Supreme Fiction

Brian Lehrer WNYC: James discusses the new Loft Law

Here is a discussion of the new Loft Law and its impact on artists living in the outer boroughs of New York. Comments here. My essay on the subject will appear in the summer 2010 issue of City Journal.

"One Image, One Minute"

Milton Avery, Red Rock Falls

Join James Panero at Hyperallergic HQ on Tuesday, June 22 at 7pm for a special fundraising event “One Image, One Minute: Significant People Present Significant Images,” which will benefit the inspirational summer camp in upstate New York, Camp Pocket Utopia.

“One Image, One Minute … ” invites you to look and listen to various people in and outside the art world respond to images that made a major impact on their lives.

Tickets are $25 and proceeds will benefit Camp Pocket Utopia, a camp conceived in Bushwick that will travel to Rouses Point, New York. Camp Pocket Utopia is presented by the Norte Maar nonprofit arts organization in collaboration with former director of the Pocket Utopia Gallery, artist Austin Thomas.

Camp Pocket Utopia is a social school and free arts camp for kids inspired by the historic Black Mountain College, as interpreted by Austin Thomas in collaboration with Norte Maar. The Camp hopes to inspire a conversation amongst artists, creative thinkers, and the community, empowering participants and observers to think for themselves while offering a free arts camp for the kids of Rouses Point, NY, and the surrounding North Country.

Confirmed “One Image, One Minute … ” presenters include: Laura Braslow, Deborah Brown, Jen Dalton, Kianga Ellis, Louise Fishman, Rico Gatson, Veken Gueyikian, Rachel Gugelberger, Chris Harding, Valerie Hegarty, Lars Kremer, Ellen Letcher, Brooke Moyse, Cathy Nan Quinlan, James Panero (speaking about Red Rock Falls, above), Jonathan Stevenson, Adam Simon, James Wagner, and more…

One Image, One Minute, Significant People Present Significant Images
Tuesday June 22nd 7:00 pm

Hyperallergic HQ (map)
181 N11th Street, #302, Brooklyn, NY

Tickets $25.00. Additional donations greatly appreciated.
Refreshments will be served.

Space is limited so RSVP and purchase tickets NOW.

Click here for more information.

Patricia Watwood, Fate (2010), courtesy of the artist

THE NEW CRITERION
June 2010

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Patricia Watwood: Portraits 2010” at Open Source, Brooklyn, “Michael Klein: Recent Paintings” at Arcadia Gallery & “Paul Resika: Recent Paintings” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.

For years beaten down, another victim of the assault on representational art, traditional portraiture nevertheless endured. Although it had to cede its place in the limelight of high art, a premodernist style of portraiture survived the last century largely as a commercial form. Traditional portraiture filled the walls of libraries and law schools, government offices and private homes, but it remained largely absent from the nation’s art museums and the critical press. An argument could be made that, in the bargain, the last century’s portrait painters helped preserve the knowledge of the academic tradition. Untangle the genealogy of today’s realist revival—who taught whom in the movement sometimes referred to as “Classical Realism”—and the line often passes through a generation of portraitists living and working outside the mainstream.

A critical mass of younger painters in this art world in exile, the students of revivalists and illustrators, has emerged to challenge traditional portraiture’s second-class status and to reassert its place in the main currents of art. As these painters enter the full flowering of their talents, they are also discovering a culture that has grown more amenable to portraiture’s importance. We may be living, once again, in portrait-friendly times.

Recently I took part in the Portrait Society of America’s annual “art of the portrait” conference, this year in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Established in 1998, the PSOA began as an educational clearing house for the portrait trade. Its annual conference has become something more. Along with its displays of natural pigments and tutorials on such concerns as “Hands: What’s the Point?” and “Simplifying the Mystery of Flesh Tones,” the conference has become a watering hole for the country’s best young revivalist painters, who aim to take the art of the traditional portrait beyond the commercial commission.

My official role at this year’s conference was to appear in a panel discussion on “Realist Revolution and Critical Relevance: Is The Mainstream Media Missing an Important Cultural Trend?” My co-panelists were the painters Jacob Collins, the New York-based champion of the classical atelier, and Alexey Steele, an L.A.-based exile who made off with Soviet Russia’s entire reserve of charisma. Rounding out the panel was Vern Swanson, the director of the Springville Museum of Art in Utah, one of those few national institutions amenable to contemporary art painted in a traditional mode. The moderator was another young painter, Jeremy Lipking, also from Los Angeles.

The quick answer to the topic question was, yes, the mainstream media is missing out on realism’s revival, brought about by a renewed study in the classical painting techniques of the nineteenth-century academy. Why? Because of a political correctness that has associated representational art, at various times, with both Fascism and Communism —and because Pop and its market champions have elevated bad technique over good. For most critics the story of this revival remains tainted by politics, while the paintings’ craft remains outmoded.

But that’s all in hindsight. How about the future? At the time of the panel I had little to offer—just certainty that, were this particular “realist revolution” to come, the critical establishment would be the last to know. In the days and weeks after the conference, a more satisfying answer came into view: Today’s young realists, trained in the classical tradition, are a social group. I absorbed the full meaning of this note-to-self only after I returned home and checked in online. I discovered that these realists are connected. The fact that they do not appear to despise each other’s work, like so many other artists do, is itself revelatory. I doubt that any other artistic milieu, per capita, maintains a more active social network of Facebook, Twitter, and weblog accounts. These artists posted so much about the conference—videos, sketches, photographs, discussions, notes from the field—that they must have analyzed every moment of our time at the Hyatt Regency Reston.

Of course, much of their sociability has emerged out of necessity. Without the patronage of museums or traditional schools, realist painters have been forced to find ways to organize themselves outside of regular art-world channels. They have to be extroverted. But their networking also speaks to a renewed cultural interest in the connections of society, to which traditional portraiture can contribute. There is a reason an ever growing number of artists is lining up for portrait classes. Unlike the inward vision of modernism, in portraiture we find a social art for a social generation.

Like a form of social networking, portraiture is a display of connections—here between artist, subject, and viewer. In this understanding we may find a secret to the portrait artist’s success or failure—not necessarily in the quality of the paint handling, but in the vitality of the network. Portraiture has long been building connections to the real world in a network that only grows over time. Even back in the dark days, the traditional portrait painter’s standing could be based, in part, on the social ranking of the commissions: Presidential, royal, and ecclesiastical portraitists at top; the corporate, judicial, and celebrity painters in the middle; and finally the university-dean trade. Many of these painters have become the elders of the Portrait Society: Everett Raymond Kinstler, Daniel Greene, Burton Silverman, and William Draper, to name a few.

Today’s younger portraitists build their network on the creativity of their connections rather than on the heft of the commissions. Informed by Classical Realism, they often have a more fundamental approach to the canvas than do their predecessors trained in commercial illustration. By eschewing photographs and other modern conveniences, these younger artists often trade expediency and the gauzy conventions of commercial work for greater aesthetic vitality and a more fundamental connection among painter, subject, and viewer—connections that can be lost when a painter works from photographic studies.

The careful selection of subject has long been a secret of non-traditional portraiture’s success in the mainstream. Think of Chuck Close on the composer Philip Glass, or Lucian Freud on the performance artist Leigh Bowery. More recently, Kehinde Wiley has built a cottage industry out of painting hip-hop celebrities in the mode of Jacques-Louis David. Elizabeth Peyton has turned cocktail-napkin doodles of rock-star friends into prized creations. One might even consider Warhol and his Factory subjects as a sort of portrait circle. Now it falls to the classically trained portrait painters to extend their craft to a population that calls out for a more genuine connectivity free of celebrity culture.

One realist who has taken up this call is Patricia Watwood. Fresh from the conference, Watwood has mounted an exhibition of her portraits in a small gallery called Open Source in Gowanus, Brooklyn.[1] An artist who both works and lives in the area around the gallery, Watwood finds her subjects in her own neighborhood: a student, a filmmaker, two members of her local congregation. She writes in her artist’s statement: “The connection of the spirit between painter and subject, and between the subject and the viewer, shows the resonance of all human interaction.” Unlike many of her classically trained contemporaries, Watwood had developed an idiosyncratic palette that often casts her images in greens and blues rather than the “brown sauce” of traditional painting. The effect leaves her work with an alien glow, strange and other worldly. Her best portraits, like her figurative nudes, are those that capitalize on this strangeness. Dorothy (2010), the “church lady,” is a fine example: an unnaturally centered head-shot frames the subject in a totemic gaze. The longer portrait of Fate (2010), a “gospel and jazz singer,” has an equally compelling face, but I found the rendering of the shirt distracting. When set against Watwood’s particular affinity for physiognomy and skin, such materials lack urgency. A smaller self-portrait, Myself (2010), in which Watwood gazes out of the canvas with an inquisitive expression, is the show’s most compelling painting as the artist-subject brings the theme of the series full circle.

Another realist from the conference, Michael Klein, also has an exhibition of recent work on display. Like Watwood, Klein is a product of Jacob Collins’s ateliers, and his work hews closely to the Water Street style—so-called after the street address of Collins’s first school in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Klein has just returned from living with his wife in her native Argentina. His extensive selection of paintings at Arcadia Gallery in May placed her and her family in genre scenes of rural life.[2] The Wash Girl was last on display at the portrait society conference, where it was a finalist in a competition that also featured excellent work by Kate Sammons, Scott Burdick, as well as Lipking—an artist whose paintings go up at Arcadia in June. The curve of the wash girl’s pose, which finds her holding a pail by a stream, is nearly flawless. Her heavy eyes combine with a small half-smile that speaks of heavy labor and, perhaps, relief at our arrival. The background landscape, alas, is less convincing. The rendering of the water is clichéd. In the hanging at Arcadia, which put the painting in unfair light, the flesh tones lacked the suppleness of Collins’s work. Klein adopts Collins’s approach to paint handling, but here the technique has left too many regions of the large canvases incomplete. The open background of Late Night seemed unfinished. Where Klein excels is in his fine rendering of fabric and other objects. The galvanized metal of the wash girl’s bucket is exquisite, as is the satin sash and pillow of La Juventud and the black tulle of The Bride. Klein’s locates his connections in the exotica of a foreign world filtered through his contemporary family.

A final word about a must-see show. The painter Paul Resika has now found a home, after the collapse of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, at the new Chelsea beachhead of Lori Bookstein Fine Art.[3] His first show at the gallery takes up the three bugaboos of modern subject matter—sunsets, sail boats, and lighthouses—and makes every brush stroke count. This latest work could be the basis of a tutorial on how to put paint on canvas. The geometry of the taut series marks out space in a constructivist shorthand of ships at sea. For such familiar subject matter, the work is a rare delight. Abstract and representational tension is at play while the color-rich brush work fills each shape with energy. Resika is a modern master delighting in his supreme command of color, line, and form—and it is a delight to behold.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Patricia Watwood: Portraits 2010” opened at Open Source, Brooklyn, on May 7 and remains on view through June 2, 2010. Go back to the text.
2. “Michael Klein: Recent Paintings” was on view at Arcadia Gallery, New York, from May 13 through May 28, 2010. Go back to the text.
3. “Paul Resika: Recent Paintings” opened at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, on May 5 and remains on view through June 5, 2010. Go back to the text.

Barnes storming

James writes:

In the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, Lance Esplund has written a passionate critique of the Barnes Foundation's planned move to downtown Philadelphia. For its analysis of the Barnes collection alone, the article is extraordinary. The full essay can be found here.

The sad story of the Barnes is one The New Criterion has been covering for years. With the publication of Esplund's essay, I thought this would be an appropriate time to bring them together in one place. In a 1991 Note & Comment, "The Outlook for the Barnes Foundation," we looked at the institution's poor financial outlook and the museum/school's effort to sell paintings. In "Betraying a legacy: the case of the Barnes Foundation," Roger Kimball called out the Foundation's fundraising effort, which involved shipping the collection around the world, in violation of the Barnes trust. Then in 1996, there was the alarming case of the foundation's black director bringing charges of racial bias against the town commissioners of Merion, Pennsylvania. And finally in 2005, in "The Barnes Foundation, RIP," we lamented the foundation's decision to relocate to Philadelphia.

Is the Barnes move a done deal? At this point, probably so. Esplund has written a definitive essay on what we are about to lose.

Gallery Chronicle (May 2010)

Joe Zucker Amy Hewes (1976), copyright: Joe Zucker, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery.

THE NEW CRTIERION
May 2010

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Joe Zucker” at Mary Boone Gallery, “Bruce Gagnier: Incarnate” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art & “Shirley Jaffe: Selected Paintings, 1969–2009” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, “Lois Dodd: Second Street Paintings” at Alexandre Gallery & “Deborah Brown: The Bushwick Paintings” at Storefront, Brooklyn.

Joe Zucker was born in 1941 to a Jewish family on Chicago’s South Side, at a time when the Irish and Italian gangs of the area sparred over territories embroiled in black migration and white flight. He got out through varsity basketball and found a moment of jock glory on the squad at Miami University in Ohio. Yet Zucker also happened to be blessed with one of the more interesting minds in American art. This complicated his athletic career and his artistic one as well. Zucker has long been out of step with the dullness that has come to dominate contemporary artistic production.

In 1961, Zucker gave up playing basketball and returned to Chicago to enroll at the Art Institute, where he had been drawing in his spare time since the age of five. His teachers were thinking Braque and the School of Paris. Zucker was more interested in potboilers and the narrative art of Thomas Hart Benton. He passed through the Institute’s bachelor’s and master’s programs, and followed this up with a teaching stint in Minnesota. He arrived in New York in 1968, one of modern art’s more fruitful moments, when the avant-garde had just passed through the rabbit hole of minimalism and was beginning to re-embrace the craft and process of painting.

At the time, modernism’s recursive instinct seems to have reached its end-game. Minimalist art and sculpture had folded form back on itself to an infinite and emptying degree. Like other artists of his generation, Zucker used minimalist logic to structure his artistic practice, but he sought to expand this logic to maximal effect.

“You can be tempted into reducing and reducing to the point of emptiness, simply repeating terms dictated by the perimeter of the paint,” Zucker noted in an interview. “I wanted to breach the perimeter and get into the very substance of the painting. I saw that as a way of evading the self-defeating outcome implicit in the reductive logic of modernism.” By infusing his work with narrative and humor, Zucker charted out a singular artistic path.

From his graduate-school days, the subject of the painter’s canvas has been one of Zucker’s recurring interests. It was the material of oil, after all, that received the lion’s share of attention by the Abstract Expressionists. Taking a cue from the revival in weaving and craft-based art, Zucker turned this relationship around and moved the canvas to the foreground, from surface to subject matter. An early series of Zucker’s work consists of abstract weavings of colored strips, recalling the warp and weft of a painting’s canvas.

In the 1970s, Zucker developed work based on the “history of cotton,” which he first showed at New York’s Bykert Gallery, run by Klaus Kertess and Jeff Byers. A one-time assistant from the Bykert Gallery has now brought five of these large works back together for an important show. The fact that this assistant has become the mega-dealer Mary Boone may indicate her turn from the over-hyped painters of the 1980s to overlooked artists like Zucker, who came of age a decade before.[1]

Or maybe Boone is now turning to Zucker because this work from the 1970s appears to be the most politically charged of his career, and somehow relevant and palatable. On their face, these large canvases depict various sepia-toned scenes of the antebellum South: a paddle boat in Amy Hewes (1976); slaves and an overseer in Brick-Top, The Field Hand, and Lucretia Borgia (1976); bales of cotton stacked and hauled in Reconstruction (1976) and Paying Off Old Debts (1975); and the neoclassical facade of Old Cabell Hall in University of Virginia Law School (1976). Yet the layers of representation in Zucker’s cotton constructions complicate this single reading.

Zucker built his paintings through a self-invented process where craft, image, and logic came together in one worked-out puzzle. After dipping cotton in pigmented Rhoplex, a thick acrylic binder, Zucker applied the balls to canvas. The effect recalls pointillist brushstrokes frozen in high relief. By forming an image of its agricultural origin, the painting’s canvas becomes both medium and content, a work depicting its own history of production as much as the American past.

Just as minimalist logic can be air tight, even airless, Zucker’s systems risk closing up through their own hermetic seals. Zucker’s more recent work has consisted of drawings of container ships and pirates, constructed in various ways from rolls of canvas and paper, some illustrated, some literal, and all in need of unpacking. Zucker’s history of modernism has become Roger Fry by way of the Jolly Roger—a picture plane shot through with cannon balls.

The 1970s series stays more accessible by tapping into a main current of the evocative American narrative, when cotton was king. The rigor of Zucker’s flights of logic can still astonish. The craft that went into these works is remarkable to behold. Boone has done us a service by bringing together these history paintings that are a part of history, at a time when museums remain oblivious to the most important paintings of the living past.

Since Elie Nadelman first rubbed down the surface of his vernacular sculptures, modern artists have understood how the quality of an object changes through handling and care. Nicholas Carone has long been carving sculptures that resemble classical fragments, ones that could have spent some time at the bottom of Lago Maggiore. Such works have a sense of their own history sculpted right into them. The sculptures of Bruce Gagnier, whose art was recently on view at Lori Bookstein, show a similar physiognomy of neglect, maybe this time of self-neglect.

Some of Gagnier’s statues, like Seaman (the drowned sculpture) (2009), seem to have attracted barnacles while ingesting some brine. With mottled, raisin-like skin and distended bellies, other figures appear almost pickled, tipsy, as though their more uninhibited selves are showing through their classical skins. Gagnier molds each of his figures in hydrocal, a plaster-like medium, then applies a finish of pigment and wax. The unique surface treatment leaves the work with a worn, marble-like sheen.

Granted, these sculptures can be more than a little creepy. I am not sure I would want to share a studio apartment with one of the life-sized works—but I wouldn’t mind a visit. Odd figures have tales to tell.

The painter Shirley Jaffe is eighty-six-years young and has been a fixture in Paris for over half a century, yet the work of this native New Yorker can still be new to the American public. So much the better for us, as we get to discover her again and again. Following its exhibit at The Art Show earlier this year, Tibor de Nagy last month launched its third exhibition of Jaffe’s work with a survey from the last thirty years.[2]

Jaffe has led a career in reverse. The oldest work in the show, the hard-edged arrangement of The Gray Center (1969), is a mature construction of color planes and gentle surfaces. Jaffe’s more recent work, by contrast, shouts youthful indiscretion. In Hop and Skip (1987), Jaffe tossed those earlier, mature color planes sky-high and captured them mid-flight. Hard-edged confetti now spirals and twists against a white background.

The more the paintings open up, the more energy Jaffe manages to contain in them, even when hints of bricks and roofline pop through, as in the “New York Collage” series of 2009. The result, a mix of hard-edged color theory and expressionist line, has a comic boldness that seems both of the moment and for the ages, fresh and timeless.

For the past several years, Alexandre Gallery has been regularly showing Lois Dodd’s gem-like scenes of Maine, often oil on masonite measuring at most two feet square. This past month, Alexandre brought together a selection of Dodd’s older work matched with two recent cityscapes of the same scene painting over forty-years on.[3]

When Dodd first painted the city view from her studio window in the 1960s, she brought a hard-edged sensibility for structure and line to the urban scene. The highlight of this period on view at Alexandre was Men’s Shelter, April (1968). In this large oil on canvas, an ordinary back window opens to a geometry of rooflines, colors, and shadows, which come together like an abstract jigsaw puzzle. Planes of color edge up against each other and seem to pulsate from their edges.

Over several images, Dodd depicted the same scene at different times of day and different seasons. In another series from the same period, she captured the garden view from her apartment in April, October, and a foggy day in February.

When Dodd returned to this same “Second Street” view from her window many years later, she brought her growing lyrical sensibility. In the two works from 2009, hard edges gives way to color and fullness, as though the urban landscape has entered full bloom.

I wrote about the painter Deborah Brown three months ago in my survey of Bushwick and its new Storefront gallery. Brown’s urban skyscape was the show-stopper of this gallery’s inaugural group exhibition. Now a solo show of her recent work is on view in this vital little space.

Unlike many of her Bushwick colleagues, Brown arrived in this neighborhood as an established mid-career artist, but she quickly tapped into the community’s youthful, shared experience. Her lush representational work, which regularly shows at Lesley Heller Gallery in Manhattan, has often depicts flora and fauna. In Bushwick, Brown found an urban contrast in industrial ruin and natural growth.

In “The Bushwick Paintings,” her latest series, an accretion of vines and wires, flowers and fences vies against a background of factory towers and enveloping skies. The images glow through scrims of pigment, which bathe the atmosphere in vibrant reds and greens. Brown finds renewal out of the blight of a ruined landscape. Her vision, which comes out of Romantic sensibility, reflects the spirit of this rough landscape and the artists who now share it.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Joe Zucker” was on view at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, from March 25 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
2. “Bruce Gagnier: Incarnate” was on view at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, from March 31 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
3. “Shirley Jaffe: Selected Paintings, 1969–2009” was on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, from March 11 through April 24, 2010. Go back to the text.
4. “Lois Dodd: Second Street Paintings” was on view at Alexandre Gallery, New York, from March 31 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
5. “Deborah Brown: The Bushwick Paintings” opened at Storefront, Brooklyn, on April 2 and remains on view through May 16, 2010. Go back to the text.

The Jacob Collins Interview

 

James writes:

He’s a figurehead of Classical Realism, a painter with anticipated exhibitions at Adelson Galleries, and the dean of his own art schools. He’s also the very accommodating subject of my September 2006 article in TNC called ’The new old school.’ Here is an interview I conducted with Collins in late Summer 2006 in anticipation of my article.

James Panero: What do you call your style of painting?

Collins: I would say Traditional Realist. That refers to the period that begins in the end of the Renaissance and goes to the end of the academic period. Or maybe Classical Realist, which is an interesting label that was coined about thirty-five years ago. It’s a useful word because it’s a paradox historically. The classicists and the realists were very opposed to one another 150 years ago. But the two of them could have constituted the heart of the dialectical mode in traditional painting, especially in pre-modern painting. So I think Classical Realist works. In fact, the Classical Tradition may be as good as a label as any.

JP: In part you are following in the tradition of the French academy.

C: Absolutely. The influence is very strong. I have a lot of respect for French academic painting. One of the arguments that I make is even if 19th century French painting is not a perfect example of Classical painting, it is at least the most recent case of it; it’s where Classical painting was before the great tradition began to fall apart. It’s something we can connect to most easily because it’s not very far away temporally; it’s only a teacher’s teacher’s teacher, and then we’re right back into the nineteenth century. So the message of French art and the ideas underlying their message are part of the cultural memory.

JP: And at the same time, you’re not a history painter. You’re empirical, in the model of Thomas Eakins.

C: That American tradition is a very strong influence on me. Eakins, the Hudson river painters; then the American painters who came after this: the Luminist painters, and the Tonalists—these art forms are both empirical and aesthetic and not narrative at all. I think there is something very American about that.

JP: Do you see what you’re doing then as more American, or rather, as following in the French model. How do you position your art in terms of national style?

C: Well for one thing, it’s a very American phenomenon. There are schools of traditional painting in Europe, but Americans are running most of them. I think this has to do with the fact that after the war, New York City took over the world as the center of art. Maybe in some ways, the Americans feel confident, or are less worried about falling behind in the art scene; maybe the Europeans are still trying to catch up. Personally, I think its time to move forward, and I don’t see post-war modernism and post-modernism as moving forward. I’m very happy to move on.

JP: How does your art relate to the tradition of modernism: specifically, what you saw growing up in New York? Does your art relate at all to postmodernism?

C: On some levels, I’m sympathetic with parts of the modern program, especially when you compare it to postmodernism. I’m very fond of the modernists’ idea of the art object as a powerful thing: that art is transformative to both the artist and the viewer, that art experiences could cause emotion. One of the negative things about postmodernism is that it’s just smart-ass, and that’s not something I’m interested in. It’s not overtly, or purely political, but it makes a smart political stance that’s not about the intrinsic quality of the art.

I think that’s one of the ways in which you can trace the history of postmodernism—that is to say, in terms of the sacrifices it made in the quality of the art work. I believe in a traditionalist approach to art. Even the modernists valued the art object in itself. One of the misfortunes with postmodernism is a loss of qualitative value.

So I grew up with those influences and with the idea of art being magical, or artists having some mysterious talents. I love that idea—belief in the art object, in itself—the aesthetic of the thing—even after so much was desecrated and people stopped caring about the art object. And certainly in the 1950s the New York artists cherished the idea of the art object, which was the influence of an earlier period.

JP: Realism has come to be associated, in the modernist view at least, with kitsch, or low art illustration. It’s not tough minded. Have you encountered such reaction to your work?

C: I encountered that, though I had some very wonderful instructors who would have called themselves modernists. One of the things I noticed when I was an art student was that a lot of artists or young art students were made to feel very culturally insecure—even in a socially or socio-economically way. In light of this, they tried to pursue a kind of art, like modernism, that seemed to push forward.

Traditional art was, essentially, the art of provincials or hicks, not intellectual or significant. I heard a lot of that and I had trouble with it, but it didn’t effect me very much. I guess I was confident that I was trying to become an traditional artist, despite the mainstream view of traditional art. And also, I didn’t feel like I was anybody’s intellectual inferior because of the fact that I wanted to draw and paint classical art.

JP: How did your history studies at Columbia university relate to your aesthetic development?

C: I was already committed from an early age, 14 or 15, to doing exactly what I’ve always been doing: art. But when I went to Columbia, I didn’t know about other people who were interested in traditional art like me. Later on, I found a lot of wonderful people who were. When I considered going to an art school for college, I didn’t really know, but my assumption was that they would be running either a modernist program, or an illustration program; something in me didn’t really want to do either of those.

So I studied history, but I wasn’t a deeply committed historian.

JP: You found your direction before your college years.

C: Right, though college probably influenced more than I’d like to admit. But I wanted to do art and I had already done a couple of things that got me very excited about doing art—some art programs in my summers off from college. I also took time off in the middle of college to go to Europe.

JP: At what age did you start to paint in the manner that you paint now?

C: It was basically what I was trying to do in high school. I wasn’t good at it, but I was trying to do it. I spent an awful lot of time copying. I copied, as a kid in my room, artists like Michelangelo, and others. I gradually got better, and I had teachers when I was young who were good, so I received good direction. It was right after college, in the very late 1980s, that I started to meet up with other artists. That’s when I started to discover that they, too, were doing this kind of art that related to the traditional art forms.

JP: Why is the nude so central in your form of Classical art?

C: I think the nude is central because it is at the core of the Classical tradition. In this regard, the Humanist tradition and the Classical tradition go together. When you go to 5th century Greece, you see the beginning of Classical Humanism. The human figure in the aesthetic center. That’s the crucible of it all, and even the architects I know will say that the architecture back then is Humanist Classicism. The Renaissance was the original return to the Classical Tradition. The renaissance artists focused on the human figure—and since there is now a return to Classical Humanism, the nude is naturally central.

One of the definitions of art is ‘us representing ourselves,’ and in a broader sense that’s what’s happening in art right now. That’s what you know about painting when you look at Egyptian art; they’re representing themselves. When you think about Renaissance painting, they’re representing their values and their proportions, from the way they dress, to the way they hold their head, to the way they look with their eyes; it’s who they are, it’s who they wish they were. And as we are now engaged in another form of this tradition, we try to find something in the art, maybe some kind of picture of ourselves.

JP: Is there something about our culture today that would necessitate your kind of investigation?

C: I’m not sure that I have a coherent philosophy that could address that question. But it seems that, in the twentieth century, a lot of energy went into dismantling traditional art forms. I don’t particularly love that. Whether it was good or bad, this spirit has definitely wound down. So much of the energy of Modernism came from the electricity of breaking the pieces of the art object apart. I’m certainly not claiming that there are no pieces, but that now, in Traditionalism, it’s about putting the pieces back together.

JP: Are you part of a movement?

C: I would say yes, When I was a kid, I felt like I was isolated in my pursuit of traditional art forms; and this despite the fact that I am a social person and I do love the idea of sharing and doing things together. There’s a certain amount of regret that I experienced when I was launching into a career where I was pretty isolated: I was doing Traditional art in the 1980s, not postmodern art with references to the past. I really wanted to make a claim, and gradually, one by one, I found other people who were interested in the same thing—in the beginning I was quite amazed and excited to find another person who also wanted to draw a figure with a coherent structure, or to learn how to put together a painting with paint and glaze. It was all a total mystery when I started. Little by little, I started randomly bumping into other people, and there was no planning in it at all—especially when I began teaching, I started finding people in very mysterious ways: people popped up and showed up at the door. I was very inspired. I found that I was meeting a whole lot of people who had the same strong desire for Traditionalism as me.

JP: Why did you found two new schools of art? Why teach and paint; why not just paint?

When I was a kid, I looked at art and I recognized that all of the artists that were really great came out of dense little worlds of artists. They all evolved in and thrived in communities where there were piles and piles of artists who often all lived within blocks of each other. And this is true for the Spanish school, for those in Rome, in Paris, in Amsterdam, and in the New York of 1880s. I realized that all the artists I really loved were friends with other people who were important in the art world. I recognized that I wasn’t going to be who I really wanted to be without help—and I was really ambitious, I wanted to be a great artist. I just looked at it historically and empirically and realized it wasn’t going to happen all by myself. Nobody gets it all by themselves. That inspired me to a great extent to start building the community that I wished I had been born into. I knew I needed to be among like-minded peers; to share and compete, to take turns raising the bar. I came across some artists with similar goals, but I didn’t find that energy we associate with the historical schools. So I started teaching and trying to build a scene. I felt like I was young enough, I was in my 20s, to be a student in my school as well as the teacher. If I was going to inherit the place in the art scene that I wanted, I should be starting at it myself by teaching. It’s not just like I have been teaching other people, these really gifted artists have taught me as much as I have given them.

Right now, there are people in my studio who are really gifted and hard working and are trying to be better than me. I don’t want to be left behind by this truck; I keep on getting pushed along by it. In the other schools of this larger world, I see how it happens from the outside. A lot of people have the insight to develop skills and techniques—they’re all drafting off of each other.

JP: How has the public reception been for Realist art?

C: It’s very interesting, I didn’t expect there to be very much public reception to it, and gradually all the little pieces are starting to come together; more artists keep showing up, training each other, inspiring each other to get better; more galleries start catching on and wanting to be involved; more collectors start to be curious about it, and the more collectors there are, the more respect the artists get.

For quite a while when I was starting out, most of the market in New York was for Modern art. The market for Classically oriented Realism was out of town—and it was mostly in galleries out in California and around the middle of the country. In New York, there seemed to be an anti-Traditionalism with respect to art. Part of Modernism, from the beginning, has been anti-traditionalist; in fact one of its defining factors. Because New York was historically coming out of a commitment to modernism, it was hard for New York galleries to come around and embrace really traditional art. But now it’s changing, it’s changing fast. The galleries are really recognizing the passions of the artists and the interests of the collectors.

JP: What are some of the gallery names where we might be able to see this art?

C: One of the galleries is a gallery I’m with: Hirschl and Adler. It’s exciting that they’ve made a commitment in the last 5 or 10 years to get behind this kind of art, which is important because they’re a blue-chip gallery.

The John Pence Gallery shows this kind of art, you see it at Forum Gallery, Eleanor Ettinger, Arcadia, and Spanierman. More and more galleries of all different types are showing and selling the artists that have been moving in this direction.

There’s a lot of Realism at the Chelsea galleries too, but most of it verges on Post-Modernism because the art seems be to kidding; it does not have the desire to be serious. Its not making a go at the Classical tradition.

JP: So if you were to make a sales pitch for your new school, would you tell artists that you could be a success by pursuing traditional art?

C: I’ve been interviewing students for years. The one thing that I tell them is that it’s crazy. They’re often very capable and talented people who could do all kinds of other things, and they would be guaranteed success, and would be able to make mortgage payments and raise a family, so they should probably not do traditional art. But if they are going to do it—and this is not one hundred percent true, but it’s mostly true—the people who get really good at it, do well and sell their work. It’s not some sort of art world crapshoot where you have to have an angle and know the right people, though there is some of that. There are people who get spectacularly good at painting too; these are the people who are subtle and aesthetic and somehow manage to speak in their own voice. Traditional art has worked, and so far it’s been working, and it may be that fashion dumps us off to die, but there’s a growing response for the works to get better. It feels like Traditional Realism is a little more on solid ground these days.

4th Annual Young Poets Evening

Tonight Dara hosts her forth annual Young Poets Evening at the National Arts Club. This year the readers are Joshua Mehigan, Rowan Ricardo Phillips & David Yezzi. Details: Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 8 pm. The National Arts Club. 15 Gramercy Park South. Admission is free. Join us for an evening of verse in the most poetic surroundings in New York!

Realist Revolution

Alexey Steele on stage with James Panero

James writes:

Last Friday I appeared on a panel at the Portrait Society of America's annual conference. The topic was "Realist Revolution and Critical Relevance: Is Main Stream Media Missing an Important Cultural Trend?" My co-panelists were the painters Jacob Collins and Alexey Steele, and the museum director Vern Swanson. The panel was moderated by the painter Jeremy Lipking. The quick answer to the panel's title question is certainly, yes. But has a lack of attention hurt this movement in reviving academic training and classical concerns? Not necessarily. Rather, the loss has gone the other way: the media's ignorance and silence has only ensured that the establishment art world and mainsteam culture miss out on a vital artistic movement.

We at The New Criterion have been laboring to right this wrong for several years through coverage of realism's more important artists. At the panel I revisited the forces that have kept realism from greater public attention: an aesthetic political correctness that has associated realism, at various times, with both fascism and communism, and the emergence of Pop and its market champions that have elevated bad technique over good.

Last December I discussed the market phenomena of Pop in these pages. As a service to our readers, I also want to draw together the various articles and reviews on realism that have recently appeared here.

My initial coverage began with Jacob Collins and the launch of a new classical school, in an article called "The New Old School." My colleague Roger Kimball also wrote on the subject for the Wall Street Journal and here on the Harlem Studio.

Other articles and reviews have concerned the painter Edward Minoff, realism and landscape, the Hudson River School for Landscape, Rear-gardism, and the sculptor Sabin Howard. You can also read my interview with Jacob Collins and listen to the subject on NPR's All Things Considered.

The panel was videotaped, so hopefully the complete discussion will be available for online streaming soon. Alexey Steele's experience in the politically directed art world of Soviet Russia was particularly engaging. Stay tuned.

Gallery Chronicle (April 2010)

The Art Show. Photo by Holger Thoss, courtesy of ADAA

THE NEW CRITERION
APRIL 2010

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On The Armory Show at the Chelsea Piers, ADAA’s Art Show & the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory, “William Bailey: New Work” at the Betty Cuningham Gallery & “Milton Avery: Industrial Revelations” at Knoedler & Company.

Has the art world forgotten the recession? The contemporary art fair known as The Armory Show, which took place inside two terminals on the Hudson River piers in March, certainly tried to ward off the onset of sobriety.[1] Rather than downsize, Armory went even bigger this year. The vibe was very 2007, when the art world’s money-crazed carnival was still in full swing. Nearly 300 international galleries set up shop in this warren of exhibition space. A record 60,000 visitors showed up for the five-day run. The artist Reed Seifer attempted to capture the zeitgeist with a two-ounce perfume called “Spray to Forget,” which was for sale for $25 just outside the “VIP Lounge.” Concealing current troubles with a pleasing body spray, the fair sought to remind us of the art world’s former self-intoxication and self- regard. You may have had a bad year, but, rest assured, you could still be a VIP here, along with thousands of other very important people flashing their own all-access cards.

Why should we want to jump-start the art market by embracing the tackiest commercial practices of the past? Are we concerned that new art cannot last without artificial stimulation? Art could benefit from a period of retrenchment; art that thrives in the wilderness can be the most enduring. I wish the twelve-year-old Armory Show would revisit its more humble roots, when exhibitors first rented rooms in the old Gramercy Park Hotel. Instead, it has become an unruly bazaar, dividing its extensive goods between contemporary art in the cavernous hanger of Pier 94 and modern art inside the long Pier 92—an afterthought of exhibition space that seemed decidedly less impressive than even a year ago, when this extension of the fair began.

The Armory Show has come to anchor an art extravaganza that spans the city, from a constellation of fairs to star-studded museum openings like the Whitney Biennial and an exhibition at The New Museum curated by Jeff Koons. At the same time, in a very different way, the Art Dealers Association of America hosts its own art fair known as “The Art Show” at the Park Avenue Armory. In previous years I have commented on these competing powerhouses. Both the ADAA Art Show and The Armory Show are commercial “art fairs”—ticketed conventions where galleries rent exhibition booths. Yet one manages to emphasize art (ADAA) while the other (Armory) puts a spotlight on spectacle.

Art fairs serve the purposes of art only when they seek to develop new collectors rather than make quick sales. Unlike the vast expanse of the piers, the limited acreage provided by the Park Avenue Armory—aided perhaps by the venue’s patrician environs—seems to focus the numerous fairs that rent space there each year, from the IFPDA Print Fair in November to the AIPAD Photography Show in late March.

In addition to the change in venue, what distinguishes The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory from The Armory Show at the piers is The Art Show’s selection of exhibitors.[2] The Art Dealers Association of America, the sponsor of The Art Show, is an invitation-only member organization of America’s leading commercial galleries. Membership in this 170-gallery organization already guarantees a level of seriousness. Of these galleries, only seventy or so make the Art Show’s cut each year. Securing an exhibition space here is competitive. The result is a fair that brings together the best American galleries under one roof, each presenting excellent mini-exhibitions.

If The Armory Show is about horse-trading and blockbuster openings, the more collegial Art Show is about building relationships. The galleries are on display as much as the art on their walls. The best exhibitors at ADAA assemble focused shows, either around formal themes or single artists.

This year June Kelly presented “The Primacy of Color” with a show-stopping new abstraction by James Little. Hans Kraus was back, this time with nineteenth-century photographs of open landscapes. The solo shows ranged from Shirley Jaffe (Tibor de Nagy) to April Gornik (Danese), Jacob Lawrence (DC Moore), William Kentridge (Marian Goodman), Martin Kippenberger (David Nolan), and Alighiero e Boetti (Sperone Westwater). Galerie St. Etienne featured an exhibition of nude drawings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, where the confidence of Schiele’s late line (from the 1910s) still astonishes.

The Art Show wasn’t the first excellent fair at the Park Avenue Armory in 2010. That distinction belongs to the Winter Antiques Show, which ran for more than a week in late January.[3] This fair only gets better as it expands its range year by year. The Winter Antiques Show has long offered everything from antiquarian books (Bauman) to arms and armor (Peter Finer), American folk art (Giampietro), master portraits (this year, Rembrandt Peale’s George Washington at Hirschl & Adler), and Indian art of the Pacific Northwest (Donald Ellis).

By not limiting the work to just paintings or prints, the fair allows its vendors to turn their booths into complete domestic spaces, filled with furniture and decorative objects. The best exhibitors create full dioramas of their pieces in private settings. Hostler Burrows, which specializes in Scandinavian furniture and houseware, decorated its booth with wallpaper by the mid-century Swedish designer Josef Frank. Hans Kraus Fine Photographs put together a museum-quality show of the photographs of William Henry Fox Talbot that included a replica of the oriel window at Talbot’s Wiltshire home, Lacock Abbey—the subject of one of Talbot’s first photographs from 1835—as well as a handful of haunting photographic etchings.

This year the fair wisely advanced its cut-off date to include collectible work made through the late 1960s. The move allowed the first-time exhibitor Lost City Arts to display a remarkable selection of hand-made metal sculpture by Harry Bertoia, including a few of his “sonambient” sculptural instruments.

Whether by luck or by design, many galleries around the city seem to schedule their more important shows around the March run of the fairs. Woodward Gallery mounted a shimmering survey of recent abstractions by Natalie Edgar, an artist who once studied with Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. Lesley Heller Workspace brought some of Austin Thomas’s Bushwick artists to the Lower East Side. The ambitious large paintings of Noah Landfield and Sara Klar went up at Sideshow Gallery.

Betty Cuningham Gallery featured its third exhibition of nudes and still lifes by the painter William Bailey.[4] This artist’s limited subject matter and reserved paint handling have often been seen as conservative challenges to the orthodox radicalism of modern art. The meaning of Bailey’s work as it relates to the history of art has been a subject of debate since his painting first appeared on the cover of Newsweek in the early 1980s. At the time Bailey was hailed as one of the new artists “of the real.” For me, such discussions have limited utility. They may give Bailey an aura of relevance, but they do little to explain the mysterious power of his work.

Like Giorgio Morandi, another great modern realist, Bailey imbues quiet paintings with intense energy. The latest Cuningham show, with its equal pairing of still lifes and nudes, pointed me to the sensuous sources of Bailey’s dynamics. Bailey’s work is so surprising, so novel, when compared to the canon of modern art because its fecundity shows no limit or irony. The egg shape that appears repeatedly in his still lifes and reappears in his nudes and figurative work, for example as the door knob in House by the Sea (2009), comes across as a central motif. The egg recalls the curved vessels of his still lifes and the rounded faces of his figures. One could even say the motif appears again in the egg-shell finish Bailey meticulously applies to every square inch of his canvas.

As a teacher at Yale, Bailey trained a generation of younger artists to paint in the realist mode. The Cuningham show suggests that more than merely reviving lost technique, Bailey’s lasting legacy may be his concern for the sensuousness of the female form. Artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage never inherited their master’s fine hand, but they took Bailey’s primary theme and made it their own through exaggeration and farce. Bailey may not be as well-known as some of his pupils, but his simple work is all the more extraordinary and enduring.

A revelatory exhibition at Knoedler of Milton Avery’s work from the 1930s called, appropriately, “Industrial Revelations ” examines the machine-age origins of this modernist painter of color and countryside.[5] A poor artist searching for subject matter beyond his Upper West Side studio, Avery roamed New York in his early years. He settled on the railroad tracks, bridges, and waterways at the edges of the city. Absent bright colors and his signature hatched paint handling, the work that came out of these wanderings reveal the artist’s uncanny understanding of composition. Avery distilled each landscape down to squares and curves. Over a solid square structure, the arcing bridges, railroad beds, water towers, and tugboat wheelhouses bend the eye across the canvas. The result is an artist already working in an essential mode.

I had always thought Avery did not hit his stride until the 1940s, but the Knoedler show suggests he reached a mature style much earlier. I doubt the gritty results will win over those who expect salmon landscapes, but paintings like Under the Bridge (c. 1930) and Railroad Yards (1931) and watercolors like Under the Bridge/Houseboat (c. 1930s) are treasures. They also remind us that this great artist once gazed along the banks of the Harlem River, looked out over the West Side El, and changed the course of American art through what he saw by building a bridge from the American Scene to the abstract art of mid-century.

It should be noted that the name of Knoedler’s former director Ann Freedman does not appear in the show’s catalogue, but her fingerprints seem to be all over it; while “Industrial Revelations” is extensive, her departure from the gallery last fall leaves this show with its only absence.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. The Armory Show 2010 was on view at Piers 92 and 94, New York, from March 3 through March 7, 2010. Go back to the text.
2. The Art Show was on view at the The Park Avenue Armory, New York, from March 3 through March 7, 2010. Go back to the text.
3. The Winter Antiques Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 22 through January 31, 2010. Go back to the text.
4. “William Bailey: New Work” was on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, from February 18 through March 27, 2010. Go back to the text.
5. “Milton Avery: Industrial Revelations” opened at Knoedler & Company, New York, on February 18 and remains on view through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.

Panel disucssion on "Realist Revolution"

Join Managing Editor James Panero, artists Jacob Collins and Alexey Steele, and author Vern Swanson for a discussion on "Realist revolution and critical relevance: Is Main Stream Media Missing an Important Cultural Trend?" The panel will be moderated by Jeremy Lipking.

Portrait Society of America Conference

Friday April 23rd, 2010 at 4:00pm

Hyatt Regency Reston, VA

The event is part of the "PSOA Art of the Portrait" conference (April 22 – 25, 2010) and will be free of charge and open to the public. Reservations required. Contact Christine Egnoski at info [at] portraitsociety.org or call 877-772-4321 (Caption image: Santiago and Sheila by Jacob Collins [2006])