That letter from Mrs. Szeemann is one of many archival documents on view on the ground floor of the Ca’ Corner della Regina, the 18th-century Venetian palazzo where Germano Celant, curator of the Prada Foundation, has recreated Szeemann’s groundbreaking show, working in collaboration with the artist Thomas Demand and the architect Rem Koolhaas. This may not be the main event in town—that would be the biennale—but still it’s made an impact. On the second of three press preview days, people were lining up outside, bumping umbrellas in the rain.
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The novelist Charles Jackson may not be as well known as the subjects of Blake Bailey’s previous biographies, Richard Yates and John Cheever—the latter book, Cheever: A Life, won Mr. Bailey the National Book Critics Circle Award—but he is no less fascinating. In Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, Mr. Bailey portrays his life with the same dogged attention to detail, literary panache and brilliant storytelling that he brought to those other subjects.

Jackson is known, to the extent that he is known, as the author of the 1944 novel The Lost Weekend (his debut), which was in short order made into a movie by Billy Wilder that swept the 1946 Oscars. The book, now reissued (along with Jackson’s 1950 volume of short stories, The Sunnier Side) with an introduction by Mr. Bailey, describes a bender of epic proportions. Its protagonist, Don Birnam, an alcoholic at rock bottom, was a thinly veiled portrait of Jackson himself, and he would continue to use his own biography in his work. “He saw himself as an American everyman,” Mary McCarthy wrote of a character she based on Jackson, a depiction that Mr. Bailey draws on throughout the book. “He felt that if he could tell the whole truth about himself, he would tell the whole truth about any ordinary American. This, in fact, he conceived to be his duty as a writer.”

Though he grew up in an ordinary enough town—Newark, N.Y., outside of Rochester, which he would fictionalize as Arcadia—Jackson was hardly an ordinary American. In his life, he rubbed shoulders with Thomas Mann, Judy Garland and the Gershwins. He partied with publisher Roger Straus. He received fan letters for his writing, and for his honest approach to alcoholism. (He would, however, always wish there were more of the former.) He experienced, to a wrenching degree, the curse of the successful first novel—he never could match his. That he was seduced by Hollywood, a common affliction of postwar fiction writers, didn’t help matters.

But his real problems ran deeper. Until the end, he fought a mainly losing battle with alcoholism and drug addiction, and he struggled to come to terms with his homosexuality. (His younger brother, meanwhile, was openly gay—or as openly as one could be at the time.) He was married, and was a doting father to his two girls. He died, after a suicide attempt, from a Seconal overdose in 1968 in the Chelsea Hotel, where he was living with a young Czech immigrant named Stanley. Mr. Bailey’s triumph is in fleshing out both Jackson’s literary legacy and the man himself. “In many ways Charlie was, and would forever be, the kindest and most approachable of men,” he writes, “while at the same time he clung like grim death to his fraying chunk of fame.”

Detective Ivan Marcano, Hilda Miolan and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

In the kind of grand-scale symbolism achievable only in this great city of ours, ordinary folks throughout Manhattan might have surmised from the Empire State Building being gussied up in blue, with red and white on the tippy-top (cop car, siren), that the swells who support the New York City Police Foundation were putting on their annual shindig last Thursday.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and others posed for glam shots on the red carpet at the Waldorf-Astoria, and on the minds of all those who’d gathered for pre-dinner cocktails—New York’s Finest in their finest, drinking gin and tonics, chardonnay and (yes!) Coors Light—was one pressing question: how would host Jon Stewart top his bravura performance of two months prior, when he had Commissioner Kelly on his show and opened the interview by taking a big gulp from a far-larger-than-16-ounce container, earning a mock stern warning from the commissioner? The soda-ban storm having passed, Mr. Stewart would have to come up with a new shtick—and after the tough-to-follow act of the NYPD’s Emerald Society Pipes & Drums, with its formidable bagpipes, the comedian more than delivered.

Taking the lectern for his introduction of this year’s Hemmerdinger Award winners—Detective Patrick Blanc, central robbery division; Criminalist IV Katen Desai, police lab; Nurse II Mary Gallo, medical division; Computer Systems Manager III Joshua Kaminstein, MISD; and Sergeant Louis Rapoli, commanding officer, school safety division—Mr. Stewart repeatedly asserted that he wasn’t hosting the event for any personal gain, all the while rifling through his vest pocket for his “notes” which, it soon became apparent from their telltale orange, were actually New York City parking tickets. The room exploded in guffaws.

Mr. Stewart went on to jokingly characterize a Hemmerdinger as a physical affliction, clutching his lower back and groaning, “I have a Hemmerdinger. It must’ve been the ice.” (The Transom happened to be seated at the table of businessman and former MTA chairman H. Dale Hemmerdinger, an impeccably gracious man who revealed to us that some 29 years ago, when he was formalizing his award, he received a visit from a young police captain—Ray Kelly himself.) Mr. Stewart also acknowledged the services of the NYPD in preparing his show for a visit from Pervez Musharaf. If there were to be a shooting incident, the police told Mr. Stewart, Mr. Musharaf would be forced to the floor. Asking them what he should do himself, Mr. Stewart joked that he was told, “Duck.”

For his hosting efforts, Commissioner Kelly graced Mr. Stewart with an NYPD bomber jacket, a good look.

After dinner, Charlie Rose and Commissioner Kelly gave the 2013 Honoree Award to real estate developer and longtime police supporter Arnold Fisher.

But the evening’s most dramatic moment came with the presentation of the Cop of the Year Award to Detective Ivan Marcano. The former beat cop’s story was told: last October, while off duty and riding in a car with his girlfriend in the Bronx, Mr. Marcano spied two men robbing a third and interceded, flashing his badge, only to be shot in the chest by one of the assailants. Back in his car, his girlfriend steering him to the nearest hospital, he happened to spot the bad guys in another car, at which point he hopped out of his and they out of theirs, and he was once again in hot pursuit.

Cut to video from a surveillance camera, and all assembled watched as then-Officer Marcano, cradling his injury in one hand as though it were no more than a valise and clutching his gun in the other, having felled one of the assailants, hopped into an ambulance that—no joke—just happened to be parked there. The coda, his promotion to detective, seemed, to the Transom at least, hardly sufficient. Knight the man, for goodness’ sake!

It was truly the stuff of instant legend, the kind of New York cop story that puts the most arresting police procedural to shame.

But the audience hardly had time to digest this tale of derring-do, never mind their tournedos of beef with wild mushroom semolina, because then from stage left emerged an exceptionally well-preserved Chaka Kahn. (“She’s 60,” Mr. Rose, who introduced her, boasted to the crowd.) Bedecked in a glittery, skintight, low-bodiced black body suit, high boots, a sequined red fire-breathing-dragon-emblazoned cape and a voluminous hairdo (how long do you think that took, murmured one of the Transom’s tablemates sotto voce), Ms. Kahn then proceeded to gamely belt out her own and others’ songs, pausing only to compliment the Waldorf’s chef on, in particular, the broccoli.

The Transom had noted earlier that when Detective Marcano received his award, there appeared near the base of the stage a raven-haired young woman with enviable poise and a digital camera. When she ascended the stage for a photo with the awardee, it became evident that this was none other than Hilda Miolan, girlfriend and, on that fateful night, driver to Detective Marcano. Raising our voice over Chaka Kahn, the Transom asked her: what was that night like for you?

“Very scary,” she said. “My adrenaline was going like crazy. But the outcome was great. He got everything he wanted.”

Karen Russell. (Photo: Michael Lionstar)

In Karen Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia! (2011), loss propels the story forward. The book, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, follows a family that runs an alligator-wrestling theme park on an island in the Florida Everglades. Mostly narrated by Ava, a 13-year-old girl who has spent her whole life in the park, Swamplandia! is about the interplay of fantasy—Ava’s older sister quite believably elopes with a ghost—and being grounded in cold reality: the death of the family matriarch, the park’s star performer, holds the story together while unraveling the family at its center.

Picking up on the more hallucinatory thread of her novel and running with it in her second collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf, 256 pp., $24.95), Ms. Russell proves herself to be a master of magical realism. Here she introduces us to a vampire couple who suck on lemons to soothe their aching fangs, girls transformed into silkworms, a flock of seagulls that steal objects from the future, dead presidents reincarnated as horses, Antarctic tailgating and a tattoo that comes to life.

Ms. Russell mines the theme of loss even deeper in these new stories. A vampire’s loss of his ability to fly threatens his relationship with his mate. In the story about the gulls, the teenage protagonist loses his chance to go to a pre-college academic program when his mother loses her job at a home for the mentally impaired after she is blamed for the loss of a pin that kept a window shut. A soldier in “The New Veterans” mourns a buddy lost in an IED explosion. In “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” a group of teenage boys is forced to confront the mysterious disappearance of a classmate they bullied, a boy who’d lost his prized bunny rabbit, when he seemingly reappears in the form of a scarecrow.

Ms. Russell tends to lean heavily on metaphor. It is at once her greatest asset and her biggest liability. When her language gets too florid, as it did at times in Swamplandia! and does in this collection as well, the worlds she constructs can be overly lush, too humid with thick embroidery to ring true. But there is an exuberance to her descriptive abilities, a kind of ludic writerly joy in the process that translates to a readerly thrill in the results. On one of the homesteads on the rain-starved Nebraska frontier that serves as the setting for “Proving Up,” there are “thirty evil turkeys that have heads like scratched mosquito bites” and a “tarantula [that] had closed around the bedpost like a small, gloved hand.” To an ancient vampire in the title story, a teenage girl “smells like hard water and glycerin.”

Ms. Russell is at her best alternating between the wildly fantastical and the utterly banal, especially when she finds a way to fuse the two together. The anthropomorphic scarecrow from “Eric Mutis,” for instance, eventually appears in a New Jersey city of “neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, homeless women with powerful smells and opinions ...” It helps that these stories are intertwined like clues to one another’s riddles. The protagonist of “Eric Mutis” refers to the silence that came after bullying a classmate being “as essential to our friendship as ... blood is to a vampire.” But in “Vampires,” we learn that blood actually isn’t essential to these creatures. In “The New Veterans,” a soldier bleeds to death after an explosion. Back in “Eric Mutis,” the scarecrow bleeds straw from a hole, and the story’s protagonist catches, on TV, “a news shot of a foreign soldier watching blood spill from his head with an expression of extraordinary tranquility.” A similar expression to the soldier’s is worn by a child whom the protagonist and his friends assault at school. The casual violence of the playground finds its echo in the outright devastation of the battleground. These moments of realism that poke through the metaphor, Ms. Russell suggests, are also dangerous myths.

Two stories that come midway through the book—“The Barn at the End of Our Term,” about a seemingly random group of deceased U.S. presidents reincarnated as horses, and “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating,” which is exactly that, the sporting event in question being an absurdly imbalanced contest between whales and tiny crustaceans called krill—suffer by juxtaposition with Ms. Russell’s finer performances. They come off as gimmicky and slight, the filler necessary to round out a collection. They reveal the nature of the high-wire act that is Ms. Russell’s brand of magical realism: when the conceit is too precious, the reader’s suspension of disbelief starts to crumble.

Not that these minor efforts don’t have their pleasures. Despite its silly premise—an elaborate riff on “buying the farm”—“The Barn” does manage to keenly convey the dead presidents’ metaphysical quandary: is this barn heaven or something more sinister? (Or is it just mundane?) The story’s protagonist is Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th president of the United States, whose election in 1876 was its own mixture of fantasy and fact—the popular vote favored his adversary, Gov. Samuel J. Tilden of New York, and the electoral votes were disputed because of fraud committed by both parties. In Ms. Russell’s story, he desperately needs to believe that a sheep in an adjacent pasture is the reincarnation of his wife. The afterlife is profoundly lonely, and the sheep “perks up when Rutherford trots over.” Then again, Ms. Russell writes, “It might be his imagination.”

sdouglas@observer.com

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Mr. Matchmaker, won't you make me a match?

A social event for a matchmaker on the day after Valentine’s Day struck Transom as having more than a slight whiff of desperation about it. Or was it hopefulness? We were expecting a shout of “Next year in...”—well, where is it that prototypically happy couples go, anyhow?

Happy coupledom, to us, has always read as shorthand for “excuse to stay home on couch in pajamas reading novels.”  These thoughts were with us as we entered the Upper East Side restaurant Amali. Amali had been described in the invite as “farm-to-table,” which got us thinking metaphorically. Ah, the farm. No matchmaking required there—jump cut to grunts and flying mud. Pity the poor humans and their tables, over which banter must be made.

We’d always wanted to meet a matchmaker, and no sooner had we picked out Richard Easton as the dark-suited fellow with round, owlish glasses, than we employed a strategy that, back in our single days, had helped us to meet men: we made a bee line for him, cornered him, and started asking questions.

One of Mr. Easton’s selling points is that he is the same demographic as his clients. To give you an idea of what that demographic is, he founded his own bank in 1988 and sold it to Merrill Lynch in 1999. He was married for 11 years, is divorced, and has two daughters.

Of late the matchmaking business is good. He expanded his business to Los Angeles in October—“It’s doing extremely well. I’m back and forth on the plane all the time”—and in the fall will open in Miami. Next year, London. He may, he says, branch out into same sex matches but, for the moment, “I have no experience in it, so I stick to what I know.”

His clients range in age from 27 to 63. Most of the men are in their 30s and 40s. Most of the women are in their 20s and 30s. The men are busy. The women are busy, too. The women are “the whole package: beautiful, well-educated, from good families, with good values.” There are 500 women members. He interviews 10 to 20 women a week. He sets up 30 to 40 dates a week. He puts two men a week into relationships. He  charges clients from $10,000 to $100,000 for a contract that lasts a year and a half.

As we spoke, clients came by to chat with him, and he described them to us, sotto voce. One was, he said, looking for a woman who is beautiful, and a rocket scientist. A tough assignment, we said, and asked about his most successful match ever, and he launched into the story of a 42-year-old German man who owns residences in several countries, to whom he introduced a 33-year-old Danish former supermodel. There was an impromptu European sojourn—nights out at restaurants, days lying on the beach, “and now they’re inseparable, engaged!”

We sighed, and asked whether he felt boxed in by the stereotypical image of the woman matchmaker, the yenta of yore. Men, he said, appreciate a man’s perspective. And “a lot of women would rather be matched by a man, because a man knows what a man wants in a woman.”

But what do most people, you know, want? “Women are just as superficial as men when it comes to looks. Society in general believes that women put looks secondary, or third.” Huh. “Men want the girl to be sweet.” Well, there it was. We’d just been disqualified from every possible match, ever. “And women want the guy to make ‘em laugh.”

But don’t, we ventured, don’t men want to laugh too? Don’t they, well, want women to be funny? “Men want that too. It’s just,” he paused, “further down on the list.” We took a drink of our cloying drink. “15 years ago, I felt people were much more focused on religion than they are today,” he went on.  That, we said, Doesn’t bode well for J Date and Christian Mingle, which promises ‘the mate God intended.’ Didn’t his company offer stylists to clients to make them more date-worthy? “A lot of typical men,” he said, “have 15 business suits and stuff to go watch a football game with their buddies, and nothing in between. That’s where a stylist can help, with date clothes.” We asked how he works, and he told us he speaks with clients at length, interviews them, gets to know them…

Wait, something about all of this was starting to sound familiar. Interviews, drawing people out. Matchmaking wasn’t so different from...reporting!

Hey! What about the all the boozy late night relationship advice we’d doled out over the years? What about the ghostwritten text messages that had earned us, in our own eyes at least, the moniker “Sarahno De  Bergerac?” We could do this. Then again, maybe not. We were pretty sure we didn’t know what qualified as date clothes. Also, we weren’t clear on what it meant to be “sweet.” Outside Amali, the air was thick with the noxious fumes of unrequited love, heavy with the lingering fog of bad dates. Or? No. It was only taxi exhaust.

sdouglas@observer.com

Paul Cezanne, Portrait of Madame Cezanne, 1891, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the rightful owner of Paul Cezanne’s 1891 Portrait of Madame Cezanne and does not have to turn the painting over to the heir of its original owner, the District Court in Manhattan found late last week.

Thursday’s decision granted the Met’s motion to dismiss the suit brought by Pierre Konowaloff, who had alleged that the Cezanne was taken “by force and without compensation” by the Bolsheviks in 1918 from his great-grandfather, Ivan Morozov, and that the Soviet Union had then illegally and secretly sold it in 1933 to art collector Stephen C. Clark.  Clark, a trustee of the Met, bequeathed the painting to the museum in 1960.

The Court found that Mr. Konowaloff’s claim would require it to question the validity of the Soviet Union’s taking Cezanne’s portrait of his wife as part of its nationalization of private property after the Russian Revolution, which the Court, under longstanding precedent of the “act of state” doctrine, refused to do.  Under that doctrine, the acts of a sovereign government are legitimate, official acts.

“The act of state that I decline to question here is the act of expropriating the painting from Morozov,” the Court wrote, and therefore “I accept that the Soviet government took ownership of the painting in 1918 through an official act of state . . .  Konowaloff lacks any ownership stake in the painting.”

On the same grounds, Mr. Konowaloff also claims to be the rightful owner of Vincent Van Gogh’s well-known 1888 painting Night Café, which Clark gave to Yale.  The university has moved for summary judgment, also invoking the act of state doctrine, in the District Court in Connecticut.

Before the Met decision came down, this reporter spoke to Phil Brown, one of the attorneys representing Mr. Konowaloff in both cases.  Mr. Brown, who is with the firm Adler, Pollock & Sheehan, acknowledged that, given the legal precedent, his client might be perceived as “tilting at windmills.”

“No judge is going to award Konowaloff judgment lightly,” he said.

"Questions for My Father" (2011) by Karl Haendel. (Photo: the artist and Harris Lieberman Gallery)

A few years ago Karl Haendel wrote down a list of questions he had always wanted to ask his father. For most of us, this would constitute an idle, possibly self-indulgent, possibly cathartic exercise, maybe one assigned as homework in psychotherapy—and would most likely result in a scrap of paper destined for the circular file. But Mr. Haendel is an artist, and for him it became a large drawing called, appropriately, Questions for My Father. He showed it in 2007 at his New York gallery, Harris Lieberman, and then, in 2010, at the Guggenheim Museum.

Last year, he revisited these questions, but this time, in collaboration with his friend, filmmaker Petter Ringbom, made them into an 11-minute film, his first, aside from some short 16-millimeter efforts. It went on view last week at Harris Lieberman. Walking into the gallery, a visitor encounters the back of what appears at first to be a huge painting propped up against a column, but turns out to be a screen. More striking, however, is what the visitor hears.

“Would you feel betrayed if I used a hair replacement product?”

“Why did you become conservative?”

“Why do you feel the need to compete with me?”

“Have you ever given money to a terrorist group?”

“Did you ever sleep with two women at the same time?”

“Why won’t you take Mom to Paris?”

The voices belong to 18 men, friends of Messrs. Haendel and Ringbom. They asked the men to replicate Mr. Haendel’s process in making his drawing. “We each got our friends who we knew could be rigorous and honest,” Mr. Haendel told The Observer in mid-August, when we met him in the lobby of his aunt’s Upper East Side apartment building. The artist, who lives in Los Angeles, was staying there as he prepared for his show. He was dressed casually, and eschewed the stiltedness of artspeak for an easy familiarity. “I said to them, ‘Tell me what you want to know from your dad.’”

Mr. Haendel doesn’t consider the film, in which hundreds of questions are asked by these men, to be a dramatic departure from his drawings, many of which are on political subjects and which went on view in a sprawling exhibition at collector Aby Rosen’s Lever House last year. In both mediums he addresses, as he put it, “questions about how we as a culture, a particular type of people in a particular time, make certain choices, have certain beliefs, certain values.”

In format, the film is relatively straightforward—the men, set against a blank black background, look out at the viewer as they speak—but it poses deeper questions about the differences between generations of men, and their approaches to politics, art and, most of all, masculinity. “I was interested in a portrait of a particular type of masculinity in the early 21st century,” Mr. Haendel said. “Guys of my generation and how our masculinity is different from our fathers’.”

Asking what Mr. Haendel, 35, calls “these difficult, sometimes funny, sometimes really weird questions” has a particular resonance during our current “mancession,” when a certain kind of masculinity, in the sphere of work at least, may be going the way of the dodo bird.

Although one of the men in the film has done a bit of acting, none of them is polished. “We’re all fidgety,” said Mr. Haendel. “That works well, because it’s awkward, asking your father these kinds of questions. There’s an overall sense of tension.”

The men are of varying sexualities, races and ethnicities—gay, straight, Arab, Jewish, Irish, Greek, African-American, Asian—but have in common that they are creative types in their 30s whose fathers came of age in the 1960s. Among them is a writer, a curator, an ice sculptor, a woodworker. “It’s the story of the second half of the 20th century in America,” Mr. Haendel explained. “Your parents got a decent education, good jobs, and the kids went to college and become dancers, theater majors, writers.” Most importantly, he said, “we tried to get guys who had a variety of relationships with their fathers, some that were quite good, some whose fathers left them, some whose fathers are dead.”

Mr. Haendel, who is in the film—he reads the questions from his drawing—is estranged from his own father. He grew up in Great Neck, went to Brown, then to art school in Los Angeles, where he remained. His father taught ship handling and boat navigation at the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point. “He could drive large tanker ships, tie knots.”

After his mother, a homemaker, died 15 years ago, his father remarried, and now lives in Saugerties. “I’ve seen him twice in the past decade,” he said. His drawing of questions “came straight out of me wanting to have a relationship with him.

“I don’t know if he’s ever seen a lot of my work,” Mr. Haendel said. They met in Manhattan two years ago and his father went with him to see a drawing Mr. Haendel had made on the side of a building, then they had lunch. “He probably looks my work up online. In the film, that’s a question I ask: ‘Do you search my name on the internet?’ I’m pretty sure he does because I hear that he kind of knows what’s going on. We talk occasionally. But it’s pretty tense.”

Mr. Haendel is a fan of American novels of the family—Franzen, Updike. “There’s this idea that you’re a selfish kid for a while, and then you grow up and realize that your parents were interesting people.” When he reached his 30s, there were things he wanted to know about his father. “Did he protest something? Did he smoke pot? Did he listen to Beatles records over and over?

Was he scared of going to Vietnam?”

In the film, these and other questions are grouped by theme, with quick cuts from one man to the next. “I was interested in how you could go from sex to politics to religion to sex,” Mr. Haendel said.

As directors, he and Mr. Ringbom were both coaches and therapists. “There was a little psychiatrist thing going on,” he recalled.

“Sometimes a guy would say something like, ‘No, he wasn’t scared of talking about sex, he was just a little puritanical.’ And I’d say O.K., you can say puritanical, say it that way.’”

If a subject proved exceptionally difficult for one of the men to ask about, Mr. Haendel would usually let it go. “There are things it’s really hard for people to talk about, like things about sex.”

Some questions, though, were avidly asked by many of the men, the most common one being about sex: “How many women have you slept with?”

“Maybe it’s this masculinity competition,” Mr. Haendel posited. “Even though you love your father you still want to be like, ‘Ahh, I’ve slept with more women.’ Or maybe not. Maybe the son’s only slept with one or two women and the dad was a playboy.”

The other popular subjects were cheating (“Have you ever cheated on mom?”; “Has mom ever cheated on you?”); failure (“Do you think of me as a failure?”); and pride (“When were you proud of me?”; “Were you ever proud of me?”). Personal sacrifice was another hot topic, and one that particularly interested Mr. Haendel. “Because there’s a kind of difference between our fathers’ generation and our generation maybe we kind of follow our dreams a little more because our parents sacrificed to get a job they didn’t really like. So there’s a lot of that’s bound up with the success/failure thing.”

It was crucial to the two filmmakers that they cast men in their own age group, ones who, like them, had just made major life decisions. “The guys in the film are getting married, starting to have kids, maybe things our parents did a bit younger,” said Mr. Haendel. He’s getting married this week; Mr. Ringbom is engaged. “One guy had his young son sitting on the sofa while we were filming.”

He was interested in capturing a moment in which he and his friends are, as he sees it, finally reaching adulthood. “There is this sort of delayed coming of age thing that goes on in the film.”

That’s something he doesn’t see a lot of in art by his peers. “It wasn’t something that I sensed was subject matter for male artists—masculinity portrayed in an emotional, honest way. You see a lot of art that portrays masculinity, but it might be in a kind of Richard Prince sense, or a Jeff Koons sense.”

What exactly is missing?

“There’s not a sensitive father/son thing going on in art,” he said. “A lot of feminist work has this kind of mother/daughter thing. It has a relationship to identity politics and feminism. I thought it was interesting that that kind of stuff was absent in men’s work, predominantly.”

In his own work, Mr. Haendel continues to make drawings, and he has started on another film, for his next show in Los Angeles, this one about why people choose to have children. (He recalled asking his father, “Why did you have kids?” and being told, “I don’t know. That’s just what people did then.”) He’s also putting together a book called Shame, a compilation of stories that people post anonymously on the Internet. “Addictions, eating disorders, cheating, low self-esteem, a lot of sexual things,” he explained.

The Observer wondered whether some of the tension in Questions for My Father resulted from the idea that the men might not actually want their questions answered. Ignorance is, after all, often bliss when it comes to one’s family; it’s not every man who wants to know, for instance, whether or not his father ever had a homosexual experience. Mr. Haendel acknowledged this might be the case for some, but, like many artists, his general curiosity about the world tends to overrule such sheepishness. “When people say, ‘I don’t want to know that,’ I never understand them. Because I always want to know everything.” He paused.

“Maybe I’m an emotional voyeur. Maybe I just want to know what the truth is.”

sdouglas@observer.com

"Monument" (1980-1981) by Susan Hiller, at MoMA P.S.1. (Photo courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London)

Crafting Modernism
Museum of Arts and Design
Oct. 12, 2011 - Jan. 15, 2012
Lest we forget that, as Tom Wolfe so eloquently put it once, this is the “museum formerly known as craft,” the place is putting on a mammoth exhibition devoted to craft, specifically to the relationship between it and design after WWII. This is a fascinating proposal because while craft slowly became a four-letter word during that period, design became uber-fashionable, to the point where, today, it sells to the same crowd that buys Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and constantly prompts questions like, “Is it design, or is it art?” But forget the concept. Go for the pieces. The show, which is organized by MAD curators Jeannine Falino and Jennifer Scanlan, who are continuing a series of exhibitions presented at the museum in the 1990s, includes stunning pieces by George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi and many, many others.

De Kooning: A Retrospective
Museum of Modern Art
Sept. 18-Jan. 9.
On the heels of its show of Abstract Expressionism, MoMA has turned its full attention to Willem de Kooning, a central figure in that group of artists. In many ways, de Kooning and his cohorts planted the seeds of the New York art world as we know it today. (Warhol would put the finishing touches on it, but that is another story.) And so the show will be important to MoMA’s base audience not just for the paintings, but for what the painter represented. De Kooning was an artist’s artist; a painter’s painter. Go for the scary and brilliant series of “Women”; stay for the gorgeous late paintings, with their shimmering hues. (For more on the show, read an interview with its curator, John Elderfield, in the culture pages of this week’s Observer.)

Maurizio Cattelan: All
Guggenheim
Nov. 4, 2011-Jan. 22, 2012
The pope felled by a meteorite. A squirrel that committed suicide. A horse with its head stuck in the wall. A pair of upside-down policemen. Twinned miniature self-portraits in miniature coffins. Maurizio Cattelan’s artworks have been playing pranks on the art world since he began making them some 20 years ago. The Italian’s work has only been seen piecemeal in New York, so this will be an opportunity to figure out when he’s joking, and when he’s being serious. Be careful: he is almost always doing both at the same time.

September 11
MoMA P.S. 1
Sept. 11, 2011–Jan. 9, 2012
It takes a certain amount of audacity to call your art exhibition simply “September 11,” without any of the usual embellishments encouraging remembrance and forbidding forgetting, and it is probably to P.S. 1’s advantage that its relatively new chief curator Peter Eleey, who is responsible for this exhibition, was willing to cut to the chase. Well, not quite. In fact, his title’s a bit sly. What you won’t see here are any images of the attacks themselves. Nor will you see any art made directly in response to them, save for a long Ellsworth Kelly. What does that leave us with? There are more than 70 works by 41 artists and many of them were actually made prior to 9/11. What Mr. Eleey appears to be up to is creating a portrait of the cultural moment in which certain horrific events took place, and he defines that cultural moment broadly: there is, for instance, William Eggleston’s haunting photograph of what could be either soda or Scotch sitting in a beam of sunlight on an airplane food tray, from a portfolio dating to 1965-1974. The show has an intriguing roster of artists ranging from Diane Arbus to John Chamberlain to Bruce Conner to Thomas Demand, Jane Freilicher, Thomas Hirschhorn, Alex Katz, James Turrell and many more. Yoko Ono and John Lennon are also on the bill.

Picasso’s Drawings, 1890­-1921: Reinventing Tradition at the Frick Collection
Oct. 4, 2011-Jan. 8, 2012
We hear a lot about Picasso these days, and, in a way, it has ever been thus. He is, after all, the quintessential modern master, modern art’s game changer. But what we mostly pay attention to are the paintings, and lately our eyes have been on them not least because they change hands for astounding sums. Currently holding the record for most expensive painting ever sold at auction is Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which went for $106.5 million last year. His works on paper generally get short shrift, but they shouldn’t. There is nothing more fascinating than poring over an artist’s drawings, as there is no better way to see how the artist’s mind works, and what, precisely, gave birth to those beloved paintings. In other words, if you want to understand not simply that Picasso changed the art game but how he did so, make your way to the Frick this fall and see him, per the title, reinvent tradition in the crucial first decades of the 20th century. See him go from ambitious student to swashbuckling genius, and from classicism to Cubism and back to classicism again, at once breaking with tradition and cleaving to its bulwark.

Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art
Nov. 13, 2011–May 14, 2012
MoMA is such a behemoth that it is hard to believe it was young once. But it was, and in its scrappy youth it gave an enviable opportunity to a politically engaged Mexican painter: you make five giant “portable murals,” we’ll give you studio space on site. Diego Rivera’s murals were on show from December 22, 1931, to January 27, 1932, and comprised the museum’s second one-man exhibition. (The first was Matisse.) He started out with Mexican subjects—like the famous Agrarian Leader Zapata but decided, while in town, to take on New York, stricken then with the Great Depression. There may be some resonance with our current economic crisis.

New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Opens Nov. 1, 2011
The reopening of the Met’s Islamic galleries in vastly expanded form will be the hands-down highlight of the art season. The $50-million project, which puts back on view some much-loved objects that have been hidden in storage for eight years now, and others that have been stowed away for many more, features a medieval Maghrebi-Andalusian-style courtyard meticulously created by Moroccan craftsmen. Thirteen hundred years of history will be on view, and while anything to do with the Middle East always seems to provoke controversy, these galleries will have much to tell us about the cultural roots we all share.

Carsten Höller: Experience
New Museum
Oct. 26, 2011-Jan. 15, 2012
Are you experienced? You will be after you get the Carsten Höller treatment. The museum-spanning show devoted to the Belgian artist and former scientist features artworks that seem a lot more like research experiments. In a way, you, the viewer, are the subject (double, or perhaps triple entendre entirely intended) of Mr. Höller’s work. Slides, carousels and a sensory deprivation pool are just some of the things you’ll find in this fun ride of an exhibition. Mr. Höller, who has never before been given full-scale museum treatment in New York, wants to yank you out of your usual routine, and you should let him.

Sherrie Levine: Mayhem
Whitney Museum
Nov. 10, 2011-Jan. 29, 2012
Surely by now you know what re-photography is, not to mention appropriation, if only from the many legal disputes it’s caused of late. (Paging Richard Prince.) Not long ago, the lifting of images from other artists’ work or the wholesale copying of them in the name of art was something of a novelty. It was conceptual copiers like Sherrie Levine, who has been doing this for 30 years, most notably in pieces like After Walker Evans: 1-22 (1981), the result of photographing a catalogue by the famous photographer Walker Evans, who gave the practice currency, and it’s been far too long since we’ve seen a serious presentation of her work. This is a serious presentation—a survey of old and new pieces curated by art historian Johanna Burton in collaboration with Whitney curators Elisabeth Sussman and Carrie Springer. It is also more that that: Ms. Levine considers the exhibition to be itself an artwork. Mayhem, indeed.

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951
Jewish Museum
Nov. 4, 2011-March 25, 2012
Like drawing, photography (as opposed to re-photography) is a medium that is sometimes overlooked. Overlooking this particular exhibition would be a mistake, as it promises to be one of the most compelling displays of work by street shutterbugs in history. Founded by a group of politically radical photographers, the Photo League became a hotbed of talent—Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Arthur Fellig (the crime-scene photographer better known as Weegee) were all members. So were Berenice Abbott, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind and Paul Strand. Much of the work was politically inclined; what will stay with you after seeing it is a sense of the vibrant personalities who populated New York in the years during which these photographs were taken, captured as they are in all their gritty humanity.

sdouglas@observer.com