grabs you first. On the other hand, color works best when a drawing is abstract; it’s allowed to become its most assertive self. Corpse (1974–75)—a collection of red, yellow, and blue hatch marks—is a ravishing example of this. And as he has grown older, geometry has become more important, in the form of curves and as a means of dividing a surface into parts. One complication after another ensues.

Over the course of his long career, Jasper Johns has given viewers a chance to marvel at objects in a world they often might take for granted. At the Menil Drawing Institute, we find an artist in command of infinite variation.

In 2016 we launched the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Art in America Arts Writing Fellowships, a joint project designed to foster art and culture writing in cities throughout the United States. For our May issue, fellowship recipient Bill Arning wrote about the enduring legacy of eccentrics in Houston. Here he talks about highlights of art life in the city and its orbit.

Houston’s art mavens have to pay close attention. New venues and artist-run spaces pop up and disband at a rapid rate. Meanwhile, three highly anticipated additions at big institutions are still months or years away. The Menil Drawing Institute, a freestanding exhibition and storage space at the Menil, is set to open next year, as are some of Stephen Holl’s new plazas and buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. The latter, designed by Michael Maltzan, is an art-and-technology initiative that will bring superstars like Olafur Eliasson and Diana Thater to interact with Rice’s students.

Sometimes America’s second-fastest growing city pauses long enough to notice abandoned structures that can be creatively reused for installations. The Silos at Sawyer Yard, once used to store rice, have been cleared out and given over to artists. Many terrific artists fail to account for the effects of the terrifying scale, but when projects succeed—like Janice Freeman’s hyper-femme floral swings, David Waddell’s projected collages that turned the damp silo into the backdrop for Boschian hallucinations, and Trey Duvall’s 4,100-pound clay sarcophagus slowly eroded by dripping water—it is marvelous. Even more overpowering sights are found in the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, a long-abandoned water-storage facility dating to the city’s early days. Magdalena Fernández is currently showing the immersive video piece 2iPM009 (2009), which—with its animation of multiplying grids suggesting cyber-Mondrian lattices—beautifully fills the space.

On the gallery front, Houston mourned the loss of Jonathan Hopson’s Hello Project, a gallery dedicating to giving artists their first public outings. For two years, this pristine white cube functioned out of veteran Houston gallerist Ronnie McMurtry’s back room. When McMurty decided to retire earlier this year, Hopson hunted for a space as unique as his vision. Now he has reopened the gallery under his own name in a terrific vintage house in the Montrose neighborhood. One of the city’s most conceptually conscious gallerists, Hopson studied how the physical space and location of a gallery inflects artistic meaning and viewer experience. He visited galleries in domestic spaces from Park View in Los Angeles to Marianne Boesky and Friedrich Petzel’s uptown locations in New York and modeled his program to create similar intimacies. Houston had a few house galleries already, such as Front Gallery, run by artists Aaron Parazette and Sharon Engelstein out of their parlor, and the recently closed Gimp Room that Emily Peacock and Sally Glass ran in their shared domestic space. Yet Hopson’s space—which he runs in collaboration with his wife, the artist Debra Barrera—is stunningly elegant, as is the work he chooses. He demonstrated his refined eye in a show by Peacock—Houston’s master of narrative intimacy in photography, sculpture, and film—and I look forward to an upcoming exhibition by French artist Annabelle Arlie. With weekend hours, a tendency to provide snacks, and an adorable gallery dog, Hopson’s gallery has already become a beloved artist hangout. He even hosted a group cry in the days following the election.

Proximities change how the city’s art scene sees itself. Houston is networked in ways that are easy to overlook when passing through for a few days, but when you live here the ease of attending exhibitions and events in New Orleans, Mexico City, Dallas, and Fort Worth makes those places part of the local cultural fabric. These days the art fairs of choice for Houston’s top collectors are Zona Maco and the Material Fair, which take place in Mexico City in February. During the 2016 fair week, Texan art lovers filled restaurants and enthusiastically Instagrammed the Fred Sandback exhibition at Luis Barragán’s Casa Gilardi, a subtly luscious combination of artwork and architecture. Since the Mexican capital is so close that one could theoretically go for lunch, I went back Halloween weekend for Museo Jumex’s mind-blowing General Idea retrospective and have sent several of the big Houston philanthropists to catch it before it travels to Buenos Aires in 2017. The subversive conceptual camp of General Idea’s best work will doubtless propagate young artists in Mexico City in the years to come. 

Just a five-hour drive away, New Orleans is always part of Houston’s consciousness, and many Houstonians keep apartments in the Faubourg Marigny for the food and wild festivities. I was thrilled to jury the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Louisiana Contemporary exhibition. I always love the Ogden’s unique focus on what “Southernness” means in art and culture. Given the amount of great eccentric characters the populate the New Orleans scene, I was not surprised when the museum’s head curator told me I had picked a half dozen artists—including Paul Rizzo and Chris Bernstein—who were better known as colorful community bartenders. The opening took place on White Linen Night, a summer ritual common to many cities in the South. But even having seen Houston’s parade of white linen, I was not ready for the huge New Orleans version, where art patrons become a white surging mass filling the city’s central business district. Viewed from the Ogden’s roof, it looked as if a strange cult of Tennessee Williams impersonators had taken over the city.

Whenever I am in New York I always see what’s on at Joe’s Pub. I’m a fan of their curated cabaret nights. One of the best developments in Houston has been the new initiative from nonprofit theater producers Lott Entertainments Presents to bring Joe’s Pub to Houston, with a series of performances that included Justin Vivian Bond’s Love is Crazy. Bond had not been here since performing as part of the duo Kiki and Herb. The solo show, more focused on that gorgeous voice than on banter and characterization, was a highlight of the fall arts season in Texas. In a city that gets a huge surge of visitors due to the high quality of the Houston Grand Opera, it was very satisfying to see friends from Austin, Dallas, New Orleans, and San Antonio come in for a history-making talent like Justin Vivian Bond.

COURTESY ARTADIA

Today the national arts fund nonprofit Artadia announced the ten finalists for their seventh annual Houston Artadia Awards. Following a panel review of 225 applicants earlier this month, the finalist are:

• Deborah Bay
• JooYoung Choi
• Lily Cox-Richard
• Bill Daniel
• Autumn Knight
• El Franco Lee II
• Angel Oloshove
• Stephanie Saint Sanchez
• Nestor Topchy
• Charisse Weston

Founded in 1999, Artadia provides “unrestricted, merit-based awards to contemporary artists chosen through a rigorous jury process involving a panel of internationally recognized curators.”

For this year’s initial panel round, jurors included Claudia Schmuckli, director and chief curator at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston; Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum; and the artist David Altmejd. Schmuckli, commenting on the decisions reached by the panel, said in a press statement:

“I am thrilled that the final selection offers an exciting cross section of artistic practice across gender, race, age, and access to education that is truly representative of the diversity that makes Houston such a unique and special place to live and work in.”

Following studio visits with the finalists in late November, Schmuckli together with Lanka Tattersall, assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, will make their final decision.

The finalist selected will receive up to $20,000 in unrestricted funds, made available through donations by the Brown Foundation, the Houston Endowment, Artadia’s board of directors and council members, and individuals throughout the country.

On the less-to-more scale of art-making, Christopher Cascio scores at the far end of the “more” side. Like Arman, Allen Ruppersberg and Barton Lidice Beneš, he is an incessant accumulator who builds his works and exhibitions from various ongoing collections. In this show the dominant collectibles were wristbands, those colorful, throwaway paper strips widely used to identify paying patrons at clubs, concerts and all manner of events (including art fairs). Over the past year, Cascio, a young, Houston-based artist, has been collaging wristbands into intricate geometric compositions often based on traditional quilting patterns. Cascio’s conflation of two vernacular idioms—quilting and wristbands—exudes that sense of inevitability that is often the mark of a classic body of work. Making the most of the modularity, artificial colors and imperfections of his materials (which include bands he has worn himself alongside those scavenged from sidewalks outside dance clubs or purchased in bulk online), he creates abstract compositions that are at once rigorous, hypnotic and giddy. Cascio is especially adept at assimilating the random imperfections of the bands into his rhythmic structures, which can range in size from 12 by 9 inches to 4½ by 6 feet. The only misstep was when he hand-painted onto canvas a scaled-up version of a small wristband collage. This failed experiment served mainly to clarify how important the use of actual wristbands is to Cascio’s process. 

In a second room, the artist highlighted a different side of his work, in which the emphasis was more autobiographical and the organizing principles had to do with categories rather than geometric patterns. One wall featured countless items carefully arranged on narrow shelves, some of which were almost at ceiling height. Pill bottles (many filled with studio detritus), plastic lighters, empty 5-Hour Energy bottles and nitrous oxide cartridges testified to various habits, and a row of used cardboard painting palettes suggested that art, too, is a habit and not always a healthy one. Affixed to two other walls were dozens of used mailers (most with labels bearing Cascio’s home address) on top of which Cascio hung examples from previous series of his paintings and collages, many of them referencing gun and drug culture. There was an effective tension between the orderly display of the items on the shelves and the raw, informal and vaguely Rauschenbergian art-on-mailer assemblages.

As one lingered in front of Cascio’s works, whether for the sake of visual delight or cultural semiotics or both, an underlying theme emerged. What remains of any experience, the artist reminded us, is only the residue, the empty container, the husk. At some level, artworks are just like leftover wristbands or empty nitrous oxide cartridges. We consume them as experience but, without the fact of that experience—in all its ephemerality—works of art are just so many inert objects. A bleak vision, but happily Cascio’s work also suggests a crucial distinction: unlike wristbands or empty bottles, artworks are not only markers of pleasures past but also occasions for experiences to come. They are, in fact, refillable, infinitely.

Visitors to Lane Hagood’s recent show had to pass between two literary references in the gallery’s front space before getting to the artist’s six new paintings (all 2014). To the left, the exhibition’s title, “The House of the Solitary Maggot” (taken from a book by the visionary American writer James Purdy), was emblazoned on a wall; to the right was the gallery’s front counter where, in lieu of the standard press release, there were copies of a poem by Chilean poet Nicanor Parra titled “Warning to the Reader.” Given these literary straits, and considering this 30-year-old, Houston-based painter’s past penchant for loading his shows with images from his pantheon of culture heroes, it was a surprise to encounter paintings so free of allusion and citation, so nearly formalist in their means.

Although every canvas featured images of human eyes within a network of lines, often suggestive of a spider’s web, they were wonderfully various. In Sky Web, a single blue eye sits at the center of a radiating network of white lines that seem to be suspended against a vista of blue sky and cottony clouds. Next to it hung Skin Web, which features a pair of green eyes, weirdly misaligned, that are ringed with a multicolored spider’s web against a pinkish-tan ground. Speckling the ground, which is close to the dirty pink of late Guston, are dozens of small spots of color, each partially obscured with a tiny dab of yellow paint. The title invites us to read them as skin blemishes, but they also draw attention to how the painting was made. As with most of the other works in the show, Skin Web began with a ground of atmospheric, spray-gunned color. Using tape to mask out the web structure around the eyes, the artist then covered the canvas with the pinkish “skin” layer. As the tape was removed, the lines of the web took on the modulating colors of the ground. At first it seems as if the blemish spots, like the web lines, were masked with tape, thus revealing portions of the underpainting. In fact, the spots—comically “fixed” with the dabs of yellow—were applied over the skin layer in a very understated kind of trompe l’oeil. In several other paintings, Hagood discreetly uses iridescent paint on the grounds, while in Jah Web, a dense Miró-esque composition throbbing with 16 small eyes, the bottom layer of paint was applied in broad horizontal bands so that the web emerged in the Rastafarian tricolor of red, yellow and green. Equally compelling were paintings that declined chroma, like the white-and-gray White Noise Web and the black-on-black Dark Web.

One of the many impressive aspects of this show was how Hagood artfully spliced together several different styles of painting—the atmospheric grounds, the hard-edge webs, the wonky Surrealist eyes—without falling into mere eclecticism. Equally impressive is his willingness to experiment: despite the consistent eye-and-web motif, this was a boldly unformulaic show. For each painting, Hagood came up with different problems and different solutions, or, as a line in the Nicanor Parra poem has it, “a heap of contradictions.”

A Russian-born artist who has lived in New York since the 1990s, Anton Ginzburg has been pursuing a conceptually driven multi-medium practice that aims to fuse the strategies of contemporary Western art with the cultural inheritance of Eastern Europe. His debut solo show in the United States, “Terra Corpus,” presented the first two parts of a projected trilogy, both ambitious works pairing films with Post-Minimal installations that act as glossaries or spatial narratives relating to the films’ themes.

The most recent installation, Walking the Sea (2013-14), takes as its subject the Aral Sea, a formerly 26,300-square-mile lake between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that has drastically diminished. Beginning in the 1960s, the waters were diverted to irrigate cotton fields—an ecological catastrophe largely unknown to the international community due to political restrictions on access to the site.

Starting with a shot of unbounded water under a night sky, the film introduces a traveler figure, played by the artist, whose white costume combines traditional Dervish elements with tropes of 20th-century art history, most prominently Robert Smithson’s “mirror displacements” and Non-Sites, alluded to by a structure on his back of three mirrors that converge at a tented angle. This avatar treks on foot from one side of the former sea to the other as the terrain transitions from canyons to prairies to salt-flecked sands, revealing wandering camels, carcasses of sunken ships and abandoned island military bases. As the traveler crosses this wasteland, the mirrors on his back refract the surroundings of the seabed, which Ginzburg has likened to “a readymade earthwork.”

The poetic allusions of the film are then clarified and given form in the adjoining installation, which acts in an almost literary manner akin to David Foster Wallace’s voluminous footnotes. One wall featured a series of contact prints providing keys to the work. Some images are derived from the West—an excerpt from Thoreau’s essay “Walking” and a detail of the Courbet painting Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, showing the painter clad in white, with a staff and a backpack, heading off into the wilderness—and others from Russia, such as photographs from ethnographic surveys of Central Asia.

The other components of the installation then reiterate these themes: a concrete basin of water evokes the absent sea and a Non-Site; sculptures made of plaster, mirrors and colored resin reference traditional Islamic architectural details from the region; and a tapestry woven from cotton presents aerial images of the sea’s gradual disappearance between the 1980s and today. The most complex sculptural element is an Aeolian harp, which plays field recordings of the wind from the Aral Sea in reaction to the visitor’s movements.

The other installation, At the Back of the North Wind (2011), was previously shown as a para-pavilion project during the 2011 Venice Biennale. Its centerpiece is a lavish, beautifully shot film that follows another figure (again played by the artist) who embarks on an expedition to find the mythical land of Hyperborea, traveling from the Pacific Northwest to the ruined gulags of Northern Russia. The film conflates his search for an imagined paradise with an investigation of the subconscious, represented by a cloud of Jungian red smoke that follows the traveler on his journey. Among the accompanying artworks that materialize elements in the film is a massive sculpture merging mammoth tusks with 3-D-printed distortions of human bones to create an ancient-modern hybrid.

While the themes of At the Back of the North Wind prove more elliptical than those of the newer installation, their visual manifestation is often ravishing. Overall, the show served to announce an audacious, questing artistic voice.

The lead painting in this retrospective of artwork by Wols is startlingly alive. Blue Phantom was made in 1951 in France, where Wols, born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze in 1913 and raised in Germany, lived from age 19 until his death in 1951. The canvas is, like most by the artist, only about 3 by 2 feet, but it is so heavy with blue impasto and a textured black form in the center that it seems to vibrate. The paint handling suggests Wols’s relationship with Art Informel, the French version of Abstract Expressionism, yet it is also particular to the artist. Finger smears and scratches attest to Wols’s specific actions with the medium, and the ambiguous central figure hints at his unique debt to Surrealism. Stare too long at this inky shape and it recedes into nothingness, and embodies the kind of existential anxiety ascribed to much post-World War II avant-garde painting.

Who knows where Wols might have gone with painting, which he did not take up until the late 1940s. Raised in a wealthy family, he studied art in Germany before rejecting his bourgeois roots and leaving for France, where he scraped by as a commercial photographer and focused on drawing, even while interned for a year at the start of the war as a citizen of a “hostile nation.” Wols, who married a French-Romanian milliner, battled poverty and alcoholism in the 1940s. Though he had critical success and gallery shows during his lifetime, it was not until after his death that his work became widely known and shown in large international exhibitions, including Documenta 1 (1955) and the Venice Biennale (1958).

The Menil retrospective, co-organized with Kunsthalle Bremen, is the artist’s first major exhibition in the United States. It surveys his oeuvre with roughly 20 photographs, 50 works on paper and 20 paintings, all titled and dated posthumously. The photographs, most taken in the late 1930s and roughly 8 by 6 inches, are black-and-white, Surrealist-inspired shots of isolated body parts and objects, such as lips, mannequins and sausages. More compelling are the drawings, most of which are no bigger than 12 by 9 inches. Made with pencil, ink, watercolor and even paint, their imagery is concentrated at the centers. The City on Stilts (1944) is one of many that swarm with geometric shapes suggesting a small city, here floating in thin air. A Thousand Problems in the Head (1939-40) is a dreamlike composition, depicting eyelashes, a wine bottle, triangular flags and other items dancing together amid a field of blue.

Wols’s paintings are more abstract and more substantial than his drawings, and since the vertical works register on a human scale, it is easy to become immersed in them. Butterfly Wing (ca. 1946-47) is one of several canvases that feature thin washes of brown and that are bisected by elliptical forms, this one outlined with streaks of black paint and topped with small pools of deep purple and red. Untitled (Composition), ca. 1946-47, is particularly haunting. Against a mottled gray background a black shadow emerges, but it has been repeatedly scratched at to reveal a spiney core that wastes the form away even as it comes into being. This gesture cuts to the heart of Wols’s skill: making artwork that reverberates far beyond its time, with themes that are universal.