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National Review
National Review
2 Mar 2024
Brian T. Allen


NextImg:Catherine Opie Does the Vatican in a New York Exhibition

T oday I’m writing about an exhibition of new work by Catherine Opie (b. 1961), Walls, Windows and Blood, at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. She’s a Los Angeles–based photographer whose work I’ve followed since the mid 1990s. Opie tends to work in series, each with a different theme, so she “can’t be pigeonholed,” as she says. She’s done portraits of her leather lesbian friends in San Francisco, which remind me of Thomas Eakins’s portraits in their candor, but also groups of photographs on ice houses on lakes, California surfers, high-school football players, and interiors of Elizabeth Taylor’s last home. Now, in her new work, she’s photographing aspects of the Vatican. I like the show a lot.

Earlier this week I wrote about the art dealer Betty Cuningham, who has sold wonderful Modernist art for the past 50 years and who’s closing her gallery on Rivington Street in Manhattan this spring. The Last Picture Show is her farewell exhibition and a survey of many of the artists whose careers she has advanced over the years. I enjoyed it. Since I know many of the artists, it was a sentimental journey on the one hand, but, on the other, they’re all so good that they never go stale.

Cuningham’s gallery is a single-owner shop, so it’s her vision and sales skills at work. Her artists — among them Rackstraw Downes, Stanley Lewis, Fairfield Porter, Philip Pearlstein, William Bailey, Joan Snyder, and Elizabeth Enders — are deliciously cerebral, which isn’t the contradiction in terms that it seems. Their work is lovely to look at, always challenging but never ranty, and deeply intelligent. Cuningham is going to work via her website and home, so she’s not disappearing. She’s closing her space in part because her rent’s going so high that NASA is needed to calculate the new number.

Opie and Cuningham’s stars are very different, but each of them combines tenderness and intelligent reflection. All make first-rate art. Opie has risen to the top of the art market now that Lehmann Maupin is her dealer. It’s got galleries in New York, London, Milan, and Seoul. Cuningham’s gallery is warm and homey, with Betty Cuningham there and accessible. Lehmann Maupin’s spaces are far bigger, but, like Cuningham’s, they house exhibitions that are open to the public. Like Gagosian Gallery’s superb Picasso exhibition, they’re often as good and sometimes better than museum exhibitions.

Opie conceived of a Vatican series in the summer of 2021, when she was a resident fellow at the prestigious American Academy in Rome. She’d attended a swearing-in ceremony for a new cache of Swiss Guards, who, for all their dashing garments, are the Vatican’s secret service. Then and there, she found a project. At the time, the city was quiet and tense. The Chinese coronavirus had evolved from mass hysteria to mass hypnosis.

Catherine Opie, Portrait of the Artist, 2014.

A year before, during my visit to Rome in August 2020 to see the Raphael retrospective, Covid restrictions had all but disappeared. Italians have weathered lots of storms and tend to look at life as an opera. I loved my visit. There were no tourists except six-foot-three old me. Gimlet-eyed as I am, I viewed Covid as a threat to the very old and very sick. By that time, most Italians thought the same.

But by my next visit, in May 2021, to visit the Torlonia collection of ancient Roman sculpture, the claws of the medical and political bureaucracy had dug deep into the Italian psyche. Restaurants were closed. I don’t consider Italians to be particularly lazy, but the state was paying them not to work. The mood was sullen and tense. I saw the Torlonia exhibition and went home early. Opie was there during this low, warped, dishonest time. The Vatican, to which she got special access, must have seemed more barricaded and hushed than ever. It was in this context that she worked.

Left: Catherine Opie, Untitled #7 (Walls), 2023, pigment print and two marble plinths. Center: Catherine Opie, Untitled #13 (Walls), 2023, pigment print and two marble plinths. Right: Catherine Opie, Untitled #10 (Walls), 2023, pigment print and two marble plinths.

Opie photographed the Vatican’s trademark external walls, seen in a group of seven-foot-tall, narrow black-and-white photographs in the first gallery, arranged side by side and mounted on hand-crafted marble pedestals. Each one is part of an edition of five. Around 850, Pope Leo IV commissioned the first set of walls surrounding the Vatican to protect the Holy See from pesky Saracen pirates.

Expanded and raised in the 17th century, the two-mile-long system encircles the 121-acre Vatican, the smallest independent country in the world. Why build walls? Because the popes weren’t suckers. The Roman Catholic Church is by no means uncontroversial. Italy is not a stable country. Rome has been sacked by outsiders. The locals are known to be easily inflamed as well.

These photographs of walls are also displayed in the second gallery. Opie is exploring a community that’s catholic — lowercase “c” — in that it professes to embrace all comers, but exclusive insofar as the Vatican is concerned. Inside is a world of elites and secrets. It’s not a glass hive. Some of the walls are equipped with surveillance cameras. Opie picked the corners of walls, making for a livelier composition. Here and there, foliage grows from the bricks and mortar, adding a dash of antiquity.

Catherine Opie, No Apology (June 5, 2021), 2023, pigment print.

In the first gallery, next to the photographs of walls, is a sweeping color photograph of the papal palace. Through one of its balcony windows, we see Pope Francis overlooking St. Peter’s Square, about to give a short speech, as he does each Sunday before his blessing and the ringing of the Angelus bell at noon. It’s the only time that Opie depicts the pope, known to be part Peronist and part Bianca Jagger. Now and then, he does something religious.

In Opie’s take, he’s a tiny figure, not for his views but for his state of encasement in architecture and in history. He’s the 266th pope embedded, for all his prosecco socialism and fad beliefs, in Christianity’s very big history. Emphasizing his smallness are some of the marble sculptures of saints on top of the square’s colonnade.

Opie chose June 6, 2021, to photograph the pope’s appearance. It’s the day that the Vatican acknowledged the news of unmarked indigenous graves of children on the grounds of Roman Catholic boarding schools in Canada. Acknowledged but not apologized for, I learned from Lehmann Maupin’s extensive, well-done press materials. These graves, newly discovered, created a furor in Canada, but most of the story has been exposed as a hoax. The photograph is titled No Apology. Opie might think about changing the title.

Left: Catherine Opie, Untitled #7 (Windows), 2023, pigment print. Right: Catherine Opie, Untitled #8 (Windows), 2023, pigment print.

The Vatican’s got plenty of walls but also plenty of windows. This is the least riveting part of Opie’s work on view. Her Vatican windows look out to the interior gardens and architecture. A couple look to Rome’s cityscape. The views range from crystal-clear to opaque. Some have frosted glass, some shades. Opie’s a good architectural photographer. Her atmosphere here is crisp. They’re not boring. Rather, her focus empowers and activates the windows. There’s transparency and opacity. And is hidden power behind the opacity? Some are so opaque that they feel like confessionals. One or two look out to puffy clouds. Some are covered with iron grids. All of this said, Opie says she had free rein to photograph hundreds of windows. Maybe the Vatican isn’t as secretive as we think.

Opie’s a sensitive photographer of architecture. An early series, Freeways, from the late 1980s, depicts California freeway overpasses in fragments. There’s no human life. Black-and-white, they look as though they belong to a long-lost civilization. Even her Icehouses series from the late ’90s presents these little shacks as organic and animated. Set on the strident horizontal of a frozen lake and popping up like a jack-in-the-box, they’re far more monumental than the idea of them would ever suggest they could be. Opie’s Vatican walls seem to have life in them as well, stern, austere, dogmatic life that it might be.

Catherine Opie, Blood Grid #2, 2023, pigment print.

Grids are central in another set of work in Walls, Windows and Blood. The three grids on view, titled Blood Grids, are groups of twelve close-ups. Opie photographed hundreds of works in the Vatican museum that show scenes of blood and gore. I’m a Methodist. We stay well clear of this aspect of Christianity, but it’s part of art history, so I’m knowledgeable. I’d quibble with these as “visual reminders of the power and dominance of the Catholic Church throughout history,” since the details come mostly from scenes of martyrdoms and the Crucifixion, whose victims were neither powerful nor dominant. Not to be picky, but otherwise, I don’t think they would have been sliced, diced, speared, and sautéed. I’m not sure about Opie’s religious beliefs, but, fascinating as these works are, she’s got the storyline wrong.

Opie brings a gay sensibility to some of her projects. The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t sanction gay marriage, and neither does any mainstream Christian denomination. Judaism and Islam don’t, either. She professes to critique the church for the child-abuse horrors but, looking at the art, this seems very remote. Gay men couldn’t donate blood during the AIDS crisis, she says, but that was government action, not the church.

Left: Catherine Opie, John, 2013, pigment print. Right: Catherine Opie, Pig Pen, 1993, c-print.

Much of Opie’s art deals with outsiders, especially what she calls her “badass butch” and gay men in San Francisco and in Los Angeles, but Opie’s not a renegade. She always wanted a family with a committed partner with whom to raise children in a stable home, and that’s what she has found. Much of her work is about building communities, too. Refuge and safety have always been themes in her work. I believe her when she says she’s committed more to navigation than proclamation.

Opie became a sensation at the Whitney Museum’s 1993 Biennial with Self-Portrait/Cutting, a view of her back on which a studio assistant — I hope he or she got double-time — incised an image of a house and two stick figures of women. Certainly an unorthodox self-portrait, even at a time when gay liberation started to get some legs.

Whether or not she understood this, the shedding of blood happens in war but also in the story of Jesus, and the martyrdoms she depicts in her grids lasted 30 years. Two of Opie’s most intriguing series are Closets and Jewels and 700 Nimes Road, capturing interiors from Elizabeth Taylor’s house in Los Angeles’s Bel Air neighborhood, where she lived from 1982 until her death in 2011. Religion seems far removed from this project unless we remember Taylor’s famous conversion to Judaism in 1959, shortly before her marriage to Eddie Fisher. Opie makes references to this front-page event in her series. Self-Portrait/Cutting is followed a few years later by another self-portrait depicting Opie breastfeeding her baby son. It’s a lovely, hushed image evoking hundreds of years of art showing Mary and the baby Jesus.

The grids — each is considered a single work of art — are priced at $75,000 for each one. The window photographs are $45,000 each. The wall photographs are $75,000 each, and the tiny Pope Francis is $50,000. Opie isn’t a hot artist. She’s 62. Are her prices high? I don’t think so. She’s one of the smartest, most original artists working today. There’s no shtick in her work.

Surfers and ethereal landscapes are among the best of Opie’s photographic series. Left: Catherine Opie, Untitled #4 (Surfers), 2003, c-print. Right: Catherine Opie, Untitled #14, 2016, pigment print.

Walls, Windows and Blood has another feature I liked. There’s a mezzanine in the second gallery from which visitors can look down to what suggests the nave of a church. The exhibition has very little interpretation, so visitors are on their own. That’s fine and liberating. A good looker can puzzle meaning from the combined trio of walls, windows, and bloody bodies.

Some gallery goers will feel that the atmosphere is off-putting and snooty. Staff members don’t have vibe checkers to monitor whether or not visitors feel welcome, much less the warm glow of belonging. There’s no fuss to be had unless you’re rich. Galleries don’t offer visitor amenities as museums do. The place is one big — and expensive — shop with the art on the walls for sale and no place to buy coloring books for the kids or coffee mugs for stocking stuffers. Opie’s exhibition is well worth a visit.