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.

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.

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])

The Hudson River School Revisited

CATALOGUE ESSAY
The Hudson River School Revisited
by James Panero

"Dee Shapiro: The Hudson Line" is on view at Andre Zarre Gallery, New York, from April 27 through May 29, 2010

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Gauguin's unanswerable questions are modern art's catechism. We begin with certainties but end in mysteries. Dee Shapiro's enigmatic work star ts in places we think we know only to lead us from conclusions. Up river, down tracks, nothing coming, nothing going. What's missing amid the water, bridges, boats, stations, docks, and towns are the narratives that might satisfy our attention and permit us to move along.

Paintings are inert when they leave us alone. The energy of a work comes from how it engages us. Shapiro keeps her paintings open so we might complete them. In between the nouns we supply the verbs of our own stories. Why do we look at these stations and docks? Are we leaving on a train? Waiting for a ferry? Has someone just departed? Have we just arrived? Or are we just watching? Are we seeing a vision through someone else's eyes? The more we look the less we know.

Shapiro has been drawing small her entire career. In the landscape work of the last several years, she has compressed a CinemaScope vision into diminutive scale. The resulting images, in exquisite detail, contain as much information as you might expect from much larger paintings. What differs is our proximity to it. Shapiro compels us to look at her work up close. The absence of monumentality, like the ambiguous narrative, pulls us in, encouraging a personal exchange with the work. When we approach, we come to occupy the painting, physically, with our own size.

Each decade of art in New York has its own spirit. The ar t of the 1970s, when Shapiro came of age, had a soul. The cool supremacism of the 1960s gave way to a studio-based culture that reconnected with the processes of making art. Since the Bauhaus, modernism has sought to elevate craft to the level of painting. In New York the legacy of the Bauhaus weavers combined with a new interest in homespun folkways to create a movement called Patterns and Decoration, or P&D. The 1970s women's movement gave P&D a political timeliness. An artist working in abstract geometric pattern, Shapiro became a founding member of Central Hall, the first women's gallery on Long Island. Her early work, exhibited at Andre Zarre Gallery in the mid-1970s and now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, used the artist's own color system to draw and paint intricate abstract patterns based on the Fibonacci Sequence, the numerical basis for Golden Spirals and Rectangles. The process, laid on a grid, recalled textile designs and needlepoint.

P&D was a more tradition-bound movement than its political associations might suggest. It was not radical enough to be sustained by academic theory, nor bold enough to be noticed in the macho celebrity culture that took over art in the 1980s. Yet the extreme of the middle, as Jack Tworkov called it, has well suited Shapiro. Today, she continues to develop the artistic idioms she first took up forty years ago.

Shapiro’s interest in small detail that we find in the early abstractions continues through her representational paintings. The smallness of the paintings recommends them to intimate environments. Unlike the Hudson River School landscapes of the nineteenth century, with their imperial awe, Shapiro's paintings seek out the more quotidian emotions of modern life. In response to Gauguin, one might only say, we come, we are, we go. Little else is certain.

For a PDF of the entire exhibition catalogue, click here

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.

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.

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.

The Art Market Explained

Why the bubble won't pop for Pop.

Sale of 200 One Dollar Bills, Sotheby's, November 11, 2009, c/o Sotheby's

THE NEW CRITERION
December 2009

The art market explained
by James Panero

As the auction commenced on the evening of November 11, 2009, the elbows of Tobias Meyer, the auctioneer and Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, ascended to a position in line with his shoulders. “600,” he said in his steely continental accent. His right arm pointed in the direction of the current bid—$600,000. His angular face turned in the opposite direction. His left arm ratcheted back close to his chin like a spring-loaded trap, palm out. Led by his forehead, Meyer’s torso leaned towards a potential bidder. It seemed as though he was attempting to pull up the current bid by a long string wrapped over his left forearm. As he entered maximum tilt, a 66.6-degree angle formed between his right hand, his head pointing to the left, and the button at the center of his bespoke suit, which had puffed out slightly around the lapels.

“650!” Meyer’s arms immediately reversed directions. He tipped the other way. On the auction block, Tobias Meyer moves only in equilateral triangles.

“Not your bid, China… . Against you, Ollie… .”

The wall of art to Meyer’s right rotated like a game-show display revealing each new lot. Gentlemen and ladies on telephones with extra-long novelty handset cords gesticulated from the side boxes. Whether watching in person from the auction room or by live webcast several continents away, the art world hung on Meyer’s chain of numbers, his bouncing figure, the specter he was conjuring up.

By the end of the evening, the Sotheby’s auction of contemporary work had added another chapter to the story of the art market. The auction house had kept the estimates artificially low. Their “buyer’s premium,” which is not factored into price estimations but counts in all reports of final sales, gave the final numbers an extra boost. Syndicates of investors can try to control an artist’s prices. Shill bids and chandelier bids always give the false sense of competition.

An art auction is less transparent than it might appear, but appearances are what mattered on November 11. Defying expectations, even after the fall of Lehman Brothers, the price bubble that had been inflating for post-war and contemporary art refused to pop for Pop. A silkscreen by Warhol, 200 One Dollar Bills from 1962, a large canvas of facsimiles of dollar bills arranged across it, brought in over $43 million, far exceeding the pre-sale estimate of $8–12 million and more than five times the price paid for any other lot. Four other artists attained record prices for their work. In a human-interest angle, a small self-portrait that Warhol had given to his young secretary, Cathy Naso, forty years ago, and which she kept in a closet, went for over $6 million, more than quadrupling the pre-sale estimate of $1–1.5 million. “Andy has made me famous for fifteen minutes,” Naso told the auction house, “and I’ve come to realize that fifteen minutes of fame is more than enough.” In total, the auction brought in over $134 million. The pre-sale estimate had been only $67.9–97.7 million.

The best explanation of the art market may be that it is inexplicable, which is one reason its alchemy continues to fascinate and capture headlines. In no other market do we lavish wealth on such useless and arbitrary things. Advanced systems of trade that are usually the facilitators of market intelligence—international public auctions and historical price indexes—only offer a false sense of comprehension while further distorting art’s valuation.

Yet if such things could be measured in degrees, the art market of today seems more unexplainable than ever. The prices paid for certain types of post-war and contemporary art continues to outpace prices for older work as well as recent art of greater nuance. Tens of millions of dollars may still chase after art of dubious formal qualities—factory-made work by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, smears by Francis Bacon and silkscreens by Warhol.

Big money’s relationship to “cheap” contemporary art is a recent phenomenon. It began in the 1960s, as Pop Art commercialized the avant-garde—not just selling the avant-garde, but also involving commercialism in defining the avant-garde. Whereas many Abstract Expressionists died before striking it rich, several of the avant-garde artists who came of age in the 1960s experienced a more profitable fate. In 1968, in a lecture at MOMA, Leo Steinberg prophetically observed:

Avant-garde art, lately Americanized, is for the first time associated with big money. And this is because its occult aims and uncertain future have been successfully translated into homely terms. For far-out modernism, we can now read “speculative growth stock”; for apparent quality, “market attractiveness”; and for an adverse change of taste, “technical obsolescence.” A feat of language to absolve a change of attitude. Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense it is hard cash. The whole of art, its growing tip included, is assimilated to familiar values. Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults.

Steinberg may have been wrong about many things, but he was correct about art’s direction. The point of sale, rather than the point of creation, came to take precedence in determining the primary meaning for certain works of art. In fact, price took on a more prominent concern in evaluating all works of art. More importantly, the art that proved to be most amenable to market manipulation was often work of the most uncertain initial value. Art depicting quick punchlines of cheapness and death shot up in price, while more traditional work, which might unfold through years of visual contemplation due to the complexity of its formal qualities, did not experience the same market uplift. Profit-minded artists like Warhol understood the difference. The crudity and ubiquity of Warhol’s silkscreen process, for example, removed the artist’s well-studied commercial hand from what is today his most valuable work. Warhol’s choice of demotic and lurid subject matter—dollar bills, soup cans, photographs of car-crash victims—further left the value of his art to be determined by his collectors rather than by critics and connoisseurs.

A consequence of this dynamic is that certain work—especially art unencumbered by a density of formal concerns—continues to attain new meaning with each turn on the open market, no matter the age of the piece. Top dollar has long been paid for work by living artists, but this is different. A Titian is a Titian regardless of the price. Today’s $300,000 Warhol is transformed into tomorrow’s $40-million Warhol, and a painting as significant as a $40-million Warhol must be worth $50 or $60 million at least. Certainly, it may be more desirable to explain the contemporary art market as a speculative investment or a tax dodge, some extension of intelligent investing, but the reality is tied up more intimately in the recent history of the avant-garde.

This history officially began at another Sotheby’s evening: October 18, 1973. Amid a circus of publicity and protest, Sotheby Parke Bernet, as the auction house was then known, held its first major auction from the collection of Robert C. Scull, a parvenu who had married into a taxi-cab fortune. The event marked not only the rise in prices but also the dominance of money in any discussion of contemporary art.

The prices achieved at the Scull auction may be a pittance by today’s standards, but many were records for the artists on the auction block. Each new bid was met by a cheering audience: Jasper Johns’s Double White Map, originally bought by Scull for $10,500, went for $240,000, the largest sum at the time for a living American artist; a Cy Twombly, originally purchased for $750, went for $40,000; Rauschenberg’s Thaw, purchased in 1958 for $900, went for $85,000; Warhol’s Flowers, originally acquired for $3,500, went for $135,000; the night’s total take came to $2,242,900. But the numbers tell only half the story. The other was the public spectacle of rapid profit-taking by a shameless self-promoter and his wife—Robert and Ethel Scull, known as Bob and Spike. “The Sculls learned everything they know from Andy Warhol,” wrote Barbara Rose, reporting on the auction for New York magazine:

They learned, for example, how to turn themselves into objects through packaging (Mrs. Scull appeared to have had everything lifted for the occasion), media exposure, and sheer, unadulterated chutzpa. The Sculls transformed their banal, nouveau riche selves into personalities by not being afraid to own up to being all that was considered lowbrow, déclassé, grasping, and publicity-seeking. They made a thing out of being vulgar, loud, and over dressed. They were, in short, shameless; and it was their shamelessness that finally got them the spotlight they ached for.

The artist Jack Tworkov made a similar observation of the Sculls in his journal back in 1962: “New People, like cheap bright aluminum pots. For whom is ‘Avant-Garde’ art intended… . They [are] embarrassed with their own status, eager to acquire through culture what has been denied to them because of family background, race, religion or the unaccustomed use of recently acquired wealth.”

Spectators at the auction were equally dismissive. Drivers from Scull’s taxi service protested in the sleet outside with signs that read “Never Trust a Rich Hippie,” and “Robbing cabbies is his living. Buying artists is his game.” Some artists purchased snow shovels at a local hardware store and began selling them in mock sales outside—a reference to the work of Marcel Duchamp and a commentary on the neo-Dada art- ists being horse-traded within. One neo-Dadaist at the heart of the auction, Robert Rauschenberg, allegedly arrived drunk and furious. “It was only love. This is the divorce,” he remarked of the sale. He shouted at Robert Scull: “I’ve been working my ass off just for you to make that profit.” Scull responded: “It works for you too, Bob. Now I hope you’ll get even bigger prices.” According to Ethel Scull, Rauschenberg then punched her husband in the stomach and walked off. The two never spoke again, but Scull proved to be right. Although the night’s sale did not directly benefit the artists, the consequential rise in prices for future work made Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol rich men. Warhol, the market savant, was singularly elated by his prices at the auction, and disheartened only that other artists had done better.

The late dealer André Emmerich was among the many luminaries in attendance that night. Recalling the event, Emmerich remarked: “In my life there have been very few watershed moments. One was the Goldschmidt sale [the 1957 London auction of eight Impressionist paintings that put Sotheby’s on the map], which I attended as a very young dealer. The Scull sale was a comparable watershed. I felt awe and shock—that pictures could be worth that much money. And a certain embarrassment—that the Sculls should have to sell in this way.”

A bubble with unique physical properties surrounds certain types of contemporary art. This fact becomes apparent when the November 2009 auctions are processed through the memory of the 1973 Scull sale. The contemporary art bubble has been inflating for nearly forty years. The larger this bubble gets, the more indestructible it seems. Of course, the bubble inflates for some but not for others. In 1973 not all artists fared as well as Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Johns. The abstract painter Dan Christensen had done well, but the temporary rise in prices only flooded the market for his lyrical work, which eventually tanked. This was a typical price bubble—a short-lived over-evaluation, followed by a crashing correction.

While the market came to agree upon a certain value for Christensen’s painterly content, art determined by the context of sale remains open-ended. Recent history demonstrates that the prices paid for Pop-style work show little sign of letting up. On the upside, great art of the highest traditional quality, from representational to abstract, continues to be available at very reasonable prices. On the downside, the resulting growth of market-driven art looks less like a bubble and more like a contagion, threatening to overtake more traditional styles of art. This process occurs in several recognizable ways.

In 2006, Tobias Meyer infamously remarked that “the best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart.” The quote received wide circulation because of its patent absurdity. A market is only as smart as the people who control it, and the art market has proved to be a dull creature when it comes to appreciating a broad range of artistic qualities. But to give Meyer credit, the market can be very smart about the art that speaks to it.

The art market has a unique talent for promoting art about the market. Since exhibition history enhances value, the collectors of what we might call “market art” have a vested interest in seeing their work take up space in traditional public collections. They often have the financial leverage to make it happen. In this way, the hedge-fund collector Steven A. Cohen could place Damien Hirst’s shark tank on temporary loan at the Metropolitan Museum. The oversized trinkets of Jeff Koons start appearing at the same time in the museum’s rooftop gallery.

Curators defend such expensive contemporary work as relevant to the commercialism of the age: the market gives meaning to the art. Through their acquisitions, international collectors can demonstrate their membership in the social club of market excess. Many museums will even sell off low-priced traditional art in their permanent collections in order to purchase a single overpriced contemporary piece. The public meanwhile gravitates to such contemporary art because the public sees its own profligacy reflected in it—an attitude that the public then feels justified in maintaining.

From toxic assets to deficit spending, representations of value can be more appealing than the solidity of wealth. The irony of the November 2009 Sotheby’s sale is that the returns were buoyed by the weakness of the dollar against the relative strength of international currencies. Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills—which was originally owned by “the legendary collector” (according to Sotheby’s) Robert C. Scull, and sold at the Scull estate auction in 1986 for $385,000—is more appealing to its new undisclosed collector than the $43 million dollars given in exchange for it. In the sale of 200 One Dollar Bills, could it be that representations of representations of wealth mean more than money itself—even more than the supposed national treasure that money signifies? As the dollar continues to depreciate, a crude illustration of money becomes a highly prized representation of value. Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills goes up in price by tens of millions of dollars. Two hundred actual one dollars bills, meanwhile, become more and more worthless—just like the excellent art that $200, $2,000 or $20,000 can still purchase. Take that to the bank.

An exercise course for the eye

In the appreciation of art, they say the eye is like a muscle. It needs training and regular workouts. Unfortunately, you could pass through an entire academic study of art history and never have the chance to look at great work up close. No wonder academia is besotted with art theory. With only slides and reproductions, the eye becomes weak and the head takes over.

The artist and family friend Tom Goldenberg is someone who has overcome this deficiency. He has developed his own art through a close study of drawings through history. Now he is offering a course to bring this study to others. It is my pleasure to endorse it and bring it to the attention of all. And I would be remiss if I did not, because I join the course whenever possible and have taken a great deal away from it already.

Professor Tom builds his class through a little known resource in New York: He reserves the private study rooms in New York's major museums and hand selects drawings from the collections, which are brought out on a table for the class to see. Tom encourages his class to look at the work, without glass, long and close, and then discuss it. The course meets once a week in the afternoons and is open to everyone. With no theoretical jargon to get in the way, the course also requires no prior experience. Everyone benefits from the discipline of close looking.

Gallery chronicle (November 2009)

Sam Francis, Middle Blue (1957), courtesy of Glenstone

THE NEW CRITERION
November 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Sam Francis: 1953–1959”at L&M Arts; “Jay Milder: Recent Work” at Lohin Geduld Gallery; “Abby Leigh: The Sleeper’s Eye” at Betty Cuningham Gallery and “Silver Anniversary: 25 Photographs, 1835 to 1914” at Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs.

Even by the exacting standards of the Abstract Expressionists, Sam Francis was an exceptional egomaniac, one of the last century’s great high-flying experiments in self-absorption. Born in San Mateo, California in 1923, he trained as an airman in the Second World War. When this experience ended in a bout of spinal tuberculosis following a crash, he took up painting from his hospital bed. As he recovered, laid out on his stomach and sketching on the floor, he came to see himself as a shaman with mystical powers. It was a notion that appealed to his diabolical nature, and rather than exorcise them, he indulged his artistic demons through thirty years of Jungian therapy (he was fascinated by Jung’s writings on alchemy). “I was a bird,” Francis once said of his earliest dreams, “and my job was to fly around the earth leaving trails of beautiful clouds behind me until the whole earth, the whole sky, was covered in a network of colored clouds.”

In 1950 Francis moved from California to Paris and quickly became one of the decade’s wealthiest abstract artists. Here he lived out his bird-dreams by painting huge lumi- nous cloud-forms, mackerel-sky compositions soaked in rain and infused with light. Acclaimed in Europe and Asia, he developed outside the New York School. Conventional wisdom has it that his Stateside reputation suffered through his absence. Perhaps, but by avoiding the center of post-war abstraction he also avoided its inward pressures. With studios stretching from California to Switzerland to Japan, he managed to float above the fray for his entire career—his powers failed only in 1994, when prostate cancer grounded him for good.

The Francis Zeppelin operated best when fully inflated, and this month we have a couple of opportunities to climb aboard. In 1968 the filmmaker Jeffrey Perkins began shooting a documentary of the artist. Forty years later this project has reached the silver screen with a limited release at Anthology Film Archives in New York in September and film festivals in Naples and Rome. The movie matches recent interviews of Francis’s contemporaries with Perkins’s archival footage. At the heart of the film is an “interview” between Francis and Perkins shot on 16mm in Santa Monica in 1973. Stretched out on a deck chair and talking through his nose, Francis does his best late Brando, one big bloated grin issuing profundities. Painting, he says, “is devotion to the self.” He speaks of “getting back into myself. I had become too extroverted.” While bemoaning the demands on his time, he fiddles with a roll of gaffer’s tape. He also fields unfortunate follow-up questions from his young son Osamu sitting off camera (“What shit?” “Lots of times I say things you say I’m busy.” “Remember when you didn’t want to go play hide and seek?”).

Painful. That Francis was a head case is all too apparent. In terms of making art, the footage in the studio is more revealing. The painter Al Held singles out Francis’s “light, lyrical hand.” Wearing nothing more than white socks, a red smock, and blue underwear, we see Francis walking over his enormous canvases like an out-of-shape Superman on retirement pay, flinging, pouring, and rolling out his paint with the greatest of ease. I am always grateful for glimpses of painters in the studio. With the rise of alternative media, the oil-on-canvas world is ever more rarefied, like the production of artisanal cheese. Filmmakers are smart to capture this world before it dies out. The findings, however flawed, remain illuminating.

Through December, L&M Arts has mounted a medium-sized exhibition dedicated to the art of Francis’s Paris years, and we can take Perkins’s images of Francis’s studio practice to the show.[1] If the Eastern aesthetic is an art of absence, Francis’s appeal to his Asian patrons is readily apparent. In his best work at L&M, like Middle Blue (1957) and Blue out of White (1958), on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum, pools of color circulate in bright empty space. Francis’s lyrical hand often knew just what to leave out. Even in denser compositions, such as Black (1955), white light reaches around his dark forms. The more open the space, the better the work tends to be. In some of Francis’s best paintings (not on display in this show), the pigment has been pushed to the extreme edges of the canvases. In his studio, sometimes Francis really could fly.

If Francis had only stayed in that studio, he would have done a lot less collateral damage. Perkins’s film offers some choice stories of the artist at his worst. Ed Moses recalls that after one drug haze Francis left his wallet containing $32,000 cash in a café (someone returned it). His daughter Kayo Malik remembers smoking pot with her generally absentee dad around age thirteen and attending the Moulin Rouge. Walter Hopps recounts a story of how Francis won over his fourth wife (of five), Mako Idemitsu, by renting a P-38 and threatening to crash the plane into her father’s house unless he consented to their marriage; it so happened that the father, Sazo, was also Francis’s biggest patron—the Japanese oil baron’s foundation, the Idemitsu Museum of Art, still maintains the largest collection of his work.

Today the absurdities of Francis’s life seem almost quaint. On the one hand, the paintings can still appear fresh, if at times a little lightweight. On the other, Francis’s mistreated wives and children might want to ask the Jung Foundation for a refund. You have to wonder if his indulgences were worth it. The art does not always justify the means.

When the painter Jay Milder says that “my work has to do with symbols, not signs,” I think I get it. Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1934, Milder is descended from the Ukrainian Hasidic mystic Rabbi Nachman. He matches his studies in the art of the New York School with an interest in Kabbalah and Theosophy. His paintings, now on display at Lohin Geduld, seem packed with symbols, with bits of numbers and letters layered on top of one another.[2] Milder marks out these symbolic particles with a childlike hand and gobs of paint. The clumsy paint handling, as well as the Cosby-sweater-like color choices, camouflages the complex symbol system contained within. Aside from Noah’s Ark Series (2008–09), which manages a pleasing overall composition, I am not sure I would want to live with many of these paintings. They start out frighteningly overpacked and rather garish. Still they could be the kind of work that, through extended viewing, reveals interesting secrets over time.

Since first taking painting classes with Will Barnet at the Art Students League as an adult, Abby Leigh has been on an artistic journey that I doubt she expected or can even quite explain, which makes her development all the more interesting. As she recently recounted in The Brooklyn Rail: “One day [Barnet] said, ‘You should be a painter.’ And I said, ‘Please, I don’t want to be a laughing stock at 40. Don’t tell me that if you’re just being nice.’ And he said, ‘No, no, I think you should be a painter.’ So I thought, well okay, I’ll give it a shot.” Trained in the theater and married to the Broadway producer Mitch Leigh, who wrote Man of La Mancha and a famous jingle for Sara Lee, Abby Leigh brings a precise hand to her odd and wide-ranging sensibility (her studio is filled with biological specimens). Many of her paintings address the issues of sight. She was, until recent surgery, legally blind.

For her third exhibition at Betty Cuningham, Leigh takes on optical art with supersaturated monochromatic paintings that seem to glow in halos of light.[3] Emerging Thought (2008), in deep red, has an almost synesthetic hum to it, with subtle tonal variations suggesting blind spots and other ocular effects. To this Leigh adds two black-and-white series on paper, one of targets and the other of horizontal bands, both made of smoke. To miraculous effect, Leigh has blown smoke clouds over paper to produce a marbleizing texture. She controls the smoke layers with masking tape. I found the resulting hard edges of the work too rigid. Her technique is innovative, but the overall compositions appear dated. I would prefer to see the subtle variations of the oils brought to the smoke. You never know with Leigh—that could be next, or something else entirely.

One of the finest dealers in early photography, Hans P. Kraus is now celebrating his silver anniversary with a must-see show of twenty-five haunting works from the first photographic experiments in 1835 to the Photo Secession and the Great War.[4] Kraus calls his exhibitions Sun Pictures after a term that William Henry Fox Talbot used to distinguish the products of his new technology from other forms of reproduction: His work was the product of the sun’s rays alone. In many ways Kraus’s exhibition is a celebration of this light. His earliest pieces, Talbot’s Tripod in the Cloisters of Lacock Abbey (1835–36) and Hippolyte Bayard’s Bust, possibly of Alexander the Great, are two spectral examples of some of the first rays of light collected in history, barely visible through the darkness. Both of these early experiments are so fragile that they can only be viewed in near darkness and for brief periods of time. “These are the whispers of the invention of photography,” says Kraus. “The very act of looking at it is creating a chemical reaction.” The dealer keeps the Bayard in a special velvet-covered case.

What distinguishes all of these images from many other early photographs is their high state of preservation. They are not artifacts but still works of art, revealed to us in the state their creators first saw them. Kraus calls himself a dealer in the “Old Masters of photography,” and he has an expert eye for condition. But Kraus also has a sensibility for photography’s wonderment—the translucence of the flowers in Anna Atkins’s cyanotype photogram (“Iris pseudacorus”); the composition of Etienne-Jules Marey’s Plaster Seagulls in a Zoetrope (1887). The strange presence of Charles Nègre’s Chandelier is a special example. In this unsentimental work, which could stand on its own in any contemporary art fair, Nègre has painted in the candle flames. The technique comes out of necessity. Flickering flame could not be captured by early photography’s long exposures. But the result also seems to radiate an unearthly glow. The photograph is a celebration of light, both real and imagined.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Sam Francis: 1953–1959” opened at L&M Arts, New York, on October 15 and remains on view through December 12, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “Jay Milder: Recent Work” opened at Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York, on October 14 and remains on view through November 14, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Abby Leigh: The Sleeper’s Eye” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on October 15 and remains on view through November 14, 2009. Go back to the text.
4. “Silver Anniversary: 25 Photographs, 1835 to 1914” opened at Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs, New York, on October 14 and remains on view through November 20, 2009. Go back to the text.

The Culture Crash on WNYC

James writes:

On August 31 I discussed my article "The Culture Crash: How Risky Investments Have Endangered New York's Leading Arts Institutions" on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Here is the audio recording and below is a video of my studio appearance.

I encourage you to listen in and posts your comments about the broadcast on the show's website here. Let's keep the discussion going. Since I am in the process of writing a short online follow-up article for City Journal, your comments are all the more appreciated.

Gallery chronicle (October 2009)

 

George Grosz, Nude in Dunes (1948), courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
October 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “George Grosz: The Years in America: 1933–1958” at David Nolan Gallery; “Mel Kendrick: Markers” in Madison Square Park; “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945–1967” at Knoedler & Company; “Leon Polk Smith” at Washburn Gallery; “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes”at Jim Kempner Fine Art; “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes” at Jim Kempner Fine Art & “Color-Time-Space” at Lohin Geduld and Janet Kurnatowski Galleries.

 

Many people have asked me how the art world is doing in the economic downturn. I am sorry to report that the art world died in early August. This tragic event was not unexpected, nor was it unwelcome. The previous several months had been rough. The end came as a blessing.

After the death of the art world comes its afterlife. The silly season that stretched for nearly a decade will give way to more sober reflection. Galleries will continue to close. But we also know that some galleries will survive, thanks to their intelligence and sensitivity to the emerging mood. Several are off to a good start.

One artist whose antennae were always attuned to changing situations was the German Expressionist George Grosz. The artist is now the subject of a museum-quality exhibition at David Nolan. The business of good gallery-making begins with the education of the eye. With twenty-nine Grosz paintings and drawings and a 280-page catalogue, David Nolan is now running his own class in Grosz anatomy.[1]

In the 1920s Grosz lampooned the excesses of the Weimar Republic, corrupt and blind to Germany’s darker forces. He singled out Adolf Hitler for ridicule when the Führer was little more than a failed artist. A one-time member of the Communist Party, Grosz also repudiated his leftist allegiances after a visit to the Soviet Union. Hitler and Stalin came to appear to him as two sides of the same war machine. Rightly so. Yet perhaps most surprisingly, Grosz developed an unalloyed exuberance for the United States. This romanticism emerged first through his reading of popular American literature and developed in dialectical opposition to his pessimism towards the deteriorating European climate.

When an invitation came in 1932 to teach a summer course at the Art Students League, Grosz booked passage the next month on the ocean liner New York. He arrived to the fanfare of the American press. He wrote back to his wife: “I love you, America. I feel like this is my country, I belong here.” He soon decided to emigrate with his family to New York and did so early the next year. Two weeks after his arrival, SA troops stormed his flat and studio in Berlin and declared him an enemy of the regime.

Anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin, pro-America—the trifecta of political astuteness, but a victory that has complicated Grosz’s legacy. Anti-Hitler, good. Anti-Stalin, tolerable. Pro-America, beyond the pale. As Klaus Mann, an exile in Paris, complained in 1936: “He has changed; a very long, very passionate battle has left him tired. He has become apolitical—or is at least trying to be… . He no longer draws: he paints.”

Grosz lived and worked in the United States for twenty-five years. He became one of the earliest high-profile refugees from Hitler. Yet while his audience expected the caustic illustrator to turn his pen against his new homeland, Grosz went about exploring other sides of his artistic vision. The nudes and landscapes that resulted are the revelations of the Nolan show, along with the dense allegorical work he developed in paint.

Grosz could apply his talents for drafting to many styles. The show ranges from black-and-white wartime illustrations to satirical send-ups of Hitler (So Smells Defeat [1937]). He worked his way through the Old Masters, Breugel in particular, by creating pressure-cooked paintings like the infernal Retreat (Rückzug) (1946) with swirling fires, twisted barbed wire, and a shot-up brick wall that has a three-dimensional texture in oil. In Cain or Hitler in Hell (1944), a pile of human skeletons climbs up Hitler’s leg.

That Grosz had a flip side to his dark vision makes him a more complex and interesting artist. His “romantic” American landscapes are as true to their own time and place as are his dystopian images of Europe. Grosz lived on Long Island and vacationed on Cape Cod. He adored the beaches and often painted his wife, Eva, in nude and sometimes erotic scenes in the dunes. The rolling sand and wispy beach grass in Grosz’s landscapes become fecund allegories for a land of milk and honey. As he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1950, “What do you have against the dune paintings and nature studies, they are part of the whole oeuvre—if I hadn’t done them (with passion and love, too), I would not have been able to paint my imaginative pictures, because ‘invention’ is only derived from nature.” He was right. Drawings like Dunes at Wellfleet (c. 1940) and Dunes Cape Cod (1939) are among the best works in the show, and to be blind to them is to be blind to Grosz’s entire vision.

Several shows this month deserve far more attention than space allows, so here are the best of them, however briefly. When I last reviewed the sculptor Mel Kendrick, another David Nolan artist, I objected to the diminutive scale of the work on view. Kendrick is a constructivist who carves an abstract shape from a wood block, then places the result on top of a base made of the leftover pieces. For an artist who likes to show his hand, sometimes the process gets the better of the product. Not so for a set of monumental sculptures now on view in Madison Square Park.[2] Derived from many of the same forms at his last Nolan show, these outdoor giants executed in poured black-and-white concrete are playful exceptions to the cloying piles that normally pass for public sculpture. To appreciate their power, just visit the park with children around. By climbing through every hole and jumping off every shape of Kendrick’s work, they understand the fun of these structures without the need for further explanation.

The New York School artist Conrad Marca-Relli brought collage to Abstract Expressionism. Some of his best work is now on view at Knoedler.[3] In 1967 the critic William Agee noted that Marca-Relli “accepted the potential risks inherent in collage and developed it as a complete pictorial system.” Unlike earlier artists who used collage as fragmentary elements in larger paintings, Marca-Relli created entire collage abstractions. An untitled work at Knoedler from 1952 serves as an example of what he could do. With a white surface covering a black background, Marca-Relli cuts a swirling line across the canvas and pulls the gaps open exposing the black beneath, sometimes turning and re-pasting a white chad back onto the surface. “The limitations of the material acted two ways,” the artist once said. “It confronted me with a problem of solving the shape and reducing it to the simple form that I was looking for. On the other hand, a collage has always been to me a kind of discipline.” It was a discipline that Marca-Relli perfected.

From Malevich to Albers, the square has long been a focus of abstract attention. Sometime in the 1960s, the circle began to receive its due. The simple drawings of Leon Polk Smith from 1968 now on view at Washburn—along with one much larger, shaped canvas—pay homage to the celestial.[4] On a white background Smith collects a handful of colorful circles together in multiple iterations. These dots act as singular objects, but we can also read them as portholes onto larger circles beneath. Smith leaves these forms to be rounded out in our minds, a dynamic that never loses energy.

It is no secret that twentieth-century modernism had a bad body image, as everyone from Picasso to Giacometti beat a psychological reading into the classical form. Look at the healthy bodies of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and realize the beauty that was lost when art turned away from the idealized nude. The sculptor Carole Feuerman has been confronting this development for decades by reevaluating the classical nude in a contemporary way. Her work is now on view at Jim Kempner.[5] Unlike other hyper-realist sculptures, Feuerman is not afraid of idealized form. She specializes in female swimmers. According to the modernist playbook she does everything wrong. Her work indulges in sentimentality. Her materials include hair and plastic resin, which she splashes on her figures like drips of pool water. Not to mention the fact that we haven’t seen bodies this fit since the Fascist summer-carnival sculpture in Zell am See. On the one hand, for all of her technique, I found some of the polychromy, especially in the faces, a little waxen. On the other, a work like Tree (2009), with its swimmer standing on a tree trunk in nothing but a leafy bathing cap, seems like an art nude for the twenty-first century, real and of the moment.

Last June, I mentioned the upcoming exhibition of Tim Bavington’s hard-edged abstraction at Jack Shainman Gallery with some enthusiasm. Having now seen the show, I can say it was a disappointment.[6] Bavington is out to revisit the optical art of the 1960s. Unfortunately, he approaches this task with the gauzy reserve of Gerhard Richter. Bavington’s optical effects are referential rather than internal to his painted form. He reinvestigates the synesthetic link between color and music, but the connections he draws are facile. For one painting, Fell in Love with a Girl (2009), Bavington informs us the work was “named for a White Stripes song” but “inspired by Missoni fabric.” Please, someone send this artist a Scriabin CD.

The abstract painters Joanne Freeman and Kim Uchiyama have organized an excellent group show over two galleries with eye-popping work by Jennifer Riley and Thornton Willis, among others.[7] Allow me to single out my new favorite painting. It is My Beautiful Laundrette (2008) by Stephen Westfall. The colorful work is based on a grid design the artist has been developing for years. What separates Westfall from the old serialists is the way he fits his pieces together, with his square corners coming together slightly out of alignment. One’s darting eyes pick up the differences and animate the frames. Color, texture, and form all come together. It is a mesmerizing spectacle and a vision, I hope, of things to come.

New Yorkers came out by the thousands for the season’s gallery openings, and several galleries mounted strong exhibitions. The death of the art world may be the best thing to happen in years.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “George Grosz: The Years in America: 1933–1958” opened at David Nolan Gallery, New York, on September 16 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “Mel Kendrick: Markers” opened in Madison Square Park, New York, on September 17 and remains on view through December 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945–1967” opened at Knoedler & Company, New York, on September 12 and remains on view through November 14, 2009. Go back to the text.
4. “Leon Polk Smith” opened at Washburn Gallery, New York, on September 10 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
5. “Carole Feuerman: Swimmers, Bathers & Nudes” opened at Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York, on September 17 and remains on view through October 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
6. “Tim Bavington: Up in Suze’s Room” opened at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, on September 11 and remains on view through October 10, 2009. Go back to the text.
7. “Color-Time-Space” opened at Lohin Geduld and Janet Kurnatowski Galleries, New York on September 10 and remains on view through October 11, 2009. Go back to the text.

Gallery chronicle (September 2009)

 
Jack Tworkov, Thursday (1960), courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC / Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

We think of painting as a window, but for Jack Tworkov painting was a home. “My striving is not for the far-off or far-out landscape,” he once wrote, “but for the identification and naturalization of a home ground.” So he became the master contractor of Abstract Expressionism. In color and gesture he rarely dazzled. In the construction of work, however, he could be flawless. Rather than seek affection, he commanded admiration. His paintings do not seduce, they secure. They dig a foundation, erect four square walls, and put a roof over your head that is built to last.

In 1960 Tworkov complained that “I’ve been second-rated by every critic, large or small.” Two first-rate productions now allow us to reconsider this estimation. At no other moment, including 1964’s Whitney survey and 1987’s Pennsylvania retrospective, could this artist be so fully examined. At the UBS Art Gallery in midtown Manhattan, the curator Jason Andrew has assembled a must-see show called “Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes, Five Decades of Paintings.”[1] The exhibition presents numerous Tworkov drawings and twenty-nine major paintings, from Untitled (Still Life with Peaches and Magazine) (1929) to the large Compression and Expansion of the Square, completed just before the artist’s death in 1982. At the same time, Yale University Press has published the definitive collection of Tworkov’s writing in a book called The Extreme of the Middle, edited by Mira Schor.[2] This 480-page volume brings together Tworkov’s artist statements, published reviews, and correspondence, but most notably it unearths extensive selections from Tworkov’s diaries. In their philosophical and artistic introspection, these rigorous notations may just be the New York School’s answer to the journals of Delacroix.

Born in Biala, Poland, in 1900, Yakov Tworkovsky emigrated to the United States in 1913 with his mother and younger sister Janice, joining his father on the Lower East Side. The sister took the name of her Old World hometown to become a famous painter herself, a jet-setting Parisian ex-pat, and the common-law wife of Ford Madox Ford. Jack proved to be much less facile in putting down roots. He wrestled with the despair of alienation. “I have the perverse desire to be completely known as a Jew to non Jews but deny that fact to Jews,” he wrote of his religion in 1954. “My predicament is that I’m essentially a religious man—a religious man without a religion and so abstract art is perhaps the nirvana towards which I reach,” he reflected in the 1970s.

The order one can impose on painting became Tworkov’s support. “Geometrics or any systemic order gives me a space for meditation, adumbrates my alienation,” he wrote in a revealing letter to the painter Andrew Forge in 1981.

Tworkov studied at New York’s Stuyvesant High School and entered Columbia University to major in English Literature. He thought of becoming a poet. Then exposure to Cézanne and Matisse lured him to painting. Upon graduation in 1923, he enrolled in the National Academy of Design to study with Ivan Olinsky and Charles Hawthorne. He followed Janice to Provincetown and met Karl Knaths. At the Art Students League he trained with Guy Pène du Bois and Boardman Robinson.

Like many of the older members of the New York School, Tworkov took up painting with the Public Works Project. His genre work from this period, such as Afternoon Bridge (The Card Players) (c. 1935), is eminently forgettable, a fact he was quick to acknowledge. He became disillusioned with loaded political subject matter and stripped his work down to the bone. Tworkov may be known as the Abstract Expressionist who turned increasingly minimal in the 1960s, but the importance of structure is apparent from his early work. “I turned to still life as a release from subject and spectacular composition,” he wrote in 1947. His Untitled (Still Life with Blue Pitcher and Grapes) (1946) demonstrates an engineering hand, as line twists through space to connect elements into a unified whole. In 1948 he rented a studio next door to his friend Willem de Kooning. As a founding member of the Eighth Street Club, Tworkov then emerged alongside de Kooning during Abstract Expressionism’s rapid ascendency in the 1950s.

Some of Tworkov’s paintings from this period endure as masterpieces of post-war American art. House of the Sun (1952) ranks with de Kooning’s 1948 Painting in the MOMA collection as a supreme demonstration of gesture tied to form, here in primary colors. Watergame from 1955 is another example. Yet while Tworkov’s structure was always strong, often his color choice and brushwork lacked assurance. His painting could be stiff and overbuilt. Nausica (1952) is one instance where pastels produce a cartoonish riff on a de Kooning Woman.

The Dionysian expression that came to define Abstract Expressionism held little interest for Tworkov, and he gradually moved towards a more Apollonian center. “I would not be comfortable with a painting that was too aggressively stated or too sleek or too self-consciously simple, or too beautiful or too interesting,” he noted in 1973. “I am uncomfortable with extreme portrayals. I let reason examine disorder.” He recognized the uplifting quality in mid-century art: “The abstract-expressionist movement, although negative in its rejection of all tradition and especially of the French art of the first half of the century, did reflect this positive element, the postwar euphoria, the sudden feeling of strength both physically and spiritually.” Yet he turned against the violence of de Kooning: “We all dissent from de Kooning’s example of defacing, of painting out the painting, of throwing the defiled scrapings back on to the surface, in a gesture of contempt and hatred… . My attitude was to abandon the angry gesture, to wear in this respect a neutral face.”

Tworkov’s home life reflected his desire for order. He rejected the licentiousness of bohemia. He identified with middle-class America and lived accordingly. “Jack took care of everything—his car, his house, his lawn, his tools, his studio, his brushes, his family, himself,” noted the poet Stanley Kunitz. “Nobody could have led a more admirably moderate, regulated, or disciplined life.”

His diaries reveal a rigorous self-questioning that emerged from a revulsion with both Nazism and Communism. “The left has become the biggest cesspool,” he wrote in 1958. This sentiment matured into his identification with a patriotism that led not towards ideology but to freedom from ideology. “Only bourgeois society as we know it in America today gives me the freedom to join nothing, no organization and protects me from its vengeance,” he wrote in 1959. “We had and still have in this country the chance to take a new turn towards humanity and human society,” he continued, “Not Russia, not India, but America is the hope of the world.” He then proclaimed in 1960: “My Americanism amounts to a total conversion. I know myself to be Jewish, but my desire is for identification with those people and those forces that move towards making this country a reality of the Bill of Rights.” Tworkov saw the direction of his philosophy for what it was: “Rereading some of these notes I am struck by the conservatism of some of my views, how uncongenial they are to the prevailing intellectual point of view. However these notes are a response to the most serious self-questioning… . They represent not what I ought to believe, but what I know I believe.”

As Tworkov found his home in middle-class America, it meant an exit from artistic bohemia and the sacrifice of his own reputation. He despised Dada and its new formulations. (“A Jew is out of his head if he is for Dada,” he wrote in 1959, “like a hare running with the hounds.”) Yet rather than despair at his falling out, Tworkov found an additional spur. Many of his signature works emerged during this period. “I think the time has now arrived for me to do the best work of my life,” he wrote in his journal in 1960. He was right: Thursday (1960) is a standout of the UBS show. A red armature binds together the painting’s green and white forms, which come alive through an ambiguity of figure and ground. Although Tworkov says his dealer Leo Castelli once worried over them, one of Tworkov’s heraldic flag–type paintings, RWB #3, is also a triumph. “They are all in red, white and blue, and perhaps unconsciously an ironic comment on my growing patriotism.”

Tworkov moved to academia. In 1963 he became the chairman of the art department of Yale. He discovered a greater interest in mathematics and geometry. Unfortunately for an artist who once remarked that “all programs represent future sorrows,” much of the work from this period comes off as programmatic. Idling II (1970) might as well be the prototype for stain-concealing wallpaper. Even his writing seems increasingly formulaic. “The painting activity stands in ironic contrast to the measuring activity,” he noted at the time. “The brushing represents a purely random activity.”

The diagnosis of bone cancer around 1980 reawakened his human touch. Conventional wisdom dismisses all of Tworkov’s post-1960s work as bloodless noodling. Yet Compression and Expansion of the Square (1982) may just be the most assured painting in the show. In this three-panel work, structure becomes gesture. Tworkov built the animation of the piece into its form, not its brushstroke.

Tworkov could be a captive of his own intellect. “I had a revulsion against the intellectual in my own nature and in art,” he wrote in 1947. “I am a man condemned—behind bars—a prisoner,” he lamented in 1954. “I need desperately to be alone again—to stop the endless verbalizing of all my thinking, and to paint.” Yet he could also harness his intellectual pressures to build great structures in paint. “Reason chooses the ground where the play of feeling is set free. … It does not so much limit as it contains,” he remarked. While his paintings became marked by a greater sense of order, in fact he always exercised a high level of control, even in his more gestural work. “His paintings have a quality that other American-type non-objective paintings do not have,” Fairfield Porter rightly observed. “Though superficially just as broad and dashing, they are entirely conscious… . Tworkov’s power, which gives his paintings their lasting effectiveness, comes from his never letting go of awareness.” Tworkov believed in an “aesthetic morality,” and it began with the trueness of his line. “Art can become the true square and level of all things,” he wrote. Rather than a mere concern for structure and gesture, for Tworkov “trueness and pleasure add up to the most fundamental quality in a painting.”

 

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

• “Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes, Five Decades of Paintings” opened at UBS Art Gallery, New York, on August 13 and remains on view through October 27, 2009. Go back to the text.
• The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, edited by Mira Schor; Yale University Press, 480 pages, $45. Go back to the text.

Special Report: The Pawnbroker

ART & ANTIQUES
September 2009

SPECIAL REPORT: The Pawnbroker
by James Panero

With the art lending business facing challenges, a startup tries an unconventional approach.

If the art of business has revolutionized the business of art in the past decade, Tony Barreiro and Ray Parker Gaylord are firmly in the vanguard. The San Francisco-based company ArtLoan, which they founded in 2004, lends money against the value of art collections owned by individuals and galleries. In this venture they join more established art financiers in New York. But unlike these large players, who lend only against big-ticket items, Barreiro and Gaylord say they want to change the way the world views even its smallest collectibles. Essentially, they aim to turn art and antiques at every level into ATMs.

Barreiro and Gaylord say they formed ArtLoan after a fateful visit to the local bank. They wanted a loan backed by a Picasso painting that Gaylord had inherited from his father, Charles, a dealer who specialized in antique mantelpieces. “We went to a major bank in San Francisco because they had extended credit to us based on real estate,” explains Barreiro, “but the idea of lending on a Picasso made no sense to them. They said that it had no value to them. We said, ‘There’s something wrong with this.’” The artwork, after all, could be appraised through auction results, just as real estate could be evaluated based on similar sales.

Eventually, they came to see the history of real estate as signaling an opportunity for the art market. “I remember the days where if you wanted to access money from your house, you had to sell your house,” Gaylord says. Home equity loans then made it possible to unlock the liquidity in real estate while still retaining ownership. The availability of money for equity fueled an unprecedented rise in home prices. This history, say Barreiro and Gaylord, shows that widespread access to an asset’s liquidity increases its value.

Asked whether the recently-imploded real estate market is the best model for lenders, Barreiro draws a distinction: “The real estate meltdown occured largely as a result of properties being overvalued and over-leveraged,” he says. “People were lending on 110, 120 percent of value. They were lending against future value, which is not how underwriting should work. We are not going to lend against what a Warhol is going to be worth five years from now.”

The ability to borrow against art is not altogether new. “Prior to the advent of modern banking and commerce,” Barreiro points out, “people borrowed against and bartered their personal property. Table silver, jewelry, furniture, porcelains and even rugs were used like cash. The business of art financing and lending can play an important role in making these objects readily liquid once again.” Even modern banking and finance gradually got back into the act. In 1979 Citibank formed an art advisory service, with two employees, out of its private banking division. The auction houses were not far behind, offering their own financial services in the form of bridge loans to sellers against consigned property and occasional financing to big-ticket buyers. Sotheby’s formed its Financial Services division in 1988. The year before, the auction house lent $27 million to Alan Bond, the Australian industrialist, to purchase Vincent van Gogh’s Irises. The purchase price of $53.9 million made it, at the time, the most expensive painting in the world, and the picture itself served as collateral for the loan.

Art prices, like real estate prices, have experienced their own recent rise and fall. Lending against equity has played a supporting role in this process by helping to drive auction returns. Even in 1987 some observers thought the Van Gogh purchase had been inflated by Sotheby’s loan.

During the past decade private equity firms, operating outside of banking regulations, have entered the business of art finance with headline-making deals that are turning expensive artworks into an ever more liquid commodity. For the first time art financing has come about not as an adjunct to other businesses but rather as an independent money-making venture.

“We are a private finance company, and not a bank” explains Ian Peck, who founded the New York-based Art Capital Group in 1999. “We are like a hedge fund.” In 2005 Andrew Rose, a former ACG director, started another private lending firm called Art Finance Partners, along with ACG’s comptroller Christopher Krecke. Since these firms operate outside of the FDIC regulations restricting bank-based lending, they could offer, for example, “non-recourse” loans—those backed only by art collateral for which the borrower is not personally liable (meaning that defaults have no effect on credit scores). The availability of such financing meant that art could be more than a luxury item. It could be a nontraditional asset in a diversified portfolio, with a suite of financial instruments at its service. In the fall of 2008 for example, the photographer Annie Leibovitz reportedly borrowed $24 million from ACG and a subsidiary against personal real estate and the reproduction rights for all her photographs.

Yet as art financing evolved over the past several years, only a small fraction of the collecting public could take advantage of it. “Our minimum loan amount is half a million dollars. Rarely do we do anything below that,” Peck explains. Since loans at ACG are made on 50 percent of the art’s value, he says, “to get to the half-million minimum you need to have artwork worth over a million,” or a combination of art and real estate with that value. Bank-based financing likewise serves only high-value art and high-net-worth individuals. Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance, founded as Fine Art Capital by Andy Augenblick in 2004, advertises loan amounts between $1 million and $100 million on art and antiques.

“The competitors that are out there are primarily focused on very high-dollar artwork,” says Gaylord. “We realized that the market out there is not generally comprised of multimillion-dollar works of art. Most sales are $100,000 and under. And that means that dealers are not all buying multimillion-dollar Picassos and Warhols. They are buying stamp and coin collections, and their most valuable coin might be $25,000. Yet the ability to access cash from those collectibles is almost nonexistent because firms like Art Capital don’t want to deal with a $25,000 transaction.”

ArtLoan is still a startup. Barreiro and Gaylord will not discuss the volume of their business. They operate ArtLoan out of the same address as Charles Gaylord & Co., the company started by Ray’s father, where the two serve as dealer-partners. Yet they see their loan model as having the potential to change the art world. “There are people in New York who have been doing it longer than we’ve been doing it,” says Barreiro, “but they do it differently. We wanted to be the first to have a Web-based procedure, for it to be easy-no mystery, no 25-page contracts.” The two have taken out patents on several online business models. When financing becomes available, they plan to institute an auction financing system “as simple as Netflix,” says Barreiro. They also have a proposal to preapprove works sold at auction for loans, which could be activated by the buyer at any time after a sale.

Unlike other art lenders, ArtLoan is able to make small loans thanks to the particular regulatory structure Barreiro selected for their company—a structure that might surprise some in the art world. ArtLoan is a licensed pawnbroker. “Sadly, a lot of people have dim views of pawnbrokers,” says Barreiro. “They think they are going to take you to the cleaners or fence goods. But that’s not what we do here. I went to a pawnbroker’s convention in Sacramento and made the decision that this license makes so much more sense than any kind of banking license.”

Barreiro says the pawn license allows him to use simple contracts with low fees and no interest triggers. Once a work of art comes in for evaluation, ArtLoan bases its lending offers on the liquidation estimate of the collateral, minus the cost of storage, processing and depreciation. There is no court process on defaults. “There is a 10-day default grace period, and on the 11th day we vest in the property.” The pawn license also means that ArtLoan only makes non-recourse loans, in which the asset serves as the sole backing and approval requires only title and lien searches on the property and an in-house appraisal, not a credit search. “We don’t care whether the borrower is employed or whether they have paid their mortgage,” Barreiro says. Likewise, because these are nonrecourse loans, defaults do not adversely affect credit scores: “If you default on a loan from us, you are not a bad guy.” Finally, the license requires that all security must be sent to ArtLoan for safekeeping during the dura- tion of a loan.

According to Barreiro, the flexibility and simplicity of ArtLoan’s procedures make the firm attractive to his credit facilities (the companies that supply the cash) as well as to his borrowers. “When you borrow from a commercial bank,” he says, “you have to go through all the financial disclosures and credit-worthy tests, but many people cannot jump through those hoops.”

Barreiro believes that many lenders aim to encourage default through interest-rate hikes and fees hidden in their long contracts. “My bankers rub their hands like Shylock, hoping for default” in order to take possession of the art, he says, “but I don’t want our customers to default.”

Some high-end borrowers have run into trouble with their loans. In late July, The New York Times reported that ACG sued Leibovitz for allegedly refusing to cooperate with attempts to sell her houses and photographs to pay back her loan. Also accord- ing to the Times, the artist Julian Schnabel took out a loan from ACG in 2006 to help fund a real-estate venture and later sued the company over what saw as its “exorbitant fees.” ACG made a counterclaim against Schnabel for additional interest and fees because the artist did not disclose that there was an existing mortgage on his property.

Barreiro and Gaylord say they steer clear of such litigation. The real challenge for ArtLoan, as for all players in the art finance industry, is the current lack of availability of cash to make loans. “Cash is king, more than ever, and it seems to wear a big crown,” says Barreiro. “I would be lying if I said we are not challenged. Banks tell us they can get 15, 18 percent on their money all day long.” The retail rates for ArtLoan’s cash vendors mean that the company charges credit-card-like interest to its borrowers, with rates that can go as high as 24 percent.

Peck says ACG faces a similar cash crunch. “We have a lot of private equity, but our commercial lines are limited. As a result of the current market, where we used to have seven commercial banks, we now have one or two.” The cash crisis, says Peck, has recently forced many of his large competitors to shut their doors. “At the moment ACG is one of the few if not the only active lender in this space.” Christie’s officials say the auction house will still consider making loans against consigned artworks. Interview requests made to Emigrant Bank for this story were declined.

In the economic downturn, there could be an upside to ArtLoan’s small size. The multimillion-dollar loans made by the larger lenders were supported by the securitization markets and the ability to sell those loans into bond packages. That market is now largely closed. In addition, the pawnbroker license gives ArtLoan a great deal of latitude in its practices. “We are structured differently,” says Peck. “We are much more institutional.”

The art financing industry largely disappeared in the economic downturns of the 1980s and ’90s, only to rebound and grow. In the current climate the demand for art finance is offset only by the availability of cash to lend. The revolution that Barreiro and Gaylord anticipate in art-equity lending might come to pass in the next recov- ery. “There is a lot of house cleaning in the art and antiques world,” says Barreiro, “and this century is going to change the way that the antiques and fine arts business has always operated.”

Peck agrees, but advises caution about the road ahead: “Thirty years ago, only 5 percent of the buying public financed their cars; now that number is inverted. I am envisioning over time the same thing becoming true for the art market. People are going to use their collection as a margin account. Americans love to leverage their assets. Yet there has to be a balance with what the market says things are worth and the ampli- fier of financing. Real estate got out of control. There was such easy credit—you could borrow 100 percent of the purchase price for a home. There has to be a balance.”

The Culture Crash: a response

James writes:

Earlier this summer I contributed an article to a special issue of City Journal on "New York's Tomorrow." My article, The Culture Crash, was an analysis of how arts organizations are doing in the economic downturn. The quick answer is not well. I then question why arts endowments lost so much money (often between 25 and 33 percent of value). I argue that a risky, heavily managed, and fee-driven strategy of investment, sometimes called the "Yale Model," led to bad habits in many organizations.

The article has received a great deal of attention. Investment managers have contacted me to say that the Yale Model still cannot be beat in a comparison of investment strategies over time. One friend sent me a copy of David Swensen's book Pioneering Portfolio Management, which is much appreciated. The reason arts endowments have fallen to such an extent, they point out, is because art funds went up so much in previous years.

All true, but that's only part of the story. The other side is the human factor--part of a disconnect I see between arts administrators and their investment managers. The Yale Model produced lavish results in good times, maybe too good, and this encouraged organizations to expand and overspend beyond their means. If the fluctuations of the Yale Model really average out on the plus side, why do so many arts organizations now face such financial hardship? The answer is that they loved the rewards, but arts organizations prepared far too little for the risks of the Yale Model.

On the investor side, the supposed irrefutability of the Yale Model also became a cover for bad behavior. Managers could rationalize higher fee structures. Half-billion-dollar losses could be excused as part of the plan. The Yale Model may still be the best strategy for long-term investment, but when applied to non-profit organizations it has become a snake-oil tonic, overly hyped and more than a little addictive.

So maybe it should come as little surprise that, according to The Wall Street Journal, Harvard University has announced a change in its investment strategy. As with many non-profit endowments, when the market tanked, Harvard's alternative investments and illiquid assets could not be sold, and the endowment took a nosedive. Now Harvard says it will move away from some of the more perilous alternative investments at the heart of the Yale Model that have wreaked such havoc over the past year.

My abstraction obsession: Jack Tworkov

Jack Tworkov, RWB #3 (1961)

Collection of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.

James writes:

In 1960 the Abstract Expressionist painter Jack Tworkov complained that "I've been second-rated by every critic, large or small." Two first-rate productions now allow us to reconsider this estimation. At no other moment, including 1964's Whitney survey and 1987's Pennsylvania retrospective, could this artist be so fully examined. At the UBS Art Gallery in midtown Manhattan, the curator Jason Andrew has assembled a must-see show called "Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes" which remains on view through October 27.

The exhibition presents numerous Tworkov drawings and twenty-nine major paintings, from Untitled (Still Life with Peaches and Magazine) (1929) to the large Compression and Expansion of the Square, completed just before the artist's death in 1982. At the same time, Yale University Press has published the definitive collection of Tworkov's writing in a book called The Extreme of the Middle, edited by Mira Schor. This 480-page volume brings together Tworkov's artist statements, published reviews, and correspondence, but most notably it unearths extensive selections from Tworkov's diaries.

I have a review of both show and book in my next "Gallery chronicle," in the forthcoming issue of TNC (it will post on the first of September). It's now the August doldrums in New York galleryland. The impressive UBS exhibition, which opened last night, is the exception. And if you visit be sure to stop in the Archives of American Art just down the lobby hallway to see some of Tworkov's journals, which largely make up the collection in the Yale book.

Restoration Hardware

Hans Holbein, Portrait of Erasmus, ca 1530

ART & ANTIQUES
June 2009

Restoration Hardware
by James Panero

Marrying traditional knowledge with today's technology, art conservators are uncovering long-lost masterpieces.

In September 2000 art conservator marco Grassi was attending an estate auction in Paris with an old friend, a European private collector. In the warren of salesrooms at the Drouot Hotel, mixed in with the chipped crockery and worn sofas, was a small rectangular painting in a dusty glass case. It appeared to be a copy of one of the four or five famous portraits of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus that Hans Holbein the Younger painted from life. Yet Grassi grew intrigued by the quality of the painting. His friend asked his opinion, and on a whim he encouraged him to buy it.

When the hammer fell the next day the collector had acquired the lot for around $2,000, in line with its pre-sale estimate. Today, as a result of a decade-long process of restoration and research conducted by Grassi, the portrait, painted on linden panel around 1530, is generally accepted as a genuine, long-lost Holbein, one that would likely be worth tens of millions of dollars if offered for sale. "It was a wild shot," says the conservator, "but sometimes wild shots work out."

This past year, after a six-month review, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam, Netherlands (Erasmus' hometown), selected the painting for inclusion in an exhibition called Images of Erasmus. "Of course, we were very excited when we were offered this painting by Marco Grassi," says curator Peter van der Coelen. "I think the last (Holbein) portrait of this quality was discovered 150 years ago." Through the show the painting was subjected to scholarly investigation and compared to similar Holbein Erasmus portraits through loans from the Louvre, the Lehman Collection in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Kunstmuseum Basel. Most experts now accept the painting as a Holbein on par with the Metropolitan and Kunstmuseum examples, if not quite on the level of the Louvre painting or the portrait of Erasmus at the National Gallery in London (the only major Erasmus painting by Holbein not in the show). The results were a coup for the conservator.

The Holbein rediscovery and other high-profile restorations have cast a new light on the private world of art conservation. In 1991, through an analysis of its under-drawing, the British scholar Nicholas Penny identified what was thought to be a Raphael copy as an original painting by the master. In 2004 the National Gallery in London purchased this painting, Madonna of the Pinks, for œ22 million from the Duke of Northumberland. In 1968 the New York dealer Ira Spanierman purchased a dirty, unknown Italian-school painting at a Sotheby's auction for $325; soon afterward, scholars identified the work as the lost 1518 Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, by Raphael. In 2007 Spanierman sold the portrait at Christie's London for œ18.5 million ($37.3 million).

Grassi has made another important rediscovery of his own. In 2001 he purchased a "Circle of Pontormo" at an auction in Lyon, France, for $45,000. Again through an analysis of the painting's preparatory drawing, scholars quickly acknowledged the painting to be an original Pontormo--a fragment of the "lost" original for one of the most copied images in the Renaissance, with more than 25 known versions. When the work failed to sell at a Sotheby's auction in 2003, Yale curator Lawrence Kantor arranged for the painting to be purchased by the Yale University Art Gallery for substantially less than its low estimate of $800,000.

"This picture is powers of 10 more famous than any other painting," says Kantor. "But Marco had a great deal of difficulty persuading the art-historical establishment this was not just another copy. You will find that in auction rooms people buy with their ears and not their eyes. One scholar expressed doubts, and everyone else fell into line. This was one of the classic cases. I asked Marco permission, if the painting was bought in, if he would offer it to us. Being the gentleman he is, he did, and we were able to buy it at a very reasonable price."

Museums are now bringing the subject of art restoration to prominence with special exhibitions. This past fall the Uffizi hosted an exhibition around the 10-year restoration of Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch. Through Sept. 6, Kantor's Yale Art Gallery is mounting an exhibition called Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation, about the history of restoration in its own collection, put together by Yale's chief conservator, Ian McClure. Both of the shows reveal a profession with a troubled history, according to Grassi. During the 1960s the Yale Art Gallery, operating under a hard-line theory in vogue at the time that called for removing all retouching and overpainting, badly stripped already-damaged work. Grassi describes that enterprise as "an absolute nadir in the annals of conservation." Kantor agrees: "Yale has one of the most dreadful histories of conservation in the known universe."

A generation later the recent Uffizi restoration of the Raphael aimed for a compromise between the traditional invisible style of restoration and the former Yale approach. Here a process, developed in Florence, infills damaged areas of a painting with a technique called "chromatic section," using pointillist-like brushstrokes that are noticeable up close but appear to blend together at a distance. Grassi remains critical of the technique: "At a certain distance the whole thing vibrates in a foggy way. This restoration doesn't do a picture any service, and it's nonsense."

An American citizen born in Florence, with degrees from Princeton and the Uffizi, Grassi represents the fourth generation of a Roman family of art dealers and restorers. Along with David Bull and Nancy Krieg in New York and Simon Gillespie in London, he has become a central player in the private practice of Old Master conservation--one of those experts who work outside the conservation departments of major museums. He pursues a traditional method of restoration, believing that results should bow to the original and be invisible rather than becoming the subject of discussion. "The best intervention is the one less seen," he says, quoting the Bergamo nobleman Giovanni Secco Suardo, who published a handbook on the restorer's art in 1876. Dressed in bespoke tweeds, Grassi works in a studio overlooking Broadway and Houston Street in New York's SoHo District. His career in restoration has taken him through Florence, Lugano and, in the mid-1960s, the Villa Favorita in Castagnola, Switzerland, home of one of Europe's greatest private collections, that of Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza. In the mid-'70s Grassi relocated to New York, and in 1984 he opened his current studio office, where he has served a clientele of dealers, private collections and auction houses.

Today Grassi Studio handles a select number of these clients while attending to work for Grassi's son Matteo, who runs an Old Masters gallery in Paris. The office is a hospital for old art, one that sees its share of masterpieces mixed in with more common examples. "There is a democracy in a conservation studio," says Grassi. "It's a ward in a hospital. All paintings have the same appendix. And sometimes the hardest problems are on mundane paintings." He limits himself to older work. "I would not do contemporary painting. There's a very big divide that occurs around the Second World War. Paintings by Picasso and Mir¢, technically, were not made differently from the past. The big change came with Pollock. The materials changed radically--cotton canvases, acrylics, different materials with totally different chemical and physical properties. Having come from a Florentine background, I have worked on 13th-century painting. In Rome I worked on the earliest panel painting in the West. For me, the earlier the better."

Grassi Studio is lined with wooden freight boxes used to protect paintings in transit. At the center of the main lab is the large low-suction vacuum table, the emergency-room tool that adds elasticity and tension to brittle and dry canvas through a slow application of heat, humidity and pressure. "The traditional process was to reline the canvas," Grassi says, explaining the utility of the device. "But this allows you to take an original canvas and treat it so it doesn't need lining. It gives it added life." Around the room are paintings currently under Grassi's care, some on gurneys, others making the rounds from X-ray room to infrared-video station to the workstation containing scalpels, solvents and binocular microscopes. Despite the gadgetry, restoration is "a craft, in the end," says Grassi. "You are working with your hands. You have to know the chemical properties of paintings and test them. You need good light and good lighting equipment. And the most important tool is the eye. That's what really counts."

Research into a painting's provenance and an informed sense of connoisseurship are also vitally important. Although his studio is now half the size it was when it was in full operation (Grassi is winding down in anticipation of his retirement), he still retains an 18,000-volume art library, one of the largest such resources in the city. He keeps it in a wood-paneled study next door to the bright restoration rooms. "For years I did nothing but scour book catalogues--a huge investment. It was vanity, too. In fact, people used to joke that for the cost of the library I could have a car idling out front to take me to the Frick," Grassi says, referring to the art reference library at the Frick Collection, on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "But having the information is very, very valuable. And having it sooner than the next guy is more valuable."

It is this expertise that causes Grassi to be sought out by private collectors like the one who bought the Holbein. Soon after the Drouot auction, Grassi realized that no known Holbein portrait of Erasmus--or even any of the copies--featured the subject in quite the same pose, holding a closed book. The new owner sent the painting to Grassi in New York, and once he had it in the studio, he was able to analyze it under a special kind of infrared camera. Infrared reflectography can reveal features below the painted surface that are invisible under normal light. Scanning the portrait, the camera showed extensive preparatory drawing and redrawing in the area of the hands and book. Grassi describes the discovery as "the first truly heart-stopping moments of revelation."

An X-ray radiograph showed further reworking--ear flaps had been added to Erasmus' cap. "These findings pointed in one obvious direction," says Grassi. "It was highly unlikely that the portrait could be a copy. Not only was an exact prototype unknown, but copyists invariably follow the model line by line without improvisation." Other characteristics reaffirmed the authenticity of the piece. The wood of the panel was European linden, what one might expect of a painting made in Switzerland or Southern Germany, as opposed to the oak used in England and the Low Countries or the poplar one finds in Italian panel painting. The studio sent the sample to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Sciences Lab for testing. "They do it for no fee," says Grassi. "It's fantastic. It's one of those nice things for which you pay your taxes." At the same time, he investigated the provenance of the portrait, as far back as possible, and was able to trace its ownership to a prominent French family of the ancien r‚gime, the Lamoignon, who had connections to Holbein.

The evidence was adding up. The attribution came to focus on Holbein himself. What remained was the quality of the work. It might not have been a copy, but was the portrait good enough to have been painted by the master's hand, was it a product of Holbein's studio or a combination of the two? Once Grassi removed the older varnish, which is a routine procedure, "the exceptional quality and delicacy8 of the modeling, the meticulous detailing and the lustrous finish all spoke clearly to the great diligence and proficiency of its creator," he says, "whoever he might have been."

But still there was something off about it. Grassi asked the late Swiss conservator Emil Bosshard, a colleague and friend from the Villa Favorita, to examine the painting. He in turn arranged for an examination by the art historian Pascal Griener, a Holbein expert. Together they began to question the dark green background of the portrait, which contrasted with the delicacy of the figure. "The background is important because the figure has to resonate with it," Grassi says. Bosshard submitted some small pigment cross-sections to Hermann Kuhn in Munich, formerly of the Doerner Institut, for testing. The resulting microphotographs confirmed what the experts had suspected. The background, originally a light green, had been painted over more roughly in a darker shade. Since this was done early in the life of the painting, the overpaint came to form a tight bond with the original layer. This discovery posed a dilemma for the conservator. Grassi discussed its potential removal with Bosshard, who thought a cleaning procedure would pose too many difficulties and dangers to the painting.

When the painting returned to New York, Grassi ran several more tests of the overpaint layer. Finally, he devised a solvent solution that was able to soften the overpaint without damage to the material beneath. Working over the surface of the painting in tiny quadrants with the solvent, a binocular microscope and a scalpel, he was able to remove the overpaint during a period of several months. Grassi's efforts revealed the portrait in its full brilliance, for the first time in 400 years.

The decade-long restoration of this Holbein speaks to the challenges posed by a major rediscovery. The process does not happen overnight. When other rediscoveries get rolled out in the popular press as done deals, conservators such as Grassi remain skeptical. "The manner of the rediscovery is interesting. To come out and say, `I found this new painting' is like, `I found a cure for cancer.' It doesn't last long." Grassi points to the recently announced discovery of a purported Shakespeare portrait, purportedly painted from life, by the English restorer Alec Cobbe. Many critics now believe the painting was over-cleaned by Cobbe, and Tarnya Cooper, 16th-century curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, has claimed that the work more likely represents the courtier Sir Thomas Overbury.

Careful restoration work can take years. The study and acceptance of a rediscovery by experts usually takes even longer. In the case of the Holbein, the chance scheduling of the Rotterdam show accelerated the process of acceptance. The canonization of this painting is not complete, however. More research needs to be done on Holbein's studio, in the way that scholars now understand Rembrandt's studio, notes Van der Coelen.

Yet the life of a restorer is not all rediscovered Holbeins and Pontormos. "There are certain things that give you satisfaction," says Grassi. "It can be a nondescript painting. The challenge is to resolve a problem, a structural problem, an aesthetic problem, and arrive at a solution that is acceptable aesthetically and artistically. It's great to work on a tremendous painting, but our daily life is made up of other things that can be equally satisfying."

Gallery Chronicle (June 2009)

Gabrielle Evertz, Four Reds + blue green © Gabrielle Evertz

THE NEW CRITERION
June 2009

Gallery Chronicle

by James Panero

On Op Art, Gabriele Evertz at Metaphor Gallery, James Little at June Kelly Gallery & Nicolas Carone at Lohin Geduld Gallery.

The excellent optical painters working today are the survivors of a peculiar history. Back in the mid-1960s, the hard-edged abstraction that arrived under the banner of Op Art turned into a bad trip for high modernism. No other art movement blew up and burned out quite so spectacularly.

In 1965 William C. Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art organized a blockbuster exhibition of Op Art called “The Responsive Eye.” The artists in this show dispensed with the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism. They largely did away with the naturalism of oil on canvas. Drawing on the intensity of new acrylic paints, they used contrasting lines and complementary colors to accentuate the biomechanics of perception. The results were immediate. Although grounded in over a century of study, the flickering, throbbing, pulsating works on view required little explanation. The show set attendance records. It was a sensation—and a problem. Up against 1960s popular culture, optical art came to be appreciated for its sociological relevance rather than its formal innovation. Its designs were exploited for commercial and cultural ends.

The optical artists in the MOMA show had deep roots in the history of modern art and science. This ancestry could be traced back to Goethe’s Theory of Colors of 1810. Here Goethe first took note of the chromatic dissidence of light-dark interaction—the colors that can be observed along the lines separating white and black. Goethe also investigated the volatility of complementary (opposite) colors as arranged on a color wheel—red against green, yellow against violet, and so forth. The Divisionism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, based on the research of Michel Eugène Chevreul, further advanced perceptual theory. Twentieth-century Constructivism connected the visual absolutes of geometric abstraction with Socialist idealism, which went on to inform the aesthetics of the Bauhaus.

Among the artists in “The Responsive Eye” was Josef Albers, a Bauhaus colleague of Johannes Itten and a patriarch of color theory who influenced a generation of artists at Black Mountain College and Yale University. Victor Vasarely came through Alexander Bortnyik’s studio, the Budapest center for the Bauhaus. Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz, one-time roommates at Yale, were Albers’s former students and also included in the show.

Yet just as the optical art of Russian Constructivism was appropriated (and later discarded) by Socialism, Op Art suffered a similar fate in the hands of 1960s pop culture. Serious painting was degraded into a mere fashion phenomenon. Time magazine coined the term Op Art in 1964. The facile alignment of perceptual art and Pop Art, which had infiltrated public consciousness at the start of the decade, gave optical abstraction an undeserved superficial gloss.

Bridget Riley, perhaps the most recognizable artist in the 1965 exhibition for her swirling black-and-white compositions, first noticed something wrong on her taxi ride from the airport to the MOMA opening. There in the shop windows off Madison Avenue, printed on the clothing designs, were her paintings. How the images from a yet-to-open art exhibition ended up on the ready-to-wear lines of Seventh Avenue can be attributed to Larry Aldrich, an art collector and dress manufacturer. With the acquiescence of Seitz, Aldrich purchased Op works before the show and created fabric designs for his Young Elegante line of clothing. Through his distribution of these textile patterns, which also included works by Stanczak, Vasarely, and Anuszkiewicz, Op motifs ended up on everything from lamps and upholstery to maternity wear and girdles. There was even Op cosmetics. Sears carried Op wallpaper. Pfizer used Op imagery on the packaging of its antivertigo medication.

Riley eventually sued for copyright infringement. Yet nothing could stop the transformation of Op from serious art into faddish design. The opening party for “The Responsive Eye,” heavily photographed and filmed (the young Brian de Palma made a documentary of it), featured women with beehive haircuts and Op clothing head-to-toe. Life magazine published a fashion spread of Op apparel photographed in MOMA’s own galleries. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Women’s Wear Daily also covered the fashion extensively. As Riley noted in 1965, “‘The Responsive Eye’ was a serious exhibition but its qualities were obscured by an explosion of commercialism, band-wagoning and hysterical sensationalism.”

Art critics generally dismissed optical art. Barbara Rose in Artforum called it “mindless.” Clement Greenberg labeled it “novelty art.” Reviewing the MOMA exhibition in The New York Times, however, John Canaday praised Op’s mass appeal: “This is a very satisfying thing for a public that has been puzzled and offended by a long series of modern isms. Optical art has a combination of virtues new to modern art: it fascinates, even if for different reasons, both the esthete and the layman.”

In the later 1960s, the popular appreciation of Op affected the art a second time, as mod fashion gave way to psychedelic drugs. Commercialism had already damaged Op by the time of the MOMA show. Now acid kitsch brought it to a new low. In a survey of Op Art at the Columbus Museum in Ohio in 2007, the libertarian art critic Dave Hickey took note of this secondary appropriation by linking the art movement to drug use and sexual liberation: “What the special effects of optical art do, specifically, is introduce us to that ‘stranger [to ourselves].’ … It replaces the elite, intellectual pleasure of ‘getting it’ with the egalitarian fun-house pleasure of disorientation, of trying to understand something that you cannot.”

From international socialism to slimming fashions to acid trips, the aggressive sensuality and easy reproducibility of perceptual art proved to be its undoing. By the end of the 1960s, Op Art seemed over. Minimal sculptors like Tony Smith adopted the hard edges of perceptual painting for machined materials. Process artists like Thornton Willis restored the Ab-Ex brushstroke to painting while still investigating the perceptual ambiguities of complementary colors.

Yet Op Art never really went away as it was reabsorbed into general abstract practice. Generations of artists continued to investigate abstraction’s optical possibilities. Today the abstract painter Gabriele Evertz, who recently ended a group show at Metaphor Gallery in Brooklyn, draws a conscious connection with her Op Art forebears.[1] Evertz is an intense colorist who constructs her work out of precise vertical lines. A former student and now professor at Hunter College, Evertz is among the current generation of artists known as the Hunter Color School, initiated by E. C. Goossen in the 1960s.

Evertz tempers her optical effects with a more traditional interest in the overall mood of color. Reds, blues, and yellows alternately predominate on her canvases. Evertz also goes beyond the interference test-patterns of 1960s Op for more subtle modulations of tint, angle, and line. Colors leach and glow, but in beautiful rather than simply disorienting ways. Evertz gives perceptual art a new confidence in control and variation.

The abstract artist James Little is a painter for whom the term hard-edged is a gross injustice. His latest work is now on view at June Kelly Gallery.[2] While Little constructs his compositions in sharp angles and straight lines, his silk-like treatment of surface is uniquely his own. Little has developed his own encaustic medium, which he applies at high temperature in over twenty coats. With gestural brushwork, unlike his Op Art predecessors, Little is not easily duplicated.

For his earlier work, Little combed his shiny surfaces in rich layers of brushwork. At this latest show, he smooths out a more matte medium like the icing on a cake. The tone is softer than in previous iterations. Sharp punctuations have given way to a more even rhythm. Triangles have been compressed into more vertical arrangements. I miss some of the brushy surface, as well as the aggression of Little’s former primary palette. But the overall effect remains supremely assured. Work such as When Aaron Tied Ruth (2008) is particularly engaging and deeply enigmatic—a feeling you would never experience in work concerned with optics alone.

Today the power of paint, on full display in optical art, comes as a welcome tonic to a period in art dominated by Pop and Dada sculpture. Next up: Tim Bavington, a Hickey protegé born in 1966, whose chromatic work draws on Gene Davis. Bavington will be featured in his third solo exhibition at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery in September.

Finally, a note about time, and an artist who bends it. Born in Little Italy, New York, in 1917, Nicolas Carone is a second-generation Ab-Ex painter who studied with Hans Hofmann, knew Frank Sinatra, and introduced Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Rauschenberg to the Stable Gallery, where he once worked. For twenty-five years, beginning in 1964, Carone taught at the New York Studio School. He later established his own painting school in Italy. Yet from 1962 to 1999, Carone largely kept his own developing art from public view. Now in his nineties, he is back with extraordinary fresh, youthful work. Mixed in with examples from the 1950s, Carone’s latest work is now on view at Lohin Geduld Gallery.[3]

A one-time representational painter, Carone is imbued with the history of classical art. In his sculpture, a few examples of which are on display in this show, he takes Italian stones and carves them into lost relics, bits of travertine figures rubbed and worn as though excavated from the bottom of the Tiber. The tactile crudity calls to mind the late sculptures of Elie Nadelman. Carone’s paintings similarly alternate between figural composition and abstract design, where the human form emerges and disappears from view. The best work here is almost entirely abstract. Carone’s line dips and curves without embellishment, carving out hints of the figure and moving with its own energy across the surface. Where Carone has rubbed out some areas of pigment, the line appears to dive beneath the picture plane. Ranging from classical painting to de Kooning, Carone’s diverse artistic influences emerge and disappear from view just like the figures in his compositions.

At Lohin Geduld there is the sense of encountering an emerging Abstract Expressionist artist for the first time. Like his lost Roman statues, his Old Master compositions, and his abstract designs, Carone is an anachronism and a thoroughly contemporary artist all over again.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Color Exchange: Berlin–New York” was on view at Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, New York from March 27 through April 26, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “James Little: De-Classified” opened at June Kelly Gallery, New York, on May 7 and remains on view through June 9, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Nicolas Carone: Abstraction/Figuration: Works on Paper” opened at Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York, on April 30 and remains on view through June 6, 2009. Go back to the text.

Beyond hard-edged

James Little, When Aaron Tied Ruth (2008), Oil and wax on canvas, 72 ½ x 94 inches

James writes:

In May 2005 I wrote about an exhibition that stopped me in my tracks. The show was called “Raising the Bar” at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, Queens, with paintings by Thornton Willis and James Little.

Stop the presses! Hold that headline! Run a retraction! All of two pages ago I doubted whether painting would ever be “back.” But yes, Virginia. Painting is Back. At the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, “Thornton Willis and James Little: Raising the Bar” has become the sleeper hit of the season, with a run extended now into May. I caught these two painterly statesmen just hours before deadline. With richly brushed surfaces of oils and wax, James Little proves that not all hard edge is created equal: the vibrating colors and racing lines of Exit Strategy (2004) dazzle the eye. Thornton Willis, meanwhile, has worked through Minimalism and Cubism since the 1970s to arrive at a totemic synthetic of modern painting. Dog Fight (2002), my favorite piece of the show, even evinces Beckmann. Willis builds up heaping layers of Cubist castoffs, drafting marks, and colored planes. Little lures us in with sensuous surfaces of silk and quicksand, and colors as sharp as needles. The two play perfectly together—a double-stroke engine in paint and a humming dynamo of potential.

Readers of this space will be aware of my continued interest in Willis, who recently finished a second solo show at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. Now James Little is back with his own solo exhibition at June Kelley gallery in Soho. I went to the opening last night and will have more to say about it in my next gallery chronicle. Little’s treatment of surface is unique. He builds up his painting surfaces with twenty coats of encaustic, a combination of pigment and wax that he formulates and brushes on at high temperature. No mere masking-tape hard-edger, Little needs to be seen in person. His exhibition will be on view through June 7.

Gallery chronicle (May 2009)

Pablo Picasso, Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur (1969) © P.A.R. Photo by Marc Domage

THE NEW CRITERION
MAY 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

Stop the presses: the Gagosian Gallery has put on the best gallery show of the season, maybe the year. How could it be that this gallery, which for years epitomized the overindulgences of contemporary art, has mounted “Picasso: Mosqueteros”?[1] I shall discuss this momentarily. But first the show. This large exhibition in Chelsea of the paintings and prints of late Picasso is breathtaking. The Picasso biographer John Richardson has selected and arranged the work in the gallery himself. Many of the best paintings come from the collection of Picasso’s heir Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. The gallery has published a sumptuous catalogue with an extensive essay by Richardson on Picasso’s last years at his country estate of Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, on the French Riviera. (This being Gagosian, there is also a daft essay by the contemporary-art bogeyman Jeff Koons.) For those of us eagerly awaiting the final fourth volume of the Life of Picasso from the eighty-five-year-old Richardson, the catalogue is a tempting treat. But the show itself is the real feast. Here Richardson makes the case for the value of the last years of the artist’s life. As Picasso entered his tenth decade (he died in 1973 at the age of 91), he went into overdrive. His high-performance output “constituted a Great Late Phase,” according to Richardson, “one in which he felt free to do whatever he wanted in whatever way he wanted, regardless of correctness, political, social, or artistic.”

The press has been gushing over the show—and rightly so. It has been twenty-five years since the last (and the first) exhibition of the late paintings of Picasso came to New York. Enough time has passed that it is easy to forget we had many of the same discussions on the revelations of late Picasso a quarter of a century ago. Late Picasso is forever being rediscovered.

The 1984 Guggenheim show, organized by Gret Schiff and originally booked for the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, almost never saw the light of day. There was limited interest in the subject. A 1973 exhibition on late Picasso at the Palace of the Popes in Avignon was a summer flop. Robert Hughes called it “more process than product.” He also slammed the show with a one-line dismissal: “Picasso appeared to have spent his dotage at a costume party in a whorehouse.” The 1980s gave late Picasso a warmer welcome. During his lifetime, people had been “incinerated in the furnace of Picasso’s psyche,” as Richardson describes it. A decade after his death, the feminist reaction to the superman artist, following the 1964 publication of Françoise Gilot’s tell-all book Life with Picasso, had dissipated. Tastes were also changing. The bloom was off the rose of high abstraction. Picasso always “loathed” abstraction, according to Richardson. “He never painted an abstract painting and he wanted to make his painting even more representative.” By the 1980s the manic representational brushwork of Picasso’s fast and furious final years came to be seen as the harbinger of neo-expressionism.

In March 1984, Jed Perl wrote a definitive essay on the subject of late Picasso in these pages, titled “Picasso’s finale.” “In the 1950s,” he wrote, “Picasso seemed an old hedonist fading away in the glare of the Mediterranean sun. The work of the last five years reveals a very different man: the wisest bacchant of them all.” Hughes remained circumspect: “No exhibition in memory has been so full of eyes (or of anuses and genitals, his other fetish objects)… . Picasso’s last decade contains little that can compare with his work in the 30 years after 1907, when his transformation not only of modernist style but of the very possibilities of painting was so vast in scope, deep in feeling and authoritative in its intensity.” Both critics came to agree with André Malraux’s understanding of the artist in Picasso’s Mask (the title of Malraux’s 1974 book). “I must absolutely find the mask,” Picasso told Malraux.

The raffish cast of characters in Picasso’s final paintings represents the artist’s masked personae, avatars of his artistic ego and totems against death, a fifty-two-painting deck of death cards shuffled through the history of art. With his voluminous output, Picasso tried to deal every possible hand to the hangman. He was “so frightened of death—you could never mention his will to him,” says Richardson. Following surgery in the spring of 1966, Picasso never took a day off from painting, drawing, or printmaking. He constructed two additional studios at Notre-Dame-de-Vie to accommodate his production. In the last three years of his life alone, Picasso may have painted up to four hundred paintings. Richardson has discovered that around his ninetieth birthday Picasso painted six huge paintings in less than one week. The final years represented “an amazing burst of volcanic energy. He wanted to somehow assimilate the whole Western figurative tradition and Picassify it.”

The great relief comes from how Picasso chose to Picassify his own late work. Picasso’s bull-and-anus motif had grown tedious. His over-sexualization of the visual world had become a cartoon-like cliché, one urinal scrawl after another. The parade of battered wives in his portraits was also growing dreary, as Picasso himself came to recognize. Today’s blond beauty, everyone knew, would become tomorrow’s succubus, a vagina-dentata gorgon forever gnawing at Picasso’s pathetically vulnerable Andalusian arch masculinity. His daughter Paloma once remarked that “people were happy to be consumed by him. They thought it was a privilege.” Maybe so, but it grew increasingly unappetizing to watch Picasso consume his cannibalistic meals. He was that child-Titan forever licking his chops and showing his plate cleaned of limbs and noses.

The final years took a different turn. As Picasso became more housebound in Notre-Dame-de-Vie, he introduced new and various forms of visual stimulation. He projected Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, featuring the Amsterdam musketeers (the “Mosqueteros” of the Gagosian title), on his studio wall. He was a movie buff. He watched television. Picasso turned his attention away from reality, his personal sexual reality, reality as filtered through cubism and expressionism, and focused on these new influences. Rather than devour the lives around him, he began to chew on the more palatable (palettable?) legacies of Rembrandt, Velásquez, Goya, El Greco, and van Gogh.

Kenneth Clark has described a major artist like Picasso, burning through his final stage, as someone who paints in an “unholy rage.” On the surface, Picasso appeared to do just that. His furious production at Gagosian seems simply mad. But the show ends up oddly apollonian. Picasso was attempting to scare off death while at the same time diligently preparing the decor for his own pharaonic tomb. Compared to his earlier work, there is less visceral rage in these final paintings and more consistent energy. The Gagosian paintings are mainly enormous playing-card portraits of kings, jacks, and jokers popping up in a roll call of stock art-historical characters. The show is an Old Master museum hall perceived through Picasso-colored glasses.

“How could these unashamedly outrageous paintings,” Richardson asks, “with their farcical irony, their caricatural baroquerie, their glut of genitals, their science-fiction time warp and subversive black comedy, be reconciled to the accepted precepts of art history?” The answer is that these conservative paintings are pure art history, a survey course by the aging don offered up in titles like the Dutch-figured Tête d’homme du 17^ème siècle de face (1967).

The show begins with Femme assise dans un fauteuil (1962). This turns out to be a straight portrait of Picasso’s mistress Jacqueline, the only one of its kind in the show. It is the earliest and most real work on view—different in a different way from the rest of the paintings. (The remaining exhibition is different in much the same way.) Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur (1969) is a later standout, an interpretation of a Velásquez dwarf-portrait but here masked and wearing a flower in his hair (which Richardson believes to be a reference to hippie fashion).

Now for a word about the venue. Look closely at the provenance of one of the paintings and you will notice that Homme à la pipe (1968) is on loan from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection. These are the same Cohens who put Damien Hirst’s shark in the Metropolitan Museum. They are collectors who have themselves become poster children for the overinflation of interest in terrible contemporary work. Their guide on this journey has been the gallery owner Larry Gagosian. In his catalogue essay, Gagosian writes, “The opportunity to present Picasso’s work in a contemporary gallery such as ours epitomizes just how relevant and thought-provoking his work continues to be today.” With seven high-profile galleries around the globe, Gagosian has an imperial understanding of promising markets, and he knows how to occupy them. He has applied his Midas touch to some of the most undeserving artists of our times. Late Picasso, far from undeserving, fits his bill of sale as well. The late period offers up a clutch of available work of similar quality by a name-brand artist, allowing for an inflation of comparable prices. So long as this translates into scholarly exhibitions free of charge, more power to him.

Finally, a word about an upcoming show in Connecticut.[2] The classical realist Edward Minoff has done for the seascape what Jacob Collins has accomplished with the figure. A former graffiti artist and professional cartoonist who has dedicated his life to classical art after meeting Collins in the late 1990s, Minoff has become a master of the breaking wave and an authority on the rolling surf. In his paintings, green translucent waves perfectly curl up in arcs and dips and ripples. Minoff grew up observing the beach at Fire Island, Long Island and continues to make his studies there: topographical studies of water and wind, color studies of misty sunlight at dawn, compositional studies of ideal moments of flood. He never works from photographs, one of the precepts of Collins’s schools and something that separates the work from photo-realism.

Until now Minoff has worked small, perfecting his seascapes over five years in jewel-like horizontal compositions. Starting last October, Minoff determined to take on a more epic seascape composition in the manner of Collins’s “Eastholm Project,” which I wrote about in June 2008. Along with several smaller paintings, including some poetic moonscapes, Minoff will be unveiling his eight-foot-wide painting, Waves, at Cavalier Galleries in Greenwich this month. I recently paid a studio visit to see Minoff apply the finishing touches. With his growing ambition and focused talent, Minoff is an artist to watch and enjoy.

 

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Picasso: Mosqueteros” opened at Gagosian Gallery, West 21st Street, New York, on March 26 and remains on view through June 6, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “Edward Minoff” will be on view at Cavalier Galleries, Greenwich, Connecticut, from May 14 through May 28, 2009. Go back to the text.

Montclair responds

James writes:

Lora Urbanelli, the director of the Montclair Museum, appeared on WNYC today along with Arnold Lehman of the Brooklyn Museum to discuss their institutions' responses to the economic downturn. While we wait for the audiocast of this interview to be posted online, Urbanelli's appearance gives us another chance to review her letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal that appeared last Thursday:

In"Another Art Museum Puts Its Collection on the Block" (Leisure & Arts, April 15), James Panero engages in a serious discussion of the nature of deaccessioning and the responsibility that museums have to their communities to uphold their trust. The Montclair Art Museum's collection policy and plans came under review and he takes issue with our decision to deaccession selected items from our collection during a time of financial crisis. This is indeed a complex and topical issue that no museum undertakes lightly.

After a careful and strategic review of its operations and finances, the Montclair Art Museum has announced a comprehensive plan, of which deaccessioning is a part, addressing both short-term and long-term needs. The full description of this plan may be found on our Web site: montclairartmuseum.org. The deaccessioning component of the plan, part of a long-term strategy in place for many years, attempts to identify items that are duplicative, of lesser quality than objects already in our collection by the same artist, or are not consistent with the collecting mission of the museum. This effort will help to build our endowment for the future purchase of works of art.

Deaccessioning for acquisition funds, linked with the pressures put on our endowment by the market, has certainly created a complicated combination of circumstances. Nonetheless, our actions were undertaken after consulting with the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. We are and have been following policy and conducting these transactions in a completely transparent manner.

Our responsibility is to ensure that the Montclair Art Museum's dedication to Native American and American art and culture can be served through new acquisitions, while assuring its ability to mount inspiring exhibitions and provide educational programs over the long term.

Lora Urbanelli

A "serious discussion"? A "complicated combination of circumstances"? It is reassuring to see that Urbanelli has taken more away from my article than certain online critics (here and here). These critics have merely nitpicked the details of the story rather than discuss the issues and implications of the case. But as I've already written, I forgive them. Professional jealousies keep this story in the spotlight.

Which brings me to Urbanelli. From my first conversation with her, which was courteous and high-minded, to the Journal letter, Urbanelli has been up front about the financial contingencies behind her deaccession. Urbanelli says she wants to be "transparent." This deaccession was first announced by Montclair, let's remember, in what the museum called a "financial security plan." Urbanelli justifies the sales by claiming that she is operating within the guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the peer-review organization that advises museum propriety. True enough. As I argued in my initial Journal editorial, AAMD's signoff, by allowing a permanent collection to be liquidated for financial considerations, reveals a fundamental flaw in museum governance.

Where Urbanelli has been less than transparent, I believe, has been in her claim that the sales are primarily a result of curatorial housekeeping with only ancillary financial benefits. "The deaccessioning component of the plan," she writes, "part of a long-term strategy in place for many years, attempts to identify items that are duplicative, of lesser quality than objects already in our collection by the same artist, or are not consistent with the collecting mission of the museum."

So long as AAMD allows art acquisition funds--generated from sales--to serve double duty as banking instruments, all museums sales must be questioned. For the Montclair sales, I have expressed my doubts that their cull has been the result of pure curatorial decision-making, done outside of financial concerns. (The financial temptations of deaccession should be regulated away, argues former Whitney and SFMOMA director David Ross, and I agree.)

From my initial investigation I noticed that certain items in the Montclair sales appear in a book of highlights published by the museum--a strange place to see "duplicative" objects or works of "lesser quality." Now the blogger Lee Rosenbaum has gone the extra step of following through on more of the specific works up for auction. The results are even more alarming. Take a look at Rosenbaum's excellent reporting here and here. Rosenbaum undercuts Urbanelli's high-ground claims and casts the Montclair sales in further ignominy.

Why should this concern us? Because as I wrote in my Journal editorial, deaccessioning for financial gain addresses a short-run problem at the expense of the long-term public trust.

Hard edged in Brooklyn

Gabriele Evertz, Red + the Spectrum (2008) 

James writes:

Lately I have become interested in contemporary abstract painters who make abstraction the subject of their work. These artists, often through variations of hard-edged color contrasts, do more than merely "abstract" the visible world. They concern themselves with pushing abstraction's formal potential. Thornton Willis, one of these artists, just completed his latest run at Elizabeth Harris Gallery; I wrote the catalogue essay for the show (and participated in a video profile of the artist). James Little will open at June Kelly in Chelsea on May 7. Consider my calendar marked.

This past month, a four-person exhibition called "Color Exchange: Berlin/New York" has been on view at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This will be the show's final weekend. Catch it if you can.

I went to Metaphor to see the work of the Berlin-born Gabriele Evertz, a scholar of color and line. The three other painters in this show, all accomplished, use abstraction for its allusive depth: Julian Jackson makes cinematic flashes and gauzy colored landscapes; Susanne Jung offers up austere monochromes that read like blizzard whiteouts, Gabriele Schade-Hasenberg builds up glazed surfaces that obscure secrets beneath. Evertz's work, however, operates entirely on the surface through an interplay of dominant and recessive colors and the width and angle of lines. It reaches out, rather than pulling you in. Seen in person these paintings come alive through intense harmonic disturbances. Evertz pushes color's potential in new and interesting ways. I've never encountered anything quite like it. The term "Op Art" would not do it justice. Her Red and the Spectrum (2008), five feet square and the largest work in the show, is a sublime visual terror (you can see what it looks like above, but be aware that this painting's optical effects do not work in reproduction). This user-driven art is activated entirely by the sense of sight, and supremely accomplished. It deserves to be seen in person.

Responding to the Montclair critics

James writes:

Over the weekend, the former director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross, published a letter in the Wall Street Journal seeking to apply the lessons of my Montclair editorial to the rulebook for all museums:

Museums will lose the public trust if they evolve into vehicles for holding long-term assets until they are needed for the purposes of loan repayment or assessments of credit-worthiness. In fact, lenders and bondholders should be prohibited by law from accepting acquisition-specific endowments as security in any form. That would take the idea of misusing collections off the boardroom table, and would go some distance toward securing these collections for future generations.

That's good advice. But alas, it looks like not everyone got Ross's memo.

The art critic for the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight, usually sound on the issue of deaccession, had a momentary lapse of reason over my editorial. In a blog posting called "Bada bing: A hit job on a New Jersey art Museum?," Knight claimed that his "eyes bugged out" after reading my editorial "five or six times now."

First off, let me review the charge that my article was a "hit job." Knight claims to have "fact-checked" my story and found it "strictly circumstantial," but it seems that he did little more than pick up the telephone in California and make a long-distance call to representatives of the museum. Well, I talked to the museum representatives at length too, but I also visited the museum on several occasions, obtained the Christie's sales prospectus, and interviewed sources close to the museum both on and off the record. For example, I have it on good authority that the museum's deacessioning campaign has increased by ten times in the past six months. I also have sources knowledgeable of the museum's collection who have questioned the purported redundancy of key works in the sale (certain works even appear in the museum's published book of highlights from its collection).

This deaccession therefore did not strike me as wholly the product of a careful and deliberative process. It needs to be examined more closely under the light of day, which was the purpose (and I am happy to say, the result) of my editorial. Unlike Knight, who seems to care about little more than attacking a journalist's reputation (I notice he goes about collecting only the evidence he wants to hear), I have an affection for the Montclair Museum and the art inside it. I've done the heavy lifting to find out what's happening at the institution. Why would I take out a "hit job" on a museum I care about?

In fact, the only "hit job" is the one Knight decided to take out on me. I can't say why he did it, nor do I really care. By identifying me in his first paragraph as the managing editor of "the conservative culture magazine the New Criterion," as though this were relevant to the facts of the case, I can only assume that Knight had his feelings hurt by Hilton Kramer twenty years ago and now I'm paying for it. As long as he spells my name right, I appreciate the attention, but I am concerned that Knight's attempted rub out will distract us from the real subject at hand: the future of a small New Jersey Museum with an important permanent collection, and the implication of its actions on the stewardship of art in the public trust across the country. So let's step out of the henhouse for a moment and out of earshot of tongue-clucking bloggers like Tyler Green and review the facts of the case.

Knight says he read my article "five or six times." If he doesn't want to try a seventh, let me help him understand my editorial—I expect we are in agreement on most of the key points:

1) recent deaccessioning campaigns at several museums have betrayed the public trust. I discuss this not to reveal some "nefarious plot," but to put the Montclair story in context. In a general interest publication such as The Wall Street Journal, such a discussion is not "boilerplate," but exposition.

2) The Montclair art museum is engaging in a deaccessioning campaign. Since other campaigns at other museums haven't always gone well, let's therefore look at this case closely.

3) Well, as it turns out, this campaign is being done (in whole on in part—the ethics of the case are still the same) in order to back the museum's bonds.

4) In fact, when pressed, the Montclair museum director is upfront about this contingency. She defends her actions by claiming that the peer-reviewed organization AAMD has no problem with the sales.

5) Now this raises a greater question--if museums are forbidden from collateralizing their bonds with the art on their walls, is it appropriate that they should be able to sell the art and use the proceeds to back their bonds?

Knight writes that "opinions are nice, but they're better when built atop some reported facts." My editorial had both. Let's move on from quibbling and have a substantive discussion about the opinions I expressed and the issues I raised. Let's also help deaccession dissenters like the former Montclair trustee Cherry Provost have their day in the court of public opinion. David Ross got it right.

Another museum puts its collection on the block

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 15, 2009

Another Museum Puts Its Collection on the Block
by James Panero

Another day, another deaccession. On March 23, after a "strategic review of its operations and capitalizations," the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, N.J., announced a new "financial security plan." In what has become an all-too-common practice in the art world, this plan will include the sale, or "deaccession," of 50 works from the museum's permanent collection, among them a Jackson Pollock drawing valued at $300,000 to $500,000 and several Hudson River School and American Impressionist works with estimates ranging from $25,000 to $300,000, according to a prospectus prepared by Christie's. The auction house believes the sales will generate between $2.9 million and $4.3 million for the institution, which says it will use the funds for future acquisitions. Presented as curatorial housekeeping, but in fact motivated by financial exigencies, the Montclair sales -- if allowed to proceed -- will set another sorry example of an institution cashing out on art in the public trust.

p>Opened in 1914, the small, neoclassical Montclair Art Museum has long boasted an impressive collection of American art, with a sizable selection of work by Hudson River School painter George Inness, who settled in the town at the end of the 19th century. The museum has also acquired and displayed a large collection of Native American art and mounted critically acclaimed exhibitions. A show exploring the influence of Cézanne on American art, 10 years in the making, is scheduled to open this September. An exhibition of Wyeth-family paintings is now on view.

In the stewardship of its permanent collection, however, Montclair has left a more questionable legacy. The museum has often treated its record of local philanthropy as trade-in art. Nobody knows this better than Cherry Provost, a former trustee who grew up in the shadow of this suburban museum and still serves on the art committee.

"I've said it repeatedly: A museum is not a private collection," she maintains. Over the years, her words fell on deaf ears as the museum sold off one part of its collection after another. "We had a snuff bottle collection of the first order," Mrs. Provost says. "I tried to save it. We also had a fabulous collection of early American and English silver -- to die for! And we had some lovely sideboards. Really good American antiques. And it was wonderful to have a sideboard. Well, the sideboard went."

That wasn't all. This past January, the museum shipped off its 6,000-volume art library as a gift to a local college, Montclair State University -- one of its many emergency actions, which include layoffs and reduced business hours, designed to shore up expenses. The museum says it also plans to sell its costume and rug collections and is determining what to do with its sizable Native American holdings.

By narrowing or "refining" a collection through deaccession, a museum can perform a valuable function. It can free up from storage work that may be second-rate or repetitive and return it to the marketplace, there to be purchased by an individual or institution that could make better use of it. A museum can furthermore raise money in a restricted endowment from the sale, to be used for the purchase of art that might better serve its mission. Peer-review organizations such as the Association of Art Museum Directors issue guidelines that define such acceptable practices. The AAMD also forbids museums from using the sale of art in their permanent collections to pay for general operating expenses or to underwrite loans with the art on the walls. Such rules are designed to prevent museums from treating their art collections as ATM machines, sources for fast money that should have been raised and managed in other ways.

Even before the economic downturn, however, museums had been finding ways around AAMD in a power struggle between directors and trustees, who want to unlock the value of their collections, and the museum-going public, which feels betrayed by the institutions that are designed to preserve and honor donations.

Museums have claimed, for example, that the art in their permanent collections suddenly does not fit their mission statements, even if the work has been on display for generations. Museums have decided that certain works of art are of secondary importance because they are rarely shown, although this record of exhibition may merely reflect the taste of the curators. Museums have also declared themselves to be schools or libraries, not bound by the rules of AAMD. As permanent collections have been put up for sale, the auction houses, of course, have only profited from the row.

In 2006 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., sold $68 million of its collection of older art in order to raise its endowment for contemporary work, claiming the older art did not fit its mission statement. In December the National Academy Museum in New York sold two valuable Hudson River School paintings to fill a budget gap, proclaiming its primary status as an art school. In a case earlier this year that attracted national attention, the trustees of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., announced plans to shut down the school's Rose Art Museum and sell off the entire collection to raise general revenue. Legislation now under consideration in New York state would codify AAMD's most basic recommendations into law, allowing for the possibility of greater enforcement.

On Nov. 20, 2008, the Association of American Museums issued a statement designed to protect our nation's permanent collections in times of crisis: "There is increasing pressure on museums to capitalize their collections and to use them as collateral for financial loans to the museum. The AAM Code of Ethics for Museums requires that collections be 'unencumbered,' which means that the collections cannot be used as collateral for a loan."

Yet while museums are forbidden from "capitalizing" their collections, or using the value of their art as collateral for a loan, nothing in the AAM or AAMD rules explicitly prevents museums from selling their art along certain subjective guidelines, earmarking that revenue for future acquisitions, and then using the endowment money raised from the sales to back their loans. In both cases, art in the permanent collection has been capitalized. By taking the extra step of selling the art first, however, museums avoid the censure of AAMD while still underwriting loans that may go to general operating expenses or the next vanity expansion project.

This dangerous gap in the guidelines -- one that puts our nation's permanent collections at risk -- the Montclair Art Museum now plans to exploit. In 2001, the museum undertook a massive $14.5 million expansion that more than doubled its size and saddled it with debt. Now, as its overall endowment has dipped 25%, to $6 million from $8 million, the museum risks not having enough cash on hand to back its loans. That's where this deaccession comes in -- to raise cash to satisfy the requirements of its bank bonds. What's most troubling is that nothing on the books is designed to stop it, even though Montclair is liquidating art in its permanent collection to raise the aggregate collateral for its loans -- precisely what AAMD claims to oppose.

In an interview, Lora Urbanelli, the new director of the Montclair Museum and a member of AAMD, is upfront about the exigencies of her deaccession: "We took out tax exempt bonds at a certain time in our history. And when you do that -- we are diligently paying them off -- but whenever you do that, as part of the agreement, you agree to have a certain amount on hand in an endowment fund. At times when our endowment is flagging, we go below that line. So this is a creative way to keep the endowment full and to stay above the water line to grow our endowment for acquisitions -- just so we are in the good graces with the bond covenants. All the bank wants to know is that the endowment is a healthy one for the size of the institution. There's nothing untoward. There is nothing to hide. The deaccessioning that we're about to do has been more or less in the works for years. What we're doing now is considering an acceleration of a process. . . . The AAMD sees no problem with the way we are handling this situation."

Ms. Urbanelli presents her deaccession as a convenient way to solve her museum's financial problems. AAMD may never have anticipated this particular case of cash for art, but Montclair is nevertheless overstepping a more basic tenet of ethical conduct. The "decision to deaccession a work of art," according to AAMD, "should not be made in reaction to the exigencies of a particular moment."

The exigencies in the Montclair care are reason alone to question the sales, not to "accelerate the process," as Ms. Urbanelli maintains. If allowed to proceed, a museum will have found another way to monetize its collection without consequence, exposing another failure in the way our arts institutions police themselves. "I'm not saying every one of those paintings is a masterpiece," Mrs. Provost, the former Montclair trustee, notes of the auction, "but I've been involved with voting a lot of those paintings in. And there's a reason for every painting." As one museum after another announces deaccession plans as done deals -- "accelerations of a process" that take advantage of lax regulations -- patrons such as Mrs. Provost are right to become concerned. Montclair gives us another reason to worry about a future of art in the public mistrust.

Shock Value

PROTO MAGAZINE:
the magazine of Massachusetts General Hospital
Spring 2009

Shock Value
by James Panero

CLICK HERE FOR SLIDESHOW

In 1926, Otto Neurath, the Austrian philosopher of science, christened the 1900s the “century of the eye”: “Wall posters call out to us from the streets and hallways; exhibitions are inviting us; millions of people are watching the motion picture screens every evening....”

For the health sciences, this development became a lifesaver. In a time before preventive medicine, the containment of infectious diseases depended on widespread awareness. To broadcast prevention strategies, public health agencies developed (in a modern phrase) multimedia campaigns consisting of radio advertising, pamphleteering and posters.

“Media technology was as much of a magic bullet as vaccines were,” argues Michael Sappol, the curator of “An Iconography of Contagion: An Exhibition of 20th-Century Health Posters From the Collection of the National Library of Medicine.” The show will travel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this September. With 22 posters from the United States and abroad, the show breaks ground by examining the art as well as the science of health campaigns, which employed modernist style to great effect.

“La course à la mort,” by Charles Emmanuel Jodelet, the oldest work in the show, calls to mind nineteenth-century caricature. Death, personified as a hooded skeleton, watches a race between tuberculosis, syphilis and cancer. As is typical of the time, text, rather than image, communicates the essential information; in this case, the annual death rates in France from the three diseases. The lesson is that the two contagious diseases lead the pack—and the public should avoid them.

Following perhaps a decade later, “Atisch” (Achoo) sounds a clear call to action in a more abstract way. Inspired by the flatness and the economy of line seen in Art Nouveau and Art Deco, Danish cartoonist Storm P shows a man sneezing on a disapproving crowd. The figure and the caption—“Thus begins an epidemic”—are easily grasped from a distance.

Another decade, another style: “She may be.. a bag of TROUBLE” recalls the style of pulp novels and pinups. “Posters about VD were meant to incite anxiety and also give pleasure,” says Sappol. This one, targeted at GIs in Europe, was intended to reduce the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea.

The exhibit’s most innovative image, “No home remedy or quack doctor ever cured syphilis or gonorrhea,” by Leonard Karsakov, takes its cue from Russian constructivist art, merging images and text, and Dada collage to form a patient made up of newspaper

After the Second World War, as health services focused more on preventive science than public awareness, came a downturn. Then the rise of a plague no science could prevent—AIDS—led to a rebirth. “Discover safer sex” uses the image of a sexually ambiguous couple to shock and intrigue. Nuance and artistry may have been lost, but 100 years on, the arts continue to play a role in the fight against infectious illness.

The New York fairs (April 2009)

THE NEW CRITERION
April 2009

The New York fairs
by James Panero

On 1Q2US, the Winter Antiques Show 2009, The Armory Show, The Art Show, and “Placing Avery: Paintings and Prints from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art” at the UBS Gallery, New York.

“The art market is less ethical than the stock market.” Such was the motion at an Oxford–style debate I attended several weeks ago produced by Intelligence Squared U.S., the three-year-old American reincarnation of a British debate series. Sponsored by Robert Rosenkranz, IQ2US is a hot ticket, and this evening’s debate felt downright personal. The art market, at one time the small preserve of a handful of dealers and collectors, has been transformed—deformed might be more like it—into a headline-making enterprise of price indices, complex financial instruments, and bewildering speculation. Just what happened? Had the art market become a more unethical version of the stock market, a haven for manipulation and crooks? The people demanded answers.

Well, it wasn’t much of a debate at all. I wouldn’t even call it a show trial. At IQ2US the live audience votes on the motion twice during the evening—once at the beginning and again at the end of the session. The results at this particular event were appalling, as far as the art world was concerned. At the start of the night, 32 percent of the audience agreed with the motion that the art market is less ethical than the stock market, 30 percent were against, and 38 percent were undecided. After the debate, the art market was the clear loser: 55 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, 33 percent were against the motion, while only 12 percent remained undecided.

Okay, well, if you must know, the three panelists assigned to speak against the motion—Amy Cappellazzo of Christie’s auction house, the artist Chuck Close, and the critic Jerry Saltz—each did a terrible job, failing to address the resolution and instead offering blanket pronouncements. “I don’t think that the value of art is determined by money at all,” said Close to a healthy round of applause (thanks, Chuck). Meanwhile Jerry Saltz came off as Hopperesque—Dennis Hopperesque: “Art is a necessity, okay? It changes the world. It won’t reduce the incidence of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa but it does change the world incrementally, and/or by osmosis, okay? … Art dealers, a lot of them are missing the same chromosome. You know?”

You know, Jerry, if you mean the chromosome that predisposes one to bloviation, the dealers Richard Feigen and Michael Hue-Williams, speaking in favor the motion, might agree with you, okay? Hue-Williams, a British dealer, decried the lost virtue of “dictum meum pactum”—“My word is my bond,” the motto of the London stock exchange. Feigen, one of New York’s finest secondary dealers who has recently focused on the Old Master market, brought up the dubious auction-house practice of “chandelier bids.” Employed to lift a work up to its undisclosed reserve price, chandelier bidding describes the common occurrence of auctioneers pointing up at the ceiling to recognize nonexistent buyers. It’s all perfectly legal, but perhaps less than ethical. “Whereas regulations exist in the stock market to provide transparency,” argued Feigen, “chandelier bidding is specifically designed to deceive, to imply that there is competition when there isn’t any.”

The evening raised more questions than it answered: Is the art market inherently less ethical than the stock market—or merely vulnerable to unethical manipulation? How does the art market’s lack of regulation relate to its ethics? Are more regulated markets more ethical? (The case of Bernard Madoff would indicate otherwise; he could never have perpetuated his fraud without the seal of approval of governmental regulatory agencies.)

The dynamics of the evening, however, told the underlying story of the art market’s recent transformation. On one side were the dealers and the gallery owners. On the other were the auction houses and their defenders. Indeed, the origin of today’s speculative art market can be attributed to the new prominence of the auction houses, especially the advent of their contemporary art divisions. The auction house system, which supplanted the closed world of the dealership/gallery system as market leader within the last generation, has shifted the focus of art from objects of aesthetic delectation into assets of speculation. If the art market is now less ethical than the stock market—and I’m still not convinced it is—the reason can be found in this exchange of artistic value for retail value, encouraged and facilitated by the auction houses.

The rise of the auction houses, indirectly at least, has furthermore led to the creation of online price databases and metrics to track art as investments. Here, contemporary work has been favored over older art for the simple reason that the uniqueness of older lots (in attribution, provenance, and condition) precludes lay investors from tracking work comparatively. Not too long ago, one art investor explained to me his preference for Josef Albers. Because much of Albers’s work is a variation on the same abstract theme, my investor friend had more comparable price points. Albers’s auction prices could therefore be tracked without any understanding of connoisseurship or even the need to see the work in person.

Now, let me say that I know people who work at auction houses. Many of them care deeply about art. Nevertheless, the auctions have fostered an atmosphere that has allowed art to be treated like hog futures, making many collectors rich and even helping out a few contemporary artists (like Chuck Close) by pushing up the prices of their work to unsustainable levels.

Auction houses have encouraged the inflation of art prices and have profited as a result. Yet they have done less for the preservation of art than that creaking old world of galleries and private dealerships. Today, galleries continue to educate the public with thoughtful free exhibitions. Galleries create markets for artists and manage them. Good dealers search for the right buyers, not just the highest bidders. And the gallery world is still based on personal interactions and therefore more honor-bound than the auction houses for the work they sell, not only because of the laws of the Uniform Commercial Code but also because, for a respected dealer, your word is still your bond.

I like to keep this in mind whenever considering the phenomenon of art fairs. There is much to lament in their recent prominence: the creation of billboard-sized work, and the circus-like atmosphere one finds at these temporary art malls. Yet it is important to remember that the art fairs are dealer fairs—in many ways, the gallery system’s public answer to the auction houses. They offer a way for dealers, artists, and collectors all to meet in one place and transact the business of art as it’s done best—face to face. As the art market contracts, and fewer buyers compete for work, the art fairs still serve an important social function, helping galleries and dealers protect their artists and position them for better times ahead.

It is the inevitable fate of the Winter Antiques Show that this fair takes place over the bleakest winter week in New York.[1] Did anyone ever think of calling this the Autumn Antiques Show? The Park Avenue Armory, which houses the fair, is usually surrounded by sheets of ice and blankets of blowing snow during the run. The week-long duration of this fair also abuses the gallery employees who must staff it. Starting around day five, most everyone looks peaked.

Yet the Winter Antiques Show 2009 featured the single best booth I’ve seen at the fairs this season. The private photography dealer Hans P. Kraus Jr. converted his booth into a recreation of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen’s turn-of-the-century 291 Gallery, officially known as the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. “Influenced by various European design movements, Arts & Crafts, Symbolism, and Japonisme,” Kraus wrote in a brochure accompanying the show, “Steichen created a new kind of gallery space that was itself a work of art.”

At the Antiques Show, Hans Kraus duplicated the look of 291 down to the color on the walls and the lighting fixtures on the booth ceiling, which he had specially reproduced. It didn’t hurt that Kraus also displayed some of the finest photographic work to pass originally through 291, including Stieglitz’s wonderful carbon print of Winter—Fifth Avenue (1893), where the rough texture of the white photographic paper reflects the blizzard within. Among several other excellent booths at the Winter Antiques Show, including a fine selection of folk art by New Haven’s Giampietro gallery, Kraus demonstrated how quality work and an artful, educational presentation can best extend a gallery’s mission at an art fair.

The Art Show, produced by the Art Dealers Association of America at the Armory a month later, remains the preeminent gathering of New York dealers.[2] Here, the best booths were often those devoted to small surveys of single artists—for example, the American watercolorist Charles Burchfield at DC Moore. There were also several excellent paintings by Larry Rivers at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which now represents the estate.

But for her selection of work by the realist Rackstraw Downes, Betty Cuningham Gallery gets the blue ribbon for best in show. In Downes’s remarkable work, the mundane cityscape never looked so fascinating. His painting George Washington Carver Houses 102nd St. Between Park and Madison (2008), crafted down to the tiniest speck of detail, recalls the awesome power of Frederic Church and reminds us of the great wealth of visual information that can be contained in oil on canvas.

Unlike the cooperative ADAA Show, the annual Armory Show—named after the 1913 Armory show and housed on the Hudson River piers—is by now a division of a corporate conglomerate with the romantic name of “Merchandise Mart Properties Inc.”[3] This contemporary art fair has risen with the tide of the contemporary markets, growing into a frothy spectacle that fills New York’s cavernous Pier 94.

This year’s fair, perhaps surprisingly in a down economy, reached record attendance. Spectators like me wanted to see if the fair would still be a spectacle. This became a spectacle in itself. Yet The Armory Show has a good residual effect on New York, even if it can be a zoo, since it spawns several other art fairs and art events timed to Armory weekend. This includes a series of exhibitions and performances in the living rooms of bohemian Bushwick, Brooklyn through an event called “Site Fest” (here I particularly enjoyed the electric violinist Sean Hagerty’s street-corner performance organized by the gallerist Jason Andrew).

The real surprise of Armory ’09 came in its introduction of a modernist selection of galleries next door on the long Pier 92, a light-filled space the fair used up until a couple years ago. Here, a few galleries from the ADAA fair made another appearence, and several modernist galleries put on excellent shows: a Martín Ramírez survey at Ricco/ Maresca, a James Castle survey at Fleisher/ Ollman, Burgoyne Diller at Spanierman Modern, a few fine limoges-like paintings by Nancy Lorenz at James Graham, and a couple of Fausto Melotti sculptures and a Giorgio Morandi landscape at Studio La Città.

Alas, the fairs are now closed. So let me offer a parting word about an exhibition at the UBS Gallery on view through the end of the month. Located in the UBS building on Sixth Avenue, interrupted by elevator bells and lunchtime conversations, “Placing Avery: Paintings and Prints from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art” is a far more substantial exhibition of Milton Avery’s work than you might expect to find in an office lobby.[4]

There are many excellent Averys here (Waterfall [1954]). There are also a few duds (Two Clowns [1937]). The exhibition presents a comprehensive scholarly effort to place Avery, an American original, in a larger artistic context (with works by Thomas Cole, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Marc Rothko).

But perhaps the best feature of the show is the guest book, where few of the witty comments fail to mention the financial sector’s recent shortfalls. My favorite went like this: “To Lawrence: if my account appreciates as well as this art—wow. You’re the man.” But that’s the great thing about great art, of course. No matter where the markets go, great art never stops being great.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. The Fifty-fifth Annual Winter Antiques Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 22 through January 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. The Art Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from February 19 through February 23, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. The Armory Show was on view at Piers 92 and 94, New York, from March 5 through March 8, 2009. Go back to the text.
4. “Placing Avery: Paintings and Prints from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art” opened at the UBS Art Gallery, New York, on February 5 and remains on view through May 1, 2009. Go back to the text.

An evening with Thornton Willis

James writes: 

This Monday evening I will be leading a small group of young New Criterion supporters on a studio tour with Thornton Willis. The ability to visit the working studio of an excellent abstract painter like Willis is a great perk of my job. It will be a pleasure for me to share it with others. There's very limited space, but if you would like to join our tour, please contact Callie Siskel, assistant editor, at 212-247-6980.

Thornton's latest exhibition is now on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea. I've written the catalogue essay for the show. You can read it here.

The young director Michael Feldman has also directed a top-rate video profile of the artist featuring additional commentary by me. Check it out.

 

A profile of the abstract painter Thornton Willis from James Panero on Vimeo.

The Salander indictment

James writes:

The Manhattan District Attorney's office has released a 100-count indictment of the art dealer Larry Salander. Salander was arrested at his home in Millbrook, New York, Thursday morning.

He is now out on bond.

Last year I wrote about the Salander case, what has been called an $88-million art-world ponzi scheme, in a feature for New York magazine.

Salander is not an ordinary con but a messianic figure who thought he was doing the right thing for the world of art by creating a market for Old Masters. Such distinctions may mean little in a court of law. Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau has been building his case for over a year through the New York City Police Department Major Case Squad. This is a bad time to go to trial for operating a ponzi scheme, of course, and Salander, a latter-day Medici, never lived modestly. These trappings will now be held against him; the DA even makes note of them in his press report.

What often gets missed in the cold reporting of this case is that New York lost an excellent gallery when Salander-O’Reilly was closed by court order in late 2007. I covered exhibitions at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries since 2002. The New Criterion’s coverage goes back to the first issues of the magazine in the early 1980s. Salander’s art must be considered separately from his business dealings. Today there is still no replacement for Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, and many of Salander’s former artists remain without representation.

Art galleries are a reflection of their directors, and Salander-O'Reilly reflected the ideals of its owner. One only needs to look at the hundreds of exhibitions Salander produced, many of them accompanied by scholarly catalogues--many, I noted as a critic, without art even for sale. These were museum quality shows, born from Salander's love of art.

It was Salander's passion for art that eventually led to his undoing. To put it mildly, Mr. Salander appreciated the life of art more than the business of art. Now the fate of this complicated, larger-than-life figure is in the hands of the courts.

Pilgrim’s Process

Thornton Willis, Convergence (2008)

CATALOGUE ESSAY
THORNTON WILLIS: THE LATTICE PAINTINGS
Elizabeth Harris Gallery, March 19-April 18, 2009

Pilgrim's Process
By James Panero

It is possible we understand abstraction less now than we did a hundred years ago. Every day, incrementally, we lose a little of our abstract consciousness. For most of us this process occurs without notice. We grow accustomed to a world less illuminated by abstraction’s peculiar light. Looking back over the last fifty years, art historians may one day speak of the counter-reformation staged by the zealots of literalness against the holdouts of the abstract vanguard. Thornton Willis has a particular sensitivity to what that loss may bring. He has never given up testing art’s abstract potential. He paints meditative objects as far removed from ordinary existence as were Kandinsky’s in his day.

Thornton is by now a Soho old-timer, a master painter with pigment under his nails and a lifetime of engagement with the history of art. He arrived in New York in a moment of abstract experimentation as part of the generation of post-minimalists and process artists. For forty years he has advanced by feel. “I like the smell of medium. I get it on my hands and paint with my hands,” he says. The loft studio where he lives with his wife, Vered, has changed little from the time he moved in decades ago. Why should it? Thornton knew what he wanted to do from the moment he put brush to canvas.

Today you may find Thornton in his studio mixing his own special dryers, acrylics, and oils. He uses the same mayonnaise-like medium he picked up from de Kooning that he keeps in a whiskey bottle: one part linseed oil, one part turpentine, one part stand oil, a dash of demar varnish, and a dash of water. He moves quickly from one canvas to another. He wants each painting to lead to the next. He uses an undercoat of acrylic to get down the basic colors and forms and then goes back in with oil, building up the surfaces. He says he has perfected his drying times: “I put in long hours when I’m really cooking. I work at night. When the juice is flowing I want to get it done.” Sometimes forward, sometimes around again, with roughness and grace he follows where his own paintings take him.

This is Thornton’s second exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. The rectangular structure of his latest work may strike some as an abrupt departure from the triangular facets he refined in his last show. Why not more of the same? The answer is that Thornton resists his own perfection. “I got to that point where I thought I had pretty much worked it through. I felt finished.” As Thornton labored over a large canvas he called “Entanglement,” which he expected to be the culmination of his triangular phase, the shapes started to change. “I had the painting to some point where it was finished, but I wasn’t happy with it. It was disappointing to me. For two years I had worked towards that painting and it was a letdown. And so I just opened it up again and boom, this is what happened. The bands started to be more dominant than the triangular shapes. It was moving me back to this.”

The result became “Conversion,” a painting made right on top of “Entanglement” that brings Thornton back to a theme he has been working on since his first forays in rectilinear shapes in the 1970s and 1980s. Thornton calls them his “lattice” paintings. “This particular idea really started with my earliest work in New York. I realized I never totally fleshed it out. I wanted to reinvestigate it. And that’s how this work came about. The grid has always been my orientation, so it feels natural to move back to this work.” “Conversion” inaugurates and “opens up” the body of work we see in the current show.

Thornton is more interested in the process of abstract art than in its completion. He wants to keep his paintings open and undone. This openness allows him to move from one painting to the next. It also elevates his work from mere design into objects of contemplation. “I’m seeking something that plays with the viewer. You want the viewer to take part in the process.” This approach accounts for the raw quality we see in Thornton’s paintings at first viewing. Once drawn in, however, we begin to interact with the technical dynamics that exist beneath the surface. This latest work calls upon Thornton’s full range of abstract abilities to undermine simple readings of figure and ground, forward and back, top and bottom. Thornton breaks down a painting’s illusion of deep space to energize his viewer’s full engagement. Ever since his wedge paintings in the 1970s, Thornton has played with the density of volumes, the interaction of colors to come forward and recede, and the character of the line. Thornton’s paintings begin and end with the line. Edges dissolve. Underpainting peeks through. Thornton plays his lines like the strings on an instrument.

Thornton’s road to abstract art began in the rural South. The son of a minister, he grew up in Alabama and Florida. Shake Thornton off and you can still see the earth clinging to his roots. His worldview was formed in the South by Gothic tragedy. Thornton’s father, in a horrific accident at age twelve, blinded his sister with a gun and ran into the woods. His family feared he would take his own life. Instead he had an epiphany. He dedicated himself to God. As an adult Thornton’s father worked as an itinerant minister in the Church of Christ. He preached in the Florida panhandle and the deep South while caring for his blind sister, his ailing wife, and his children. Before he died in a head-on collision on the road to Bible class, he taught Thornton to quote scripture in the small cotton towns of Alabama, the same ones that now supply Thornton’s canvases.

One of Thornton’s earliest visual fascinations was reading the comic pages on his father’s knee. The landscape of his childhood has never been far from his abstract work. “There are things growing up, these old back highways in the South. You would have billboards along the side of the road and they would get weathered and peeled and you would see broken up collage. It was part of my visual growing up and I identified it with Alabama. I grew up mostly in rural areas, and I remember things like old structures, a gravel pit, some big old structure. I would always be fascinated with these kinds of things.”

Thornton is not a religious man himself, but he has followed his own calling in paint. His awakening occurred at an exhibition of abstract art that passed through Alabama in the 1950s – a show of Hans Hofmann and his students. “That was like a punch in the face, a punch in the gut. A boom!,” he said of the effect. “Seeing that work was the epiphany that brought me to painting. I’ve been chasing that ever since.” Thornton has been chasing abstract painting for nearly half a century.

Now age 72, Thornton shows his genteel Southern slightness. He looks out at the world with rain clouds in his eyes and magnolias in his voice. He has come to resemble his paintings more and more, with skin the texture of brushstrokes, his spirit in bold colors, his honesty in the painted shapes that collapse illusions. Thornton’s unassuming path to the forward positions of art speaks to the truth of what he does. “There’s a naive place from where I want to work.” he told me. He never chose to be an abstract painter. Abstract painting chose him, instilling a single-mindedness that has a glaring honesty. “I’m a straightforward person,” he explains. In an art world destroyed by cleverness, he occupies the last avant-garde position. His honesty would put us to shame if it were not so embracing. As abstraction’s preacher he has never been more charismatic.

other links:
www.thorntonwillis.com

www.elizabethharrisgallery.com

"Comeback Kid" by James Panero (Art & Antiques)

Pictures at an Exhibition

Titian, Supper at Emmaus, 1533-43

ART & ANTIQUES
March 2009

Pictures at an Exhibition
by James Panero

Behind the scenes at the MFA Boston's Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese

As the march 15 opening approaches for his exhibition “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the curator Frederick Ilchman moves from conservation to design to exhibition space with an amiable twitter. Dressed in a natty three-piece suit, he looks as if he just stepped off a vaporetto on the Grand Canal. He is a specialist in Tintoretto—he spent five years in Italy researching the expressionistic cinquecento painter—and seems to know every painting and every person in Venice.

Curators are a museum’s ghostwriters; they write in pictures and let the pictures speak for themselves. A name on a wall, an essay in a catalogue, a voice on an audio guide—the curator works behind the scenes, but the choices someone like Ilchman makes in the conception, selection and execution of a show will leave an indelible impression on the way we see the work and on the story we take away. At 41 years old, Ilchman is about to mount the most important exhibition of his career.

With only weeks to go, Ilchman keeps busy with all aspects of his show’s preparation. The catalogue is done and off at the printers, but some of the loan guarantees are yet to be finalized. The museum’s own paintings destined for the exhibition are still up in the conservation lab for cleaning. An extensive X-ray analysis, undertaken by the conservator Rhona MacBeth, is revealing new secrets of the creation of one unusual work. Back at the design department, a model of the exhibition hall—a sort of curatorial dollhouse—is being fitted with foam-board walls and postage-stamp-sized printouts of paintings. “For the last room, I’m thinking of the autumn of their years. Fall colors,” Ilchman says to designer Keith Crippen while sticking a miniature wall up with putty. “This one you showed me a moment ago is way too Martha’s Vineyard. It’s preppy cranberry.”

Ilchman is the Mrs. Russell W. Baker assistant curator of paintings at the museum. After Princeton he did graduate work in art history at Columbia University under the advisement of the Renaissance scholar David Rosand. A visit to Italy at the completion of his master’s degree convinced Ilchman to focus on Tintoretto, the rebel painter of the late Venetian Renaissance. Although he was a favorite of John Ruskin, the artist has lacked for good modern scholarship. “Tintoretto occupies a special place in my heart, and I appreciate the underdog,” he says.

Ilchman immersed himself in Venetian painting for his on-site dissertation research. He also became an important player in cultural politics by working for the philanthropic organization Save Venice, and these connections have now helped him secure the loans for his show and even underwrite, through a donation to Save Venice, the restoration of one of the works destined for display (A Deposition of Christ, from Venice’s Accademia).

Upon arriving in the museum world, Ilchman says he first contemplated mounting a monographic exhibition of his dissertation subject. Then a major 2007 show of Tintoretto at the Prado in Madrid, to which he contributed, mitigated the necessity of such a project. “Incredible attendance, 400,000 people,” Ilchman recalls. “Tintoretto is smiling and looking down at that.”

So he began thinking about new ways of approaching the Renaissance master. Out of this emerged the present show, which is destined to make headlines through a comparative examination of the three-way rivalry between a grand Venetian patriarch (Titian) and his heirs at once repudiating (Tintoretto) and respectful (Veronese). “To understand Tintoretto you have to spend a lot of time considering Titian and Veronese,” Ilchman explains. “While there are other artists in Venice, these were the rivals. Here’s the important thing to remember: Titian was born 30 years before Tintoretto and 40 years before Veronese. These painters’ careers then overlapped for nearly four decades.” (Titian lived more than 90 years.)

“Instead of the usual effort to locate art within a political or social context,” says Rosand of the upcoming exhibition, “the Boston project makes the studio itself the context, that is, the art of painting is the subject of the exhibition. And this very focus—on the aesthetic and technical—testifies to the imagination of its curator. Frederick Ilchman envisioned an exhibition that would focus on the art, its materials and techniques, and by bringing these three painters together he is in effect reconstructing the artistic context of 16th-century Venice, its world of artistic competition.”

Ilchman’s focused survey will be his first exhibition as lead curator at the MFA, which he joined in 2001. The museum has pulled out all the stops for him, setting aside its Gund Gallery in the I.M. Pei-designed Linde Family Wing, sending paintings from its permanent collection abroad in order to secure important loans back home, even promoting the exhibition with a press lunch at Mario Batali’s Del Posto in New York.

The show is set to display many of the finest works by these artists ever to travel to the United States. In the fall it will go up at the Louvre, which signed on as an exhibition partner in 2007—quite late by museum standards—after being impressed by Ilchman’s initial plans for the Boston show. “My colleague George Shackelford, the head of the department, went to Paris with the binder to borrow two great Titians—The Supper at Emmaus and the Madonna and Child. They asked if we were looking for a partner,” Ilchman explains of the serendipitous collaboration.

A snowstorm is bearing down on Boston and about to knock out part of a day from the show’s tight advance schedule. Ilchman has spent the morning in the recording studio working on the audio guide. Settling into a corner booth in the museum’s Bravo restaurant, steps away from the future location of his show (where a blockbuster exhibition of Assyrian treasures from the British Museum is installed), the curator places a well-worn three-ring binder on the table and, with a close eye on his watch, begins flipping through the pages.

“This binder is the physical manifestation of the evolving exhibition in my head,” he explains. “I’ve been carrying this binder around for four years. It’s been on 20 airplane flights. The process of a show’s refinement is extremely complex. It’s easy to assume the curator tries to get the best things, and puts up what’s best, but there has to be a coherence to the show.”

The binder is made up of plastic sleeves, each containing a printout of a painting destined for the exhibition walls and the direct comparisons he hopes to make: in portraiture, ecclesiastical painting and even in three nudes regarding themselves in the mirror (Titian’s Venus With a Mirror, circa 1555; Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders, circa 1555–56; and Veronese’s Venus With a Mirror, circa mid-1580s). This is Ilchman’s hand, his deck of cards reshuffled and restacked. What was once 100 paintings has been whittled down to 56. In the front pocket are loose images—the paintings that didn’t make the cut.

“A lot of the work in the exhibition is about shuffling these cards,” says Ilchman. “Every painting in the exhibition has to justify its presence. The crate that a painting travels in costs a lot to make, and there is limited real estate on the walls. You can’t be sentimental because you like something. Then there’s negotiating, refining the checklist, getting the best things to make your point. A huge amount of time is spent writing the request letters. I have to make it clear that the painting we’re looking to borrow is the missing piece. And,” Ilchman continues, speaking of the intricacies of museum politics and the labor in securing loans, “you do favors for each other. In Italy I put on one of my best suits, speak Italian and take this binder and explain why this painting is essential for the show.”

The introductory painting in the exhibition is a Bellini and Workshop, Virgin and Child With Saints, one of two paintings in the show not by the three rivals. “This is the kind of painting that Titian could have painted and would have learned in Bellini’s workshop,” says Ilchman. “It’s from the Met. It’s been off view since 1974. The whole doesn’t come together very well. The saints look like they were Photoshopped in.” Ilchman explains his decision to edit down his initial plans for a longer introductory section. “A colleague warned me you are going to spend all your time borrowing one Giorgione,” he says of the great early Renaissance Venetian painter, “when you could borrow three Veroneses. And where Giorgione was a huge influence on Titian, it’s not the case for Tintoretto and Veronese. The thing is to keep the focus.”

Turning to Titian’s Supper at Emmaus, Ilchman compares Titian’s version of the subject (from the Louvre, dated 1533–34) with a 1542 version by Tintoretto from Budapest and one mid-1570s Veronese from Rotterdam. “Tintoretto’s energy is spinning out of control. Compare this to Veronese’s close focus. And for the Veronese we’re helping the museum in Rotterdam. We’re helping them restore this painting in time for the exhibition by splitting the cost of the treatment three ways.”

The show also includes a strange nativity scene that belongs to the MFA, a painting consisting of five different canvases stitched together and executed by what appears to be an equal number of different hands. Amid the crudely worked over imagery, three exquisitely painted figures stand out. They seem to have been painted by Tintoretto himself. “We did a battery of scientific tests, and we found a painting underneath it,” Ilchman says. A 72-negative X-ray analysis, which picks up the lead content in white underpainting, revealed hidden angels and the feet of Christon the cross. Upon seeing the X-rays, one of Ilchman’s colleagues made a startling realization: sections two and four—those most likely by Tintoretto himself—were once joined together. Ilchman now speculates that in an act of Renaissance recycling, common in the workshops of Venice, an original, vertical crucifixion by Tintoretto, set among the angels in a cloud, was taken apart and transformed (not too convincingly) into a nativity scene.

Behind all of Ilchman’s decision-making for Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese is the one technical fact that defines the Venetian Renaissance and makes such an exhibition as this a possibility outside of Italy. It is the development of oil on canvas. “You can never do a Michelangelo show,” the curator says. “His best work is fresco painting and monumental sculpture. There have been impressive shows of Renaissance Florence, but many of those artists are truly best defined by works that are not moveable. But you can approximate Venetian artists like Tintoretto accurately because you can move many of his key canvases.”

The consistent combination of oil with canvas was new in the early 15th century, Ilchman explains. Up until then, prestige paintings were made on wooden panel or as frescoes. The humid and saline climate of Venice finally encouraged artists and patrons to adopt a technique that up to that point had been used for banners and other forms of low art. In 1474 the Venetian government decreed that the redecoration of the main room of the Palazzo Ducale would be done on canvas. If Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese had been painting two centuries before, much of their work would have most likely been Venetian fresco, and given the climate, little of it would remain today.

But the development of oil on canvas did not just lead to work with a longer shelf life. It also encouraged the building up of textured surface. Paintings defined by layered coloring and expressionistic brushwork eventually became the hallmarks of Venetian art and defined it against the sharp contours and refined draftsmanship of Florence.

Finally, oil on canvas led to transportability and the birth of the secondary painting market. Titian became the first nonresident court artist by shipping work to two successive Spanish monarchs, Charles V and his son Philip II, largely without leaving home. It also created an art world of celebrity painters that we would have little trouble recognizing today. The artistic ego, the concept of the artist as something greater than an artisan for hire, took root in Venice, and it was nurtured in the competition of three great artists.

“In many of its aspects,” Ilchman writes in the exhibition catalogue, “our modern concept of painting, and the artistic self-determination it assumes, owes much to the rivalry between Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese in Cinquecento Venice.” It might also be said that the modern museum, with its library of moveable art, owes much to the developments these artists made half a millennium ago. It’s a story tailor-made for a museum exhibition, worth telling by the curator who can bring the paintings together to tell it.

Outside the frame

 The Death of James Lee Byars, 1982/1994, by James Lee Byars

HUMANITIES MAGAZINE
March/April 2009

"Outside the Frame"
by James Panero

How Asia changed the course of American Art

On July 8, 1853, four black warships under a cloud of smoke entered the waters around Edo, now known as Tokyo, the center of power in feudal Japan. The American commander, Commodore Matthew Perry, carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore for the Imperial Emperor. Under the policy of sakoku, or “closed country,” in effect since 1639, the ports of Japan had been forbidden to foreign transit but for a Dutch harbor in Nagasaki. Fillmore's long and even chatty letter, brimming with American optimism ("Great and Good Friend!" it announced to the Emperor), sought to overturn this policy and forever alter the United States' relations with the East.

“Friendship, commerce, a supply of coal, and provisions and protection for our shipwrecked people” were Fillmore's requests. His hope was to ensure the safe passage of the American whaling fleet, then fishing off the Japanese coast, and for American vessels en route to China.

Yet it wasn’t the persuasiveness of Fillmore’s letter so much as the intelligence of the American commander and armaments and technology of Perry’s gunboats, consisting of two steam frigates and two sloops, that guaranteed an audience with the Tokugawa Shogunate and Japan’s acquiescence less then a year later. With the signing of the Convention of Kanagawa, Japan was open.

Perry’s voyage, however, had a reciprocal effect. With the opening of Japan, the East began to exert its own cultural influence on the United States. For those who merely expected a one-way spread of the Christian gospel and Western culture to “heathen” lands, the result was unexpected. Nevertheless, as Perry approached Edo harbor, one might say a Japanese black fleet of its own, outfitted with Eastern philosophy and Oriental ornament, made its slow way to the cultural shores of the United States. The period of Asia’s colonization of American imagination was about to begin.

The influence of Eastern thinking over American artistic culture is now the subject of a sprawling 250-work exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York entitled “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.” The show sets out to survey the East’s cultural reflections in American art in the same dreamy manner that American artists often appropriated Eastern themes. A meditative peel of bells, courtesy of the artist Ann Hamilton, circles Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling rotunda and sets the tone for an exhibition that seeks to be both didactic and contemplative, Western and Eastern. The exhibition rises and falls on the same themes as the work it contains. The show “does not illustrate its textual sources; it embodies them,” announce the curators.

“Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I am.” Rene Descartes summarized a strain of Western classical thought when he wrote this maxim in 1644. His declaration of self-consciousness borrowed from Aristotle and the Nicomachean Ethics: “Whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we exist.” For the arts of the West, this philosophy of self-awareness established formal boundaries between the artist or observer or conscious subject and the passive window-like art object.

Traditionally, the Western artist imposed an extension of the rational world on a painting through the illusion of perspective. The artist’s studied draftsmanship used the West’s particular knowledge of representational technique to translate the visual world to the picture plane, all the while concentrating almost exclusively on the positive space within the boundaries of the frame.

But what about the space outside the frame--not just the physical space, but the spiritual and relational space between art and artist and viewer? In the past hundred and fifty years, the philosophies of the East have exerted their strongest influence over this negative, numinous region. Meanwhile, the artists of the West have observed, imagined, and even made up what the East has to say about this liminal area, filling in with their own dreams, spirituality, meditations, and politics. Influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Asian art and performance, Western artists “deliberately abstained from European empiricism and utilitarianism and looked toward Asia to forge an independent artistic identity that would define the modern age--and the modern mind--in a new transcendentalist understanding of existence and consciousness,” writes Alexandra Munroe, the curator of the Guggenheim show.

Dream House (1962--present) by La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela and The Death of James Lee Byars (1982/94) by James Lee Byars, two of the most memorable works at the Guggenheim, both use Western means to affect this Eastern sensibility. Dream House came about in the early 1960s when Young combined his interest in North Indian classical raga music with Zazeela’s studies in light art. Both became followers of a North Indian vocalist named Pandit Pran Nath and lived with him as disciples in a traditional gurukula manner. The result of their work at the Guggenheim is a carpeted meditative room (no shoes allowed) off the side of the main gallery, filled with colored light and deceptive shadows and sounds that pulsate in deep, repetitive electronic tones. Young and Zazeela’s art cannot be isolated as single elements to be observed—a beam of light, strips of paper, a movement of music--but instead concerns itself with enlivening the spectator through acute sensory stimulation.

The Death of James Lee Byars operates through similar means. From 1958 to 1968, Byars lived in Kyoto, where he taught English to Buddhist monks and studied Noh theater, “a highly abstract spectacle whose dramas explore the intersection between the human and supernatural worlds,” writes Monroe. Through this Japanese influence Byars developed a metaphoric performance practice that carried meaning over to form. The Death of James Lee Byars, now on display in the first large gallery room of the Guggenheim, is composed of a monumental hollowed-out cube covered in glittering gold leaf. In the center is a platform on which the artist once performed as the dead figure of himself. Today, small shimmering crystals rest on the slab in his place. The work of art here is less concerned with sculpture in itself than in the resplendent gold void contained within it, a special space of its own that evokes the spirit of the artist.

The earliest American interest in Eastern expression emerged in New England, where the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read Hindu texts in the 1840s. Here Eastern art connoisseurship arose out of the China trade, and a community of Asian scholars developed around Harvard University. The most influential of these was Ernest Fenollosa, who became the curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1890 and wrote the canonical two-volume Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912).

The transcultural assimilation of Asian thought in Western art and culture was never merely an American phenomenon, however, and it did not begin with Commodore Perry. In 1827, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel linked Arthur Schopenhauer’s “cult of nothingness” to the Buddhist nirvana. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, in what was known as japonisme, the French Impressionists took up the formal qualities of Japanese wood-block prints, called ukiyo-e. The flattening of the picture plane, which became a central feature of modernism, owes much of its development to the styles found in this Japanese art.

Fenollosa directly influenced at least two important artists, Arthur Wesley Dow of Massachusetts and John La Farge of New York, who had both studied painting in Paris and taken an early interest in French japonisme. Dow worked with Fenollosa at the Museum of Fine Arts and published Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected from a New System of Art Education (1899) based on his interest in Japanese prints, which emphasized the rhythmic spacing of forms. Both artists traveled to Japan, and La Farge, through his wife, had a familial connection to Commodore Perry. His close-cropped images of flowers, in their high horizon lines and color choices, resemble Edo-period paintings. After traveling with Henry Adams through Japan, La Farge helped design a memorial, now in Rock Creek Cemetary in Washington, DC, for Adams’s wife with the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the architect Stanford White. This important work, which evokes both Symbolist iconography and Eastern quietude, “is likely the most public artwork of the nineteenth century to refer in such significant ways to Eastern sources,” writes Monroe. There is a cast of it in the Guggenheim show.

It is appropriate that the Guggenheim Museum, with its renowned collection of abstract paintings by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, should be the institution to hold this survey. Beyond a mere formal influence on the look and style of modern art, the East had its most profound effect on the philosophies of art, no more so than in the early development of abstract painting, which arrived in America in a roundabout way from Asia by way of European intermediaries (who themselves drew on the publications of New York-based spiritualist circles).

Kandinsky’s debt to Theosophy has been a long-standing source of embarrassment for those who prefer to see only a positivist, materialist origin to abstract art, often examined only through the lens of French modernism. The occultist practice of Theosophy, founded by Madame Blavatsky in New York in 1875 and continued by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, borrowed extensively from Eastern religious practices, in particular Hindu and Buddhist teachings and cosmograms used as visual tools for achieving greater consciousness. Besant and Leadbeater’s book Thought-Forms, which promised a “glimpse of the forms natural to the astral or mental planes” through the synesthetic mixing of the senses, visualized a Gounod chorus, for example, as an “oblate spheroid” of colors rising “six hundred feet” in the air. Kandinsky’s own book On the Spiritual in Art borrowed extensively from Thought-Forms, as did his formal experiments in paint.

Kandinsky’s abstract “compositions” did not set out to represent an external reality so much as “to effect a spiritual awakening in the viewer’s consciousness,” write Kathleen Pyne and D. Scott Atkinson in the Guggenheim catalog. “Kandinsky drew from Theosophy to develop his revolutionary claim that abstract art (the formless form) had the greatest potential for expressing cosmic laws,” adds Monroe. “The notion of art as a mystical inner construction charged with the power to transform the viewer’s state of mind had a profound impact on American vanguard artists, on whom Kandinsky’s debt to Asian logic for his theories of abstraction was not lost.”

The first generation of American artists to arrive at abstraction came through Kandinsky’s indirect Eastern influences. Marsden Hartley met Kandinsky in Berlin in 1913. Alfred Stieglitz, the center of New York’s early avant-garde, ran excerpts of Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art in Camera Work that same year. Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Synchronists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright reflected Kandinsky’s interest in synesthesia, an artistic belief, related to Richard Wagner’s “total work of art,” that the senses could be brought into harmony, with colors that can be heard and music that can be seen. These artists also absorbed Fenollosa’s books and Hindu and Buddhist texts (Hartley’s Musical Theme [Oriental Symphony] is a synthesis of all these influences). “The example of Kandinsky highlights the hybrid context of the introduction and reception of the East in American modern art,” writes Monroe.

One might think that the calligraphic brushstroke of the second generation of American abstract painters, the Abstract Expressionists, was equally Asian influenced, but these artists were on the whole less accommodating to Eastern roots. The critic Clement Greenberg insisted that Franz Kline, one of the more obvious candidates, has no more “than a cursory interest in Oriental art.” Robert Motherwell claimed he wanted “no fake Oriental work for me.” As occult practices became too closely associated with the rise of fascism and Nazism during the war (and Japan itself was, of course, an Axis power), across the board, abstract painting in the second half of the twentieth century sought to dry out and desacralize much of the mysticism that went into abstraction's origins.

American poetry took its own cue from Eastern sources from an early date, most importantly in Ezra Pound’s 1915 publication of Cathay, containing translations of Fenollosa’s notes on Chinese classical poetry. After the Second World War, the Beat writers took up the mantle of Eastern aesthetics, although often more philosophically than through actual textual interaction. The title of the show, “The Third Mind,” refers to a cut-up work by Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin that combines text and images in random collage.

Interestingly, in 1958, Alan Watts, the preeminent American advocate of Zen, distanced himself from his artistic cult followers, including the Beats. He accused them of using Zen to rationalize “sheer caprice in art, literature, and life [to] revolt against culture and social convention.” He went on: “Today there are Western artists avowedly using Zen to justify the indiscriminate framing of simply anything—blank canvases, totally silent music, torn-up bits of paper dropped on a board and stuck where they fall, or dense masses of mangled wire.”

The composer John Cage, whose 1952 composition “4’33” ” consists of three movements in which no notes are played, came in for his own criticism from Watts. Cage became famous for translating Eastern philosophy into twentieth-century Western music in what the Guggenheim calls “Cage Zen,” although Cage’s affinities for indeterminancy are closer to I Ching, a book of divination that is one of the five classics of Confucianism, than to Buddhist Zen. “What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen,” responded Cage, whose approach to the East, as with the Beats, was predominantly philosophical. Nevertheless, even as his Eastern influences were not always directly drawn out, Cage found a way to articulate the Eastern importance of negative space better than anyone: “Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, useful towards a variety of ends. . . . Where none of these or other goals is present, silence becomes something else—not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds.”

Despite often dubious misappropriations of Eastern philosophy, and maybe even because of them, Western artists were drawn to produce some of the most important work of the modern period. “Misreadings, misunderstandings, denials, and imaginary projections emerge as important iterations of this individual, transcultural process,” admits Munroe. They also left plenty of second-rate examples, where the lessons of Eastern space failed to translate into the frame of Western art. For from the dreams of astral consciousness, this is what Western artists must make and what Western museums must display: works in frames. The work that endures in “The Third Mind” respects its Western demands. The art that fails holds out for a vision where none appears. In either case, the effect can be enlightening, in both an Eastern and Western way.

Gallery chronicle (March 2009)

Louise Nevelson, Untitled (1968)
Photo by: Bill Jacobson / Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
March 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks” at Pace Wildenstein, New York, February 13–March 14, 2009.

The sculptor Louise Nevelson was the idol of art’s own silent screen, the creator of evocative, cinematic work who also lived like the sirens of early film. An excellent selection of nearly twenty of her large wall sculptures from the 1950s through the 1980s is now on view at Pace Wildenstein in Chelsea.[1]

Nevelson used the syntax of Constructivism to plumb the depths of Romanticism and Symbolism. Hilton Kramer rightly praised her work as a “realm of enchantment.” Now Pace further reminds us how Nevelson refined allusion and mystery to make her own powerful contributions to twentieth-century modernism.

She was born Louise Berliawsky in Kiev, Russia in 1899, the daughter of Jewish parents. At four she moved to the United States and grew up in Rockland, Maine. Her father worked in the timber business; her mother dressed like a Park Avenue grande dame; Louise, meanwhile, developed a persona best suited for her sense of artistic destiny. “I’ve always had to overcompensate for my opinion of myself,” she said. “I had to run like hell to catch up with what I thought of myself.” Her grandiose pronouncements went hand-in-hand with her particular artistic achievement.

“I knew I was a creative person from the first minute I opened my eyes,” she claimed. “I knew it, and they treated me like an artist all of my early life. And I knew I was coming to New York when I was a baby.” She maintained the aura of a successful artist even before she was one. In her life and demeanor she rejected down-and-out bohemianism in favor of celluloid glamor. In 1920 she came to New York and married a shipping magnate named Charles Nevelson. “My husband’s family was terribly refined,” she complained. “Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.” She had a son two years later. In 1931 she divorced, refusing to accept the complications of marriage. “I learned that marriage wasn’t the romance that I sought but a partnership, and I didn’t need a partner.” For many years she managed to live well, but also as an art world outsider. Over time she filled her palazzo-like homes with her large sculptures—first at a Murray Hill townhouse in Manhattan, and later spread through multiple buildings on Spring Street in Soho. She even discarded her home furnishings and other distractions to focus on making art.

She spent a quarter-century in the artistic wilderness. In the early 1930s, she went off to Munich to study with Hans Hofmann. She worked as an extra in films in Berlin and Vienna. She then became an assistant to Diego Rivera, whose sense of scale and technique of storytelling through sequential frames would make a lasting impression on her art. She also developed a lifelong fascination with modern dance and drew from Martha Graham a sensibility for movement: “Dance made me realize that air is a solid through which I pass, not a void in which I exist.”

Nevelson did not emerge onto the public stage until 1958, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired and exhibited Sky Cathedral, a wall-sized object of open wooden boxes containing recovered bits of architectural molding, dowels, and spindles, all painted a uniform black. Sky Cathedral, constructed on a system of box frames she had developed a year before, brought Abstract Expressionist scale and Cubist space into sculptural high relief. It also represented but a fraction of the work lining the walls of her home. Nevelson always exhibited the confidence of someone who was expecting the artistic spotlight. She was fifty-nine years old when it started shining on her.

It wasn’t long before Nevelson became a public eminence in the mode of Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. She wore gypsy bandanas and jockey helmets, sporting inch-long eyelashes and a riot of Incan and Persian jewelry. “I am what you call an atmospheric dresser. When I meet someone, I want people to enjoy something, not just an old hag,” she said. She smoked cigars. She appeared on magazine covers wrapped in furs. She rolled off one-liners and maintained the absolute position of her own artistic greatness. “In Maine, and at the Art Students League in New York, and then in Munich with Hofmann, they all give me 100 plus,” she said, often referring to herself as the builder of an artistic empire. “I am not very modest,” she admitted. She remained prolific up to her death in 1988. In the 1970s and 1980s, particularly after Alexander Calder’s death in 1976, she began receiving numerous commissions for public sculpture.

Most of us, regrettably, now first encounter Nevelson’s work through this public art. She was never at her best sculpting monumental stand-alone objects, nor does her work show well outdoors. “The very basis of Nevelson’s environments is enveloping rather than object-delineated,” wrote Arnold Glimcher. Gather her wooden sculptures in the right room, however, and the experience is altogether different. For the exhibition, Pace Wildenstein smartly displays some of Nevelson’s sculptures on blackened walls. Upon entering the show, I felt like the writer Joe Gillis when he meets Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. “You used to be in pictures. You used to be big,” says Gillis. “I am big,” replies Desmond. “It’s the pictures that got small.”

Nevelson’s own larger-than-life persona would be of little interest were it not so tied to her sculptural practice. Her theatricality helps define her use of form. Hilton Kramer, in his introduction to a 1983 Nevelson catalogue, recalls a studio visit he made to her Murray Hill townhouse in the 1950s: “the most extraordinary of all my encounters with artists and works of art.”

Here one entered a world of shadows, and it required a certain adjustment in one’s vision simply to see even a part of what there was to see… . It was also, as one came afterward to realize, intensely theatrical. Emerging from that house on this first occasion, I felt very much as I had felt as a child emerging from a Saturday-afternoon movie. The feeling of shock and surprise upon discovering that the daylight world was still there, going about its business in the usual way, was similarly acute.

Nevelson arrived at a sculptural form that conveyed the darkness of the movie house by way of Richard Wagner’s “total work of art.” “Theater, dance, music, films—the whole world of theatricality had long been one of Nevelson’s passionate interests,” Kramer remarked. Nevelson never drew formal boundaries between the arts. Everything became absorbed into her sense of overall creativity. Like the movies, which are a vulgar descendant of Wagnerian opera, Nevelson’s dark, musical work has more in common with advanced nineteenth-century art than the distilled classicism of twentieth-century high modernism.

Nevelson’s lush persona seemed far removed from the existential angst of the Abstract Expressionists at mid-century and the chilly serialism of the Minimalists a decade and a half later, even as her career took her through both worlds. In assembling her sculpture from wooden cast-offs, Nevelson became a spiritual actor. Her creative process had as much to do with nineteenth-century occult practices as twentieth-century formal concerns: “I feel that what people call by the word scavenger is really a resurrection. When you do things this way, you’re really bringing them to life. You know that you nursed them and you enhance them, you tap them and you hammer them, and you know you have given them an ultimate life, a spiritual life that surpasses the life they were created for.”

At Pace, the division of staked crates that make up Untitled (1964), turned open on their side, forms the frames of a larger moving image. Taken alone, each box displays an inanimate still life: table legs, pieces of shoes, all perfectly blackened and plunged in a bath of darkness. When read sequentially, though, the box frames become animated. The objects and the black spaces between them start to dance, one box to the next.

Nevelson refined this animating practice in her work in the 1970s, when she ceased relying on found-object crates and began contracting out for more uniform boxes. The result was an orderly constructivist grid, one that reflected the art world’s new measure of Minimalism but without a loss of animated action. For End of Day Nightscape (1973), the best work in the show, Nevelson further divided her grids into smaller and smaller units to arrive at a result so overwhelming it seems to become that total work of art, no longer the product of a single artist. The sculpture can be read differently at multiple distances. From up close it looks like the topography of a city; from farther away, one hears the tones of a contrapuntal fantasia. “The eye is fed such a rich diet that it can never quite take everything in at once,” Kramer remarked in a review of Nevelson’s work in 1976. The divisions have to be “read as a series of sequences, and as we give ourselves over to it, we are enclosed in its magic spell.”

Cascade VII (1979) zooms in on the action, with multiple lines of hinged box doors that open and close as you read down. Cascade VIII (1979) is a perfect open grid of six-by-five boxes where sticks of wood further divide the space and reflect frame to frame. The “Mirror-Shadow” series from the mid-1980s explodes the grid, using it now as open armatures for free-floating objects in suspended space. Here one sees the box-like forms of earlier work mixed in with the allusive stand-alone elements of carved bed frames and musical instruments.

Nevelson’s handful of unpainted assemblages of mixed media from the 1980s at Pace, academic exercises in synthetic Cubist collage, come off as interesting counter-examples to her painted work but in the end fail as experiments in colorization. A few stand-alone sculptures from the same period, which resemble oversized golf bags containing loose strips of wood, also convey little of the evocative authority of her black wall sculptures. Nevelson is best in black and white with wall screens that are halfway between picture windows and stand-alone sculptures. Like much of her outdoor sculpture, the failed works at Pace risked variations that became too object-specific.

Louise Nevelson should be remembered for her artistic tenacity in lean times as well as her prolific output in flush. She understood the world in cinematic form, one that spoke in the silent stop-action of a flickering screen. “I feel in love with black; it contained all color,” Nevelson remarked in her best Norma Desmond imitation. “It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Black is the most aristocratic color of all, the only aristocratic color. For me this is the ultimate. You can be quiet, and it contains the whole thing.” Fortunately for us, late in life, Nevelson was able to see herself become the star of her own spectacular in black and white.

 

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

 

1. “Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks” opened at Pace Wildenstein, New York, on February 13 and remains on view through March 14, 2009. Go back to the text.

Gallery chronicle (February 2009)

 

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Philip Guston: 1954–1958” at L&M Arts, “John Walker: Drawings 1973–1975” at Knoedler & Company, and “Biala: Collages 1957–1963” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

 

Conventional wisdom has it that the work of Philip Guston started out very pretty and ended up very ugly. The place in history of this painter—born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada in 1913 and raised in Los Angeles—has been confirmed, or at least defined, by his movement from one style to another. His embrace of gritty, cartoony neo-expressionism in the 1970s (full of boot heels and white-hooded Ku Klux Klan figures) elevated the abstract-expressionist confections he painted in the 1950s.

Within this dynamic, the actual paintings from either period mean less individually than they do in their relationship to one another and in the mythology behind them. “They have had a cultish influence almost akin to that Cézanne had on young painters a century ago, influence here being partly a measure of the permission one artist gives to another, through example, to be free,” gushed the chief art critic for The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, in his consideration of late Guston in 2003.

By comparison, an earlier chief critic for the Times had an altogether different take. In a 1970 review titled “Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum,” Hilton Kramer slammed Guston’s Marlborough Gallery metamorphosis as a career move by an artist who has “always been a latecomer,” one who, in the 1950s, had embraced the “aesthetics of the New York School when it was already well established.” Kramer called Guston’s late paintings “a form of artifice that deceives no one—except, possibly, the artist who is so out-of-touch with contemporary realities that he still harbors the illusion his ‘act’ will not be recognized as such.”

Kramer was right about all but the public’s reaction to Guston. The art world not only came to embrace the artist’s reinvention but also found itself energized by Kramer’s critique. The politics of the late 1960s, Guston explained, encouraged him to reject “all that purity” of his earlier abstract work. Today the popularity of his “risky” career move has only intensified. In a 2004 sale of a 1975 Guston painting, which realized a hammer price of $1.2 million, Christie’s auction house included a quotation from Kramer’s negative 1970 review as a selling point for the lot.

For the accepted Guston storyline to work, however—for the late paintings to be considered appropriately impure—the early paintings must exhibit enough “purity” of abstract form for Guston to reject later on. This month L&M Arts offers up a chance to test this premise with a selection of seven large Guston paintings from the “pure” abstract years of 1954 to 1958.[1] Much of the material is well known. Two of the paintings come through major museum loans: Painting (1954) from the Museum of Modern Art and Dial (1956) from the Whitney Museum. The remaining five consist of work from private collections. One painting on view, Beggar’s Joys (1954– 1955), is today recognized mainly for realizing a Guston auction record of over $10 million at a Sotheby’s sale in 2008. (The Sotheby’s auction catalogue again praised Guston for going “beyond the attempts of outside observers to judge and define his work, but to subvert his own previous aesthetic assumptions as he evolved stylistically.”)

To my eyes, early and late Guston look best when considered side by side in those postage-stamp-sized reproductions you find in textbook surveys of modern art. In person, the early works seem far less pretty than the artist’s later ugliness would lead you to believe. At L&M, MOMA’s Painting is built on a brittle structure of hatch marks with a dominant red that is more scablike than lustrous. The Whitney’s Dial strikes me as a smudgy floral still life. I enjoyed the circus riot of To Fellini (1958)—upon seeing it, I couldn’t help humming Nino Rota’s theme from 8 1/2. But I found the ironically named Beggar’s Joys, all $10 million of it, more cloying than pretty, more a piece of deliberate ornamentation than a great work of art.

I don’t much care for Guston’s color sense—he carried the same pinks and reds right on over from early to late. His ultimate transformation seems not so much to be a move from pure to impure but from fuzzy to focused. The last work in the show, Traveller III (1959–60), outside of the exhibition’s 1954–1958 purview, already reveals the beginning of this transition, as a gray form comes forward into sharper relief. The high abstract works at L&M are mannered studies in obscurity: we are expected to look past the murk for the objects buried beneath. Guston’s later, cartoonish figures speak to a low-rent private iconography—here we must tune our tinfoil antennas to the evils of society. Both styles operate through assumptions about what exists beyond the painting rather than what is contained within it. This is a strategy that Guston relied on consistently throughout his career.

There is reason to be particularly interested in the abstract painters who came of age in New York in the 1970s. Many of them have been producing excellent work for the past four decades. The British-born painter John Walker, who arrived in New York on a Harkness Fellowship in 1969, is one example. An illuminating exhibition of his drawings from 1973–1975 is now on view at Knoedler—the gallery’s fifteenth Walker show in the past twenty-five years.[2]

Many of the painters of Walker’s generation have yet to receive their full due. From Jake Berthot to Thornton Willis, the list goes on, and Walker himself is no exception. At a time when theory and criticism focused on the hard-edged, pre-meditated practices of minimalism and conceptualism, as well as the new figuration of pop art, neo-expressionism, and photo-realism, the abstract painters who are sometimes known as the “post-minimalists” or the “third-generation abstract expressionists” stood apart from the mainline of art history by continuing to develop and reaffirm the studio practices initiated by the New York School.

Walker and his generation embraced the same aspects of chance and experimentation that had produced the great abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s. They also adopted certain minimalist motifs, adding serialism and programmatic application to their studio repertoire. In this period, the stand-alone, all-over abstractions of an earlier era tended to give way to a sectioning-off of the picture plane—with divisions working off one another—and groups of paintings in formal dialogue. Grids made a recurring appearance. Paintings developed through trial and error, feeding off the dynamics of previous examples. New work added to, undercut, and challenged prior progress. Nothing was allowed to get too complete.

The abstract painters of Walker’s age may have shared superficial affinities with the minimalists, but their overall approach to art could not have been more different. For the minimalists, it was all about beginnings and ends. For the abstract painters of the 1970s, process was everything. Many of them, now in their sixties and seventies, have arrived at an age when they are doing great mature work. With a studio practice designed to build on itself, they have followed a slow-growth evolutionary process and have now arrived at a masterly sense of painting’s possibilities.

In fall 2006, Knoedler exhibited a new body of small, near-abstract landscapes by Walker called “Seal Point Series,” painted on a deck of antique Bingo cards. Writing about this exhibition two years ago, I considered it a Bingo moment for the artist. Those found objects, featuring that famous pre-printed Bingo grid, encouraged Walker to examine a single landscape view through serial exploration.

The current Knoedler show takes us back forty years from this recent highlight to a moment when the artist was at the peak of his early development. In the mid-1970s Walker had just completed a series of massive collages, signature early works that were monumental in scale. After a time, they must have also seemed resistant to further development. So Walker began to push against them. He embraced intimate scale and the lightness of ink washes and Japanese rice paper. He also developed deliberately evanescent artistic practices, creating a series of “blackboard drawings” that was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974—all meant to end in a cloud of chalk dust. “It was as if Walker had re-thought the question ‘What is a picture?’ and decided to explore it from a point of view antithetical to the one he had taken hitherto,” admired the critic John Russell, writing in Art News in 1973.

From the start, Walker has been prolific enough to drive the engine of his own development. “Looking around at his contemporaries, he finds no echo, no unit of measurement, no recent track record against which to compete,” noted John Russell, and so “Walker has always worked his pictures in ways peculiar to himself. The images were his own; but so, equally, was the process.”

Most of the drawings now at Knoedler have not been seen for decades. They represent a few different fertile lines of development, all remarkably examined and executed within the same three-year period. The gallery’s front room is dedicated to works on paper related to Walker’s blackboard series. Fortunately for us, these drawings are not designed to be erased at the end of the show. For the darker works from 1973 and 1975 (all the drawings in the show are untitled), Walker dug something like an etching needle into a black acrylic-covered ground. He carved out a handful of basic forms, reflecting the work he had done in collage, and squiggled them in with a loose hatching of lines. He then went over the black surface of the paper with dry white pigment, filling in the roughed-out edges and leaving a spongy white wash on the paper’s black surface that can resemble photo emulsion or the wiped-down blackboard in your old grammar-school homeroom.

I love the effect Walker achieved in these works. Taken another way, the white dust glowing out of these black sheets resembles the stars in a nighttime sky, with the etched lines calling to mind the constellations. In other work, Walker reduced the all-over blackness of the picture plane to a taped-out section of white paper, which he covered with black oil stick before carving it up and rubbing in chalk dust. The effect is altogether different. I nearly mistook it for an act of print-making. All told, these blackboard drawings are more enigmatic and resonant than what you might find by Cy Twombly from a similar period, working his more famous Latin-class hijinks.

The gallery’s side room features an extensive series of ink and pencil washes on Japanese paper from 1974. I could swear they depicted the identical view of the Maine coast found in Walker’s Bingo series thirty years later. The gallery director Frank Del Deo assures me that was impossible (I would still like to see Walker’s 1974 phone records). The sand, the sea, the reflecting sun, the mountain on the horizon—even if Walker was working here only from abstract forms, taking off from the earlier collages, you quickly recognize the continuity of his spatial divisions.

In the large back room, Knoedler has assembled a series of 1975 Walker drawings in charcoal that recall the moody work of Georges Seurat (I am told that MOMA’s recent Seurat exhibition was one inspiration for this show). The best drawings are the messy ones, where Walker has allowed his pigments to rub up and smudge the white borders around his images. Here the studio process comes to the fore. We can see the evidence of the artist at work, although in my opinion at times more successfully than at others. Several of Walker’s charcoal drawings seem too concerned with gradations of tone, too enamored with the charcoal catching the texture of the paper. More impressive are his similar 1973 drawings in oil crayon, again dominated by a heart of black, and here taking up even smaller spaces on larger sheets of white paper. This is Walker at his most enigmatic—working through the darkness back into the light.

The artist known merely as Biala was born Janice Biala in Poland around 1903 and died in France in 2000. She spent most of her time shuttling between New York and Paris, living with the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, becoming friends with Willem de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg, and getting to know over her long life just about everyone along art’s migratory patterns. She exhibited her own paintings regularly on two continents—sweet, joyful work dipped in Pernod that can leave you tipsy.

I usually take my Biala in moderation, but this month Tibor de Nagy gives us an excuse to indulge with an exhibition of her collages from the late 1950s and early 1960s.[3]

They say it’s the sugar that does you in, and here Biala has cut the sweetness with the rough edges of mixed media. Pieces of newsprint, torn construction paper, pencil sketches, and spatters of paint add a degree of toughness to her work. The process encouraged this artist, accustomed to getting by on sensuality alone, to take on a new sense of rigor. The results are superb.

Provincetown (1957), her best work in the show, is a museum-quality streetscape built of painted surfaces and paneled planes—Matisse in Morocco by way of Cape Cod. Untitled (Château de Talcy) (c. 1961) is a dynamic mass of color chips and bits of spiral-bound paper that is a swirling dynamo—an enigmatic abstract image that works though feeling more than representational content. Untitled (Blue Tree), the work at the entrance to the gallery, is Biala at the top of her form, with collage and brushy spatters of paint exploding with nearly anthropomorphic vigor. Table Chargée, a large work from 1963, is so rugged that up close it’s nearly impossible to see past the shapes on the picture plane. Step back, however, and a complete still life of table and chair, teapot and spoons come into focus—a wonderful effect.

“In each of the collages,” writes Mario Naves in his catalogue essay, “we experience the heady excitement of an artist tussling with process, precedent and the unexpected poetry of the everyday.” Process, precedent, and poetry—Biala is an artist who understood there’s a place for all three.

 

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

 

1. “Philip Guston: 1954–1958” opened at L&M Arts, New York, on January 15 and remains on view through February 28, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “John Walker: Drawings 1973–1975” opened at Knoedler & Company, New York, on January 15 and remains on view through March 7, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Biala: Collages 1957–1963” opened at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, on January 17 and remains on view through February 28, 2009. Go back to the text.

Culture Gulf

ART & ANTIQUES
February 2009

Culture Gulf
by James Panero

With his Museum of Islamic Art, the Emir of Qatar makes a bold bid to transform the desert nation into a world art center....

It was an evening out of the Arabian Nights, with the air of the Gulf hanging thick over a campsite of tents and divans. The entire art world, it seemed, had been flown in as the personal guests of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, on Nov. 22, to celebrate the opening of his new Museum of Islamic Art. There was Sheikh Hamad, the supreme monarch of the gas-rich country, sitting with his family by the upper entrance of his new museum. His guests marveled at the spectacle from the tents below, mingling in black-tie attire with local grandees dressed in white dishdashas, waiting for the doors to open to the Emir’s new museum. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed with his Silk Road ensemble from a small outdoor stage. Jeff Koons admired the pillars of flowers dotting the landscape. Damien Hirst posed for snapshots with tongue literally in cheek. Ron Wood, the Rolling Stone, made his way over a rug-covered boardwalk. "I’m knackered," he said to White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling. Wood had missed his flight to Dubai for a party the previous night.

An array of fireworks went up around the new museum. Starbursts illuminated the water. Golden tracery mirrored the fronds of the corniche, the bay at the center of Qatar’s capital city of Doha, in which the Museum of Islamic Art now stands. "It is like the beginning of the world and the end of the world," remarked James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum. "The fireworks are from another aesthetic." Speaking of his own situation as an honored guest in a Gulf state, Snyder noted, "One needs to interpret this invitation as an important development."

Many of the Emir’s assembled group of museum curators and art stars pondered the significance of the event in which they were participating. With an opening party that appeared untouched by economic concerns, the Emir was making a significant overture to world culture with the unveiling of his new museum, a Western-style institution housed in a faceted gem of a building designed by I. M. Pei.

"I think it is spectacular," said Stephen Lash, chairman of Christie’s Americas. "This is a new development in a new region. We are staring at an important part of the future." Thomas Campbell, the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said, "We’re extremely supportive of what is going on here." He was heading up a contingent that included outgoing director Philippe de Montebello and president Emily Rafferty. "The kind of money they’re spending, we can’t compete with that."

Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, said, "The critical issue is that finally an Islamic nation has recognized the significance of their own culture in a major way and felt the importance of making that culture alive and valid to the entire region and beyond. They are sending a message how Islamic art could help reduce tension and go back to the fundamentals of beauty and harmony and order. This is the new world in the cradle of civilization. It is the ancient world reborn."

A hundred years ago, the oil barons of the United States converted their petrodollars into world-class art collections and the museums to house them. Today it is the energy-rich states lining the Persian Gulf (here known as the Arabian Gulf or simply "the Gulf") that are competing to do the same. The story of Qatar’s cultural ambitions begins in 1995, when Sheikh Hamad, then in his early 40s, deposed his father, who was vacationing in Switzerland, in a bloodless coup. Sheikh Khalifa had ruled Qatar since a year after its independence from Britain in 1971, but he had been slow to invest the country’s petroleum revenue in cultural improvement. Doha, now a vast construction site, continues to show signs of poor urban planning and cheap cement construction from its initial development in the 1970s.Upon his ascension, Sheikh Hamad ushered in a series of political and cultural reforms—religious tolerance, private foreign ownership, women’s suffrage, the creation of the news channel Al Jazeera—turning his conservative Islamic country into a new model for the Middle East. At the same time, the Emir invested in the technology to explore and tap the vast gas reserves beneath Qatar’s territorial waters known as the North Field, converting this one-time hamlet of pearl divers and nomadic tribesmen into the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.

An upturn in world energy prices, combined with steady oil production and increased gas exploration, has created unprecedented wealth for this small country, which is the size of Connecticut and boasts one of the world’s highest GDPs.

The same oil money that helped pay for a new skyscraper skyline rising out of the corniche has led to the creation of Qatar’s 4,500-object collection of Islamic art, with artifacts ranging over 1,400 years, from Spain to the Far East—the results of a decade-long buying spree. Backed by a blank check from the Emir, Qatar has been an unstoppable force as Islamic work came up at auction, but due to the relatively short acquisition period, the collection has been limited by the public availability of important work. Even after the Al-Thani family paid £2.9 million for the Clive of India flask in 2003, for example, it took nearly five years to negotiate its export from Britain to Qatar.

Eight years ago, after an initial architectural competition fell through, the Emir convinced Pei to take on the project to house his collection. "I started this project with the Emir," said Pei, 91, as he toured the new museum. "He asked me to do a building of this kind for Qatar to put an emphasis on culture. Here, in the oil-and-gas world, culture is not emphasized as it should be. I accepted it because of that challenge. I’ve never had the opportunity to do anything like this."

Pei researched Islamic architecture, eventually rejecting the opulence one finds in Cordoba, Spain, for the simple massing of a 13th-century ablution fountain, which he admired in the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo. Pei filtered the stepped proportions of this domed building through his modernist sensibility to create a refined structure that is a near-perfect architectural pairing of ancient and modern. It is more conservative in materials and form than other recent museum projects around the world, but its restrained opulence mirrors the elegant treasures contained within.

Project costs, like much in Qatar, remain a court secret, but no expense was spared in the museum’s construction. Pei rejected the museum’s initial proposed location and insisted his project be set off from the encroaching city on a 64-acre park of landfill extending out in the Gulf. "I didn’t choose it. I made it!" he declared of the site. The same limestone that Pei used in his addition to the Louvre was quarried and imported from Burgundy, France. Black jet mist stone was brought in from Virginia for the museum’s granite base, which extends down to the water line. Due to the desert heat, which can reach 130 degrees in the summer, much of the construction took place at night, with ice poured into the cement mix to prevent the museum’s molded coffered ceiling from cracking as it dried.

To lead Qatar’s growing cultural concerns—the Museum of Islamic Art is the first of the Emir’s many museum projects to be completed—the country drew on American and British expertise. Marie-Josée Kravis, the president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art, joined the Qatar Museums Authority board two years ago and helped secure a launch event at MoMA. "Islamic experts tell me that in quality it compares to the great collections of the world," she said. A year ago Roger Mandle, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, became executive director of the QMA. "We are able to build these museums afresh, from the ground up," he said, explaining the appeal of his new appointment. "We hope to create a new paradigm for museums in the 21st century." Last summer, Oliver Watson, a one-time curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, left his post as keeper of Eastern art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to become the director of the Museum of Islamic Art. "It is an educational thing for the world," he said on opening day. "It’s not Bedouins and oil and terrorism. It’s about one of the great cultures of the world in its time. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true—if, as I hope is the case, America realizes that the Middle East is important."Behind these high-profile appointments is the leader of the ruling Al-Thani family, Emir Sheikh Hamad, and behind him a duo of powerful women: the second of his three wives, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned, and their daughter Al-Mayassa. The opening of the museum became a coming-out party, of sorts, for the elegant 25-year-old Sheikha, the new public face of the Al-Thani clan, a Duke University alumna who is now taking graduate classes at Columbia. "We are truly becoming a global capital of culture," she proclaimed from the museum steps. A day later she held a surprise press conference on the museum balcony with the actor Robert De Niro to announce the creation of a Doha branch of the Tribeca Film Festival.

The cultural establishment has been wary of the Al-Thanis’ buying power. A year and a half ago, there was a small uproar over their reported $72.8 million purchase of a Mark Rothko consigned to Sotheby’s by David Rockefeller; critics gasped at the price and objected to a foreign buyer snatching up an important modernist work. The Al-Thani family’s acquisition of a multimillion-dollar Damien Hirst sculpture spoke little of artistic leadership or sound cultural investment. Then there was the scandal of Sheikh Saud Al-Thani, the Emir’s high-profile cousin and one-time principal art buyer, who was stripped of his purchasing authority in 2005 and placed under arrest for the misuse of Qatari funds.

Against this backdrop the new Museum of Islamic Art stands out as a remarkable achievement. The redevelopment of Qatar might lag half a decade behind its Gulf neighbors in the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the two most powerful principalities in the UAE, already boast glistening new cities and thriving cultural scenes. There are art fairs such as Art Paris Abu Dhabi and Art Dubai (where this year the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, worth $1 million, will be handed out), and galleries such as Dubai’s Third Line, which recently opened an outlet in Doha. The emirate of Sharjah is making its mark with the Sharjah Biennial, which coincides with Art Dubai this March. And for the past three years, Abu Dhabi has been making headlines with its monumental proposal for the development of Saadiyat Island, which is to include a Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry and a branch of the Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel (the Louvre’s naming rights alone are reported to have cost $500 million).

The opening of the Museum of Islamic Art might be a minor event compared to the plans for Saadiyat Island, but Qatar has distinguished itself by founding a museum that, in Mandle’s words, is "not about glitz, how big it is, how much it costs, but how good it is." As an independent institution, the museum resists the allure of Culture Inc. that one sees in the franchised development of Saadiyat. It also contrasts with Qatar’s own "Education City," with branch campuses of six American universities, including Georgetown, Cornell and Texas A&M, which come off as dislocated outposts of imported culture—replete with banners of football players and "Welcome Home Aggies"—rising out the desert sands. After initial talks, Yale balked at opening a branch campus of its own in Qatar, over the requirement that it award undergraduate diplomas indistinguishable from the ones handed out in New Haven.

With a notable collection that is set to grow, a contextualized architectural landmark and a seasoned staff to study, conserve and display the art inside, Qatar has raised the bar of its cultural ambitions. For the emirate’s contentious Middle Eastern neighbors—Qatar’s precious gas claim abuts Iran’s—the museum speaks to the beauty of a shared civilization. For the West it communicates a view of the Islamic world that looks past the latest terrible headlines.

So as the doors opened, the guests—an assembly of cultural luminaries, imported like much else in Qatar from New York, Paris and London—made their way inside. Hirst was full of praise for his collector’s new museum. "Brilliant. I’m so busy looking at the building I can’t focus on the art," he remarked in a room of brass astrolabes, the astronomical computers of Islamic science. "This is where it all comes from, the past." De Montebello, meanwhile, absorbed his surroundings with more reserve. "Floor-to-ceiling vitrines—if you can afford them," he remarked, overlooking a room of glazed earthenware from ninth-century Iraq and a jade pendant made for the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal.

With the opening of its Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar has made a serious play in the art world. Now it remains to be seen whether the country can operate an institution up to international standards. Its intentions are good and its buying power is unrivaled, but Qatar has yet to convince the West of its full ability to run a serious museum. In a world where money is no object, the approbation of the museum establishment is one commodity that still needs to be earned.

Evolution for Art's Sake

CITY JOURNAL
"Evolution for Art’s Sake"
Denis Dutton’s Darwinian aesthetics
by James Panero

a review of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton (Bloomsbury, 288 pp., $25)

This year marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. An international Darwin Day is set for February 12, the biologist’s birthday. But the annus mirabilis is off to an early start with the publication of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, a Darwinian attempt to explain humanity’s interest in art. Dutton may not be a household name, but his Web portal Arts & Letters Daily has become an international phenomenon, a virtual Galapagos of cultural interest, since he formed it out of an e-mail newsletter in 1998. A professor in the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Dutton has now written a book full of observations that again demonstrate his uncanny ability to collect complex arguments and present them as thought-provoking statements.

Dutton builds a bold cross-cultural argument: we all have a prehistoric “art instinct” programmed into our genes through natural and sexual selection. The Art Instinct begins with the results of a recent survey of international artistic taste, which concluded that “people in very different cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of pictorial representation: a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals”—images that we often find in the kitschy world of calendar art. How to explain such universal taste? “The calendar industry has not conspired to influence taste,” Dutton writes, “but rather caters to preexisting, precalendrical human preferences.”

Dutton’s belief in a universal urge for art finds common ground with older aesthetic theories, from the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant to the spiritualism of Emanuel Swedenborg to the Kunstwollen of Alois Riegl. But the idea of universality in the arts has been under attack ever since Continental critical theory took over the academy and went after connoisseurship as a social construction. “The whole idea that art worlds are monadically sealed off from one another is daft,” Dutton counters. “Do we need to be reminded that Chopin is loved in Korea, that Spaniards collect Japanese prints, or that Cervantes is read in Chicago and Shakespeare enjoyed in China? . . . Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.”

Dutton devotes quite a bit of space to setting up his premise, arguing exhaustively with theorists like Arthur C. Danto about the definition of art. Dutton’s philosophical ground-setting may be academically responsible, but Chapters Three and Four (“What is Art?” and “‘But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art’”) are uphill work—directed, it seems, more at a university audience than at the general reader.

Once Dutton arrives at his central thesis, The Art Instinct becomes an altogether better read. The Pleistocene age lasted for 80,000 generations of humans and protohumans, Dutton writes, “against a mere five hundred generations since the first cities.” For the human race, the survival of the fittest—a term coined by the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, not by Darwin himself—played out in these long years. The people of the Pleistocene most likely found time for leisure, Dutton argues, and in the arts they developed the adaptive traits that aided in socialization and sexual selection. “It is inconceivable that Pleistocene people did not have a vivid intellectual and creative life,” he writes. “This life would have found expression in song, dance, and imaginative speech—skills that matched in complexity and sophistication what we know of Pleistocene jewelry, painting, and carving.” Through the arts, early man learned to see the world. “This intense interest in art as emotional expression derives from wanting to see through art into another human personality: it springs from a desire for knowledge of another person. . . . Talking about art is an indirect way of talking about the inner lives of other people.”

Here Dutton cites Darwin’s most controversial book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and its portrayal of “the mind as a sexual ornament.” Think of the arts as something akin to the peacock’s tail, Dutton writes. The peacock’s wasteful piece of plumage is useless—in fact, a hindrance—when it comes to foraging for food or escaping from predators. Nevertheless, its tail is attractive to peahens precisely because it is an opulent display of extra resources, one that says this peacock is doing better than just scraping by in the world of peafowl. For early man, a social animal, survival likewise not only favored the strongest, but also “the cleverest, wittiest, and wisest.” Just as “the evolutionary function of language is not only to be a means of efficient communication but to be a signal of fitness and general intelligence,” Dutton writes, “sexual selection was building a more interesting human personality, one that we have come to know as convivial, imaginative, gossipy, and gregarious, with a taste for the dramatic.” The art instinct is closely connected with this sexual selection. Simply put, the arts have sex appeal, and it should come as little surprise, Dutton writes, that “love is poetry’s natural subject.”

There are, of course, plenty of counterarguments against Dutton’s “art instinct.” The most obvious is that artists in recorded history often seem to have little interest in procreation, whether because of homosexuality, social dysfunction, or simple lack of interest. Cyril Connolly was on to something when he tartly wrote that “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” Art-making often seems to be a distraction from, or even a stand-in for, sexual reproduction.

Another concern is that art history is already besotted with theory. About the only place one finds Marx or Freud read with any sense of relevance nowadays is in the study of the humanities, with art history being no exception. (By contrast, try finding Freud discussed in a psychology class with anything but historical interest.) Does Dutton expect us to add Darwinism to the dysfunctional set of Marxist and Freudian master keys? Fortunately, it appears not: “No philosophy of art can succeed if it ignores either art’s natural sources or its cultural character,” he writes, hoping to expand our range of inquiry rather than limit it.

Darwinism is, nevertheless, still a theory of its own, no more so than in the study of Dutton’s “art instinct.” Dutton builds his case on speculation. He constructs a story line that must be reverse-engineered back from the present day. He devotes little attention to what early artistic evidence we do have, such as the cave paintings of Lascaux. Likewise, Dutton could have compared the art of early recorded civilizations: they should exhibit similar artistic practices, according to Dutton’s thesis, even if they developed at opposite ends of the globe.

Still Dutton’s central premise is worth repeating. “What sexual selection in evolution does,” he writes, “is give us an explanation of why so much human energy has been exhausted on objects of the most extreme elegance and complexity—not just the massive symmetry of the Pyramids, but the poignancy of Shakespeare’s sonnets or the Schubert Quintet in C.” It’s a remarkable idea and one that deserves exploration through the historical evidence, both what we have on hand and what remains to be uncovered. The Art Instinct is an important first step in that process—a hyperlink to future conversations.

Gallery chronicle (January 2009)

Helen Frankenthaler, A Green Thought in a Green Shade (1981),
© Helen Frankenthaler / courtesy Knoedler & Company

THE NEW CRITERION
JANUARY 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades” at Knoedler & Co., New York.

Living masters have it rough, and Helen Frankenthaler has been living as a master for over half a century. In 1952, at the age of only twenty-three, she created Mountains and Sea, an iconic painting that forever secured her place in the history of art. It was a work that at once defined Frankenthaler’s style and changed the visual texture of abstract painting. Mountains and Sea built on the achievements of Jackson Pollock with its poured paint and rolled-out canvas—but it also outdid Pollock. With its thinned pigments soaked directly into linen, it displayed a new artistic temperament, subsuming the artistic ego into forms of color that absorbed the Abstract Expressionist gesture into an all-over stain. It paved the way for an entire new school of American abstraction known as Color Field, with Frankenthaler’s experimentation leading to the lush mannerisms of Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Unfortunately, nothing hurts a career more than an impeccable reputation, especially in the annals of modernism. Without a doubt, Helen Frankenthaler’s standing today has been diminished by her historical significance. Few would deny her importance, but the fidelity of her artistic vision, which has remained remarkably pure for half a century, has yet to receive its full due.

In a tribute to Frankenthaler’s eightieth birthday this past December, Knoedler has mounted a small survey of paintings spanning six decades, selected by Karen Wilkin from the artist’s own collection.[1] The best argument for Frankenthaler’s importance is not her textbook relevance but the authority of her work.

A Green Thought in a Green Shade (1981), the enormous work that looks back from the far wall of the gallery, comes off as a painterly ecosystem, with algae blooms swirling in a liquid medium. On one of my visits, I noticed two patrons transfixed by this painting, with their noses a few inches from the canvas for what must have been an hour. Frankenthaler employs such a masterly, easy touch that she can let her work, you might say, work on its own, with biomorphic forms bubbling up and dissolving from view not as a vision of the artist’s unconscious but rather as a vision of the canvas’s unconscious, if that’s at all possible.

American museumgoers were reminded of Frankenthaler’s particular touch over the past year. Mountains and Sea temporarily left its permanent home at the National Gallery in Washington for a multi-city tour as part of “Action/Abstraction,” an exhibition that looked at the evolution of American painting through the influence of the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. In the court of public opinion, Frankenthaler’s reputation has been tied to Clement Greenberg’s own approval ratings, a disservice to the artist and to the historical record, as Greenberg’s theories of flatness and the direction of abstract art owe more to Frankenthaler’s development on canvas than the other way around.

And Frankenthaler’s public esteem has suffered in other ways as well. Consider her biography of family privilege, against which she never rebelled. There is also her cosmopolitan style and her physical beauty—not for nothing, the supermodel Stephanie Seymour portrayed her in the recent biopic of Jackson Pollock. Frankenthaler never bared the tortured soul that is often assumed to be at the heart of important art (one reason, perhaps, why the reputation of Joan Mitchell, a lesser contemporary of Frankenthaler’s and a notoriously foul-mouthed drinker, has recently been on the rise). There has also been Frankenthaler’s resistance to identity politics. She has made little of her position as a groundbreaking woman in the arts. This decision speaks to an inner confidence; she knows she is a groundbreaking artist, regardless of gender. And finally there is her resistance to serialism and the demands of a marketplace that says it wants newness but really seeks more of the same. She could have turned Mountains and Sea into a commodity, producing variations on the theme. Instead, she passed up ready-made labeling, packaging, and selling for a life of pure artistic pursuit.

Which was why seeing Mountains and Sea in “Action/Abstraction,” removed from its usual context in Washington, had been a delight. For such a well-known painting it is still awesome and strange, with its lyrical hints of landscape dissolving into sunspots, which further separate out into oil stains and untreated white canvas. There is an unexplainable beauty at its heart. Frankenthaler is the American Fauve, and she shares several similarities with Henri Matisse. Both artists staked their claim in color rather than tone, and both artists have been accused of bourgeois sentiment, choosing to channel their energies directly into their work rather than into their biographies. For Frankenthaler this process became quite literal. She never battled her way to a high style. There were no decades of experimentation before arriving at a signature work; her signature work began as experimentation filtered through her artistic intuition. Experimentation, in fact, has been the one quality that has defined her oeuvre as she has gone from painting to drawing to printmaking to metal sculpture to pottery and back again.

You might also say that Frankenthaler arrived on the scene at a soaking-in moment for American art. Her achievement was to develop a way to translate this mood directly to canvas. The battles against European surrealism and homegrown regionalism had been fought and won, if not in the public’s mind, then at least for its forward-looking artists of Abstract Expressionism. Frankenthaler never felt compelled to fight a Freudian-like death match with the Beaux-Arts in the manner of de Kooning or to channel Pollock’s Indian rain dance. To do so would have been pantomime. The language of abstraction had already evolved into a lingua franca, and it no longer required overt gesticulation. Frankenthaler purified this language in shapes and colors. Through her thinned pigments and nimble physicality, she discovered how to execute a vision on canvas that removed the evidence of artistic will and seemed to bring forward forms already buried deep in the picture plane.

Recently, in The Wall Street Journal, William Agee described Frankenthaler’s particular journey to Mountains and Sea:

In August 1952, Ms. Frankenthaler traveled to Nova Scotia, where she continued her practice of doing small landscapes. She painted in watercolor and oil on paper, working freely from nature. These studies helped to keep her limber and flexible, like a dancer or athlete tuning up or, as was the case here, a painter preparing for a major new effort.

On the afternoon of Oct. 29, back in New York, she tacked a large—roughly 7-by-10-foot—piece of untreated canvas to the floor of her studio to begin the largest painting she had ever undertaken. Her mind and her arms were filled with memories of the spectacular Cape Breton landscape. After roughing in a few charcoal marks as an initial guide, she poured highly thinned oil paint from coffee cans directly onto the canvas, as if she were drawing with color. She had no plan; she just worked, with control and discipline. At the end of the afternoon, when she had finished, she climbed on a ladder and studied the painting. She was not yet sure what she had done; she was “sort of amazed and surprised and interested.” … It soon became clear that what she had done was invent a new way of making art.

Once you understand Mountains and Sea as something altogether different from the premeditated “next step,” the unprogrammatic nature of Frankenthaler’s career-long output makes perfect sense. The catalogue that accompanies this latest Knoedler show is a delight, because it economically divides her paintings by decade, assigning a full-page studio shot to each. The 1950s photograph shows Frankenthaler with her hair loosely pulled back, her white shirtsleeves rolled up, waving her arm over the canvas like a conductor calling forth a response. Western Dream (1957), the work on display from this decade at Knoedler, is a diffuse assembly of sun shapes and pictographs resembling an accretion of graffiti, with flattened lizards and what might be a rabbit and who knows what else. There’s a little too much iconography here to work as a landscape and not enough to be read as a rebus, and so the picture never quite comes together as a whole, certainly not as well as Mountains and Sea. The image also suffers from the evidence of too much hand, too much artistic will, even with the poured-in oils.

The photograph of Frankenthaler from a decade later shows the artist taking another step back as she lets fuller fields of color bleed into the canvas through a sponge. Provincetown I (1961) takes the notion of the canvas as picture window and gives it a life of its own. The semblance of a drawn-in frame and the image it contained melts and folds into abstract shapes of blue, red, and brown. Pink Lady (1963), just two years later and now acrylic rather than oil, takes a further turn, as the paint spreads out from a center black line as if by tectonic process, without the artist anywhere in sight.

By the 1970s the internal rhythm of her paintings had shifted to a slower beat. The photograph from this period shows her walking away from a work in progress with a sheet of paper in hand while pointing back, as if issuing the watering instructions for something now growing on its own. Sphinx (1976), a closed-mouth assembly of orange, brown, and gray, really does keep its riddles to itself, perhaps a little too much, as a monument reduced to ruin.

The 1980s photograph shows Frankenthaler bending over a large canvas with a brush and paint can in hand, bringing a synthesis of stained and poured techniques to works like A Green Thought in a Green Shade, the highlight of the show. The 1990s, at least as represented here, come off rather poorly by comparison, as Snow Basin (1990) flirts with frosting, The Rake’s Progress (1991) attempts a visual pun (the paint has been scraped by the teeth of a rake), and Aerie (1995), with its looping swirls, seems too preconceived.

The current decade brings her back into her majesty. The athleticism required of her enormous earlier canvases has given way to repose and modestly sized work of great intellectual complexity. Knoedler’s 2003 exhibition of new Frankenthaler paintings demonstrated just how good she had become in the last several years, in many ways at the peak of her powers, and one of these paintings, Warming Trend (2002), has returned for this show.

“What I want,” Matisse famously said, “is an art of balance, purity, an art that won’t disturb or trouble people. I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my paintings.” Luxe, calme, et volupté: All three are now on view at Knoedler.

 

Notes
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1. “Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades” opened at Knoedler & Co., New York, on November 6, 2008 and remains on view through January 10, 2009. Go back to the text.

Made in China

Zhang Huan, “½” (1998)

THE NEW CRITERION
DECEMBER 2008

Made in China
by James Panero

On Zhang Huan & contemporary art in China.

The art world success of Zhang Huan makes a compelling story, the postmodern Horatio Alger myth at the heart of contemporary Chinese art. Today, at the age of forty-three, Zhang is a multimillionaire. In New York, he is represented by PaceWildenstein, which held a survey of his latest work in Chelsea last spring. At his factory studio in Shanghai, a hundred assistants living in dormitories churn out labor-intensive carvings of propaganda scenes, photorealistic “ash paintings,” and fifty-foot-tall giants constructed of calfskins stitched with wire. After a decade and a half of privations, Zhang has become a giant himself, one of the artistic titans of the new Chinese economy. But his tale should come with a warning label. Zhang has struck it rich through cunning and compromise and contamination. He embodies all that it means to be a contemporary artist “made in China.”

In the early 1990s, when Zhang started out, the prospects for artistic survival in the People’s Republic looked grim. Born in 1965 in Henan Province, the Chinese Midwest, and raised by his grandmother in a rural town, Zhang took an undergraduate degree in oil painting at Henan University in 1988. At the time, the first flush of Western-style artistic experimentation in China, through a movement known as the ’85 New Wave, was working its way through modern modes, most notably Pop Art. Artists started criticizing the regime of the Chinese Communist Party and the cult of Mao. Shows of Western artists such as Robert Rauschenberg came to Beijing. The culmination of these developments took place in 1989, when an exhibition called “China/Avant-Garde” went up at the National Art Museum. Then, four months later, the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, leading to a crackdown on democratic expression from which China has yet to recover.

The art critic Richard Vine, a senior editor at Art and America and for many years one of the few incorruptible observers of China’s cultural scene, recounts this history in his new critical survey called New China New Art, published by Prestel.[1] Today’s Chinese avant-gardists do not “share either the political intent or the reckless bravery of the Tiananmen organizers,” he notes. “The cruel lesson of June 4, 1989 is that repression sometimes works.”

In the post-Tiananmen world, Zhang confronted his limits. In 1993, after receiving an advanced degree in oil painting at the selective Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he moved to a run-down section of the city, where rent was $16 a month, and promptly became depressed. He listened to the music of Kurt Cobain—the suicidal front man of the grunge band Nirvana.

Look up Chinese art history and you won’t find chapters on illusionistic painting or abstraction or high modernism. Traditional Chinese art is limited to calligraphic ink on paper. So today’s hot Chinese artists, who skillfully replicate the contemporary practices of Western art, never passed through the history that created it. “Mao Zedong, having set out to establish a Communist utopia,” notes Vine, “inadvertently paved the way—at the cost of forty to seventy million peacetime lives—for a postmodern society par excellence.”

Western-style art in China did not emerge from a vacuum. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union exported its oil-on-canvas technique to the PRC—handed down through the nineteenth-century Russian Beaux Arts—to be used for propaganda purposes in socialist realism (think of the portraits of Mao). Two constellations of art schools developed in China—a division that can still be found in most cities—with one dedicated to native techniques and the other to foreign influences.

By studying oil-on-canvas, Zhang had already cast his lot with imported artistic practice. Zhang’s brilliance was his ability to appropriate these foreign influences—along with textbook knowledge of Western art history—and to apply them effectively to his particular Chinese condition.

Zhang chose not to threaten the Chinese Communist Party. Instead he followed a model of success that was about to revolutionize the Chinese economy. In recent years, China has seen 10 percent annual growth. It now boasts fifteen billionaires and over 300,000 millionaires. Along with Western collectors, this new super-rich class has become the patrons of contemporary Chinese art.

Like the industrialists who learned to apply the “China price” to international commerce—pushing cheaper work into the marketplace at the expense of quality, originality, safety, and liberty—Zhang struck the mother lode of art-world success by outsourcing the Western avant-garde to China’s economy of scale, employing “mercantile skills for which China is renowned,” writes Vine, “a legacy only temporarily suppressed during the high Communist period.” Artistically, what Zhang was about to create had been done before—it was part of his brilliance to combine the Western practice of appropriation with the Eastern penchant for copyright infringement.

Zhang and a handful of artists christened their benighted Beijing neighborhood the “East Village” after the New York artist district. Then, in 1994, Zhang enacted his defining early performance. For 12 Square Meters, he covered his naked body with fish oil and honey and sat monk-like in a torrid communal outhouse swarming with flies. An hour later he walked out and washed himself in the waters of a brackish pond.

As a matter of cultural comparison, the privations to which Zhang subjected himself in this and other performances replicated but never overshadowed the horrors of American performance art in the 1970s. In 1971, in Santa Ana, California, Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm with a 22 caliber rifle. (The art critic Peter Schjeldahl calls Burden “pretty great” and praised this work at “perfectly repellent.”) In another example, Burden spent five days, rather than a mere hour, in a small locker with one bottle for water and one bottle for waste. In yet another, Burden had himself crucified on top of a Volkswagen beetle with nails hammered through his hands.

In terms of abnegation of the flesh, for those of us keeping score, Western art still had Zhang beat. The Chinese have no native tradition of asceticism, and in his monasticism Zhang was making another appropriation, referencing both Christian and Buddhist practice. But compared to the blurry black-and-white snapshots of Burden’s 1970s provocations, the iconic photographs taken of Zhang’s 1994 event, with a chiseled, glistening artist in meditative chiaroscuro, come off as far more reproducible. They would soon make Zhang a star.

In the year that followed, Zhang, gagged and naked, suspended himself from a ceiling by chains while doctors below extracted 250 cc’s of his blood, which they cooked on a hot steel pan (65 Kilograms). For his thirtieth birthday, he lay underneath a highway with earthworms stuffed in his mouth (Original Sound). For an hour, he reclined naked beneath a steel cutting tool as sparks shot over his body (22 mm Treading Steel).

The media-savvy Zhang, who like a dancer understood how to use his own toned physique, recorded these actions by camera and retained the copyright. Sure enough, his hairless, meditative portraits began appearing in Western publications, from Artforum to the cover of the New York Times Arts & Leisure section. In 2006, after an eight-year residency in New York (several contemporary Chinese artists have become bi-continental), Zhang moved to Shanghai. He gave up performance art, and his self-abuse, to inaugurate his current studio practice.

In New China New Art, Richard Vine divides his survey by medium. In performance art, Zhang takes the lion’s share of the coverage, perhaps rivaled only by Ai Weiwei, the son of an exiled poet and a more fleshy contrarian than Zhang. A one-time outsider, Ai now enjoys the support of the CCP, serving as a consultant on the “bird’s nest” stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In fact, Chinese artistic participation in the games was widespread; the fireworks-cum-installation artist Cai Guo-Qiang, a self-described Maoist who retains a large studio in New York and a second in Beijing, served as the Olympiad’s Art Director of Visual and Special Effects.

Today in China, Mao is officially said to have been “70 percent correct, 30 percent wrong.” In the 1970s, Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping renounced the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Deng learned to modify the party line to serve the long-term prospects of China’s authoritarian regime.

Such pragmatism accounts for the explosion of China’s new rich. After the death of Mao, Deng updated Chinese socialist principles by declaring “poverty is not socialism; to grow rich is glorious.” It also accounts for the survival of China’s vanguard art once foreign collectors began buying it up. The CCP, which once backed traditional calligraphic work “both as a compensation for the now-renounced Cultural Revolution and as an assertion of national identity,” writes Vine, “has today, however grudgingly, come to value avant-garde art as part of a soft power strategy to enhance China’s global status.”

For a time, in fact, the CCP’s allowances were so broad that they encouraged grotesque artistic attempts at shock, which Vine recounts in graphic detail: “There is very little sentimentality about livestock in China; and for a time at the turn of the twenty-first century, preserved human ‘medical specimens’ were readily available.”

In the early 1990s, Wenda Gu used menstrual blood, semen, and placenta powder in his installations. (Wenda’s website announces that his placenta powder came from “normal, abnormal, aborted, [and] still born [pregnancies], produced according to Chinese ancient medical methods.”) When the British shock team Gilbert and George toured Beijing’s East Village in 1993, Ma Liuming protested their lack of interest by masturbating and drinking his own semen. In 1997 Sheng Qi injected, hacked, and urinated on live chickens (Universal Happy Brand Chicken). In 2000 Liu Jin wrestled a bound pig to death in a fire-heated vat of soy sauce (Large Soy Sauce Vat). That same year Yang Zhichao had grass implanted in his shoulder (Planting Grass) and encouraged Ai Weiwei to scar him with a hot brand (Iron).

As upsetting as these performances are, the Chinese use of human material has been its most reprehensible artistic practice. In 2000 Peng Yu dripped oil into the mouth of an infant corpse (Oil for a Human Being), Sun Yaun arranged a “dead fetus snuggled against the face of a deceased old man in bed covered with ice” (Honey), and the two artists together transfused blood from their arms into the mouths of Siamese-twin corpse fetuses (Linked Bodies). That same year, in a “protest against groundless strictures forbidding cannibalism,” according to Vine, Zhu Yu “cut a fetus specimen into five handy pieces (two arms, two legs, one head-and-torso) and gnawed—or at least pretended to gnaw—the morsels for a still camera” (Eating People).

“A certain psychological arc is implicit in this development of mainland performance art,” writes Vine, “from utilization of one’s own living body to the manipulation of objects to deployment of the dead bodies of others. The genre seems to have begun by claiming freedom and selfhood, passed into a critique of consumerism, and arrived at a commodification of others for the sake of notoriety and financial gain.”

In 2001 the Chinese Ministry of Culture banned exhibitions involving torture, animal abuse, corpses, and overt violence and sexuality, yet their history reveals the cynicism informing much of contemporary Chinese art. (No surprise, but one of China’s artistic movements is known as “cynical realism.”)

While the handful of Chinese painters who have emerged as celebrities may be less repellent—but perhaps more pernicious—than the performers, they share the same exploitative nature. The painter Wang Guangyi is openly dismissive of artists who fail to game the system. Zhou Tiehai has advocated “exploiting the international art market as a means of personal and collective self-defense.” The top-selling Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun, and Zhang Xiaogang have created an iconography of laughing men, bald thugs, and expressionless portraits, which they endlessly reproduce. In China, common artistic practice includes “blatant imitation of other artists’ works, willingness to pay for art criticism and museum exposure, refusal to adhere to dealer-artist exclusivity, an elastic notion of ‘limited’ editions, and mass replication of the artists’ own most successful motifs.”

The goings-on of artists halfway around the world would be of limited interest were it not also a window on our own artistic culture. “This immense, newly capitalistic country on the far side of the globe,” writes Vine, “has an unsettling way of reflecting our cultural-financial reality like a magnifying mirror.” Chinese contemporary art has entered the “international monoculture.” Western patrons were the first collectors and remain the primary boosters of contemporary Chinese works, some of which have seen price escalations of 2,500 percent. In 2006, Sotheby’s New York took in $13 million from an Asian sale of mostly Chinese art. In 2007 that number jumped to $38.5 million. That same year a painting by Yue Minjun sold at Sotheby’s for $5.9 million. Paintings by Zhang Xiaogang have sold for up to $3 million. How the financial meltdown will play out in the Chinese art market remains to be determined, but it will undoubtedly trigger a significant correction in prices as the global contemporary art bubble pops.

Last June, in an article called “Mao Crazy,” Jed Perl in The New Republic wrote a blistering attack on new Chinese art for its apparent embrace of the personality cult. “Make no mistake about it,” Perl concluded, “many among the current generation of Chinese artists are in the business of re-educating the public. By the time they are done with the Cultural Revolution, it will be just another art event, neither more nor less significant than a performance by Joseph Beuys or Matthew Barney.”

As they say of the Chairman himself, this assessment is 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. Contemporary Chinese artists may use Maoist iconography, but their cult belongs to Warhol’s Mao, not Chairman Mao. Instead of the production, it is the Western consumption of Chinese art that deserves our scrutiny. By turning Chinese art into the latest trend, we have extended the global transformation of serious art into a speculative commodity, supported the soft power strategy of an oppressive state, and reveled in the negative force of an avant-garde linked to an authoritarian regime not seen since the Futurism of Fascist Italy. We have shipped our vanguard dreams abroad, and we have brought back home an imitation art, cheaper, more compelling than the real thing, but containing the fatal taint of melamine.

 

Notes
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1. New China New Art, by Richard Vine; Prestel, 240 pages, $60. Go back to the text.

Gallery chronicle (October 2008)

Giorgio Morandi, Grande natura morta con la lampada a destra, 1928, etching

THE NEW CRITERION
OCTOBER 2008

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On "The Etchings of Giorgio Morandi" at Pace Master Prints, New York, and "Giorgio Morandi: Paintings and Works on Paper" at Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York.

For thirty years, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, has been a model of sobriety in a decadent age. Other institutions have succumbed to the fashions of the moment, but the Metropolitan has remained a museum of art. Great art and excellent curators have been championed over financial and egotistical concerns. And while de Montebello’s leadership has been rooted in the best traditions of conservatorship, it has also been visionary. The good works of his museum radiate out into the culture at large. The story in the galleries this month certainly bears that out.

I don’t put much stock in the forwards to museum catalogues, usually a boilerplate of acknowledgments. But de Montebello’s essay for the Met’s Giorgio Morandi retrospective, reviewed in this issue by Karen Wilkin, is revealing. “Like his paintings,” writes de Montebello, “small in scale and intimate in content, Morandi never fit into the declamatory, self-aggrandizing mode of the most prominent twentieth-century masters. He was a quiet, almost reclusive, and deeply thoughtful man, content to explore his own artistic preoccupations without concern for the expectations of the fast-paced world of artistic fashion.”

These statements could have been a manifesto for de Montebello’s leadership over the last three decades—an attitude that, outside of the Metropolitan, has given license for the New York art world to look beyond the “fast-paced world of artis- tic fashion” and to appreciate slower rewards. “It is indeed unusual to see twenty-seven of Giorgio Morandi’s etchings in a New York gallery,” writes the painter and curator Janet Abramowicz in her essay this month for “The Etchings of Giorgio Morandi” at Pace Master Prints.[1] How right she is. I doubt that even a top-flight gallery like Pace could have considered mounting a sizable exhibition of Morandi’s intimate etchings without the institutional legit- imation provided by the Metropolitan Museum.

Abramowicz studied printmaking with Morandi at Bologna’s Accademia di Belle Arti and went on to become his teaching assistant. She has written the essay on Morandi’s etchings for the Metropolitan catalogue and acted as curator for the Pace show, assembling work from six American collections and from the Museum of Modern Art. The result is an education in Morandi’s development as an etcher, here displayed chronologically in work ranging from 1921 to 1961.

“Etching was an integral part of Giorgio Morandi’s oeuvre,” Abramowicz notes in her Metropolitan essay. “Rather than simply being a complement to his painting,” certain images, Morandi believed, “could be expressed in this medium only.” Yet as Abramowicz writes for Pace, “traditional etching was the medium least conducive to the tonalities Morandi sought in his oeuvre, and it is a tribute to him that he mastered one of the most trying of traditional techniques.”

Morandi’s artistic development was very much defined by his evolution as an etcher. In 1912, as a student, Morandi dropped out of the Accademia for a year in order to teach himself the printmaking process. In doing so he revealed his passion to be more traditional than even his academic minders—he wanted to learn the hard-ground technique of Rembrandt—but he also wanted to apply etching to his modernist vision.

It took Morandi six years to feel comfortable with etching, a process that relies on a volatile chemistry of acid baths to open up or “bite” the furrows in the metal printing plate carved out by the etching needle. You might say it took Morandi a lifetime to test etching’s potential, learning how to adapt a lineal art, an art based on line, to reflect his interest in tone. Il ponte sul Savena a Bologna (Bridge on the Savena River at Bologna, 1912), a landscape and the earliest work in the show, already reveals Morandi’s reserved sense of composition but not yet the assuredness of his etching needle. His marks are a loose thicket of hatchings, his lines doggedly tracing out the architecture of the landscape—the curve of the road, the arch of the bridge. The hatchwork of shadow lines mingles and loses itself in the tonal shading of the trees and rooflines. Compare this to Natura morta con bottiglie e brocca (Still Life with Bottles and Pitcher, 1915), a futurist still life where the tonal areas already feel more assured and light-handed. Rather than merely containing shadow lines, the volumes here are defined by the etching hatchwork.

Morandi’s breakthrough comes in 1921 with the tiny Pane e limone (Bread and Lemon), just one-and-a-half by three inches, which, for Abramowicz, calls to mind Rembrandt’s Small Gray Landscape. Here the background and surrounding area get equal, if not more, attention from the etcher’s needle than does the subject matter itself. The hatch marks have an all-over effect. Morandi defines his objects entirely through their tone, using a texture of lines woven like linen, reflecting the weave of the printed paper, to darken the areas around and beneath the lemon and bread. In Veduta della Montagnola di Bologna (View of the Montagnola in Bologna, 1932), these textures become more abstracted, largely uniform fields of pattern—a dense but even hatchwork of diagonal, vertical, and horizontal lines for a field in shadow, a more open pattern for areas in sun.

The remaining work in the Pace show displays Morandi’s application of his all-over hatching for his iconic still lifes of bottles and other household objects. The blissful regularity of his ordinary subject matter is probably Morandi’s most radical contribution to modernism and still his most debated accomplishment. Through repetition, Morandi was able to revisit the same objects with an experimental eye, changing his approach each time and turning his etching technique into a subject matter of its own. His work becomes more interesting the more he dissolves the plastic shapes of his bottles and cans into the patterns of the etching line. I prefer the wavy Natura morta a grandi segni (Still Life with Large Signs, 1931) to the more “realistic” rendering of Grande natura morta circolare con bottiglia e tre oggetti (Large Circular Still Life with Bottle and Three Objects, 1946).

Of all the examples on view at Pace, Grande natura morta scura (Large Dark Still Life, 1934) stands out for its atmospheric mood, a vision glimpsed in the spectral light of night. The darkness of this work is achieved through the compaction of thousands of etching lines. It is remarkable to consider the density of these lines and the master’s needle carving out each one. Mark for mark, you find more in a square inch of Morandi’s printmaking than in a foot of most modern multiples. You might say that Morandi is the high-thread-count etcher of modernism. The luxuriance of his work comes through in its feel rather than its mere appearance. Consider moreover that Morandi printed most of his etchings himself, sometimes in limited runs of only three or four, and you realize that each of these multiples is a rarified object in its own right, as intimate as any of his oils on canvas.

Intimacy is one aspect of Morandi’s art that poses a unique challenge to curators. Before there was “installation art,” there was simply art’s installation, an awareness of how stand-alone objects become informed by the space around them. I can think of few other examples of modern art that place such a high demand on their hanging as Morandi’s. Rather than reach out to us, Morandi’s paintings and etchings pull us in. It is true that Morandi’s work does not clash against itself—there are no bold colors, no conflicts of program—but his introverted works can tug at one another when arranged too close together. It is a common mistake to assume that Morandi’s intimacy demands proximity, when really his work benefits from open space.

The Metropolitan’s installation of its Morandi survey in the basement of the Lehman wing, a troublesome venue resembling an airport hotel conference center, could not be worse for appreciating Morandi’s particular touch. The Pace exhibition suffers in a similar way. Here the work is packed together in a small dark space, arranged chronologically, clockwise around the room, left to right. Such an exhibition sacrifices pleasure for didacticism.

In terms of presentation, by far the most successful Morandi exhibition this month is now taking place at Lucas Schoormans in Chelsea.[2] Gallery-goers may recall that in 2004 Schoormans mounted a small exhibition of Morandi oils that became the hit of the season. This month the gallery follows up with an equally impressive display. From the open, light-filled space to the sky- blue color of the walls, Schoormans has mounted his exhibition with an eye for intimate detail that complements Morandi’s own.

The gallery’s ground floor focuses on Morandi’s compact oil still lifes from the 1940s and 1950s. His Natura morta (Still Life), rendered in a buttery batter of paint, here from 1953, nears perfection. I also like how a moderately sized still life from 1948 gets to take up its own wall, affixed by two simple screws. The minimal presentation shows Morandi at his elegant best. He seems thoroughly contemporary, rather than dusty and reclusive.

Upstairs, Schoormans has assembled an exhibition of works in pencil and, in fact, several of the same etchings found at Pace. You might wonder if there is anything produced by Morandi not on public display this month in New York—not exactly a terrible situation to contemplate.

It is a delight to find these repetitions and see the same work in different surroundings: just as at Pace, we find Ponte sul Savena a Bologna, Natura morta con bottiglie e brocca, and Natura morta a grandi segni, among others, but here in more congenial surroundings. I like how this presentation does not set out to be all-inclusive. Instead it aims merely to please. I also enjoyed seeing Morandi’s etchings alongside a few of his wispy pencils and watercolors on paper.

I suppose there is something for each side of the brain in these two gallery shows—a printmaking class at Pace, and a sentimental education at Schoormans. They are both worth visiting, and each benefits from the other. Pace and Schoormans also vary as to which of their limited prints is listed for sale. It’s quite a month when we can find two gallery shows of Morandi multiples at once. For this, indirectly, we owe thanks to the singular vision of Philippe de Montebello, a museum director who dares to mount a major survey of this quiet modern master.

 

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

 

1. “The Etchings of Giorgio Morandi” opened at Pace Master Prints, New York, on September 18 and remains on view through October 18, 2008. Go back to the text.

In search of Watteau

THE NEW YORK SUN
September 17, 2008

In Search of Watteau
By JAMES PANERO

A review of Jed Perl's 'Antoine's Alphabet' (Knopf)

Who is your favorite painter? Jed Perl, the art critic for the New Republic, responds: "Whenever I'm asked to name my favorite painter I reply, without a moment's hesitation: 'Watteau.'"

Come again? Watteau? A confection of the ancien regime, Jean-Antoine Watteau was born in 1684 and lived a mere 36 years, dying in 1721, the master of the fête gallant and the portraitist of the commedia dell'arte. It's not the answer you might expect to come out of a tough-minded critic on the contemporary scene.

But "Antoine's Alphabet" (Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages, $25.95), a brief, deeply felt follow-up to "New Art City," Mr. Perl's muscular account of the New York art world at mid-century, defies expectations. "I may be perceived as being somewhat sardonic," Mr. Perl writes in his introduction, "or ironic, or even impish when I say that Watteau is my favorite painter, as if I were trying to mock the question, or were hiding my true feelings behind a dandyish façade."

Far from retreating from reality, however, Mr. Perl finds engagement with the present moment through Watteau. "This artist who said hardly anything about his paintings and struck most of his friends as something of a mystery man took as his essential subject the invention of self-consciousness, the struggle to feel fully alive." While this critic who rails against the commercialism of the contemporary art world makes no mention of today's art politics, one cannot help but see a counter-example in the fancy-free Watteau to the predetermined art that now fuels record sales at Sotheby's and is bought up by the oligarchs of Beijing, Moscow, and New York as cynical investments.

In its best sense, Mr. Perl sees the birth of the modern in Watteau's figures awakening to their own imperfections. "Watteau's young people seem to want, above all else, to feel at ease, somewhat at ease, in an uneasy world," he writes. In work such as Watteau's famous painting of "Gilles," the contemplative clown, Mr. Perl finds "doubts," though they are "clothed in the commedia dell'arte lightness of an improvisation or a folly." He calls Watteau "The man who practically invented the bohemian imagination." In his aesthetic wanderlust, his reveries of vagabond performers, Watteau did not follow the dictates of the church or a rich clientele, but pursued art for art's sake, the prototypical modernist.

"Antoine's Alphabet" is not a generic appreciation, or a typical brief history. Mr. Perl presents his volume as a primer, arranged as an alphabet: A is for actors, Anthony, and Art-for-Art's-Sake; B is for Backs, Beardsley, and Beginnings, and so on. "The power of certain great paintings," Mr. Perl writes, "no matter how much self-conscious craft the artist brings to the work, is the quality of a daydream, an orchestration of elements whose meaning remains ambiguous or contradictory." Mr. Perl follows the same daydreaming impulse in the footloose presentation of his book. Each definition examines an aspect of Watteau while also offering a meditation on the Watteau-esque — a glint of history, an inspiring theme, a personal rumination. For example, we get:

Beginnings: So much begins with intense yet fragmentary experiences. At the start of a friendship or a love affair there may be some acute recognition, some striking sliver of experience, although initially it's impossible to know where this will go, if indeed it will go anywhere. ...

Cappricio: Watteau is recklessly capricious, a weaver of arabesques who embraces the grotesque, not in the sense of gothic horrors but in the sense of curious divagations and transmutations.

My favorite is "Enough: One day in his studio, D said to me: 'I've always had enough. I'm tall enough, I'm good-looking enough. I have enough money.'" Enough said.

The literary games on display might, in the hands of another writer, come off as an indulgence, but here they serve a clear purpose: They not only describe the mood of an artist, but they let us inhabit his sensibility. The book speaks in the serendipitous language of Watteau's canvases — serendipitous, additionally, because we know very little about Watteau outside of his work. "At the time of his death," Mr. Perl writes, "Watteau was a famous figure in Paris, with his share of devoted friends. The nuggets of reliable information about his life, however, are few and far between, so that every attempt to construct a biography from what scattered facts there are appears bound to fail."

Mr. Perl is not the first to take an unorthodox approach to his history of this artist. Watteau's most successful biography, Mr. Perl recounts, came out of a fictionalized memoir by Walter Pater called "A Prince of Court Painters," which was published in 1885, and which, "in assembling and readjusting some of the facts of the artist's life ... constructs a fable about Watteau that is truer to what we feel when we're looking at his paintings and drawings than a more straightforward account could possibly be." In his story, Pater "imagines himself as a part of the eighteenth-century Pater family that actually knew Watteau."

Mr. Perl here does something of the same, going one step further. Rather than merely imaging himself an associate of Watteau, he becomes a Watteau in print. So am I crazy to see a resemblance between the portrait of Watteau drawn by François Boucher, reproduced in the book, and the photo of Mr. Perl on the dust jacket? Mr. Perl constructs his book around the arabesque, the daydream, and the fragment. "Much of the fragment's fascination has to do with its delicious air of possibility," he writes, "for a fragment provokes a partial experience that can leave us with a heightened awareness of what we are missing."

Many of those "experiences" are personal for Mr. Perl. But that does not mean they are artful dodges. Rather, Watteau allows this trenchant thinker — arguably our best art critic writing today — to show, for once, his own hand. We see the painted ceiling of his boyhood home in Brooklyn, and are given a manifesto of his desires in paint: "What I really want from art is a variety of qualities, a multiplicity of qualities, a kaleidoscope of qualities, the unpredictability of qualities, qualities that are as varied as the artists who create the works of art."

In its oddity, the book gambles and wins. I hope that "Antoine's Alphabet" will become a cult classic among artists, a call to caprice, in the way that Dave Hickey's "Air Guitar," a critic's libertarian riff, gave license to a generation of artists to forego politics for the rapture of the marketplace. In this capricious cross-pollination of history and memoir, Jed Perl does not merely show us how to live. Like Watteau, he illuminates the struggle to feel fully alive.

Mr. Panero is the managing editor of the New Criterion.

Hudson River Schooled

Jacob Collins, founder of the Hudson River School for Landscape, on location in Hunter, New York, August 7, 2008

THE NEW CRITERION
SEPTEMBER 2008

Hudson River Schooled
by James Panero

On Jacob Collins's Hudson River School for Landscape.

Anyone who suspects that nineteenth-century American art has less to teach us than twentieth-century modernism should take a drive up the winding road of Route 23A, up Kaaterskill Clove in the eastern escarpment of the Catskill Mountains. Here in the town of Hunter, New York, a group of young artists is studying the nineteenth-century traditions of the Hudson River School by walking in the footsteps of the original American masters.

In the summer months, Hunter can be a desolate modern town—a weedy ski village in downtrodden Greene County trying to survive the heat while waiting for snow. Ten years ago, an organization called the Catskill Mountain Foundation saw a need to turn this area into more than just a seasonal resort, so the Foundation bought up real estate downtown and set about building an arts program, offering the traditionalist painter and teacher Jacob Collins the use of the Foundation’s buildings for a summer painting school.

This donation became the beginning of Collins’s Hudson River School for Landscape. Dedicated to reviving nineteenth-century landscape technique by “modeling itself after the artistic, social and spiritual values of the Hudson River School painters,” Collins wrote in his mission statement, his school aimed to “bring together the reawakening enthusiasm for the old American painters.” Ideally, he says, his student artists “and their beautiful representations of nature will help to lead the culture back to a stronger connection to the landscape.” This year Collins offered five-week summer fellowships for two dozen painters to live together in Hunter and paint in the surrounding countryside. The school term ran from July 17 through August 22. I dropped in during one mid-session weekend.

Over 180 years before my visit, the painter Thomas Cole went by ship up the Hudson from New York City and disembarked at West Point. He traveled into the Catskill Mountains to paint the terrain around which I was staying, becoming the inspiration for all artists who followed and the ultimate reason for my trip. Cole’s show of Catskill landscapes was a smash when he exhibited in New York in 1826. Widely publicized in the New York Evening Post, Cole’s three paintings included his image of the falls at Kaaterskill, still flowing just down the road from present-day Hunter.

In his History of the American People, Paul Johnson calls Cole, “the first painter to appreciate the immensity of the opportunities offered by the scale and variety of the American landscape.” His Falls at Kaaterskill were likewise “the first American masterpiece of landscape art.” Cole’s achievements sparked an entire movement of landscape painting and opened up the Catskills, in particular the area around Kaaterskill, to a wave of artists. Palenville, at the base of the gorge of Kaaterskill Clove, became America’s first art colony. Lavish hotels went up along the mountaintops around The Clove. A year after Cole’s death, in 1849, Asher B. Durand dedicated perhaps the most famous American landscape painting, Kindred Spirits, to his colleague by depicting Cole and William Cullen Bryant, the poet and editor of the Post, standing on a promontory overlooking Kaaterskill. (In a lowpoint for New York’s artistic patrimony, this painting, in the collection of the New York Public Library for over a century, was sold in 2005 for $35 million to the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton of Arkansas.)

At the time of Cole’s initial trip in 1825, the changing wilderness of New York State was very much on the American mind. Emerson’s Transcendentalism was still more than a decade off, but the idea of a natural theology, as articulated by William Paley at the turn of the century, had instilled a new reverence for the natural world. Meanwhile, the Erie Canal, the technological marvel that tamed the West by connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, was built between 1817 and 1825. The rough landscape of rural New York took a literary turn in these years as well. In 1819, Washington Irving located his popular story of Rip Van Winkle in the Catskill Mountains, and four years later James Fenimore Cooper published his colonial story of the Catskill woodsman Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers—one of Cole’s reference books for his trip.

“This is the birthplace, the origin,” Collins said to me when I found him in early August, painting a sky study in an overgrown parking lot off Hunter’s Main Street. Like his students, Collins paints from eight in the morning until sunset, seven days a week when he is in town, building up a portfolio of studies that he will assemble into complete landscapes back in the studio.

After the daytime painting hours are over, the Hudson River School for Landscape turns into a commune and a summer camp. The students in each cabin prepare meals for their housemates. The bonhomie of the school is not lost on Collins, who wants to revive the camaraderie of the Hudson River School. After dinner on the evening I visited, the students laid out the day’s work for a critique that quickly turned technical. “So what would you do, Jacob?” asked Josh, a student, of his latest forest scene. “I would put something in front of it,” said Collins. Then: “When you have a white sky, you can drop the value one step.”

After the crits, Collins introduced George O’Hanlon, the owner of a paint company called Natural Pigments, who came in from California to give a talk. Collins runs a regular evening lecture series for his students, and on the day I visited O’Hanlon delivered a PowerPoint presentation on “The Secrets of the Old Masters.” His talk lasted from nine to eleven-thirty in the evening, but Collins’s students showed little sign of wear as O’Hanlon moved from the chemistry of pigments to the nuances of linseed oil. (His secret of the Old Masters had to do, in part, with the viscous properties of natural pigment versus the homogenized consistency of modern oil paints).

The next morning, a number of the students made the half-mile hike up Kaaterskill Falls. At 260 feet, the two-drop falls of Kaaterskill are the highest in New York. They are also as breathtaking as the day Cole first saw them. Cole’s dark autumn scene of the double cascades, with a mammoth boulder resting in the falls’ upper amphitheater, is both an accurate depiction of the topography and an awesome image of an untamed wilderness—a tiny, lone figure can be seen among the straggly trees and the black rocks.

Have Collins’s students been able to approach the majesty of Cole’s great image? Their successes will depend on the final paintings that, like Cole, they work up in the studio from studies in the field. But I am concerned that these students, with their small, scrupulous studies of rocks and stumps, may be missing the forest for the trees of genuine Hudson River School landscape. In his mission statement, Collins maintains, “It is through extensive and real engagement that the artist learns to capture the spirit of the landscape. The many hundreds of hours spent out in the sun and the wind, scrupulously studying nature, transform the artist. It was by this experience that the old masters of the landscape realized their art. And it is how we hope to realize ours.”

Pragmatism informed by observation is laudable, but during my visit I came to wonder if “extensive and real engagement” was truly enough to “capture the spirit of the landscape.” Collins’s students may be learning the vocabulary of the Hudson River School, but I saw little evidence that they are being taught how to speak it. Collins’s students are young, mainly in their twenties. They are the products of an art world that shouts but has little to say. So the silence offered by Collins’s draftsman drills, developed in his schools in New York and carried over to landscape, is itself a form of rebellion, a release that looks for depth in the details of leaves and bark. But this must only be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The original Hudson River School was full of secrets—perhaps more than any other movement in American art. So the prospect of a genuine revival giving way to false profundities couched in technique is a serious concern. The original Hudson River School artists did not go into the wilderness to paint illustrations of the natural world. They went to paint the God they saw manifest in the natural world. “It’s the best piece of work that I’ve met with in the woods,” Natty Bumppo says of Kaaterskill Falls in Cooper’s story, “and none know how often the hand of God is seen in the wilderness, but them that rove it for a man’s life.”

Can there be a Hudson River School revival without the revival of God? This is the question that Collins and his students must confront. Their studies, no matter how precise, may never come together as a whole without an underlying philosophy that goes beyond mere proficiency. In a small exhibition I saw of last year’s student work, I found a landscape by Mikel Olazabal, River in Hunter, NY, to be the most accomplished but also the most problematic painting of the show. After viewing it, I walked across the street and down to the riverbank where, along an old foundation, I found the exact spot on which his image was based. Olazabal’s landscape was highly proficient, full of happy thoughts, but it struck me as altogether wrong. With flowers peeking through the rocks and every leaf on every tree glittering in the sun, his buffed-up interpretation was an idealized illustration of rural renewal, mood communicated through mood lighting.

I don’t want to suggest that landscape painters need to seek out ugliness over beauty, but if an artist believes a landscape evinces God, as the original Hudson River School painters surely did, then an artist should not improve on it without cause, or he risks descending into sentimentality.

On the day I visited, the waters of Schoharie Creek had been redirected through plastic pipes around a construction site upstream, so that the dried-out riverbed gave off a sooty odor. I am not sure this unsightly mess would be right on its own for treatment in paint, but when I think back to the best landscape painting of the nineteenth century—and the art of such modern interpreters as Rackstraw Downes—great work is defined by the intersection of industry, agriculture, and wilderness: the tamed farmland in contrast with the rugged forest in The Oxbow by Thomas Cole, or the railroad and tree stumps populating George Inness’s verdant images of the Lackawanna.

For the Hudson River School painter, the entire landscape was part of God’s world. Such thoughts, of course, rarely infiltrate modern belief. “And what remains when disbelief has gone?” asks Philip Larkin in his poem “Church Going”: “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,/ A shape less recognizable each week,/ A purpose more obscure.” To understand the Hudson River School today, Collins’s students must learn to see themselves as seminarians as well as painters. They otherwise risk becoming the mere technicians of grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, and sky. Deep in the Catskill wilderness, they may be in a house of God, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got religion.