‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman,’ an Alternate History at MoMA

Soldier, Spectre, Shaman, a noteworthy and all too rare exhibition on view on the museum’s third floor, offers a vital corrective to the gospel of abstract art. Most of the 30 or so artists here are European, and stand outside the museum’s tenacious master narrative. While their American counterparts were paring down painting, sculpture and other media to their essences, these artists insisted on the primacy of the figure, and conceived a new, more downhearted humanism for an inhuman age.