Supreme Fiction

Gallery Chronicle (March 2010)

Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses, Black Horses (1942) © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York.
Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
March 2010

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On "Seventy Years Grandma Moses" at Galerie St. Etienne, New York & “Carolanna Parlato: Vortical” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York.

Grandma Moses deserves more than a Hallmark greeting. The paintings by this self-taught artist should be in any museum that lays claim to the history of American art. An extensive loan exhibition on view at Galerie St. Etienne endeavors to make the case that the elderly woman behind millions of Christmas-card reproductions is a pivotal American artist.[1]

Moses’s personal story is compelling, in turn amplifying and diminishing her artistic reputation. She lived from the age of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of John Kennedy. She was born Anna Mary Robertson in upstate New York in 1860, the third of ten children. At twelve she left home to work as a maid on a nearby farm. She spent most of the next fifteen years as a farm girl, obtaining scattered schooling alongside the children of her employers. In 1887, at twenty-seven, she married Thomas Salmon Moses, a farmhand. Relocating to Virginia, they farmed in the Shenandoah Valley, where Moses gave birth to ten children, losing five in infancy. Eighteen years later, in 1905, the family returned to upstate New York, this time to Rensselaer County, just south of her birthplace, to a farm they called Mount Nebo, near the hamlet of Eagle Bridge. The landscape of the surrounding countryside formed the underlying topography of her subsequent artistic output.

It was not until the mid-1930s, following the death of her husband in 1927, that Moses began to paint in earnest. “I had always wanted to paint, but I just didn’t have time until I was seventy-six,” she later said. Arthritis led her to give up needlework in favor of oil on board. She submitted her first work to the county fair, but she took home a prize for her preserves rather than her paintings. Then, in 1938, a collector named Louis Caldor spotted Moses’s artwork in the shop window of W. D. Thomas’s pharmacy in the town of Hoosick Falls, New York. He purchased as many works as he could carry and returned to New York City. The next year Caldor landed three of the paintings in a members’-only group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A year later Caldor convinced Otto Kallir, a Jewish refugee from Austria with a newly opened commercial gallery in New York, to mount the artist’s first one-woman show. The name of Kallir’s shop was St. Etienne; the gallery, now run by Hildegard Bachert and Jane Kallir, Otto’s granddaughter, has represented Moses ever since.

Otto Kallir may have been the first to call her “Grandma” Moses, a name journalists have delighted in ever since. His gallery has shepherded Moses’s career from obscurity to popular success. A painter beloved in reproduction, she was abandoned by the artistic establishment. By the time of her death in 1961 at the age of 101, Moses had met presidents, appeared on the cover of Life, been visited by Edward R. Murrow, and seen her licensed images appear on 100-million Christmas cards. Yet the initial critical support she received at the time of her first show in 1940 was soon eclipsed, as Regionalism, Primitivism, and the American Scene fell out of favor with sophisticated taste. Moses’s work never entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the site of her first exhibition.

“One of the first artists to be hailed as a media superstar,” notes Jane Kallir, “and possibly the most successful female artist of her era, Moses is nevertheless surprisingly invisible when it comes to histories of postwar American painting.” Moses never found a place in America’s projection of postwar international style. Nor was she taken up by the theorists of the 1970s, despite her success as a woman painter.

The misunderstanding of Moses hinges on her initial status as a primitive, unschooled artist. Rural living in fact provided Moses with its own aesthetic education. The crafts of farm life—needlework and quilting—gave Moses an appreciation of bold colors and a neo-Impressionist sense of paint application. Three of the earliest pieces in the show—Mt. Nebo on the Hill (1940), Untitled (House and Barn in Landscape) (c. 1940), and Shepherd Comes Home from the Hills (c. 1940)—are “worsted pictures” made of embroidered yarn and fabric.

Like other resourceful self-taught artists—Henry Darger and John Kane come to mind—Moses freely appropriated imagery from prints and photographs. She transferred figures from Currier and Ives and popular advertisements to her paintings by tracing them with carbon paper. Several of her more “realistic” paintings from the early 1940s are based entirely on the compositions of colored lithographs. When Leaves Turn (1943) follows a series of paintings she made called Autumn in the Berkshires—one of them painted directly on top of a commercial print. A Fire in the Woods (1940) and The Burning of Troy (c. 1939) are similarly based on documentary material. Moses’s historical knowledge of local events provided its own narrative template, further drawing on documentary illustrations. The Battle of Bennington in 1777, the burning of Troy, New York in 1862, and the Checkered House inn, built in 1765 on the nearby turnpike road, are all recurring motifs.

Moses had taken up mapmaking in childhood. As she combined a technique born from folk traditions with an intimate knowledge of local history and geography, she distinguished her art with a unique sense of pictorial space and an urge to record her world. She put equal weight on foreground activity and on distant topography. Her sensibility to represent all space with even focus resembles cartography more than conventional painting based on visual perception.

In her paintings, Moses did not simply reproduce geographical reality. She crafted diagrams of rural life, often drawing from the pre-industrial past. One can see a mapping instinct in every decision she made, down to the way she reproduced buildings. Like architectural isometric projection, she unfolded shapes so that right-angle planes were equally drawn out. The results are didactic representations rather than illustrations in single-point perspective. Moses loaded her paintings with such information to create visual maps of a shared rural memory. The people in these scenes—traced and transferred figures performing various tasks like sugaring, catching the Thanksgiving turkey, and riding a sleigh to grandma’s house—are not faithfully depicted. Rather they stand as representations of activity: more like street signs than cognizant human beings.

That St. Etienne would mount a museum-quality exhibition of Moses while actual New York museums continue to ignore her ies noteworthy. It is also noteworthy that an extensive show called “Grandma Moses in the 21st Century,” which toured through six national museums in 2001, never found a New York venue. Writing at the time in the New York Observer, Hilton Kramer called the omission a scandal.

Regardless of Moses’s aesthetic achievements, her place as a popular artist commands our attention. Yet as the St. Etienne show makes clear, Moses’s work can be exceptionally good. Certainly, it wasn’t always great. Sometimes her untrained hand got away from her, or her compositions became over-filled with genre figures. While there are elegant exceptions, her late work with its more impressionistic line seems crude. But certain paintings, especially her expansive landscapes, can hold their own in the history of art, beyond her designation as a self-taught outsider.

Black Horses (1942), on display in the current show, is the work that convinced Kallir to appreciate Moses as a serious artist. This painting can do the same for us today. Moses is much more than a footnote to an artistic movement. With her memorialization of a rural past, she transcends even the history of American art. She has become, simply put, a national treasure. The time has come for the art world to understand what the rest of the world realized decades ago.

I predict that the art of the 1970s will find new relevance in the coming years. The expressionist 1950s returned in the 1980s. The pop 1960s struck back in the last decade. Now the legacy of the 1970s has reemerged to hash it out in another recessionary period. What matters is how this decade gets remembered—for its theory or its practice. The Conceptualism of the decade has long been championed by the cultural establishment, while the rigorous studio practice of 1970s painters has been ignored.

This oil-on-canvas generation never disappeared. The artists who came of age in that decade continue to work and, in many respects, get better. What didn’t change was their sense of community and, regrettably for them, often the price of their work. The public has yet to catch on. This past month, a large group show at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg brought several artists of this generation together under one roof with many younger painters and even some older ones. By last count, 380 works climbed the walls in a Barnes-style hanging. At times the cement bunker of a gallery, run by Richard Timperio, seemed like the Alamo of 1970s process painting. It was an outstanding group show, with studio painters in conversation across the generations. A work on paper by Jake Berthot was a standout. I was also excited to see Ronnie and Noah Landfield, father and son, in one room. A promising recent graduate of Hunter, Noah is now up for a solo show at Sideshow.

One artist at Sideshow—younger than the 1970s generation but with a shared sensibility—was Carolanna Parlato. She now has a solo show at Elizabeth Harris.[2] Working in bold acrylic, Parlato seeks to collaborate with her paint rather than over-manipulate it. She pours her paint onto her canvas and tips the wet surface back and forth. She allows the drips to run. The happy accidents that result come out of Parlato’s understanding of paint’s chemistry. Through her own experimentation, Parlato now uses extra medium, even soaps, to encourage the controlled movement of her pigments, which she layers over one another. Sometimes the compositions become overpopulated. Coronal Loop (2009) has too much going on—although particular details, like the sweep of brush, are beautiful effects.

In her best work, the fields of paint, often juxtaposed in two different forms, have an energy of their own. Undercurrent (2009) pairs a shape melting down with another dripping up. Orbital (2009), the best painting in the show, has an oozing amoeba foregrounding an explosive burst of green and red, reacting together in a bath of clear medium. Building on each new painting, the work develops through Parlato’s own process. Like all good artists, she is her own best teacher.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Seventy Years Grandma Moses: A Loan Exhibition Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Artist’s ‘Discovery’” opened at Galerie St. Etienne on February 3 and remains on view through April 3, 2010. Go back to the text.
2. “Carolanna Parlato: Vortical” opened at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on February 11 and remains on view through March 13, 2010. Go back to the text.

'Conservative Wunderkind' Writes for 'Conceited Cultural Troglodytes'

From "Magazine Rack" by Grant Mandarino, Artnet.com:

Even though the conceited cultural troglodytes at The New Criterion are pretty much irrelevant -- they hate art so much, why are they even in the business? -- it’s good to check in occasionally just to see what they’ve got going. The staunchly conservative "review of the arts and intellectual life" was launched in 1982 by art critic Hilton Kramer after he left the New York Times in disgust at the appalling state of criticism then in practice -- you know, all that multicultural hogwash. Kramer edits the magazine in collaboration with Roger Kimball, an unrepentant toff who reviews art for The National Review and heads Encounter Books, publisher of such fine titles as How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security, and In Praise of Prejudice.

The February’s glowing panegyric for Irving Kristol, "godfather of modern conservatism," is no great surprise. Love is blind, after all. More surprising for a journal otherwise devoted to limited government and free markets is a review of the latest biography of Ayn Rand that compares this capitalist paragon to Stalin. Rand is described as a paranoid megalomaniac whose verbose faux-philosophic novels are as enjoyable and intellectually stimulating as eating your own face off (I’m paraphrasing). For once I agree with a New Criterion author, but given that the article has drawn over 24 pages of reader responses on the magazine website, plenty of Rand loyalists remain ever ready to defend their mad, dead queen.

As for the art reviews, they’re a mixed bag. Wall Street Journal art critic Karen Wilkin nitpicks her way through an exhibition of works by Cézanne, Picasso and Mondrian on view at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, while painter and professor Mario Naves unloads his spleen on Gabriel Orozco, whose work is of course the subject of a major retrospective at MoMA right now. Nitpickery and insults, typically at tedious length and generally without intelligence or wit, this is the right wing’s idea of "art criticism." Showing a bit more promise is conservative wunderkind James Panero’s brief visit to the burgeoning art scene in Bushwick, Brooklyn (where "pigeon coops are common. . . and birds often circle above the rooftops"), but alas, although nice, the prose is a bit prosaic.

Strike the Set

CITY JOURNAL
Winter 2010

Strike the Set
by James Panero

A militant union smothers New York theater.

You’ve got to hand it to New York’s stagehands’ union. Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) has been collective-bargaining the life out of New York theater for over a century. Just how much does this union of carpenters, electricians, and prop masters bleed from city arts organizations? Carnegie Hall’s tax returns for its 2007–08 season suggest an answer.

Dennis O’Connell, Carnegie’s properties manager, has pulled down headline-making salaries from the concert hall for years. Between 2001 and 2003, for instance, his annual salary ranged between $309,000 and $344,000. But for the fiscal year ending in June 2008, O’Connell’s earnings topped $530,000, making him Carnegie’s highest-paid employee after its executive director, Clive Gillinson. Four other stagehands—carpenters James Csollany and Kenneth Beltrone and electricians John Goodson and John Cardinale—came in just behind, with salaries exceeding $400,000 apiece.

The Carnegie payouts received wide circulation in the New York media last fall after being reported in Bloomberg News. Yet the story only hints at a deeper truth well known in the New York arts community—one that affects Lincoln Center, all of Broadway, and numerous other venues. Because of the stranglehold of Local One–negotiated contracts, New York theater owners must all pay a sizable tribute each day just to keep the lights on. The pay rates that Local One secures for its stagehands far exceed the deals struck by other IATSE chapters nationwide, and many employees can pad their base pay with multiple surcharge triggers—overtime, missed meals, and tasks that mandate excessive staffing.

The money comes out of arts organizations’ bottom lines, driving up production costs and ticket prices and inhibiting the evolution of New York theater. “Any programming that does not resemble programming 30 years ago is prohibitive,” explains one theater manager. Pricey union contracts have “absolutely prohibited arts organizations from doing new things, particularly in difficult times.” The contracts also prevent organizations from expanding their reach through advances in technology like webcasting and simulcasts in movie theaters. The Metropolitan Opera had to spend years at the bargaining table to launch its Live in HD program.

The union has established a closed network of unchecked power. (To get a sense of its might, just try to speak to someone on the record.) When Local One workers talk about their “brotherhood,” some of them mean it literally: the chapter president, James J. Claffey, Jr., is the son of a Local One member and counts five brothers in the union. The leadership is predominantly Irish and male, and of the union’s 3,000 members, only about 130 are women. Thanks to a tiered salary structure and a union-controlled promotion system, not all of the members benefit from the big payouts. One anonymous blogger who identifies himself as a rank-and-file member rails against what he calls the union’s “Irish loop” system of preferment: “2500 victims plus the 350 to 500 plus relatives and loop boys (white, Irish, males).”

In better economic times, when theaters were flush, Local One’s impositions were bad enough. Now, as arts organizations are failing in the recession, the union’s compensation packages should receive the same scrutiny as the pay rates of top management. Keep in mind that the high salaries commanded by maestros and executive directors, which can exceed $1 million, were determined in an open marketplace. Could another prop master do O’Connell’s job just as well, and for less pay?

You can’t fault O’Connell: he performs a service and enjoys his legally agreed-upon compensation for doing so. The true blame rests with an arts leadership too weak-willed to fight union demands. The former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Joe Volpe, showed that such fecklessness wasn’t necessary. A former stagehand himself, with sons working as union extras, Volpe knew how to play tough against Local One. “At labor negotiations, for example, I can whoop and holler and scream and carry on like a wild man,” he once said. “I’ll shout that they can burn the place down but I’m never going to give in. And I’ll walk out. And their attorney will come over to me later and tell me it was great—that my act really helped him because until then the union was stuck in its position and he couldn’t get them to change.”

While Local One protects the lucky few at the top of the stagehand food chain, many more New Yorkers in the arts, unionized or not, are seeing their positions eliminated or their salaries cut during the current downturn because of unsustainable budgets. Arts leaders, who need to start controlling costs at all levels, also need the backbone to stare down the threat of a Local One strike. And if negotiations break down in the future, the arts community must overcome its unwillingness to cross picket lines for a justified cause that will help all workers. You don’t have to be antiunion to confront the inequity of Local One. You just have to be anti–Local One.

James Panero is the managing editor of The New Criterion.

The artist Gabriele Evertz: a documentary

Last June I wrote about the painter Gabrielle Evertz and the legacy of Optical Art. The filmmaker Michael Feldman, who created the wonderful segment on Thornton Willis, now has a new documentary on this artist, with some additional commentary by me.

Gabriele Evertz Paints a Color Study from Michael Feldman on Vimeo.

Gallery Chronicle (February 2010)

Deborah Brown, Green Sky (2009), courtesy of the artist and Storefront.

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2010

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On the Bushwick art scene, the "Inaugural Exhibition" at Storefront, “The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now” at Lesley Heller Workspace, “Works on Paper” at Danese & “Jack Tworkov: True and False” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

The neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn is the art world’s recession special. In the last decade, this broken quadrangle, a one-time hellhole of riots, arson, and drug violence, has become an artist haven. The urban renaissance that lifted even the bleakest corners of New York City left this gray landscape of low tenements and light-industrial factory buildings with some room to grow. At the same time, a wave of rising rents pushed many of the city’s artists from west to east—from the East Village to Williamsburg and Greenpoint and finally to Bushwick. Inexpensive, just a subway ride from Manhattan, the neighborhood presented a gritty and expansive urban tableau.

Several of the city’s outlying neighborhoods, from the South Bronx to the Gowanus Canal, have seen an influx of artists in recent years. Still, Bushwick became a community unto itself, a latter-day commune of youthful energy in the shadow of an industrial wasteland, a world away from downtown. The trust-fund bohemians of the Bowery School and the Lower East Side may have landed shows at Deitch Projects and overdosed on their de Menil credit cards, but the Bushwick School seemed content to remain obscure. For those on the outside, Bushwick appeared impenetrable, even unappealing.

The neighborhood’s affordability and open spaces allowed its artists to develop largely independent of market forces. The factory-style production that defined the art of the last decade was disregarded in favor of a more intimate, material-based studio practice. Skim off the froth, and many members of the Bushwick School might be seen as the spiritual descendants of the process-based painters who first settled in Soho in the 1960s and 1970s.

Its slow maturation has left Bushwick vibrant but ephemeral. The question has been how to make its idealism sustainable. Hundreds of the neighborhood’s artists have been organizing annual Bushwick Open Studio weekends each June. Several artists run informal year-round galleries out of their studios. A few commercial spaces have opened (and often closed) in basements and garages and storefronts, with names like Pocket Utopia, English Kills, Factory Fresh, and Famous Accountants. Nevertheless, the Bushwick School’s market presence has remained limited, which has been both its defining feature as well as a growing practical concern.

A sympathetic curator named Jason Andrew, who lives in Bushwick but often works in the world of blue-chip New York, has been trying for years to bring some professionalism and maturity to the Bushwick scene without compromising its off-the-grid ethos. A curator of the Jack Tworkov estate, Andrew has created a non-profit arts organization called Norte Maar out of his living room on Wyckoff Avenue that exhibits local artists, holds performances (broadcast onto the street), and works with neighborhood children.

Buying art out of someone’s living room may be intimate, but it is also awkward, which may be one reason why Bushwick’s popular artist-run exhibitions have often failed to find buyers. Now Andrew has opened a small gallery on Wilson Avenue in partnership with the accomplished mid-career painter Deborah Brown. Called simply Storefront, the prosaic-looking, fluorescent-lit gallery that was until recently an accountant’s office (the awning still reads “TAXES”) is an attempt to give art retail in Bushwick a better name.[1]

Storefront’s inaugural group show delivers on a promise to feature “the work of artists we know, the artists we like, and the artists we’d like to get to know better.” The exhibition presents a solid cross-section of Bushwick’s artistic production, with art- ists who work, live, or regularly show in the neighborhood. Deborah Brown’s own contribution, a painting titled Green Sky (2009), is an homage to Bushwick, with a loft of pigeons flying above a chain-link fence (pigeon coops are common there, and birds often circle above the rooftops).

The exhibition ranges from abstract drawing and painting (Rico Gatson, Aurora Robson, Michele Araujo, Theresa Hackett, Brooke Moyse, Kevin Regan, Mary Judge), to intimate realism (Matthew Miller, Amy Lincoln, Bill Adams), to collage (Ellen Letcher, Andrew Hurst, Hilda Shen). A number of works feature an unusual mixture of various media (Justen Ladda’s shellacked cedar wood, Stephen Truax’s sewn fabric, Steve Pauley’s granite, Austin Thomas’s assembly of paint, collage, and newsprint).

A young sculptor named Jimmy Miracle —his real name, by the way—reminds me of Christopher Wilmarth, another spiritual artist who sought to “depict not the thing but the effect that it produces,” in the words of Mallarmé. Miracle, who was last on view at another Bushwick gallery called Sugar, works with common materials like string and paper to evoke ineffable space.

Andrew and Brown have done a service to the artists of Bushwick with the opening of Storefront. They have also opened up the Bushwick School to the larger arts community with well-selected, affordable work that is representative of the area and now easy to see. Storefront offers a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to support the serious art coming out of this unique neighborhood.

Art is not produced in a vacuum. The context of creation, while never a complete explanation, can provide a point of access to a body of work. In the 1950s, a group of young abstract artists in Chicago decided to buck the city’s entrenched establishment and form their own cooperative gallery. Many of these artists eventually moved away to become well-known names: Robert Natkin, Aaron Siskind, and John Chamberlain. Lesley Heller Workspace on the Lower East Side now brings the Chicago group together with work from the 1950s and today in a show called “The Wells Street Gallery Revisited.”[2]

That Bushwick’s own Jason Andrew is the curator of this exhibition might further demonstrate his neighborhood’s affinity (or at least Andrew’s affinity) for the studio-based art communities of the past. The Heller show is thankfully light on social history and tells its story through the works on display.

Judith Dolnick’s Untitled (1957) is a standout, as is Ernest Dieringer’s small work on paper, Sketch for Zig Zag (1961), Donald Vlack’s carefree drawing Untitled (1955), and Gerald van de Wiele’s Voices of Caves (2008), a sculpture of carved wood. If one attribute connects the work, it is the Chicago School’s light-heartedness when compared to the Ab Ex angst of New York.

In an economic downturn, it can be a challenge for artists and galleries to sell new work without undercutting their own established prices. A great majority of artists who never benefited from the over-inflated market now face devaluation as more art chases after fewer collectors.

One answer can be to produce smaller work. Not only does the banal statistic of square inches often determine an artwork’s price, but with the housing market still in flux, who knows what will happen to that wall space above the sofa. Fewer collectors have the confidence right now to purchase large works of art.

Another smart tactic is to branch out into other media with a less established price point, such as works on paper. Paper operates in a different economy from oil on canvas. A work on paper can sell for much less than a similar sized oil without devaluing a painter’s market.

From what I understand about the general demands of the art market, works on paper are also less desirable. Here is a prejudice I could never get my head around. Paper gives us access to the artistic process in a way that a finished oil cannot. Paper also reveals a delicacy of line that often gets lost in the thickness and vibrancy of paint.

The curators at Danese must be on the same page, so to speak. The gallery has pulled together an extensive, wide-ranging group show of works on paper.[3] I tend to gravitate toward drawing that leaves things open. Smudges, erasures, and a general lack of finish best reveal the artistic process and leave you with the taste of graphite and ink.

My good friend Tom Goldenberg has contributed a stick-cracking landscape, Damm Hill (2008), to the Danese show. Barry Le Va has an electrifying black ink abstraction, Twin-Diode-Pendode from Electrode Series (Plan Views for Sculpture) (2002). Richard Serra has a gummy mess, Stratum G (2006), that looks like it saw the business end of a tire.

Danese has organized the show through an intelligent hanging, but many of the smaller pieces still get overwhelmed in the gallery’s cavernous space. A few temporary walls could have broken things up and brought us closer to the drawings. Unlike oils on canvas, works on paper are often at their best in confined environments—ideal, you might say, for apartment living.

Should I have titled this month’s column The Jason Andrew Chronicle? Probably so, because Andrew helped organize a Jack Tworkov exhibition now on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.[4] It was a sign of the times when the UBS Gallery closed its doors for the last time following its exquisite Tworkov retrospective, which I wrote about in these pages in September. Like UBS, the Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition gives us an opportunity to evaluate Tworkov’s often dismissed later work from the 1960s and 1970s, when he adopted a more structural and less expressionistic style. And again, this work looks better and more active with each viewing. Idling II (WNY-70 #1) (1970) operates through subtle tonal modulations to arrive at a mysterious vision barely perceptible through a thicket of paint. Trace (1966) has a similar effect. P73 #7 (1973) uses thin white borders to create the illusion of prismatic screens of paint layered on top of one another.

The later work is anything but sentimental. One tends to miss the heroic, tattered heraldry of earlier abstractions such as Barrier Series #5 (1963). Still, Tworkov was on to something. They may not be his most likable canvases, but the mark left by Tworkov’s innovative late paintings is most distinctly his own.

 

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

• “First Exhibition” opened at Storefront, Brooklyn, on January 2 and remains open through February 6, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now” opened at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, on January 20 and remains on view through February 28, 1010 Go back to the text.
• “Works on Paper” opened at Danese, New York, on January 8 and remains on view through February 6, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “Jack Tworkov: True and False” opened at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, on January 15 and remains on view through February 20, 2010. Go back to the text.

Why 'Forgot He Was Black' Comment Spells Trouble for President

James writes (from Big Government):

One of the most talked about lines from the State of the Union came not from Obama but from a comment the MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews made after the President’s address: “He is post-racial by all appearances,” Matthews observed. “You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two.”

I am prepared to take this comment seriously. No doubt Matthews meant it as a compliment. A cheerleader for the President, Matthews once famously remarked that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” following another Obama speech. But the observation of a “post-racial” President spells trouble for Obama. For one, judging by Matthews’s backtracking, the comment has inadvertently exposed the subject of Obama’s race to be a continuing taboo for any meaningful discussion. Why is it taboo? Because race remains the key issue through which one can unlock and understand the power that brought Obama to office, and Obama’s defenders do not want to give that key away. Harry Reid’s recently reported comments about Obama being a “light-skinned Negro” raised hackles for similar reasons.

Also, if race has played a key role in the making of this President, the concept of a “post-racial” Obama means the President could be losing his “racial” gloss with the electorate. If the voters have indeed “Completely forgotten it…. Completely forgotten it,” as Matthews claims to have forgotten that Obama is black during the duration of the SOTU, then the President may be “transcending race: only to lose the source of his political power.

Since the attacks of 9/11, the sociological effects of a war on terror have made the electorate more fluid, harder to define, tending towards extremes, and looking for salvation. They have also been more willing to take risks on candidates. The Obama election was a consequence of this dynamic. After the perceived fatigue of the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq, the electorate desperately needed to be liked, and the election of Obama provided a way for the electorate to prove its likability.

Obama tapped into the main artery of the electorate and ran on an undefined, broad platform of hope. But what is hope? Hope implies risk. Hope can be a gamble. The instinct that brought Obama to office was the same instinct that fed the economic bubble. The electorate doubled down on candidate Obama and purchased a complex political instrument they did not really understand.

The 2008 election was the demonstrable event. The perceived importance of electing America’s first black President cannot be underestimated. Little may have been known about candidate Obama, but everyone could appreciate Obama’s race. Race was so prominent in voter calculus and media coverage, in fact, that Obama did not need to address it himself in a direct way, except when compelled by Jeremiah Wright. The issue was obvious.

There was only secondary concern for how Obama would lead once elected. The electorate wanted and needed to show that it could elect a beautiful man and put his family in the nation’s first home–a “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Norman Lear, “Sesame Street” fantasy. The election of this symbolic figure alone would then address our international standing, it was assumed, appease the Muslim world, and solve our own racial psychosis at once. The problems of the world would be half-solved by the time he took office.

Of course, the problems of the world have not ended. We now get to spend four years with a president we don’t really know. And a year in, we are still not liked.

I think Obama has changed much less than the public perception of him has changed. We got what we elected, an unproven freshman politician as President, a terrible leader who manages to project weakness even when he does something forceful (as in rightly sending more troops into Afghanistan).

Hope has evolved to distrust. The electorate is moving on. If the election of Obama, rather than the governance of Obama, was the thing, now that this act has been completed, the variable of Obama’s race has become far less important for the Chris Matthews of the world.

It is undeniably significant to elect America’s first black President, given the sordid history of race relations in this country. It is, however, far less significant to *reelect* America’s first black President. With the aura of race quickly dissipating, Obama is losing a source of his power. He had the world on a string before the election. But in office, his Midas touch has left him, which is why his emergency appearances could not rescue Democratic candidates in New Jersey, Virginia, or Massachusetts and will provide little uplift to Democrats in the mid-term elections.

Obama was a good campaigner because he understood how to manipulate race to get elected. This had been David Axelrod’s specialty, after all. But Obama has not evolved into a popular President, in part because he has not figured out how to keep his race significant. He was supposed to be an agent of change, but I doubt whether he can change *himself* in time to keep up with the electorate’s changing expectations. A year ago the voters thought they were getting a black version of Abraham Lincoln. Now they need a Ronald Reagan, and any color will do.

The Vanishing Benefactor

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JANUARY 14, 2010

The Vanishing Benefactor
By James Panero

The six-month disappearance of Harvey S. Shipley Miller, the sole trustee of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, reported in Wednesday's New York Times, shows us the perilous nature of charitable governance and the surprisingly limited oversight through which foundations, especially charitable trusts, can operate.

Before a little-known abstract artist named Judith Rothschild died in 1993 at the age of 71, she tapped Mr. Miller, her best friend, to be the one trustee of her multimillion-dollar charitable trust. Its mission was to promote her reputation and support artists of her generation. The appointment left Mr. Miller with a six-figure salary, free room and board in the artist's Park Avenue townhouse, several million dollars in cash to advance the foundation's mission, and several million more in real estate and fine art that could be liquidated for foundation purposes. The story seemed to have all the hallmarks of a feel-good movie. But it has taken an unpleasant turn for the people who were promised the foundation's help.

According to the Times story, Mr. Miller had neither been seen nor heard from by his grantees from July of last year until this month, and none of the foundation's 17 grants for 2009, totaling more than $100,000, have been paid. Grantees discovered that the Rothschild Foundation's telephone was disconnected and that registered mail was being returned. Emails to Elizabeth Slater, the foundation's grant-making officer and its only other employee, bounced back. Ms. Slater, the Times reported, had been dismissed in a cost-cutting move early last year. Meanwhile, the foundation's troubles have refocused attention on a controversial foundation gift of drawings to the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Miller's curious behavior has renewed scrutiny of how this charitable trust has been managed, with the New York state attorney general's office having contacted the foundation's attorney.

"We are a very small institution," says Tim Detweiler, who runs the James and Janie Washington Foundation, a 2009 grantee based in Seattle dedicated to the work of James W. Washington Jr., a self-taught African-American artist. "It would have been very helpful to have that $4,000. They have done a lot of good, but with no communication you fear the worst—that someone ran off with the money."

The primary mandate of Rothschild's bequest has been the promotion of her posthumous reputation through the exhibition and sale of her art, followed by management of other art in her collection and "facilitating and funding the acquisition by public galleries and museums of work primarily by contemporary American artists who died after Sept. 12, 1976 and before March 6, 2008"—artists of her own generation—according to the foundation's tax returns.

As the foundation's only trustee, Mr. Miller enjoyed broad discretion to use the funds as he saw fit. With the power to buy, sell and donate art, he became his own cultural force. Since he assumed his position at the foundation, MoMA and several other major institutions invited him to join their own boards of trustees.

Between 2003, when he joined the MoMA board, and 2005, Mr. Miller used foundation funds to buy 2,500 drawings by nearly 700 mainly contemporary artists. He hand-selected the works—by very well known older artists such as Cy Twombly and several hundred younger artists entering the MoMA collection for the first time—through an $18 million run through commercial galleries and art fairs. His supermarket sweep, subsequently gifted to MOMA, became the Judith Rothschild Collection and the subject of the show "Compass in Hand," which closed at the museum on Jan. 4.

"Judith Rothschild was concerned with a community of artists she could have known," says Christian Rattlemeyer, the Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings at MoMA and the show's organizer. (Asked about the endowed curatorship, a MoMA spokesman said it was funded with a donation from Mr. Miller's personal funds.) The collection is in the spirit of "a community of living artists who have a dialogue with each other." Erik J. Stapper, the attorney for the foundation and Rothschild's estate, concurs that Mr. Miller's actions were consistent with the foundation's mission. "We had long discussions with the attorney general's office about this kind of program: How do you advertise an underrecognized artist? Judith had the fullest confidence that Harvey would be the one to do it."

Not all observers familiar with Rothschild's life believe it fulfilled the spirit of her wishes. "This was the worst of the excesses of art-market gambling, of young artists and helping their careers and putting them in the museums," says Wendy Snyder, who represents the estate of the artist Sam Glankoff. "Nowhere does the mandate mention gleaning public recognition for Judith Rothschild by giving drawings of young contemporary artists to one of the most elite museums in the world." Other than the mention of her name, visitors to "Compass in Hand" were left with little sense of who Judith Rothschild was or what she had done.

Natalie Edgar, director of the Pavia Trust, was moved to contact the New York state attorney general, whose office has oversight over charities and foundations. "Harvey Shipley Miller [has] been spending foundation assets on a shopping spree to buy 2,500 drawings of emerging artists," Ms. Edgar wrote shortly after the new year. He could not pay the grantees, "but he could spend millions on the shopping spree for the MoMA."

Unusual for a donation of this kind, the manic speed with which the gift took shape and entered the museum presented its own problems. Even Mr. Rattlemeyer remarks on the unorganized assortment he first confronted. "If you acquired 2,500 works in two years, you acquire three or four a day, which means they come, they go to a warehouse, and they move to the museum and the museum received 2,500 pieces at once."

Finally there is the question of a single trustee leveraging resources of one charitable organization to benefit another where he also maintains a board seat. "When you are sitting on the board of two different organizations, you really ought to be careful to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest," says Raymond Dowd, a lawyer at Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller who specializes in art law. "Usually that is resolved by recusing yourself or getting an independent judgment of counsel."

Just this week, Mr. Miller re-emerged after several more grantees began filing notice with the Charities Bureau of the New York state attorney general's office. But the circumstances of his disappearance remain murky. "He was very seriously hurt in a car accident," just before Christmas, Mr. Stapper says. This account contradicts Mr. Miller's own account of his convalescence. In a phone conversation on Tuesday from his home outside Philadelphia, he said he had slipped on a waxed floor. "I fell in my house. I broke my neck. Then it turns out the halo they put on my neck didn't work. Then they had to operate with bone chips harvested from a corpse. Oh my God, I am Frankenstein! Really, it was just insane. I was so out of it."

Mr. Miller says the checks did not go out earlier because the foundation's assets are mainly illiquid and he was waiting for the proceeds from the sale of work. He now promises to honor the grants within 30 days. "Our big problem is we have assets but we can't sell them easily. I haven't been paid since [last] January." Neither story takes into account the months of silence from Mr. Miller.

What is clear from this episode is the danger of unaccountability in single-trustee charities, which lack the kinds of checks and balances provided by the presence of a full board of directors. "It is really difficult when you have a board of one," says Mr. Detweiler. "A lot of things can happen. That's why most nonprofits have larger boards, so decisions are not made on personalities."

To his credit, Mr. Miller has fulfilled his mission of bringing greater attention to the legacy of Judith Rothschild. Just not the way she fully expected.

Gallery chronicle (January 2010)

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (911-3)(2009), © Marian Goodman Gallery

THE NEW CRITERION

January 2010

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

on “Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009” at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, “Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades” at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York & “Ray Parker: The Simple Paintings” at Washburn Gallery, New York.

The abstractions of Gerhard Richter tend to be mediocre paintings and polarizing works of conceptual art. An aura of academic theory surrounds them. To first encounter them in person is generally a so-so affair. There is much to look at but little to see. Once you get to know them, however, and to know about them, you either love them or hate them. (I have always come down in the latter camp.) The artist has built his career around this response. Now, an exhibition of several large new “monochromatic” abstractions at Marian Goodman Gallery has put this model of response in doubt, because I liked seeing some of the work in the show.[1] It left me wondering whether the aging German is off his game.

Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter escaped the RAF firebombing and later the Eastern Bloc to renounce all ideology. “I believe in nothing,” he said. This nihilistic position encouraged him to construct an artistic system out of (he claimed) moral and aesthetic equivalents. The traditional distinction between abstraction and representation became one such example. Here Richter took pains to occupy a middle ground, actively painting in both modes for much of his career. On one side, he appropriated a wide range of desultory images, often settling on the macabre, to create photo-realistic paintings of Allied bombing raids, Nazi relatives, Leftist German terrorists, snow-capped Alps, and burning candles. On the other, he labored to create facsimiles of mid-century gestural abstractions—like what is now on display at Goodman. In both approaches, Richter scrapes and pulls his paint across the canvas to blur the particulars, a process that effaces his hand from the work’s creation.

Self-effacement has enabled Richter to be taken up as both a Dadaist trickster and a top-selling commercial painter. He can bemoan the death of painting while making a living out of manipulating oil on canvas. He can leave his visual questions unanswered knowing that others will answer them for him. A cadre of theoreticians follows Richter from show to show, adding their own layers of varnish. The Dean of the Yale School of Art, Robert Storr, and the Harvard savant Benjamin Buchloh have been long-time boosters—Storr curated Richter’s large touring MOMA retrospective in 2002; Buchloh has recently worked at the American Academy in Berlin on a monograph of the artist. As an indication of what is to come, in the catalogue essay for the Goodman show, Buchloh shills for Richter with an opacity of language that reflects the artist’s own handling of paint on canvas.

In his essay, Buchloh attempts to link Richter with the history of avant-garde monochrome painting. The comparisons seem forced, because Richter’s one true antecedent has always been Andy Warhol. Richter saw his first Pop paintings in reproduction in 1962 and identified himself as “German Pop” a year later. His images of ruin, his aestheticization of violence, soon reflected Warhol’s, to the point where they both painted grieving portraits of Jackie Kennedy in 1963. Richter’s machine-like paint handling, which emerged from his training in Soviet Realism, also finds parallels in Warhol’s silkscreens (as do his exorbitant price tags).

Clement Greenberg once identified a certain style of paint handling as the “Tenth Street touch,” after the abstract artists who congregated on that block in Manhattan. “The stroke left by a loaded brush or knife frays out,” Greenberg explained, “when the stroke is long enough, into streaks, ripples, and specks of paint. These create variations of light and dark by means of which juxtaposed strokes can be graded into one another without abrupt contrasts.”

In his repetitive pulling and stripping of paint, half a century later, Richter takes the intentionality out of Tenth Street brushwork. Richter’s extended output of abstract art has made him into one of the most high-profile abstractionists working today, but he has mostly created Pop serializations of Abstract Expressionist gestures—work where the humanizing freedom of abstract paint handling has been numbingly beaten down and stripped away.

When Richter’s abstract paintings began appearing in galleries and museums, they resembled the rusting hulks of high modernism—another cold-hearted depiction of a ruined empire. What surprised me, and undoubtedly other observers as well, was the intensity with which Richter went on to develop his abstract idiom. You would think that once you’ve seen one Pop appropriation of an Ab-Ex painting, you’ve seen them all. Moreover, the evolution of an abstract style would seem to cut against Richter’s pose of non-belief. It would reveal an artistic mind making conscious decisions in the studio.

But Richter’s abstract work has evolved to display greater thickness and I might even say painterliness over the years. In his latest large work at Goodman, all from 2009, Richter took a series of polychrome paintings in the making and worked them over in a gauze of white oils. Bits of old colored paint show through where his knife cut down to the under-layers. Abstract Painting (911–4) (2009) even displays areas of wavy brush handling that seem to be nothing less than personal gestures. (The title's oblique reference to September 11, 2001 strikes me as a failed attempt to impute the painting with political significance).  

Buchloh goes to great lengths to justify Richter’s studio decisions as just another goose step in the march of the avant-garde. If Richter had left the polychromatic paintings as they were, Buchloh argues, the “obsolete chromatic constellation … could have been easily associated with a tradition of multi-chromatic abstraction that continued to govern long and large segments of twentieth century and pre- and postwar art, ranging from Hans Hoffmann [sic] to Howard Hodgkin, all of whom had claimed Henri Matisse as their legitimizing ancestor… . Contemporary spectators would inevitably have felt deceived by a color scheme that shows no evidence of any reflection whatsoever on its deeply problematic illusionistic desire and unconscious naturalistic agenda.”

Buchloh’s academic dialect requires trans- lation. Once deciphered, his argument reveals its flimsiness. “Problematized” art is great for what I might call “solutionatized” academics, those who spin political theories of the visual world, but I wonder if the mind games grow wearisome for the artists who supply them.

In his monochrome series, Richter seems to luxuriate in his own paintings. The sensuality of the finished work, which still reflects a high gloss shine and has not been worn down through the usual effacement, moves closer to Matisse, not further away. Has Richter found faith in the enduring life of paint? His latest work seems less like Pop appropriations and more like straight abstract canvases. He would probably consider this conclusion a failure. I consider it a success.

The pairing of Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924) and Al Held (1928–2005) in a comparative show makes more sense than you might think. Both artists arrived in New York around 1950 and exhibited in the same circle of Abstract Expressionists. They also became friends. Most significantly, they both matured from an early apprenticeship in the thick paint handling of the Tenth Street touch to a cooler, more hard-edged style. A five-decade side-by-side survey of notable work from each of their careers is now on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery.[2]

What becomes immediately clear from the Cuningham show is the importance of stylistic evolution to both artists, and how well this evolution has been documented in the selection of work assembled for the exhibition. These artists have confronted a similar set of challenges and arrived at different solutions (but not all that different, it turns out).

As evidence of their similar beginnings, the exhibition starts with a brushy figuration by Pearlstein (The Capture [1954]) and a thick abstraction by Held (Untitled [1958]). A decade later, both artists had already developed what we might consider to be their signature styles: Held’s hard-edged, rounded color abstractions (Echo [1966]) and Pearlstein’s domestic portraits of coolly aloof nudes (Female Nude on Yellow Drape [1965]). As if to complete the circle, there is also Pearlstein’s (clothed) portrait of Held and his wife Sylvia Stone from 1968, on loan from a private collection.

In the decades that followed, both artists went on to complicate their pictorial arrangements within their particular systems. Pearlstein increased the sharpness of his perspective angle, twisting and cropping his Female Model on Ladder (1976) against the picture frame. From the 1980s through the present day, Pearlstein filled his paintings with artifacts to make them into more complex tableaux. Held followed suit in his own way. By the 1970s, he also introduced volumetric space, first in black lines on white canvas. In Northwest (1973), he suggests a puzzle of three-dimensional geometric shapes that never fully break with the picture plane. His most accomplished and largest work, Roberta’s Trip II (1986), follows on as a tour de force of spatial architecture and color flatness.

Pearlstein’s paintings from the same time period looks right at home alongside it. When you see their shared infrastructure, these artists’ individual developments stand out in even greater relief.

Ray Parker (1922–1990) was the master painter of the edge. A second-generation Abstract Expressionist, sometimes called a Lyrical Abstractionist, Parker made his most well-known work as part of a series he executed in the 1960s called “Simple Paintings.” Many of these paintings are now on view at Washburn Gallery.[3]

Simplicity is a gift. It also requires a command of complexity. Parker’s great talent was to activate the edges of a simple arrangement of two or three color-forms in a white field through complex yet subtle means. The results are lush, energetic, and gestural but also naturalistic. Many of his shapes recall the pleasantness of clouds. The living quality of the work emerges from the careful arrangement of forms to each other (the color harmonies combined with the white space between them), as well as the modulation of paint around their edges. The underlying colors peaking out behind the forms speak to the history of a developing composition while also giving the forms extra chromatic resonance. In For My Love Denise (1961), reds, tans, and browns all emerge from what we first take to be a shape created by a single color. The results influenced decades of post-painterly and process artists. They remain as fresh today as they were nearly fifty years ago.

 

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

• “Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009” opened at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, on November 7, 2009 and remains on view through January 5, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on November 19, 2009 and remains on view through February 13, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “Ray Parker: The Simple Paintings” opened at Washburn Gallery, New York, on November 5, 2009 and remains on view through January 9, 2010. Go back to the text.

War Through Weakness: How the Terrorists Win

James writes (from Big Government)

For those who were expecting the election of Barack Obama to yield a peace dividend in the war on terror, the resurgence of Al-Qaeda has come as a surprise. Obama’s obsequious diplomacy was supposed to be a tonic to the aggressions of the Bush years, but his appeasement seems to have only encouraged more war. Rather than calm the Islamic world, Obama’s passivity has invited attack.

As in the Cold War, the current battle of ideology takes place in proxy wars. Unlike in the Cold War, the war on terror is largely fought through symbolic actions. Islamists do not make tactical attacks. They do not bomb Boeing factories or destroy highways and rail lines as in a conventional land war. Instead they destroy iconic buildings, trains, and airplanes. They use the spectacle of destruction, carried out in a diabolical way by suicide agents, as their means of waging war. That is the definition of a terror campaign.

The proper response to terror is not appeasement but counterattack. Islamists wage their terror campaigns in order to cow American influence abroad, especially in the Gulf. The answer to such attacks, if we hope to avoid them in the future, is to increase American involvement in Muslim countries both through soft influence and force of arms. Such a strategy was one of the best but least articulated justifications for the Second Gulf War.

Obama doesn’t get this. When the State department closed its embassy in Sanaa, Yemen for two days last week due to intelligence of an imminent terrorist threat, this action only increased the existential threat to Americans in Yemen and abroad. It came off as a symbolic withdrawal of American influence, especially so close to the attempted Northwest airline bombing. The temporary closing betokened a myopic vision of the war on terror as an isolated series of security issues rather than an ideological battle fought through connected symbolic action.

All of the West’s technology and intelligence can never prevent would-be terrorists from penetrating our defenses. The only way to prevent terrorism is to make it clear that terror attacks will result in symbolic outcomes that are most advantageous to us and least advantageous to them. We need a Containment Policy for the 21st Century.

The President's Yuletide Jeer

James writes (from The New Criterion & Big Government):

It isn't often that matters of art enter the political news cycle. The Obama administration is determined to change that. Over the holiday week, the online media mogul Andrew Breitbart drew his readers' attention to the ornamentation on the White House Christmas tree--in particular, an ornament featuring a picture of the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Also flagged were ornaments with images of the drag queen Hedda Lettuce and another with Obama's face taped onto a photograph of Mount Rushmore. The Christmas decorations, recycled and reappropriated by "community groups" with ornaments from previous White House installations, were the brainchild of Simon Doonan, the Pop Art gadabout tapped by the White House for the occasion. Doonan is most well known for his controversial window displays at the Barneys New York department store, which have included dioramas of Margaret Thatcher in dominatrix wear and Dan Quayle as a ventriloquist’s dummy.

The news of the White House's holiday hijink reached around the globe. Fox News ran a segment on it. Hedda Lettuce was delighted to lay claim to "the most famous ball in the nation." The most interesting commentary came out of the smackdown between the art critic for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Knight and Breitbart. I have had my run-ins with Knight myself. On this occasion, Knight thought he outdid the right-wing commentators by making a distinction between any old portrait of Mao and "Andy Warhol's 'Mao '"—from which the White House ball derived.

"The image is one of a very large series of silkscreen paintings and prints the late Pop artist made of Mao," wrote Knight. "Warhol's parody transformed the leader of the world's most populous nation into a vapid superstar—the most famous of the famous. The portrait photo from Mao's Little Red Book is tarted up with lipstick, eye-shadow and other Marilyn Monroe–style flourishes." To which Breitbart responded: "If Bush had one kitschy Hitler ornament among 1000s of others, I'm sure you'd refrain from judgment, right?... How the artist of the Mao picture negates the inappropriateness of honoring the world's worst mass murderer in the history of the world in the White House is beyond my pedestrian education."

Now, I admire Breitbart's rhetorical faux naivete, and of course there is a difference between "Andy Warhol's Mao" and the Mao portrait you find looking down over Tiananmen Square. I doubt the White House intended the offending ornament to be an overt celebration of the Great Leader. Yet it is equally naive to claim, as Christopher Knight does, that Andy Warhol's Mao is a straightforward attack on the dictator and therefore exculpatory. The image of Warhol's Mao is neither pro-Communist nor anti-Communist. It is simply parody, and parody with the broadest of implications. Warhol's Mao is an attack on an icon for the sake of its iconography, not for what that icon represents. This is why Doonan included it, and why we should be wary of it.

The problem with the White House Christmas Tree isn't Mao per se but another three letter word: Pop. Simon Doonan's choice of Christmas ornaments, "decorated" in a Dada assembly of camp images from drag queens to historical figures, is a kitschy affront to the icon they are meant to adorn—the Christmas tree itself. Doonan's pop sensibility might be appropriate for the window displays at Barneys New York, where it can poke fun at the materialism of the Christmas season, but Pop Art irony has no place in what should be the least ironic house in the nation. For this reason Doonan's White House tree should be criticized.