Exhibitions of the Week: Leighton and Whistler at the Frick, Stern and Coppola at MoMA

Leighton's Flaming June (Until September 6 at the Frick Collection)

It is puzzling that Frederic Leighton's Flaming June languished in obscurity for as long as it did. How does a canvas depicting a voluptuous woman in a semi-transparent, explosion-orange gown wind up behind (as the exhibition materials put it) "the false panel of a chimneypiece in a house on the outskirts of London?" That is where Flaming June, which was assigned a place of honor at the Royal Academy Exhibition 1895, could be found until 1962: the painting was rescued by art collector Luis A. Ferré and was subsequently granted new sanctuary the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. So why, then, wasn't history as kind as Ferré?

Now on display in an intimate exhibition at the Frick Collection, Flaming June can be taken as an exemplar of an artistic mode -- Victorian "art for art's sake" aestheticism -- that has long been rather out of favor among scholars and public alike. And Leighton, who was ennobled late in his lifetime, had the bad luck to be a man of the establishment in an age when artists from France, Ireland, and even the United States were figuring out how to reconcile elegance and provocation. Sargent: Portaits of Artists and Friends at the Met is stirring example of this combination: the four Whistler portraits that flank Flaming June, though less obvious evidence, are certainly more probing and challenging than Leighton's centerpiece. These are reasons for obscurity, yes, but not really problems. Under the direction of curator Susan Grace Galassi, the Frick's showcase needs only one painting to encapsulate Leighton's personality -- showy yet conservative, sort of like a Victorianized Gustav Klimt. From there, you are left with an exhibition that invites you to contemplate the fortunes and fashions of art history.

In terms of effect and accomplishment, Leighton's perfect-square canvas is a strange work: it has the subject, flair, and dimensions of an aspiring masterpiece, but appears to be aspiring too hard. Classical and renaissance allusions, painstakingly articulated drapery, a swath of golden sea in the background -- it all adds up to a composition that is aesthetically coordinated but lacks spontaneity and mystery. (The woman depicted in Flaming June, after all, is asleep. If you can, try to imagine the Mona Lisa asleep.) But maybe grand gestures, brilliant surfaces, allusions to Leda and Michelangelo, and psychological indifference are what Leighton's art for art's sake was really, intentionally about. Please and impress the eye; the human condition can wait.

From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (Until October 4 at the Museum of Modern Art)

Though modernists Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola spent eight years as husband and wife, there is little evidence of exchange or collaboration -- and, huge relief, little "artistic romance" emotional baggage -- in the show that bears their names. From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires avoids this obvious and tempting approach in presenting the works of these two photographers. It also avoids an even more obvious, even more tempting approach, the very approach that the globetrotting title seems to promise -- placing the relatively obscure Stern and Coppola alongside better-known international modernists. (There are portraits of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, both taken by Stern, but that's about it.) With only Stern and Coppola at the forefront, organizers Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Hermanson Meister are pressed to justify why their two subjects should command a 300-item show. It isn't hard to be frustrated with the size and emphasis of Stern and Coppola's Museum of Modern Art retrospective -- or with its large expanses of middling work -- though it is ultimately harder to overlook the enjoyments and the rewards of spending a little time with these two.

Often, Stern and Coppola come off as good-humored ambassadors for the avant-garde. Their work toys with city spaces, odd perspectives, weird juxtapositions, and in-focus objects, but avoids classic modernist anguish. Stern, for instance, could have made a fine advertising executive, had she settled down. Her ability to give high art just the right measure of zippiness and camp first appears in her collaborations with Ellen Auerbach, photographs of torsos and mock-ups that appeared under the studio name Ringl & Pit. Even better are her Dreams (or Sueños), surrealistically manipulated photomontages that were printed in a woman's magazine between 1948 and 1951. Humor and camp could undermine the likes of Dali and Ernst; these qualities are the saving graces of Stern, whose Dreams feature misdirected ladders and veering reptile heads. For his part, Coppola seemed to move too quickly and to produce too much to attain seriousness: the show abounds in his snapshots of Buenos Aires and other cities, which despite their numbers never settle into a remotely interesting mood or character. He was better with film, a far better medium for volume and restlessness. Even if Stern and Coppola knew that their names would never figure largely in art history, they did seem to know that they were in the midst of something worth promoting, whether at the Bauhaus, in Buenos Aires, or into the 21st century.