Supreme Fiction

Degrees of separation: Clement Greenberg & Kurt Cobain

James writes:

Clement Greenberg and Kurt Cobain. One is the great formalist critic of twentieth-century art. The other is the former front man for the rock band Nirvana. If you don't know who Clement Greenberg was, you can read my review of Alice Goldfarb Marquis's Greenberg biography here (from the Wall Street Journal). If you don't know who Kurt Cobain was, well, you're not a member of my generation (Roger Kimball asked me, "Wasn't he a famous drug addict?").

Now for the connection (I owe it to Dara for making the discovery): Kurt Cobain was married to Courtney Love. Love is the grand-daughter of the writer Paula Fox. Fox is married to the writer and translator Martin Greenberg. Martin is Clem's brother.

It's a small world!

Is Tintoretto the greatest?

James writes:

I just submitted an article for the Wall Street Journal's 'masterpiece' column on the subject of Tintoretto, the sixteenth-century Venetian painter. Here I make the argument that in his monumental "Crucifixion" of 1565, located in Venice's Scuola di San Rocco, Tintoretto may just have painted the single best work of religious art in the Italian Renaissance.

I'll have more to say on this painting when the piece appears, but for now, check out the website maintained by the Scuola confraternity--http://www.scuolagrandesanrocco.it. Click around the website a bit and look for the 'virtual view' of the Scuola Grande. There's no substitute for the real thing, but the 360 view of the "Crucifixion" in the 'albergo' boardroom is worth checking out.

Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal

James writes:

Simply put: check out tomorrow's Journal . I've written an article for the "Masterpiece" column on the nature dioramas the American Museum of Natural History. As someone who spent his childhood gazing at these displays, I probably had more fun putting this piece together than any essay I've written in a while.

I'll have more about the topic once the article appears tomorrow--including my interview with Stephen Christopher Quinn, the diorama guy at the museum and the author of a great new book on the subject called Windows in Nature.

How did I get on NPR's 'All Things Considered'?

James writes:

Over at The New Criterion, I've been engaging for several months with the "back to basics" art movement known as classical realism. (You can read my latest post here).

The first article I wrote on the subject appeared in the September 2006 issue. Called "The New Old School," this was a profile of one of the movement's young stars, a painter and teacher named Jacob Collins (Hirschl & Adler galleries recently featured an exhibition of his nudes, with a catalogue essay by Roger Kimball).

Towards the end of my piece, I wrote a line about another young classical realist artist named Graydon Parrish. This caught the attention of a producer at NPR. (I said that Parrish's grand allegory of the World Trade Center attacks, pictured above, "appears to be yet another tragedy of 9/11.")

Karen Michel, the NPR host, questioned me about this statement for an hour or so about a month ago. (That was a strange, isolation-chamber experience. I showed up at the New York studios, and Michel questioned me through the headphones from studios in North Carolina).

Long story short, the segment with my commentary appeared on All things Considered last night. You can click here to listen to the broadcast.

Art: John Currin at Gagosian

Dara writes:

The Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York has put up a show of new paintings by John Currin, perhaps best known for his show a few years back at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, in which he depicted very big-breasted women and very lascivious men in a cartoonish yet "hauntingly real" way. Critics lauded Currin's almost classical technique in painting figures. The contrast of classical technique and '70s porn characterization created tension.

I went to the Whitney show like everyone else and kind of found it interesting. James took me to this latest exhibition and boy, am I sorry (James is no fan either, of course). Taken from images in old pornographic magazines, the paintings in this new show depict women's private parts in a very crude manner. Women are engaged in raw sex acts with other women and some men. James says Currin wants to become the Norman Rockwell to the 1970s. The painter seems purposely to objectify women in order to...in order to...I do not know.

The occasion this evening was a book signing for a new Currin catalogue out from Rizzoli. Currin and wife were situated in a side room. I kind of fled from the images into the reception area, where three extremely made up galleristas were receiving guests (though there were not that many, apparently to their chagrin, since one said into the phone, "yeah, it's slow"). The young women each had slinked into a tight, short-sleeved dress in colors ranging from plum to wine. They had swept their hair up or pulled it back, applied much eyeliner, and pulled on fishnet stockings. They towered in heels and poured on the charm to a banker who requested a catalog. (Question: who buys John Currin catalogs? Answer: dirty old men).

The images of sex and the coquettish hostesses made me wonder, why does sex attach itself to the art world and flee from the literary world? Perhaps because money attracts sex and the literary world does not attract money? Alls I know is when I attend a reading at the 92nd Street Y I do not feel the heady buzz of hormones that I do at a gallery opening. Perhaps because visual artists are flamboyant and writers reserved, which translates into loud versus quiet sexuality?

Art: Symbolism and the occult

"The Secret History of Modern Art,"
by James Panero
The New Criterion, December 2006

James writes:

This article originated as a slide lecture I gave at the New York Studio School in October, and concerns a period of art that has interested me since graduate school. The piece is part of our special "December art issue." Be sure to give the whole month a good look.

At the galleries in December

James writes:

Here are the shows that I'm thinking about for my next "Gallery Chronicle" in The New Criterion (look for it in January)

"Thornton Willis: Recent Paintings" at Elizabeth Harris
Gallery, New York, through December 22.
An abstract painter of the old school who has for decades worked through a synthesis of cubism, expressionism, and minimalism. I last wrote about Willis here.

"The Early Works of William King" at Alexandre Gallery through January 20.
A Rough-hewn mid-twentieth-century sculptor who recalls Ellie Nadelman

"American Masterworks from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute" at Hirschl & Adler Galleries through December 29
Sanford Gifford, Frederick Church, Thomas Cole, and Milton Avery. 'Nuff said.

"Frankenthaler: Sculpture" at Knoedler & Company through January 13.
From the artist's mid-1970s collaboration with Anthony Caro (and the ghost of David Smith).

Ralph Albert Blakelock, Louis Michel Eilshemius, and Albert Pinkham
Ryder at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries through January 6
Three great outsider American artists who were modernists before their time. Albert Blakelock's moody little landscapes, on display at the Hirschl and Adler exhibit, were personal favorites at this year's New York Print Fair (look for more in my "NY fair chronicle" next spring).

Whitney Fug-ennial

In homage to my favorite fug site, I'll say that I saw Chloe Sevigny at the party last night for the opening of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, "Day to Night."

She didn't look bad. Her baggy jacket said couture, and made me check out the person draped in it. Yep. Sevigny. She took off the baggy puce-colored thing to reveal a white suit with a little black country tie, like Bob Dylan on tour with his country band playing Vegas. But the white suit looked very Bianca Jagger.

I think to be a celebrity you need to have a death stare. Sevigny's said, stay away from me and my very long very bleached hair.

The show: dull and puce colored. Political. Stop Bush, Serra says, in his now iconic print of one of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners.

My favorite room was the one on the mezzanine near the Calders of "Amerika's Outlaws," including Mohammed Atta, Patty Hearst, Piss Christ, Larry Clark and Mapplethorpe photos, etc. Or maybe I just enjoyed this because at long last it was quiet in the room where they were on display.

The show is a little _quick_. I heard Leon Wieseltier define a criterion of art that you don't get it right away; you need to think about it. I would say not many of these pieces fit that criterion. Got it. Stop Bush. Not many of the pieces invited lingering.

I did like the Dada bunker: sandbags on the ceiling, Duchamp's bike wheel and french window and urinal with lights shining on them so they make shadows on the walls. I thought of the legacy of Dada.

On the third floor artists have broken up the gallery walls. Very transgressive.

I think one artist was included because he's cute and tall. It gets the kids in, and that seems a major purpose of this show.

Saw a few head-turners: Jeff Koons, Rufus Wainwright, three women all in red.

I drank an Amstel Light and left.

Met Museum Outlet Sale

So I just got back from the opening of the new Salander-O'Reilly mega-church on 71st Street. Fair readers, this marks my first art post. I'm not really part of that scene, but Mr. Right is, and he asked me to attend in his absence so I could take notes.

Note One: Billy Crystal didn't show, though I could have sworn I spotted him next to a 13th-century Scandinavian crucifix.

Note Two: It's a strange thing, the commodification of religious art. It's disorienting to look at a Byzantine altarpiece and wonder how much it costs and in which Park Avenue duplex you might find it.

Note Three: How does one evaluate these relics? By which criteria do you assess a life-size wooden Madonna and Child? Of course, Renaissance scholars have established a value system for this stuff; I suppose it's just a lot more foreign to me than are the set of rules by which we deem Pollock and Rothko. And I guess that's the gallery owners' point: this stuff is NEW. There's not yet a market for it. We still connect stone gargoyles to Strasbourg and not to SoHo. I suppose these dealers are challenging us to erect Benedictine cloisters in our West Village gardens, to carve out chapels from our walk-in closets.

Note Four: The deep shame and tingling pleasure of sipping Veuve Cliquot while cowering under a giant Christ suspended from ceiling wires.

Note Five: Chatter heard in the line waiting to get in: "It looks like a Francois le Jeune, definitely 16th-century. We just discovered it," breathed a bookish woman in a 1980s power suit. I exhaled a little in the presence of her professorial non-style, hoping my sensible skirt and public radio tote bag wouldn't brand a scarlet "academic administrator" on my forehead. Sure, a fair number of slim Northern Italian types in linen and gauze sauntered among the dozens of rooms. But actually far fewer snappish fashionistas than I'd feared inhabited the party. A very handsome, tall man in a tuxedo at the door had merely welcomed us and wished us a wonderful evening, mentioning nothing about our names and on what list he might find them.

Note Six: Whoever oversaw the mansion's comprehensive makeover had missed a blob of graffiti near the entrance. Perhaps an indication of what was inside: the profane and the sacred interacting.